Being a saddo, I've just read the Hansard transcripts following Alexander's statement on the US deal. Most of the Tories who spoke were broadly supportive of it, recognising that we hadn't made concessions on farming standards, digital taxes or online safety. I'm not at all convinced that Kemi's view that we've been "shafted" is shared by many of her colleagues, which could spell trouble for her. For what it's worth, Douglas Alexander's responses to questions were quite impressive.
Next Foreign Sec.
Reshuffle this summer, although Lammy may last until next reshuffle.
Two Labour MPs have been impressive this week. Douglas Alexander and Louise Haigh. I'd be happy to see either replace the pusillanimous Foreign Sec.
How has Haigh been impressive ?
How has she been impressive, @Roger. I can see some good fairly gentle challenges to the leadership to get their backside in gear on things like Council Tax Reform and more progressive taxation, which are strategic things most of us here want addressed even if we disagree on exact answers
And a bit on her long term campaigns. And having a go at R4 for not being able to pronounce "Haigh" properly (like the WW1 General I think, not horse fodder).
What else do we have?
I knew nothing about this new Cabinet Minister with screaming red hair until she was fired for dishonesty. Then the other night I caught an episode of Newsnight and put the two characters together. She was bright sparky and with an attractive personality and SKS's apparently odd choice made sense.
She has subsequently been on the radio several times because of the subject matter of this interview.
Cheers. I've been following her for some time wearing my active travel hat, as she was showing signs of thinking carefully about strategic things such as road safety and some underlying issues such as a more realistic approach to how returns on transport projects were evaluated. That had potential to move the DoT on from being a "Department to Build Roads, which therefore builds roads" to something more balanced.
She did a fair amount and had some good people in the policy side of here staff (source: Chris Boardman), so we'll see what emerges in the policy doc which is due soon. My perception of the new Transport Minister Heidi Wotsit is that she's more of a passenger than Louise Haigh had been.
Yes, me too. Which surprised me, because my first impressions were that Louise Haigh was an identikit student lefty and Heidi wotsit was a serious transport type. But actually if anything the reverse seems to be true. An odd thing that brought Louise Haigh down, mind. Still feels like there's more to that than meets the eye.
Essentially Donald is desperate for a deal - any deal - and we’ve taken advantage of that to avoid the worst of his so-called liberation tariffs.
Kemi just looks like an opportunistic idiot. She’s simply not up to it, as predicted by anyone conscious of her lack of achievements in Cabinet.
The Tories have nothing to offer. The only reason I can think of to vote for them might be that they are not Reforn. In a hypothetical Tory/Reform election, I would hold my nose and vote Tory.
The deal is status is fiddling around plus accepting higher tariffs than previously existed in the US while not raising any of ours.
Not really something to crow about. The only bright spot is reducing the tariff increases in several key U.K. export areas.
I’m not crowing.
I’m merely noting that the net effect is positive for the UK against what was in place a week ago, and the UK also gains modest diplomatic kudos for being first cab off the rank as it were.
This is what "making Brexit work" looks like.
The second bit of the phrase, "(as well as it can be made to work)" tends to be unsaid.
Kemi keeps dropping words & phrases such as ‘shafted’, ‘half-arsed’ into the discourse, as well as telling Sir Keir ‘he doesn’t have the balls’ . Is it going to establish a view of her as straight talking, or rude? John Rentoul has noted his displeasure with it a couple of times
Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.
Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak, it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation bill.
Personally, I think it demeans her, makes it harder to take her seriously, and displays a lack of gravitas. There's plenty of ways to make a forceful point without slipping into rudeness.
Fascinating that Trump, per FT, is proposing to raise the taxes on the rich (income over $2.5M), and remove the preferential tax treatment of hedge funds.
The collapse in US elite support for Trump has been wonderful to see. This won’t help.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
Places where Reform have been successful such as Hull, Lincolnshire and Blyth are places where there is net zero / renewables investment. Wrong kind of regeneration / new jobs?
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
Kemi keeps dropping words & phrases such as ‘shafted’, ‘half-arsed’ into the discourse, as well as telling Sir Keir ‘he doesn’t have the balls’ . Is it going to establish a view of her as straight talking, or rude? John Rentoul has noted his displeasure with it a couple of times
Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.
Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak, it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation bill.
Personally, I think it demeans her, makes it harder to take her seriously, and displays a lack of gravitas. There's plenty of ways to make a forceful point without slipping into rudeness.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the County Council.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
Is there a change of tone recently from the Trump administration?
Compare this from JD Vance a couple days ago:
“ I think — I mean this from the heart and as a friend — that there is a trade-off between policing the bounds of democratic speech and debate and losing the trust of our people. And we’re all going to draw the lines a little bit differently,” Vance said. “I’m fine if one country is going to draw those lines a little bit differently than the United States.”
with his absurd and hostile speech he gave in Munich in February.
There's also been more criticism of Putin and less of Zelensky recently.
I wonder if the China hawks in the US administration have realised: a) They can't really offer anything to Putin that will make him break with China. b) They need allies (eg Europe), if they are to take on China.
The meeting between Carney and Trump was also somewhat conciliatory.
If only they had read PB. Or perhaps they did and saw the errors of their way.
See the commentary that the UN is going to feature in the realignment of the world order. Seems the Illuminati are out of a job.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the Council.
Yes Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
Apparently net zero costs a bomb, right, so we're going to scrap that woke lefty nonsense, right, and go back to the good old days with British power stations burning British coal, right, who wants wind turbines or pylons anyway, right.
I know that "Net Zero" is completely the wrong messaging, but the goal of energy independence is a good one. The environment needs to be tret as a bonus rather than the objective. Green energy is how we regain our place of power, no longer at the whim of Putin or money markets, we not only generate free energy but we can design build and export the technology.
It should be a no-brainer. But "investment" is seen to be "subsidy" and thus "who will pay for it"
Fox News host to become US Attorney for the District of Columbia.
Thank heavens Trump and the Republicans brought back meritocratic hiring.
Somebody a while back suggested Trump was hiring based on whether someone looked right for the part - I thinking like a TV producer.
Given Fox hires the same way perhaps there is a reason why so many of his appointees are ex Fox?
He hires people who say nice things about him on TV, and the TV he watches is Fox
The people he hired don't actually look the part
Guyliner for Veep?
Alcoholic Defense secretary?
Brain Worm for HHS?
Both RFK Jr and Hesketh physically look like his idea of what an American leader should look like (big, short hair, square jaw). It doesn’t mean they are qualified but Trump doesn’t care about that.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
As usual it's a mix. Cars last longer. New cars are cheaper vs salary than they used to be. A more flexible credit market. The motability scheme (1 in 5 new cars!).
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
Car finance schemes are how people without much money end up driving brand new Range Rovers.
They are also full of liar loans, mis-selling and the kind of bullshit "selling" that made Foxtons so popular.
Sorry to read that the BBC is still going downhill.
I don’t know about others, but I get my news from PB, the FT digital edition, a little bit from the NYT app, and X.
Everything has gone downhill, maybe even PB. (Would be interesting to run some kind of analysis of PB circa 2010 with PB today).
AI driven content is likely making everything worse, too. Why - as a minimum wage journalist - write an article when you can get AI to do it, even as it regurgitates stock phrases and factual errors?
I used to listen to Radio 4 every morning, take a daily newspaper, and enjoy serious debates on various BBC platforms.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the County Council.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
(One also notes the level of donations to Reform from fossil fuel industries, which is somewhere between "most" and "nearly all of it".)
I just think Labour should confront people with this. Do you want to go on a gas only electricity tariff? Do you want all that investment to go elsewhere?
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
Again, we run into the dichotomy (have I used the right word there?) between what Reform are offering and what Reform voters want - which appears to be the SDP. (And doesn't seem an unreasonable ask to me.)
My inference on Reform voters and Net Zero is that - inasmuch as they think about it at all - while it isn't a principle they would die for, and while they probably find some of the 'green stuff' a little annoying, they generally prefer not-harming the environment over harming it; and all else being equal prefer clean sources of energy over dirty ones. I can see Nigel Farage's point about the costs of Net Zero, but he can make it sound as if harming the environment is his primary aim.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
What abundant energy? The North Sea gas fields are in end-of-life decline & the decision on whether to grant new exploration licenses is a rounding error compared to that inevitability.
Now if you meant nuclear, then sure. Although the Uranium for that mostly comes from Australia IIRC.
Kemi keeps dropping words & phrases such as ‘shafted’, ‘half-arsed’ into the discourse, as well as telling Sir Keir ‘he doesn’t have the balls’ . Is it going to establish a view of her as straight talking, or rude? John Rentoul has noted his displeasure with it a couple of times
Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.
Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak, it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation bill.
If Boris said the same things, the people who moan about Kemi for this wouldn't give a shit.
Her problem is that when she and her party were in charge their own work was half-arsed.
I’d like her to do well, but I think she has a way of speaking that makes her sound a bit forced, especially when being controversial. I think you’re right though, imagining Boris saying the same things they don’t seem as bad. But Rentoul has called her out every time, and he wasn’t a Boris supporter
I doubt he would have called Boris out for the odd colloquialism though. It is just a bit of snobbery.
Kemi keeps dropping words & phrases such as ‘shafted’, ‘half-arsed’ into the discourse, as well as telling Sir Keir ‘he doesn’t have the balls’ . Is it going to establish a view of her as straight talking, or rude? John Rentoul has noted his displeasure with it a couple of times
Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.
Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak, it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation bill.
If Boris said the same things, the people who moan about Kemi for this wouldn't give a shit.
Her problem is that when she and her party were in charge their own work was half-arsed.
I’d like her to do well, but I think she has a way of speaking that makes her sound a bit forced, especially when being controversial. I think you’re right though, imagining Boris saying the same things they don’t seem as bad. But Rentoul has called her out every time, and he wasn’t a Boris supporter
Boris was (is?) a genius actor including in faking sincerity, so he almost never sounded forced; so got away usually with anything. His off the cuff style was scrupulously rehearsed. (Though when he froze, as in Peppa Pig speech, going off register, he was toe curling, which shows how much of a performance all this was. IIRC there is evidence from Jeremy Vine of how rehearsed and reheated the unrehearsed stuff was)
Neither Kemi nor the PM have any of that. She did much better before being leader, seeming to be herself. Being herself, IMO, doesn't include even mild scatological language.
Agreed. I've no objection to politicians using phrases like half-arsed. But it's obvious if it's not their natural mode of discourse, and a bit embarrassing.
Badenoch was simply not ready for the leadership. Picking anyone with so little experience is a gamble, and this one didn't pay off for the Tories.
It's hard to see where they go from here, but just carrying on with her is a death sentence for them.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
Cheap credit via a leasing with manufacturer supported residuals.. People are effectively doing shared equity schemes on cars. You can also get some dick twitching bargains if you're patient and aren't fussy about colour or spec. The same thing has happened with motorbikes.
I've just bought a 100% original 5,000 mile RD500LC. It's been nice knowing some of you.
