I did, and I bothered to follow it. Especially with us both coming from areas of Scotland that have been devastated by poor SNP governance for years and now Labour policies that have really affected our areas too?! I am sorry, but that kind of cheap dig really gets me when I think of the fact that the only real effective opposition to the SNP & SGreens has been the Scottish Conservatives!! Thank god for Scottish Conservatives and the last Conservative government at Westminster when it came to protecting women's rights. And also after just a few days ago when Douglas Ross's Right to Recovery bill all about promoting wider drug rehabilatation was voted down by the SNP and SGreens in Holyrood and in the country with the biggest drug deaths, particularly in Dundee!
Also coming from the North East of Scotland, I remain really angry at the impact of the SNP, SGreens and now the Labour Government at Westminster's devasting impact on the North Sea Gas and Oil Industry here. So your flippant lads together comment really jarred with someone else who actually lives in the North East of Scotland right now! I am fed up watching the only Opposition party in Scotland knocking its head against a brick wall and getting dismissed in this way by a long time dismissive snobbish group on here! When I arrived on this site twenty years ago, I was out loud and a proud female Scottish Conservative and I remain so thanks to their bloody hard work protecting my rights as a biological woman here in Scotland!!
So Kemi, you go girl!
Morning! I encountered a very loyal Andrew Bowie voter in Banchory, because the "Tories protect my industry". We discussed the large numbers of job losses and the huge Tory flip flops on energy and Net Zero. He was resolute.
Point is, the Tories can hardly claim to have been stalwart defenders of an industry they have run down. And not just energy, as I pointed out earlier the local farmers are fuming at both their treatment by the party and by the rank arrogance of Bowie et al assuming their vote remains secure...
Your weakness on these policy issues in the North East of Scotland is showing, I have unlike you lived in the North East of Scotland and have been married to someone who has worked in the Oil and Gas industry here for 40 years, also now spent 20 years living in a rural area where many of our friends are farmers. There is a good reason why Andrew Bowie held onto his seat at the last GE and the fact he knows his constiuency both rural and industrial in Aberdeenshire and in Aberdeen helped a lot. So don't knock a bloody good local MP what ever his party colours!
I'm not knocking him! As the party look to be reduced to a rump he could be the next leader!
Now that we have set the "you're not from round here" point aside (and I accept I am not) can we go back to the points I am making?
A big run down of the industry under the Tories. A lot of job losses. The whole net zero thing was Tory, with all that entails. Not funding CCS here was Tory. The slashing of farming subsidy in a direct betrayal of promises made was Tory. Its not us saying these things to farmers and energy workers. They are saying it to us. And Bowie got short shrift at several of the local agricultural fairs, and more so when the Tractors for Truth came into the area.
The discontent is real, hence the decline in the vote.
I wish more of your former voters would stick with you rather than switch to Reform.
OMG! You really don't have a clue about cyclical ups and downs of the North East Oil and Gas Industry or the farming industry here or elsewhere in the UK over the last 40 years and the long term impact it had on either indusrty!! I bet you never looked up being a sheep farmer in Scotland when they barely made a living looking after and feeding the sheep on their farms and even after they were bought by the supermarket a leg of lamb in the supermarket was too expensive for most folk despite the pittance they had paid for them!! Oh by the way, that was happening during the last Labour government!
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
Far from it, the Conservatives have shifted the parameters of the debate.
It's a great example of how strong political leadership can do that and break the consensus.
Before Kemi no-one was seriously questioning at a national level the wisdom of this law, even though no doubt many people will now "forget" this and pretend that they were.
The Tories are going to get demolished next May. English local elections. Welsh and Scottish national elections. And then nobody will say “yebbut she wants to abolish Stamp Duty”.
I’m not remotely wedded to Stamp Duty. We don’t have it in Scotland. But having suddenly decided Stamp Duty is bad, you actually need power again to do this thing you didn’t do when you were in power. Which means persuading people to vote for you. Which they won’t.
Errrr - we do, and it's a significantly higher tax here than down south (LBTT). It's starting to catch middle class people out in the central belt and that is anathema to the SNP, who are the masters of middle class bungs dressed up as progressive policy.
I'd suggest that it could become enough of a deal in Scotland for SCon to get double figures. If I buy with my partner it will cost me around £20k.
LBTT is not Stamp Duty, nor is it under the remit of Westminster. I listened to various podcasts yesterday and Ruth Davidson was scathing about Kemi not speaking about Scotland or Wales at all and that her big policy doesn't apply in those nations...
Yes it is. It just has a different name. The same as PAWHP = WFP. The Conservatives even have the benefit of never being in power here (with no prospect of it), which puts them in a strong position - particularly as LBTT is so much higher.
It is possible to target Net Zero while still seeking to maximise North Sea oil and gas extraction.
And when you have a government locking in demand for natural gas as part of its decarbonisation strategy, through CCGT and blue hydrogen plants with CO2 capture, there is every incentive to 'drill, baby, drill' rather than import LNG from Qatar.
I may have mentioned this previously.
Blue hydrogen is a ludicrously expensive non solution to climate change even more ridiculous than the current CO2 capture plans.
But otherwise, agreed.
Blue hydrogen is part of the CO2 capture plans. CO2 capture is integral to blue hydrogen.
Green hydrogen is more expensive than green. At present.
Kemi has proposed her scrap net zero and deportation of illegal immigrants policies mainly as red meat to attract back Tory voters lost to Reform. As Moon Rabbit states though there is a risk that they still stick with Farage while voters who backed 'Vote Blue Go Green' Cameron, net zero by 2050 May and eco Carrie influenced Boris stick with Starmer Labour or the LDs if they went that way last year or even a few go LD if they stayed Tory last year. A few Asian Hindu voters who supported Rishi and immigrants who welcomed Boris' largely relaxed approach to immigration with his points system might also be put off by Kemi's deportations and actively hostile approach to immigrants who she wants removed.
Kemi's Stamp Duty abolition was much more sensible, clear blue water distinctive from Farage, Starmer and Davey. If the Conservatives do get a poll boost next week that will be the reason, home buyers especially in London and the Home Counties will see it as very attractive. It is this the economy, keeping taxes and spending low which will keep voters voting Conservative, they won't out Reform Reform on the culture war
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The offset isn't real - if you are going to make people redundant you need to explicitly say what government functions are going to be reduced or binned off.
Because there are often obvious consequences that the last Tory Government was too thick to understand.
Reduce the number of people processing asylum claims those awaiting their claim to be processed take longer to be processed which means they need to be housed for longer
which means you need to house more people than you have space for so suddenly that little staff saving results in £10bn being spent to hire run down hotels.
I have given this example on here many times but after 35 years of working with local authorities a cycle applies, and it happened 35 years ago and it still happens.
A journeyman (or woman) Chief Executive is brought in to