I’m sure it was on the BBC last night where the presenter got halfway through explaining the Habemus Papam announcement and then forgot what the announcement actually was. If you’re covering one of the most famous setpiece events in the world, you think you’d get that bit down.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
What abundant energy? The North Sea gas fields are in end-of-life decline & the decision on whether to grant new exploration licenses is a rounding error compared to that inevitability.
Now if you meant nuclear, then sure. Although the Uranium for that mostly comes from Australia IIRC.
And this is the problem - unless we can agree on the facts it's difficult to agree a way forward. Its a fact that the north sea is running down, but politically that's not good so lets just ignore it.
Kemi keeps dropping words & phrases such as ‘shafted’, ‘half-arsed’ into the discourse, as well as telling Sir Keir ‘he doesn’t have the balls’ . Is it going to establish a view of her as straight talking, or rude? John Rentoul has noted his displeasure with it a couple of times
Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.
Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak, it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation bill.
Personally, I think it demeans her, makes it harder to take her seriously, and displays a lack of gravitas. There's plenty of ways to make a forceful point without slipping into rudeness.
Yeah, I'm one of the few remaining pro-Kemi types - but I agree fully with that.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
Places where Reform have been successful such as Hull, Lincolnshire and Blyth are places where there is net zero / renewables investment. Wrong kind of regeneration / new jobs?
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the County Council.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
(One also notes the level of donations to Reform from fossil fuel industries, which is somewhere between "most" and "nearly all of it".)
I just think Labour should confront people with this. Do you want to go on a gas only electricity tariff? Do you want all that investment to go elsewhere?
It is not 'investment', it is companies seeking money from a rigged energy market at the consumers' expense. People are waking up to this fact and rightly so.
As I mentioned earlier, even when generating power these energy sources damage and disrupt the grid. Things have gone very quiet on Heathrow - we could well see renewable energy was responsible for that substation blowing in the first place, as well as the fact that the backup generation had been fucked up.
The whole thing is an utter shitshow on every level, and people blowing the whistle have been slandered, mocked and condemned, whilst those in the pay of 'green entrepreneurs' have been heaped with praise for their 'boldness'.
On the header, the fact that the winner was 50/1 doesn't mean that the betting market was wrong. 50/1 shots should and do win about 2% of the time, not because the markets are wrong, but that is what 50/1 means.
It might have been wrong and he was always a more likely candidate (maybe even pre-ordained), but it could also have been that if you ran the process again he would mostly have come nowhere.
It's hard to know if 50/1 shots do win about 2% of the time without doing some maths. It might be overall true, but I think the argument is that it might not be true for next pope markets, though I think you can make a better case for saying that the odds on the favourite were too short in a market which is essentially guesswork and has a large number of possible winners.
There are probably not enough 'next pope' markets to do any analysis, but it might be that you could show that 'laying the favourite' could be a successful strategy on this kind of market - if you think markets like next Democratic presidential nominee, next Conservative leader, next Pope, can be lumped together...
Plenty of research has been done to show 50/1 shots win about 2% of the time. If they won 1% of the time everyone would just lay them, if they won 3% of the time everyone would just back them.
Within the basket of 50/1 bets there will be good and bad value individual bets but if you back a random mix of 1,000 50/1 bets you get on average around 20 winners.
Sure, I obviously didn't make myself clear:
The argument made on here is that some kinds of markets are consistently wrong, and laying the favourite is a profitable strategy, eg for next Conservative leader. I don't know if this is true or not, but it at least sounds plausible, though if too many people follow it it's not going to work any more... so if you find something like this out you keep it to yourself if you want to make money. It's information that doesn't want to be free!
The idea that betting markets are strictly rational is also not true.
A few years ago when I was when I was regularly betting on football you could often get significantly different odds on the Asian Handicap -0.5 market on Betfair compared to the win market on Betfair, despite them being exactly the same bet (and on markets with massive liquidity). This was the case for quite some time. No doubt that obvious anomaly has gone by now, but I'm a bit sceptical that the betting market is always quickly automatically going to reach fair odds in the way you describe.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
The relevance of Spanish problem to the UK has been fully debunked. You make your case weaker by including it.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
As usual it's a mix. Cars last longer. New cars are cheaper vs salary than they used to be. A more flexible credit market. The motability scheme (1 in 5 new cars!).
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
Car finance schemes are how people without much money end up driving brand new Range Rovers.
They are also full of liar loans, mis-selling and the kind of bullshit "selling" that made Foxtons so popular.
I keep getting pushed internet ads for, er, people who will look to see if you were missold car finance - with the implication that a) this is a universal problem, and b) people are getting car finance so frequently that they lose track. Which doesn't really tally with the 'cars are lasting longer' aspect. )
Fuxake, those Steven Bartlett cryptoshite tweets have gone into overdrive, every fifth tweet on my feed this morning. They're paid for ads, I wonder if it's a ploy to persuade users to go ad free with premium?
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
As usual it's a mix. Cars last longer. New cars are cheaper vs salary than they used to be. A more flexible credit market. The motability scheme (1 in 5 new cars!).
And because we drive on the left, there is (almost) no export market for used cars so they stay here, depressing the price.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
As usual it's a mix. Cars last longer. New cars are cheaper vs salary than they used to be. A more flexible credit market. The motability scheme (1 in 5 new cars!).
And because we drive on the left, there is (almost) no export market for used cars so they stay here, depressing the price.
I suspect the rip off Britain nature of our garages also plays a part. If we could get servicing and repairs done at a fair price I'd buy older cars, but I don't know enough about cars and don't trust mechanics.
On the header, the fact that the winner was 50/1 doesn't mean that the betting market was wrong. 50/1 shots should and do win about 2% of the time, not because the markets are wrong, but that is what 50/1 means.
It might have been wrong and he was always a more likely candidate (maybe even pre-ordained), but it could also have been that if you ran the process again he would mostly have come nowhere.
It's hard to know if 50/1 shots do win about 2% of the time without doing some maths. It might be overall true, but I think the argument is that it might not be true for next pope markets, though I think you can make a better case for saying that the odds on the favourite were too short in a market which is essentially guesswork and has a large number of possible winners.
There are probably not enough 'next pope' markets to do any analysis, but it might be that you could show that 'laying the favourite' could be a successful strategy on this kind of market - if you think markets like next Democratic presidential nominee, next Conservative leader, next Pope, can be lumped together...
Plenty of research has been done to show 50/1 shots win about 2% of the time. If they won 1% of the time everyone would just lay them, if they won 3% of the time everyone would just back them.
Within the basket of 50/1 bets there will be good and bad value individual bets but if you back a random mix of 1,000 50/1 bets you get on average around 20 winners.
Sure, I obviously didn't make myself clear:
The argument made on here is that some kinds of markets are consistently wrong, and laying the favourite is a profitable strategy, eg for next Conservative leader. I don't know if this is true or not, but it at least sounds plausible, though if too many people follow it it's not going to work any more... so if you find something like this out you keep it to yourself if you want to make money. It's information that doesn't want to be free!
The idea that betting markets are strictly rational is also not true.
A few years ago when I was when I was regularly betting on football you could often get significantly different odds on the Asian Handicap -0.5 market on Betfair compared to the win market on Betfair, despite them being exactly the same bet (and on markets with massive liquidity). This was the case for quite some time. No doubt that obvious anomaly has gone by now, but I'm a bit sceptical that the betting market is always quickly automatically going to reach fair odds in the way you describe.
I'm not saying the markets are automatically and quickly correct, there is indeed value around. I am saying that a 50/1 winner does not indicate that the market was wrong, especially not laughably wrong.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
Cheap credit via a leasing with manufacturer supported residuals.. People are effectively doing shared equity schemes on cars. You can also get some dick twitching bargains if you're patient and aren't fussy about colour or spec. The same thing has happened with motorbikes.
I've just bought a 100% original 5,000 mile RD500LC. It's been nice knowing some of you.
At least you'll depart this world with the heady aroma of 2-stroke in your nostrils.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
There are several sides to that afaics.
1 - New cars bought on finance have gone from about half to 80-90% since the millennium. 2 - Cars last a lot longer, and don't rust anything like as much. Average age is up from about 6.5 years to about 9.5 years over 20 years. 3 - Mileage driven has fallen, by about 20% over 20 years (regardless of COVID), so condition should be better (?). 4 - The cost of running has not increased, except perhaps marginally, in real terms, over the last 15 years.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the County Council.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
(One also notes the level of donations to Reform from fossil fuel industries, which is somewhere between "most" and "nearly all of it".)
I just think Labour should confront people with this. Do you want to go on a gas only electricity tariff? Do you want all that investment to go elsewhere?
It is not 'investment', it is companies seeking money from a rigged energy market at the consumers' expense. People are waking up to this fact and rightly so.
As I mentioned earlier, even when generating power these energy sources damage and disrupt the grid. Things have gone very quiet on Heathrow - we could well see renewable energy was responsible for that substation blowing in the first place, as well as the fact that the backup generation had been fucked up.
The whole thing is an utter shitshow on every level, and people blowing the whistle have been slandered, mocked and condemned, whilst those in the pay of 'green entrepreneurs' have been heaped with praise for their 'boldness'.
Support for solar and wind is currently at 88% and 83%, respectively, with 1% opposition. 3% oppose solar farms in their area. 74% think they boost the economy.
In older polling, support for new gas and coal is at 7% and 5%.
The (political) argument is over, Reform would be mad to take this approach.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
As usual it's a mix. Cars last longer. New cars are cheaper vs salary than they used to be. A more flexible credit market. The motability scheme (1 in 5 new cars!).
And because we drive on the left, there is (almost) no export market for used cars so they stay here, depressing the price.
I suspect the rip off Britain nature of our garages also plays a part. If we could get servicing and repairs done at a fair price I'd buy older cars, but I don't know enough about cars and don't trust mechanics.
If you're not DuraAce you need an independent local garage you can trust. Not easy to find, but they do exist. I'm happy to drive a second hand shitbox, because I've got a couple fairly locally.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
As usual it's a mix. Cars last longer. New cars are cheaper vs salary than they used to be. A more flexible credit market. The motability scheme (1 in 5 new cars!).
And because we drive on the left, there is (almost) no export market for used cars so they stay here, depressing the price.
I suspect the rip off Britain nature of our garages also plays a part. If we could get servicing and repairs done at a fair price I'd buy older cars, but I don't know enough about cars and don't trust mechanics.
Labour should abolish VAT on repairs on cars over 10 years old. Good for the environment, good for poorer drivers.
Fuxake, those Steven Bartlett cryptoshite tweets have gone into overdrive, every fifth tweet on my feed this morning. They're paid for ads, I wonder if it's a ploy to persuade users to go ad free with premium?
There is a rumour that YouTube has plans for a cheaper ad-free tier. Whether or not that's true, it is what I'm waiting for. Mind you, these days videos have intrusive sponsorship messages.
Yes it was unexpected but the fact North American and Latin American cardinals combined had a plurality of votes in the conclave should have been a clue
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
As usual it's a mix. Cars last longer. New cars are cheaper vs salary than they used to be. A more flexible credit market. The motability scheme (1 in 5 new cars!).
And because we drive on the left, there is (almost) no export market for used cars so they stay here, depressing the price.
I suspect the rip off Britain nature of our garages also plays a part. If we could get servicing and repairs done at a fair price I'd buy older cars, but I don't know enough about cars and don't trust mechanics.
Labour should abolish VAT on repairs on cars over 10 years old. Good for the environment, good for poorer drivers.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
As usual it's a mix. Cars last longer. New cars are cheaper vs salary than they used to be. A more flexible credit market. The motability scheme (1 in 5 new cars!).
Better standards of bodywork?
Corrosion resistance is definitely better but the panels themselves are much thinner. Most OEMs are down to 0.6mm from 2.0mm in the 80s. This is why modern cars have all those mad creases and lines in the panels; to add rigidity to the delicate panels.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
As usual it's a mix. Cars last longer. New cars are cheaper vs salary than they used to be. A more flexible credit market. The motability scheme (1 in 5 new cars!).
And because we drive on the left, there is (almost) no export market for used cars so they stay here, depressing the price.
I suspect the rip off Britain nature of our garages also plays a part. If we could get servicing and repairs done at a fair price I'd buy older cars, but I don't know enough about cars and don't trust mechanics.
Labour should abolish VAT on repairs on cars over 10 years old. Good for the environment, good for poorer drivers.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
What abundant energy? The North Sea gas fields are in end-of-life decline & the decision on whether to grant new exploration licenses is a rounding error compared to that inevitability.
Now if you meant nuclear, then sure. Although the Uranium for that mostly comes from Australia IIRC.
@Luckyguy1983 persists in the belief that there is lots of coal that can be *economically* mined. Except there isn't.
UK deep mined coal died because
1) Seams were exhausted/the cost of getting the coal out dramatically increased as the easier to access stuff was mined out. This started happening before WWI. 2) The giant open cast mines on shallow seems, 20 foot (or more) thick, were opened. In other countries. 3) A major market for some UK coal was high quality coal for steam ships. Once oil came in, this market disappeared. Burning Welsh Best in a power station gives little benefit and cost a lot more.
Kemi keeps dropping words & phrases such as ‘shafted’, ‘half-arsed’ into the discourse, as well as telling Sir Keir ‘he doesn’t have the balls’ . Is it going to establish a view of her as straight talking, or rude? John Rentoul has noted his displeasure with it a couple of times
Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.
Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak, it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation bill.
If Boris said the same things, the people who moan about Kemi for this wouldn't give a shit.
Her problem is that when she and her party were in charge their own work was half-arsed.
I’d like her to do well, but I think she has a way of speaking that makes her sound a bit forced, especially when being controversial. I think you’re right though, imagining Boris saying the same things they don’t seem as bad. But Rentoul has called her out every time, and he wasn’t a Boris supporter
I doubt he would have called Boris out for the odd colloquialism though. It is just a bit of snobbery.
Kemi keeps dropping words & phrases such as ‘shafted’, ‘half-arsed’ into the discourse, as well as telling Sir Keir ‘he doesn’t have the balls’ . Is it going to establish a view of her as straight talking, or rude? John Rentoul has noted his displeasure with it a couple of times
Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.
Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak, it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation bill.
If Boris said the same things, the people who moan about Kemi for this wouldn't give a shit.
Her problem is that when she and her party were in charge their own work was half-arsed.
I’d like her to do well, but I think she has a way of speaking that makes her sound a bit forced, especially when being controversial. I think you’re right though, imagining Boris saying the same things they don’t seem as bad. But Rentoul has called her out every time, and he wasn’t a Boris supporter
Boris was (is?) a genius actor including in faking sincerity, so he almost never sounded forced; so got away usually with anything. His off the cuff style was scrupulously rehearsed. (Though when he froze, as in Peppa Pig speech, going off register, he was toe curling, which shows how much of a performance all this was. IIRC there is evidence from Jeremy Vine of how rehearsed and reheated the unrehearsed stuff was)
Neither Kemi nor the PM have any of that. She did much better before being leader, seeming to be herself. Being herself, IMO, doesn't include even mild scatological language.
Agreed. I've no objection to politicians using phrases like half-arsed. But it's obvious if it's not their natural mode of discourse, and a bit embarrassing.
Badenoch was simply not ready for the leadership. Picking anyone with so little experience is a gamble, and this one didn't pay off for the Tories.
It's hard to see where they go from here, but just carrying on with her is a death sentence for them.
More in Common still had the Conservatives on 20% with Kemi and only a returned Boris putting them back in front
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the County Council.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
(One also notes the level of donations to Reform from fossil fuel industries, which is somewhere between "most" and "nearly all of it".)
I just think Labour should confront people with this. Do you want to go on a gas only electricity tariff? Do you want all that investment to go elsewhere?
It is not 'investment', it is companies seeking money from a rigged energy market at the consumers' expense. People are waking up to this fact and rightly so.
As I mentioned earlier, even when generating power these energy sources damage and disrupt the grid. Things have gone very quiet on Heathrow - we could well see renewable energy was responsible for that substation blowing in the first place, as well as the fact that the backup generation had been fucked up.
The whole thing is an utter shitshow on every level, and people blowing the whistle have been slandered, mocked and condemned, whilst those in the pay of 'green entrepreneurs' have been heaped with praise for their 'boldness'.
Support for solar and wind is currently at 88% and 83%, respectively, with 1% opposition. 3% oppose solar farms in their area. 74% think they boost the economy.
In older polling, support for new gas and coal is at 7% and 5%.
The (political) argument is over, Reform would be mad to take this approach.
Two caveats to that, though.
One is that the balance of capital to running costs is different for fuel power and renewable power. People- especially older people- don't like projects with ten year paybacks.
The other is that we are all instinctively NIMBY. Hence "solar energy please, but not near me". And the thing about NIMBYism is that it makes people scramble for any argument against the thing they don't like.
Bad government, but potentially good as an election winner. Maybe anti-net-zero is the new Brexit...
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
Car finance schemes are how people without much money end up driving brand new Range Rovers.
They are also full of liar loans, mis-selling and the kind of bullshit "selling" that made Foxtons so popular.
I keep getting pushed internet ads for, er, people who will look to see if you were missold car finance - with the implication that a) this is a universal problem, and b) people are getting car finance so frequently that they lose track. Which doesn't really tally with the 'cars are lasting longer' aspect. )
The ambulance chasing industry built around the pension miss-selling is looking for a new target. The mortgages repayment thing kept them going for a bit. And there has been a crackdown on fake car accident claims. The vultures need *something*.
The entire car finance market is due for a crash. Horrible people lending money at ripoff rates to buy horrible cars.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the County Council.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
(One also notes the level of donations to Reform from fossil fuel industries, which is somewhere between "most" and "nearly all of it".)
I just think Labour should confront people with this. Do you want to go on a gas only electricity tariff? Do you want all that investment to go elsewhere?
It is not 'investment', it is companies seeking money from a rigged energy market at the consumers' expense. People are waking up to this fact and rightly so.
As I mentioned earlier, even when generating power these energy sources damage and disrupt the grid. Things have gone very quiet on Heathrow - we could well see renewable energy was responsible for that substation blowing in the first place, as well as the fact that the backup generation had been fucked up.
The whole thing is an utter shitshow on every level, and people blowing the whistle have been slandered, mocked and condemned, whilst those in the pay of 'green entrepreneurs' have been heaped with praise for their 'boldness'.
Support for solar and wind is currently at 88% and 83%, respectively, with 1% opposition. 3% oppose solar farms in their area. 74% think they boost the economy.
In older polling, support for new gas and coal is at 7% and 5%.
The (political) argument is over, Reform would be mad to take this approach.
Two caveats to that, though.
One is that the balance of capital to running costs is different for fuel power and renewable power. People- especially older people- don't like projects with ten year paybacks.
The other is that we are all instinctively NIMBY. Hence "solar energy please, but not near me". And the thing about NIMBYism is that it makes people scramble for any argument against the thing they don't like.
Bad government, but potentially good as an election winner. Maybe anti-net-zero is the new Brexit...
What's surprising about the polling is that people are YIMBY for solar farms and, to a lesser extent, wind. Maybe that is different in Lincolnshire? But 76% of Reform voters support them...
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the County Council.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
(One also notes the level of donations to Reform from fossil fuel industries, which is somewhere between "most" and "nearly all of it".)
I just think Labour should confront people with this. Do you want to go on a gas only electricity tariff? Do you want all that investment to go elsewhere?
It is not 'investment', it is companies seeking money from a rigged energy market at the consumers' expense. People are waking up to this fact and rightly so.
As I mentioned earlier, even when generating power these energy sources damage and disrupt the grid. Things have gone very quiet on Heathrow - we could well see renewable energy was responsible for that substation blowing in the first place, as well as the fact that the backup generation had been fucked up.
The whole thing is an utter shitshow on every level, and people blowing the whistle have been slandered, mocked and condemned, whilst those in the pay of 'green entrepreneurs' have been heaped with praise for their 'boldness'.
Support for solar and wind is currently at 88% and 83%, respectively, with 1% opposition. 3% oppose solar farms in their area. 74% think they boost the economy.
In older polling, support for new gas and coal is at 7% and 5%.
The (political) argument is over, Reform would be mad to take this approach.
Two caveats to that, though.
One is that the balance of capital to running costs is different for fuel power and renewable power. People- especially older people- don't like projects with ten year paybacks.
The other is that we are all instinctively NIMBY. Hence "solar energy please, but not near me". And the thing about NIMBYism is that it makes people scramble for any argument against the thing they don't like.
Bad government, but potentially good as an election winner. Maybe anti-net-zero is the new Brexit...
The NIMBY argument needs to differentiate between roof-based solar on existing or new structures and the field-based installations. A good number of people who are uncomfortable with the latter are very much onboard with the former.
Fuxake, those Steven Bartlett cryptoshite tweets have gone into overdrive, every fifth tweet on my feed this morning. They're paid for ads, I wonder if it's a ploy to persuade users to go ad free with premium?
Off to see my good friend Ben Francis the Gymshark CEO before the Bank of England arrests him.
Put a dab of paint on your oil filter and see how often it actually gets changed. The VW dealer my father insisted on going to did this all the time and used to claim it was an "oversight". This contrite claim may have carried more heft if the old oil filter hadn't been given a quick wipe with WD40 to clean it up and make it look new.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the County Council.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
(One also notes the level of donations to Reform from fossil fuel industries, which is somewhere between "most" and "nearly all of it".)
I just think Labour should confront people with this. Do you want to go on a gas only electricity tariff? Do you want all that investment to go elsewhere?
It is not 'investment', it is companies seeking money from a rigged energy market at the consumers' expense. People are waking up to this fact and rightly so.
As I mentioned earlier, even when generating power these energy sources damage and disrupt the grid. Things have gone very quiet on Heathrow - we could well see renewable energy was responsible for that substation blowing in the first place, as well as the fact that the backup generation had been fucked up.
The whole thing is an utter shitshow on every level, and people blowing the whistle have been slandered, mocked and condemned, whilst those in the pay of 'green entrepreneurs' have been heaped with praise for their 'boldness'.
Support for solar and wind is currently at 88% and 83%, respectively, with 1% opposition. 3% oppose solar farms in their area. 74% think they boost the economy.
In older polling, support for new gas and coal is at 7% and 5%.
The (political) argument is over, Reform would be mad to take this approach.
Two caveats to that, though.
One is that the balance of capital to running costs is different for fuel power and renewable power. People- especially older people- don't like projects with ten year paybacks.
The other is that we are all instinctively NIMBY. Hence "solar energy please, but not near me". And the thing about NIMBYism is that it makes people scramble for any argument against the thing they don't like.
Bad government, but potentially good as an election winner. Maybe anti-net-zero is the new Brexit...
The NIMBY argument needs to differentiate between roof-based solar on existing or new structures and the field-based installations. A good number of people who are uncomfortable with the latter are very much onboard with the former.
Including me, tbh. I don't think we should be using arable land for them, though that kind of farming tends to be in the sunniest spots.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
As usual it's a mix. Cars last longer. New cars are cheaper vs salary than they used to be. A more flexible credit market. The motability scheme (1 in 5 new cars!).
And because we drive on the left, there is (almost) no export market for used cars so they stay here, depressing the price.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
As usual it's a mix. Cars last longer. New cars are cheaper vs salary than they used to be. A more flexible credit market. The motability scheme (1 in 5 new cars!).
And because we drive on the left, there is (almost) no export market for used cars so they stay here, depressing the price.
I suspect the rip off Britain nature of our garages also plays a part. If we could get servicing and repairs done at a fair price I'd buy older cars, but I don't know enough about cars and don't trust mechanics.
Labour should abolish VAT on repairs on cars over 10 years old. Good for the environment, good for poorer drivers.
My 2009 Ford Focus gets approximately £200 a year spent on maintenance. It has been astonishing reliably and remarkably cheap to run. I'm in the market for an electric car when it dies, but it shows no signs of doing so yet. Cars made this century are far more reliable than cars made last century. And depreciation on it is costing me roughly £0 per year. I do have a weird problem with moss growing on it, however. And it is very damp in the winter. I feel sure both problems are solvable but I have not yet been motivated to solve them.
My 2009 Ford Focus gets approximately £200 a year spent on maintenance. It has been astonishing reliably and remarkably cheap to run. I'm in the market for an electric car when it dies, but it shows no signs of doing so yet. Cars made this century are far more reliable than cars made last century. And depreciation on it is costing me roughly £0 per year. I do have a weird problem with moss growing on it, however. And it is very damp in the winter. I feel sure both problems are solvable but I have not yet been motivated to solve them.
Sorry to read that the BBC is still going downhill.
I don’t know about others, but I get my news from PB, the FT digital edition, a little bit from the NYT app, and X.
Everything has gone downhill, maybe even PB. (Would be interesting to run some kind of analysis of PB circa 2010 with PB today).
AI driven content is likely making everything worse, too. Why - as a minimum wage journalist - write an article when you can get AI to do it, even as it regurgitates stock phrases and factual errors?
I used to listen to Radio 4 every morning, take a daily newspaper, and enjoy serious debates on various BBC platforms.
It’s all going to shit, isn’t it?
No idea about BBC telly, as I rarely watch it. The dumbing down of Radio 3 is a piece of appalling iconoclasm. Radio 4 has decent stuff but far too thinly spread, and the BBC confuses impartiality with being uninspiredly boring.
In particular R4 Today, which has three hours to spread itself, has acres of boring stuff more suited to general interest moaning in the graveyard slots, and joins R5 in the belief that thoughtful peopele listen to radio to find out what happens when you share the thoughts of people who don't know anything, and pay attention to single issue fanatics. You would never know that BBC has access to global expertise on real news.
The BBC is also extremely light on the biggest story for years: the possible descent of the USA into authoritarianism.
A beautiful example from the Guardian's Polly Toynbee of two rules: all politics is relative, so Polly is now rushing to sympathise with One Nation Toryism which was once the wicked political foe; secondly that there is always a degree of unity among the right sort against oiks.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
What abundant energy? The North Sea gas fields are in end-of-life decline & the decision on whether to grant new exploration licenses is a rounding error compared to that inevitability.
Now if you meant nuclear, then sure. Although the Uranium for that mostly comes from Australia IIRC.
@Luckyguy1983 persists in the belief that there is lots of coal that can be *economically* mined. Except there isn't.
UK deep mined coal died because
1) Seams were exhausted/the cost of getting the coal out dramatically increased as the easier to access stuff was mined out. This started happening before WWI. 2) The giant open cast mines on shallow seems, 20 foot (or more) thick, were opened. In other countries. 3) A major market for some UK coal was high quality coal for steam ships. Once oil came in, this market disappeared. Burning Welsh Best in a power station gives little benefit and cost a lot more.
Lucky is deep into 70s nostalgia. Which is pretty odd for a neo/paleo-Thatcherite.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the County Council.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
(One also notes the level of donations to Reform from fossil fuel industries, which is somewhere between "most" and "nearly all of it".)
I just think Labour should confront people with this. Do you want to go on a gas only electricity tariff? Do you want all that investment to go elsewhere?
It is not 'investment', it is companies seeking money from a rigged energy market at the consumers' expense. People are waking up to this fact and rightly so.
As I mentioned earlier, even when generating power these energy sources damage and disrupt the grid. Things have gone very quiet on Heathrow - we could well see renewable energy was responsible for that substation blowing in the first place, as well as the fact that the backup generation had been fucked up.
The whole thing is an utter shitshow on every level, and people blowing the whistle have been slandered, mocked and condemned, whilst those in the pay of 'green entrepreneurs' have been heaped with praise for their 'boldness'.
Support for solar and wind is currently at 88% and 83%, respectively, with 1% opposition. 3% oppose solar farms in their area. 74% think they boost the economy.
In older polling, support for new gas and coal is at 7% and 5%.
The (political) argument is over, Reform would be mad to take this approach.
Two caveats to that, though.
One is that the balance of capital to running costs is different for fuel power and renewable power. People- especially older people- don't like projects with ten year paybacks.
The other is that we are all instinctively NIMBY. Hence "solar energy please, but not near me". And the thing about NIMBYism is that it makes people scramble for any argument against the thing they don't like.
Bad government, but potentially good as an election winner. Maybe anti-net-zero is the new Brexit...
What's surprising about the polling is that people are YIMBY for solar farms and, to a lesser extent, wind. Maybe that is different in Lincolnshire? But 76% of Reform voters support them...
(Coal is deeply unpopular, as you'd expect).
I sort of know that Reform are opposed to Net Zero; does anyone know what they support on the matter of climate change? Are they deniers or something else?
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
What abundant energy? The North Sea gas fields are in end-of-life decline & the decision on whether to grant new exploration licenses is a rounding error compared to that inevitability.
Now if you meant nuclear, then sure. Although the Uranium for that mostly comes from Australia IIRC.
@Luckyguy1983 persists in the belief that there is lots of coal that can be *economically* mined. Except there isn't.
UK deep mined coal died because
1) Seams were exhausted/the cost of getting the coal out dramatically increased as the easier to access stuff was mined out. This started happening before WWI. 2) The giant open cast mines on shallow seems, 20 foot (or more) thick, were opened. In other countries. 3) A major market for some UK coal was high quality coal for steam ships. Once oil came in, this market disappeared. Burning Welsh Best in a power station gives little benefit and cost a lot more.
Licences.
And I don't have any rose-tinted view of the ease of accessibility or otherwise our coal resources. I would however seek a range of views before I decided once and for all, as (for example) Labour has spread flat out lies about the Cumbrian coal product being unsuitable for the Scunthorpe steel furnace when it will absolutely be suitable. There is a lot of bad faith and vested interests in this debate.
In principle, I would far rather burn British coal than American wood pellets - it seems obvious.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
What abundant energy? The North Sea gas fields are in end-of-life decline & the decision on whether to grant new exploration licenses is a rounding error compared to that inevitability.
Now if you meant nuclear, then sure. Although the Uranium for that mostly comes from Australia IIRC.
@Luckyguy1983 persists in the belief that there is lots of coal that can be *economically* mined. Except there isn't.
UK deep mined coal died because
1) Seams were exhausted/the cost of getting the coal out dramatically increased as the easier to access stuff was mined out. This started happening before WWI. 2) The giant open cast mines on shallow seems, 20 foot (or more) thick, were opened. In other countries. 3) A major market for some UK coal was high quality coal for steam ships. Once oil came in, this market disappeared. Burning Welsh Best in a power station gives little benefit and cost a lot more.
Lucky is deep into 70s nostalgia. Which is pretty odd for a neo/paleo-Thatcherite.
In the 1970s coal production was collapsing on it's trajectory to ending. The trajectory was remarkably steading and linear.
Sorry to read that the BBC is still going downhill.
I don’t know about others, but I get my news from PB, the FT digital edition, a little bit from the NYT app, and X.
Everything has gone downhill, maybe even PB. (Would be interesting to run some kind of analysis of PB circa 2010 with PB today).
AI driven content is likely making everything worse, too. Why - as a minimum wage journalist - write an article when you can get AI to do it, even as it regurgitates stock phrases and factual errors?
I used to listen to Radio 4 every morning, take a daily newspaper, and enjoy serious debates on various BBC platforms.
It’s all going to shit, isn’t it?
No idea about BBC telly, as I rarely watch it. The dumbing down of Radio 3 is a piece of appalling iconoclasm. Radio 4 has decent stuff but far too thinly spread, and the BBC confuses impartiality with being uninspiredly boring.
In particular R4 Today, which has three hours to spread itself, has acres of boring stuff more suited to general interest moaning in the graveyard slots, and joins R5 in the belief that thoughtful peopele listen to radio to find out what happens when you share the thoughts of people who don't know anything, and pay attention to single issue fanatics. You would never know that BBC has access to global expertise on real news.
The BBC is also extremely light on the biggest story for years: the possible descent of the USA into authoritarianism.
That's partly because most of their US political contacts seem to be with the GOP. Justin Webb, for example, is something of a fellow traveller.
What's your beef with R3 ? Granted there's some lightweight stuff there, but with iPlayer, you don't have to listen to it.
That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.
And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.
I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.
It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.
I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.
We are entering the era of peak Reform?
Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:
The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.
Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.
Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.
Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.
Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.
I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.
Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?
I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?
As usual it's a mix. Cars last longer. New cars are cheaper vs salary than they used to be. A more flexible credit market. The motability scheme (1 in 5 new cars!).
And because we drive on the left, there is (almost) no export market for used cars so they stay here, depressing the price.
Essentially Donald is desperate for a deal - any deal - and we’ve taken advantage of that to avoid the worst of his so-called liberation tariffs.
Kemi just looks like an opportunistic idiot. She’s simply not up to it, as predicted by anyone conscious of her lack of achievements in Cabinet.
The Tories have nothing to offer. The only reason I can think of to vote for them might be that they are not Reforn. In a hypothetical Tory/Reform election, I would hold my nose and vote Tory.
You have it wrong. This US trade deal is a watershed moment that will re shape UK politics for a long time to come. Starmer has pretty much guaranteed Reform and Conservative Coalition after next election. This moment is BIG.
A super bigger Deal with USA cannot now happen because although Starmer has bottled taking us back into EU, the deal he is making with EU restricts scope for a bigger trade deal with others. You can agree? Labours EU wheeler dealing puts Brexit freedoms, such as to get the big super big Trade agreement with USA and others, and all the golden years of growth, through the shredder. You don’t agree? But more voters than you see it like that.
The second half of Labours awful day yesterday we learnt Business Investment growth has collapsed by 50% from 3% to 1.5 - as Labours sneaky tax gamble massively backfires. even worse indicator of UK dramatically weakening economy is Export growth has gone from 3% to absolutely nothing. Zero export growth. BoE have gone hawkish on future interest rate cuts - what the markets believed would happen next has been replaced by high interest rates and inflation set to stay for the foreseeable.
Suddenly, what happens in the following chapters of this story, the end of Starmer’s government in late 2027 and next election result 2029, is becoming very clear to us.
Firstly, this Labour government is in huge economic trouble. Can Starmer survive more than another 20 months of a shitter economy than the one he inherited? After Starmer the madness of left wing populists take over Labour policy.
Secondly, Starmer’s middle path to keeping the country economic poor and struggling, using neither Brexit Freedom or EU membership, is what the coming Ref Con Coalition government will beat Labour to a pulp with on their way to government. Don’t knock clear blue water politics like Starmer has handed his opponents, just because you like what Starmer is doing. Focus group those backing Reform now when they voted Boris in 2019 and it was Boris, Brexit Deal, and Super Trade agreement with USA bringing back economic growth.
2016, 2019, 2029, a clear pattern emerging. They voted for economic growth, community renewal and money in their pockets in every one.
May 8th 2025, hideous day for Labour. The writings on the wall.
Put a dab of paint on your oil filter and see how often it actually gets changed. The VW dealer my father insisted on going to did this all the time and used to claim it was an "oversight". This contrite claim may have carried more heft if the old oil filter hadn't been given a quick wipe with WD40 to clean it up and make it look new.
I fucking love the car game, me.
Full time hobby, though, isn't it ?
I suspect the current generation of local mechanics will be the last one, as transport goes electric.
I'm having a look into whether now is a good time to switch again, maybe to electric. I love it, but I'm not sure that I still need my large (low mileage now) estate. It may be at the point where the value may be going to take a dive, so now could be a good time to0 swap.
What is a good smallish electric? Needs would be for local and county travel, with occasional extended distance.
I think someone mentioned a Fiat 500e recently, and the larger battery version of that looks like having potential. Any other suggestions would be welcome.
One question I need to understand - how long does a battery actually sensibly last? And what age is practical for buying a second hand electric?
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
What abundant energy? The North Sea gas fields are in end-of-life decline & the decision on whether to grant new exploration licenses is a rounding error compared to that inevitability.
Now if you meant nuclear, then sure. Although the Uranium for that mostly comes from Australia IIRC.
@Luckyguy1983 persists in the belief that there is lots of coal that can be *economically* mined. Except there isn't.
UK deep mined coal died because
1) Seams were exhausted/the cost of getting the coal out dramatically increased as the easier to access stuff was mined out. This started happening before WWI. 2) The giant open cast mines on shallow seems, 20 foot (or more) thick, were opened. In other countries. 3) A major market for some UK coal was high quality coal for steam ships. Once oil came in, this market disappeared. Burning Welsh Best in a power station gives little benefit and cost a lot more.
On the header, the fact that the winner was 50/1 doesn't mean that the betting market was wrong. 50/1 shots should and do win about 2% of the time, not because the markets are wrong, but that is what 50/1 means.
It might have been wrong and he was always a more likely candidate (maybe even pre-ordained), but it could also have been that if you ran the process again he would mostly have come nowhere.
It's hard to know if 50/1 shots do win about 2% of the time without doing some maths. It might be overall true, but I think the argument is that it might not be true for next pope markets, though I think you can make a better case for saying that the odds on the favourite were too short in a market which is essentially guesswork and has a large number of possible winners.
There are probably not enough 'next pope' markets to do any analysis, but it might be that you could show that 'laying the favourite' could be a successful strategy on this kind of market - if you think markets like next Democratic presidential nominee, next Conservative leader, next Pope, can be lumped together...
Plenty of research has been done to show 50/1 shots win about 2% of the time. If they won 1% of the time everyone would just lay them, if they won 3% of the time everyone would just back them.
Within the basket of 50/1 bets there will be good and bad value individual bets but if you back a random mix of 1,000 50/1 bets you get on average around 20 winners.
But that's all 50/1 bets. The question is whether the next pope market is different. The next pope market is sufficiently niche that it could be very inefficient and it might be that laying the favourites is a very sound strategy.
Sorry to read that the BBC is still going downhill.
I don’t know about others, but I get my news from PB, the FT digital edition, a little bit from the NYT app, and X.
Everything has gone downhill, maybe even PB. (Would be interesting to run some kind of analysis of PB circa 2010 with PB today).
AI driven content is likely making everything worse, too. Why - as a minimum wage journalist - write an article when you can get AI to do it, even as it regurgitates stock phrases and factual errors?
I used to listen to Radio 4 every morning, take a daily newspaper, and enjoy serious debates on various BBC platforms.
It’s all going to shit, isn’t it?
No idea about BBC telly, as I rarely watch it. The dumbing down of Radio 3 is a piece of appalling iconoclasm. Radio 4 has decent stuff but far too thinly spread, and the BBC confuses impartiality with being uninspiredly boring.
In particular R4 Today, which has three hours to spread itself, has acres of boring stuff more suited to general interest moaning in the graveyard slots, and joins R5 in the belief that thoughtful peopele listen to radio to find out what happens when you share the thoughts of people who don't know anything, and pay attention to single issue fanatics. You would never know that BBC has access to global expertise on real news.
The BBC is also extremely light on the biggest story for years: the possible descent of the USA into authoritarianism.
Does anyone have a view on the current version of the BBC World Service?
Essentially Donald is desperate for a deal - any deal - and we’ve taken advantage of that to avoid the worst of his so-called liberation tariffs.
Kemi just looks like an opportunistic idiot. She’s simply not up to it, as predicted by anyone conscious of her lack of achievements in Cabinet.
The Tories have nothing to offer. The only reason I can think of to vote for them might be that they are not Reforn. In a hypothetical Tory/Reform election, I would hold my nose and vote Tory.
The deal is status is fiddling around plus accepting higher tariffs than previously existed in the US while not raising any of ours.
Not really something to crow about. The only bright spot is reducing the tariff increases in several key U.K. export areas.
The deal is a sensible defender measure. You don't crow about not losing business you otherwise would.
The opportunity is with the EU and repairing the Brexit damage, but we are some way from doing that.
Just had a look at Facebook. Apparently a) I and Prince Harry have a mutual friend and b) Martin Lewis has been arrested. It's fairly useful for groups where one knows all, or at least many, of the members but after that .....
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
What abundant energy? The North Sea gas fields are in end-of-life decline & the decision on whether to grant new exploration licenses is a rounding error compared to that inevitability.
Now if you meant nuclear, then sure. Although the Uranium for that mostly comes from Australia IIRC.
@Luckyguy1983 persists in the belief that there is lots of coal that can be *economically* mined. Except there isn't.
UK deep mined coal died because
1) Seams were exhausted/the cost of getting the coal out dramatically increased as the easier to access stuff was mined out. This started happening before WWI. 2) The giant open cast mines on shallow seems, 20 foot (or more) thick, were opened. In other countries. 3) A major market for some UK coal was high quality coal for steam ships. Once oil came in, this market disappeared. Burning Welsh Best in a power station gives little benefit and cost a lot more.
So bring back steam locomotives.
Have you ever travelled in a train pulled by one, let alone stood in the cab?
Five minutes and you understand why electrification of the railways was seen as a huge thing.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the County Council.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
(One also notes the level of donations to Reform from fossil fuel industries, which is somewhere between "most" and "nearly all of it".)
I just think Labour should confront people with this. Do you want to go on a gas only electricity tariff? Do you want all that investment to go elsewhere?
It is not 'investment', it is companies seeking money from a rigged energy market at the consumers' expense. People are waking up to this fact and rightly so.
As I mentioned earlier, even when generating power these energy sources damage and disrupt the grid. Things have gone very quiet on Heathrow - we could well see renewable energy was responsible for that substation blowing in the first place, as well as the fact that the backup generation had been fucked up.
The whole thing is an utter shitshow on every level, and people blowing the whistle have been slandered, mocked and condemned, whilst those in the pay of 'green entrepreneurs' have been heaped with praise for their 'boldness'.
Support for solar and wind is currently at 88% and 83%, respectively, with 1% opposition. 3% oppose solar farms in their area. 74% think they boost the economy.
In older polling, support for new gas and coal is at 7% and 5%.
The (political) argument is over, Reform would be mad to take this approach.
Two caveats to that, though.
One is that the balance of capital to running costs is different for fuel power and renewable power. People- especially older people- don't like projects with ten year paybacks.
The other is that we are all instinctively NIMBY. Hence "solar energy please, but not near me". And the thing about NIMBYism is that it makes people scramble for any argument against the thing they don't like.
Bad government, but potentially good as an election winner. Maybe anti-net-zero is the new Brexit...
What's surprising about the polling is that people are YIMBY for solar farms and, to a lesser extent, wind. Maybe that is different in Lincolnshire? But 76% of Reform voters support them...
(Coal is deeply unpopular, as you'd expect).
I sort of know that Reform are opposed to Net Zero; does anyone know what they support on the matter of climate change? Are they deniers or something else?
The world is warming whether the UK acts or not - so expenditure on mitigation to my mind would be the sensible path.
On the header, the fact that the winner was 50/1 doesn't mean that the betting market was wrong. 50/1 shots should and do win about 2% of the time, not because the markets are wrong, but that is what 50/1 means.
It might have been wrong and he was always a more likely candidate (maybe even pre-ordained), but it could also have been that if you ran the process again he would mostly have come nowhere.
It's hard to know if 50/1 shots do win about 2% of the time without doing some maths. It might be overall true, but I think the argument is that it might not be true for next pope markets, though I think you can make a better case for saying that the odds on the favourite were too short in a market which is essentially guesswork and has a large number of possible winners.
There are probably not enough 'next pope' markets to do any analysis, but it might be that you could show that 'laying the favourite' could be a successful strategy on this kind of market - if you think markets like next Democratic presidential nominee, next Conservative leader, next Pope, can be lumped together...
Plenty of research has been done to show 50/1 shots win about 2% of the time. If they won 1% of the time everyone would just lay them, if they won 3% of the time everyone would just back them.
Within the basket of 50/1 bets there will be good and bad value individual bets but if you back a random mix of 1,000 50/1 bets you get on average around 20 winners.
But that's all 50/1 bets. The question is whether the next pope market is different. The next pope market is sufficiently niche that it could be very inefficient and it might be that laying the favourites is a very sound strategy.
Evidence to make that case is not a single bet. Anyway, we could carry on but enough from me on this.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the County Council.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
(One also notes the level of donations to Reform from fossil fuel industries, which is somewhere between "most" and "nearly all of it".)
I just think Labour should confront people with this. Do you want to go on a gas only electricity tariff? Do you want all that investment to go elsewhere?
It is not 'investment', it is companies seeking money from a rigged energy market at the consumers' expense. People are waking up to this fact and rightly so.
As I mentioned earlier, even when generating power these energy sources damage and disrupt the grid. Things have gone very quiet on Heathrow - we could well see renewable energy was responsible for that substation blowing in the first place, as well as the fact that the backup generation had been fucked up.
The whole thing is an utter shitshow on every level, and people blowing the whistle have been slandered, mocked and condemned, whilst those in the pay of 'green entrepreneurs' have been heaped with praise for their 'boldness'.
Support for solar and wind is currently at 88% and 83%, respectively, with 1% opposition. 3% oppose solar farms in their area. 74% think they boost the economy.
In older polling, support for new gas and coal is at 7% and 5%.
The (political) argument is over, Reform would be mad to take this approach.
Two caveats to that, though.
One is that the balance of capital to running costs is different for fuel power and renewable power. People- especially older people- don't like projects with ten year paybacks.
The other is that we are all instinctively NIMBY. Hence "solar energy please, but not near me". And the thing about NIMBYism is that it makes people scramble for any argument against the thing they don't like.
Bad government, but potentially good as an election winner. Maybe anti-net-zero is the new Brexit...
What's surprising about the polling is that people are YIMBY for solar farms and, to a lesser extent, wind. Maybe that is different in Lincolnshire? But 76% of Reform voters support them...
(Coal is deeply unpopular, as you'd expect).
I sort of know that Reform are opposed to Net Zero; does anyone know what they support on the matter of climate change? Are they deniers or something else?
The world is warming whether the UK acts or not - so expenditure on mitigation to my mind would be the sensible path.
*Adaptation, to please the policy wonks. Mitigation is reducing emissions.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
What abundant energy? The North Sea gas fields are in end-of-life decline & the decision on whether to grant new exploration licenses is a rounding error compared to that inevitability.
Now if you meant nuclear, then sure. Although the Uranium for that mostly comes from Australia IIRC.
@Luckyguy1983 persists in the belief that there is lots of coal that can be *economically* mined. Except there isn't.
UK deep mined coal died because
1) Seams were exhausted/the cost of getting the coal out dramatically increased as the easier to access stuff was mined out. This started happening before WWI. 2) The giant open cast mines on shallow seems, 20 foot (or more) thick, were opened. In other countries. 3) A major market for some UK coal was high quality coal for steam ships. Once oil came in, this market disappeared. Burning Welsh Best in a power station gives little benefit and cost a lot more.
So bring back steam locomotives.
Have you ever travelled in a train pulled by one, let alone stood in the cab?
Five minutes and you understand why electrification of the railways was seen as a huge thing.
I'm having a look into whether now is a good time to switch again, maybe to electric. I love it, but I'm not sure that I still need my large (low mileage now) estate. It may be at the point where the value may be going to take a dive, so now could be a good time to0 swap.
What is a good smallish electric? Needs would be for local and county travel, with occasional extended distance.
I think someone mentioned a Fiat 500e recently, and the larger battery version of that looks like having potential. Any other suggestions would be welcome.
One question I need to understand - how long does a battery actually sensibly last? And what age is practical for buying a second hand electric?
Renault 5. I've got one so you know it's mint. Alpine A290 if you're flush and want a bit more pep.
My 2009 Ford Focus gets approximately £200 a year spent on maintenance. It has been astonishing reliably and remarkably cheap to run. I'm in the market for an electric car when it dies, but it shows no signs of doing so yet. Cars made this century are far more reliable than cars made last century. And depreciation on it is costing me roughly £0 per year. I do have a weird problem with moss growing on it, however. And it is very damp in the winter. I feel sure both problems are solvable but I have not yet been motivated to solve them.
Scuttle drain is blocked.
I'm no mechanic, and Dura has form on this - so my instinctive reaction was that this was obscurely expressed abuse for my choice of car. But now I see it is Dura being hekpful. Thanks, Dura!
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the County Council.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
(One also notes the level of donations to Reform from fossil fuel industries, which is somewhere between "most" and "nearly all of it".)
I just think Labour should confront people with this. Do you want to go on a gas only electricity tariff? Do you want all that investment to go elsewhere?
It is not 'investment', it is companies seeking money from a rigged energy market at the consumers' expense. People are waking up to this fact and rightly so.
As I mentioned earlier, even when generating power these energy sources damage and disrupt the grid. Things have gone very quiet on Heathrow - we could well see renewable energy was responsible for that substation blowing in the first place, as well as the fact that the backup generation had been fucked up.
The whole thing is an utter shitshow on every level, and people blowing the whistle have been slandered, mocked and condemned, whilst those in the pay of 'green entrepreneurs' have been heaped with praise for their 'boldness'.
Support for solar and wind is currently at 88% and 83%, respectively, with 1% opposition. 3% oppose solar farms in their area. 74% think they boost the economy.
In older polling, support for new gas and coal is at 7% and 5%.
The (political) argument is over, Reform would be mad to take this approach.
Two caveats to that, though.
One is that the balance of capital to running costs is different for fuel power and renewable power. People- especially older people- don't like projects with ten year paybacks.
The other is that we are all instinctively NIMBY. Hence "solar energy please, but not near me". And the thing about NIMBYism is that it makes people scramble for any argument against the thing they don't like.
Bad government, but potentially good as an election winner. Maybe anti-net-zero is the new Brexit...
What's surprising about the polling is that people are YIMBY for solar farms and, to a lesser extent, wind. Maybe that is different in Lincolnshire? But 76% of Reform voters support them...
(Coal is deeply unpopular, as you'd expect).
I sort of know that Reform are opposed to Net Zero; does anyone know what they support on the matter of climate change? Are they deniers or something else?
The world is warming whether the UK acts or not - so expenditure on mitigation to my mind would be the sensible path.
*Adaptation, to please the policy wonks. Mitigation is reducing emissions.
Nobody was prepared to state that there was too much immigration until it became patently obvious, and the omerta around green issues is at least as deadening. Watch that polling tumble.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
What abundant energy? The North Sea gas fields are in end-of-life decline & the decision on whether to grant new exploration licenses is a rounding error compared to that inevitability.
Now if you meant nuclear, then sure. Although the Uranium for that mostly comes from Australia IIRC.
@Luckyguy1983 persists in the belief that there is lots of coal that can be *economically* mined. Except there isn't.
UK deep mined coal died because
1) Seams were exhausted/the cost of getting the coal out dramatically increased as the easier to access stuff was mined out. This started happening before WWI. 2) The giant open cast mines on shallow seems, 20 foot (or more) thick, were opened. In other countries. 3) A major market for some UK coal was high quality coal for steam ships. Once oil came in, this market disappeared. Burning Welsh Best in a power station gives little benefit and cost a lot more.
So bring back steam locomotives.
Have you ever travelled in a train pulled by one, let alone stood in the cab?
Five minutes and you understand why electrification of the railways was seen as a huge thing.
Ideal for a service from Lincolnshire to Ashfield, though.
I'm having a look into whether now is a good time to switch again, maybe to electric. I love it, but I'm not sure that I still need my large (low mileage now) estate. It may be at the point where the value may be going to take a dive, so now could be a good time to0 swap.
What is a good smallish electric? Needs would be for local and county travel, with occasional extended distance.
I think someone mentioned a Fiat 500e recently, and the larger battery version of that looks like having potential. Any other suggestions would be welcome.
One question I need to understand - how long does a battery actually sensibly last? And what age is practical for buying a second hand electric?
Which? did a study recently.
- EVs purchased in 2017 or 2018 showed a battery capacity drop to approximately 93% of the original - 2019 or 2020 reported an average of 96% battery capacity remaining.
That's in line with other data. Which is that battery capacity drops by 1-1.5% per year.
I'm having a look into whether now is a good time to switch again, maybe to electric. I love it, but I'm not sure that I still need my large (low mileage now) estate. It may be at the point where the value may be going to take a dive, so now could be a good time to0 swap.
What is a good smallish electric? Needs would be for local and county travel, with occasional extended distance.
I think someone mentioned a Fiat 500e recently, and the larger battery version of that looks like having potential. Any other suggestions would be welcome.
One question I need to understand - how long does a battery actually sensibly last? And what age is practical for buying a second hand electric?
Buying new the Renault 5, buying second hand there are a lot of options
It’s was Robert who mentioned the Fiat 500e and that could have been California centric.
Fascinating that Trump, per FT, is proposing to raise the taxes on the rich (income over $2.5M), and remove the preferential tax treatment of hedge funds.
The collapse in US elite support for Trump has been wonderful to see. This won’t help.
And he's fucked over US agriculture by establishing the precedent of allowing tariff free imports of UK beef without requiring the UK to take hormone treated beef or watering down our strict labelling laws which has always been a deal breaking requirement for US farmers in prior trade talks. I'm honestly shocked that they've allowed this to go through. It seems to have gone a but under the radar but it is actually a huge reversal of position from the US and I'm still sceptical as to whether the beef deal will make it through unscathed.
My 2009 Ford Focus gets approximately £200 a year spent on maintenance. It has been astonishing reliably and remarkably cheap to run. I'm in the market for an electric car when it dies, but it shows no signs of doing so yet. Cars made this century are far more reliable than cars made last century. And depreciation on it is costing me roughly £0 per year. I do have a weird problem with moss growing on it, however. And it is very damp in the winter. I feel sure both problems are solvable but I have not yet been motivated to solve them.
Scuttle drain is blocked.
I'm no mechanic, and Dura has form on this - so my instinctive reaction was that this was obscurely expressed abuse for my choice of car. But now I see it is Dura being hekpful. Thanks, Dura!
You want to get it sorted out because it'll cause rust and that car isn't a viable candidate for an inevitably expensive rust repair.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
What abundant energy? The North Sea gas fields are in end-of-life decline & the decision on whether to grant new exploration licenses is a rounding error compared to that inevitability.
Now if you meant nuclear, then sure. Although the Uranium for that mostly comes from Australia IIRC.
@Luckyguy1983 persists in the belief that there is lots of coal that can be *economically* mined. Except there isn't.
UK deep mined coal died because
1) Seams were exhausted/the cost of getting the coal out dramatically increased as the easier to access stuff was mined out. This started happening before WWI. 2) The giant open cast mines on shallow seems, 20 foot (or more) thick, were opened. In other countries. 3) A major market for some UK coal was high quality coal for steam ships. Once oil came in, this market disappeared. Burning Welsh Best in a power station gives little benefit and cost a lot more.
So bring back steam locomotives.
Have you ever travelled in a train pulled by one, let alone stood in the cab?
Five minutes and you understand why electrification of the railways was seen as a huge thing.
If only were actually looked at electrifying lines rather than diesel and battery hybrid schemes
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
I hope not, and we would be extremely foolish to do so.
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
What abundant energy? The North Sea gas fields are in end-of-life decline & the decision on whether to grant new exploration licenses is a rounding error compared to that inevitability.
Now if you meant nuclear, then sure. Although the Uranium for that mostly comes from Australia IIRC.
@Luckyguy1983 persists in the belief that there is lots of coal that can be *economically* mined. Except there isn't.
UK deep mined coal died because
1) Seams were exhausted/the cost of getting the coal out dramatically increased as the easier to access stuff was mined out. This started happening before WWI. 2) The giant open cast mines on shallow seems, 20 foot (or more) thick, were opened. In other countries. 3) A major market for some UK coal was high quality coal for steam ships. Once oil came in, this market disappeared. Burning Welsh Best in a power station gives little benefit and cost a lot more.
So bring back steam locomotives.
Have you ever travelled in a train pulled by one, let alone stood in the cab?
Five minutes and you understand why electrification of the railways was seen as a huge thing.
Several times, and it's a delight.
They are fun to play with. Big toys. I've done a fair bit of that.
But for passengers, a modern electric train is an improvement of orders of magnitude.
Sorry to read that the BBC is still going downhill.
I don’t know about others, but I get my news from PB, the FT digital edition, a little bit from the NYT app, and X.
Everything has gone downhill, maybe even PB. (Would be interesting to run some kind of analysis of PB circa 2010 with PB today).
AI driven content is likely making everything worse, too. Why - as a minimum wage journalist - write an article when you can get AI to do it, even as it regurgitates stock phrases and factual errors?
I used to listen to Radio 4 every morning, take a daily newspaper, and enjoy serious debates on various BBC platforms.
It’s all going to shit, isn’t it?
No idea about BBC telly, as I rarely watch it. The dumbing down of Radio 3 is a piece of appalling iconoclasm. Radio 4 has decent stuff but far too thinly spread, and the BBC confuses impartiality with being uninspiredly boring.
In particular R4 Today, which has three hours to spread itself, has acres of boring stuff more suited to general interest moaning in the graveyard slots, and joins R5 in the belief that thoughtful peopele listen to radio to find out what happens when you share the thoughts of people who don't know anything, and pay attention to single issue fanatics. You would never know that BBC has access to global expertise on real news.
The BBC is also extremely light on the biggest story for years: the possible descent of the USA into authoritarianism.
That's partly because most of their US political contacts seem to be with the GOP. Justin Webb, for example, is something of a fellow traveller.
What's your beef with R3 ? Granted there's some lightweight stuff there, but with iPlayer, you don't have to listen to it.
I am glad I don't have to listen to it, and mostly don't. The BBC have a treasure trove of archive so are not short of great stuff. They have taken to filling acres of space with snippets, tiny pieces and random assortments. There appears to be a sort of assumption that you listen to music for random disassociated emotional uplift and mood creation mixed with cheery commentary about how amazing everything is.
Its live broadcasts are accompanied by unserious luvviedom.
I'm having a look into whether now is a good time to switch again, maybe to electric. I love it, but I'm not sure that I still need my large (low mileage now) estate. It may be at the point where the value may be going to take a dive, so now could be a good time to0 swap.
What is a good smallish electric? Needs would be for local and county travel, with occasional extended distance.
I think someone mentioned a Fiat 500e recently, and the larger battery version of that looks like having potential. Any other suggestions would be welcome.
One question I need to understand - how long does a battery actually sensibly last? And what age is practical for buying a second hand electric?
Data suggests the current generation of batteries lasts for well over a decade. And they are getting better.
The second hand market needs a couple more years before there will be large enough numbers available to reach some sort of equilibrium.
Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.
To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.
Will we?
To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.
Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.
I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the County Council.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
(One also notes the level of donations to Reform from fossil fuel industries, which is somewhere between "most" and "nearly all of it".)
I just think Labour should confront people with this. Do you want to go on a gas only electricity tariff? Do you want all that investment to go elsewhere?
It is not 'investment', it is companies seeking money from a rigged energy market at the consumers' expense. People are waking up to this fact and rightly so.
As I mentioned earlier, even when generating power these energy sources damage and disrupt the grid. Things have gone very quiet on Heathrow - we could well see renewable energy was responsible for that substation blowing in the first place, as well as the fact that the backup generation had been fucked up.
The whole thing is an utter shitshow on every level, and people blowing the whistle have been slandered, mocked and condemned, whilst those in the pay of 'green entrepreneurs' have been heaped with praise for their 'boldness'.
Support for solar and wind is currently at 88% and 83%, respectively, with 1% opposition. 3% oppose solar farms in their area. 74% think they boost the economy.
In older polling, support for new gas and coal is at 7% and 5%.
The (political) argument is over, Reform would be mad to take this approach.
Two caveats to that, though.
One is that the balance of capital to running costs is different for fuel power and renewable power. People- especially older people- don't like projects with ten year paybacks.
The other is that we are all instinctively NIMBY. Hence "solar energy please, but not near me". And the thing about NIMBYism is that it makes people scramble for any argument against the thing they don't like.
Bad government, but potentially good as an election winner. Maybe anti-net-zero is the new Brexit...
What's surprising about the polling is that people are YIMBY for solar farms and, to a lesser extent, wind. Maybe that is different in Lincolnshire? But 76% of Reform voters support them...
(Coal is deeply unpopular, as you'd expect).
I sort of know that Reform are opposed to Net Zero; does anyone know what they support on the matter of climate change? Are they deniers or something else?
They tiptoe around denialism. Their manifesto last year said:
"Net Zero is pushing up bills, damaging British industries like steel, and making us less secure. We can protect our environment with more tree planting, more recycling and less single use plastics. New technology will help, but we must not impoverish ourselves in pursuit of unaffordable, unachievable global CO2 targets."
It goes on:
"Cheap, Secure Energy for Britain "Start fast-track licences of North Sea gas and oil. Grant shale gas licences on test sites for 2 years. Enable major production when safety is proven, with local compensation schemes.
"Thereafter: "Cleaner Energy from New Technology "Fast-track clean nuclear energy with new Small Modular Reactors, built in Britain. Increase and incentivise ethical UK lithium mining for electric batteries, combined cycle gas turbines, clean synthetic fuel, tidal power and explore clean coal mining."
So, lots of talk of "clean" energy and some of their plan is low-carbon (nuclear, batteries), but overall what they're proposing would involve pumping out lots of CO2.
I'm having a look into whether now is a good time to switch again, maybe to electric. I love it, but I'm not sure that I still need my large (low mileage now) estate. It may be at the point where the value may be going to take a dive, so now could be a good time to0 swap.
What is a good smallish electric? Needs would be for local and county travel, with occasional extended distance.
I think someone mentioned a Fiat 500e recently, and the larger battery version of that looks like having potential. Any other suggestions would be welcome.
One question I need to understand - how long does a battery actually sensibly last? And what age is practical for buying a second hand electric?
Data suggests the current generation of batteries lasts for well over a decade. And they are getting better.
The second hand market needs a couple more years before there will be large enough numbers available to reach some sort of equilibrium.
I’m not so sure - I’m looking on Autotrader and can see some 2 year old cars with 200 miles range that I could live with for less than £15,000
And it’s likely that there could be a period like now where prices are lower than they will be going forward as demand is lower than supply
Essentially Donald is desperate for a deal - any deal - and we’ve taken advantage of that to avoid the worst of his so-called liberation tariffs.
Kemi just looks like an opportunistic idiot. She’s simply not up to it, as predicted by anyone conscious of her lack of achievements in Cabinet.
The Tories have nothing to offer. The only reason I can think of to vote for them might be that they are not Reforn. In a hypothetical Tory/Reform election, I would hold my nose and vote Tory.
The deal is status is fiddling around plus accepting higher tariffs than previously existed in the US while not raising any of ours.
Not really something to crow about. The only bright spot is reducing the tariff increases in several key U.K. export areas.
The deal is a sensible defender measure. You don't crow about not losing business you otherwise would.
The opportunity is with the EU and repairing the Brexit damage, but we are some way from doing that.
Just referred to Starmer having a 1-0 to the Arsenal trade policy and I think I might use that more widely.
...The idea that betting markets are strictly rational is also not true...
I agree. They are the assessment by the gamblers of the probability of a win, weighted by wealth, access and propensity to gamble. That's it. They do not reflect the "true" probability of winning (if such a thing can be said to exist).
The Brexit market was such an example. Remain voters were richer and placed higher bets.
As you point out, there are also differences between markets. Although much less these days, arbitrage used to be a thing if you could spot them.
Comments
An odd thing that brought Louise Haigh down, mind. Still feels like there's more to that than meets the eye.
The second bit of the phrase, "(as well as it can be made to work)" tends to be unsaid.
The collapse in US elite support for Trump has been wonderful to see. This won’t help.
Fun fact: the Normandie-Niemen Regiment was a squad of French pilots flying Soviet fighter planes on the Eastern Front.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Régiment_de_Chasse_2/30_Normandie-Niemen
All we are providing other countries with presently is an object lesson in what not to do.
And we are now realising (Spain, North London) that our renewable energy sources are causing problems even when they're working!
We must completely reset, and use the abundant energy we are lucky to have been given, before we can no longer do so when our bankrupt country is sold to China and we see them come in and exploit what were once our resources.
Yet Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.
The low carbon and energy economy, already worth £1.2bn per annum to Greater Lincolnshire, holds exceptional potential offering an unprecedented level of private investment of £60bn over the next fifteen years.
https://www.greaterlincolnshirelep.co.uk/priorities-and-plans/game-changers/green-energy/
If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.
(One also notes the level of donations to Reform from fossil fuel industries, which is somewhere between "most" and "nearly all of it".)
See the commentary that the UN is going to feature in the realignment of the world order. Seems the Illuminati are out of a job.
I know that "Net Zero" is completely the wrong messaging, but the goal of energy independence is a good one. The environment needs to be tret as a bonus rather than the objective. Green energy is how we regain our place of power, no longer at the whim of Putin or money markets, we not only generate free energy but we can design build and export the technology.
It should be a no-brainer. But "investment" is seen to be "subsidy" and thus "who will pay for it"
Vance he didn’t have a choice about.
They are also full of liar loans, mis-selling and the kind of bullshit "selling" that made Foxtons so popular.
I don’t know about others, but I get my news from PB, the FT digital edition, a little bit from the NYT app, and X.
Everything has gone downhill, maybe even PB. (Would be interesting to run some kind of analysis of PB circa 2010 with PB today).
AI driven content is likely making everything worse, too.
Why - as a minimum wage journalist - write an article when you can get AI to do it, even as it regurgitates stock phrases and factual errors?
I used to listen to Radio 4 every morning, take a daily newspaper, and enjoy serious debates on various BBC platforms.
It’s all going to shit, isn’t it?
My inference on Reform voters and Net Zero is that - inasmuch as they think about it at all - while it isn't a principle they would die for, and while they probably find some of the 'green stuff' a little annoying, they generally prefer not-harming the environment over harming it; and all else being equal prefer clean sources of energy over dirty ones. I can see Nigel Farage's point about the costs of Net Zero, but he can make it sound as if harming the environment is his primary aim.
Now if you meant nuclear, then sure. Although the Uranium for that mostly comes from Australia IIRC.
I've no objection to politicians using phrases like half-arsed. But it's obvious if it's not their natural mode of discourse, and a bit embarrassing.
Badenoch was simply not ready for the leadership. Picking anyone with so little experience is a gamble, and this one didn't pay off for the Tories.
It's hard to see where they go from here, but just carrying on with her is a death sentence for them.
I've just bought a 100% original 5,000 mile RD500LC. It's been nice knowing some of you.
As I mentioned earlier, even when generating power these energy sources damage and disrupt the grid. Things have gone very quiet on Heathrow - we could well see renewable energy was responsible for that substation blowing in the first place, as well as the fact that the backup generation had been fucked up.
The whole thing is an utter shitshow on every level, and people blowing the whistle have been slandered, mocked and condemned, whilst those in the pay of 'green entrepreneurs' have been heaped with praise for their 'boldness'.
The argument made on here is that some kinds of markets are consistently wrong, and laying the favourite is a profitable strategy, eg for next Conservative leader. I don't know if this is true or not, but it at least sounds plausible, though if too many people follow it it's not going to work any more... so if you find something like this out you keep it to yourself if you want to make money. It's information that doesn't want to be free!
The idea that betting markets are strictly rational is also not true.
A few years ago when I was when I was regularly betting on football you could often get significantly different odds on the Asian Handicap -0.5 market on Betfair compared to the win market on Betfair, despite them being exactly the same bet (and on markets with massive liquidity). This was the case for quite some time. No doubt that obvious anomaly has gone by now, but I'm a bit sceptical that the betting market is always quickly automatically going to reach fair odds in the way you describe.
You make your case weaker by including it.
Here is High Peak Autos:-
Why Used Cars Are SO Cheap in the UK (Compared to Everywhere Else)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjMyx24pxTo
ETA HPA starts with the same point I just made. Collusion? Memory more like.
1 - New cars bought on finance have gone from about half to 80-90% since the millennium.
2 - Cars last a lot longer, and don't rust anything like as much. Average age is up from about 6.5 years to about 9.5 years over 20 years.
3 - Mileage driven has fallen, by about 20% over 20 years (regardless of COVID), so condition should be better (?).
4 - The cost of running has not increased, except perhaps marginally, in real terms, over the last 15 years.
In older polling, support for new gas and coal is at 7% and 5%.
The (political) argument is over, Reform would be mad to take this approach.
I'm happy to drive a second hand shitbox, because I've got a couple fairly locally.
Dealer servicing is indeed a ripoff.
UK deep mined coal died because
1) Seams were exhausted/the cost of getting the coal out dramatically increased as the easier to access stuff was mined out. This started happening before WWI.
2) The giant open cast mines on shallow seems, 20 foot (or more) thick, were opened. In other countries.
3) A major market for some UK coal was high quality coal for steam ships. Once oil came in, this market disappeared. Burning Welsh Best in a power station gives little benefit and cost a lot more.
One is that the balance of capital to running costs is different for fuel power and renewable power. People- especially older people- don't like projects with ten year paybacks.
The other is that we are all instinctively NIMBY. Hence "solar energy please, but not near me". And the thing about NIMBYism is that it makes people scramble for any argument against the thing they don't like.
Bad government, but potentially good as an election winner. Maybe anti-net-zero is the new Brexit...
The entire car finance market is due for a crash. Horrible people lending money at ripoff rates to buy horrible cars.
(Coal is deeply unpopular, as you'd expect).
I fucking love the car game, me.
- No export market (not even Ireland after Brexit)
- Ex-company cars in good condition
- Cheap credit
- Keeping up with the Joneses
- Weather
- MOT tests
- Ease of registering ownership changes
- DIY died
Why Used Cars Are SO Cheap in the UK (Compared to Everywhere Else)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjMyx24pxTo
Westminster Voting Intention:
RFM: 28% (+3)
LAB: 23% (-2)
CON: 19% (-2)
LDM: 14% (=)
GRN: 8% (=)
SNP: 3% (+1)
Via @techneUK, 7-8 May.
Changes w/ 23-24 Apr.
I do have a weird problem with moss growing on it, however. And it is very damp in the winter. I feel sure both problems are solvable but I have not yet been motivated to solve them.
In particular R4 Today, which has three hours to spread itself, has acres of boring stuff more suited to general interest moaning in the graveyard slots, and joins R5 in the belief that thoughtful peopele listen to radio to find out what happens when you share the thoughts of people who don't know anything, and pay attention to single issue fanatics. You would never know that BBC has access to global expertise on real news.
The BBC is also extremely light on the biggest story for years: the possible descent of the USA into authoritarianism.
after all Cameron nearly won
it in 2010 but a Reform voting
oik is beyond the pale
Which is pretty odd for a neo/paleo-Thatcherite.
https://newrepublic.com/article/195028/trump-uk-trade-accord-tariffs
Huzzah for Sir Starmer. Or not. But there are some good lines in there.
And I don't have any rose-tinted view of the ease of accessibility or otherwise our coal resources. I would however seek a range of views before I decided once and for all, as (for example) Labour has spread flat out lies about the Cumbrian coal product being unsuitable for the Scunthorpe steel furnace when it will absolutely be suitable. There is a lot of bad faith and vested interests in this debate.
In principle, I would far rather burn British coal than American wood pellets - it seems obvious.
Justin Webb, for example, is something of a fellow traveller.
What's your beef with R3 ?
Granted there's some lightweight stuff there, but with iPlayer, you don't have to listen to it.
A super bigger Deal with USA cannot now happen because although Starmer has bottled taking us back into EU, the deal he is making with EU restricts scope for a bigger trade deal with others. You can agree? Labours EU wheeler dealing puts Brexit freedoms, such as to get the big super big Trade agreement with USA and others, and all the golden years of growth, through the shredder. You don’t agree? But more voters than you see it like that.
The second half of Labours awful day yesterday we learnt Business Investment growth has collapsed by 50% from 3% to 1.5 - as Labours sneaky tax gamble massively backfires. even worse indicator of UK dramatically weakening economy is Export growth has gone from 3% to absolutely nothing. Zero export growth. BoE have gone hawkish on future interest rate cuts - what the markets believed would happen next has been replaced by high interest rates and inflation set to stay for the foreseeable.
Suddenly, what happens in the following chapters of this story, the end of Starmer’s government in late 2027 and next election result 2029, is becoming very clear to us.
Firstly, this Labour government is in huge economic trouble. Can Starmer survive more than another 20 months of a shitter economy than the one he inherited? After Starmer the madness of left wing populists take over Labour policy.
Secondly, Starmer’s middle path to keeping the country economic poor and struggling, using neither Brexit Freedom or EU membership, is what the coming Ref Con Coalition government will beat Labour to a pulp with on their way to government. Don’t knock clear blue water politics like Starmer has handed his opponents, just because you like what Starmer is doing. Focus group those backing Reform now when they voted Boris in 2019 and it was Boris, Brexit Deal, and Super Trade agreement with USA bringing back economic growth.
2016, 2019, 2029, a clear pattern emerging. They voted for economic growth, community renewal and money in their pockets in every one.
May 8th 2025, hideous day for Labour. The writings on the wall.
I suspect the current generation of local mechanics will be the last one, as transport goes electric.
I'm having a look into whether now is a good time to switch again, maybe to electric. I love it, but I'm not sure that I still need my large (low mileage now) estate. It may be at the point where the value may be going to take a dive, so now could be a good time to0 swap.
What is a good smallish electric? Needs would be for local and county travel, with occasional extended distance.
I think someone mentioned a Fiat 500e recently, and the larger battery version of that looks like having potential. Any other suggestions would be welcome.
One question I need to understand - how long does a battery actually sensibly last? And what age is practical for buying a second hand electric?
The opportunity is with the EU and repairing the Brexit damage, but we are some way from doing that.
It's fairly useful for groups where one knows all, or at least many, of the members but after that .....
Five minutes and you understand why electrification of the railways was seen as a huge thing.
- EVs purchased in 2017 or 2018 showed a battery capacity drop to approximately 93% of the original
- 2019 or 2020 reported an average of 96% battery capacity remaining.
That's in line with other data. Which is that battery capacity drops by 1-1.5% per year.
It’s was Robert who mentioned the Fiat 500e and that could have been California centric.
But for passengers, a modern electric train is an improvement of orders of magnitude.
Its live broadcasts are accompanied by unserious luvviedom.
And they are getting better.
The second hand market needs a couple more years before there will be large enough numbers available to reach some sort of equilibrium.
"Net Zero is pushing up bills, damaging British industries like steel, and making us less secure. We can protect our environment with more tree planting, more recycling and less single use plastics. New technology will help, but we must not impoverish ourselves in pursuit of unaffordable, unachievable global CO2 targets."
It goes on:
"Cheap, Secure Energy for Britain
"Start fast-track licences of North Sea gas and oil. Grant shale gas licences on test sites for 2 years. Enable major production when safety is proven, with local compensation schemes.
"Thereafter:
"Cleaner Energy from New Technology
"Fast-track clean nuclear energy with new Small Modular Reactors, built in Britain. Increase and incentivise ethical UK lithium mining for electric batteries, combined cycle gas turbines, clean synthetic fuel, tidal power and explore clean coal mining."
So, lots of talk of "clean" energy and some of their plan is low-carbon (nuclear, batteries), but overall what they're proposing would involve pumping out lots of CO2.
And it’s likely that there could be a period like now where prices are lower than they will be going forward as demand is lower than supply
Reform down 3% from their 30% NEV last week and LDs also down 3% from their local elections voteshare
➡️RFM: 36.8% (+36.8)
🌹LAB: 28.0% (-23.1)
🟢GRN: 15.0% (+0.2)
🟠LD: 10.9% (+2.7)
🌳CON: 9.4% (-15.7)
Reform GAIN from Labour
Changes w/ 2024 Local Elections
https://bsky.app/profile/davidheniguk.bsky.social/post/3lopyz2ccks2h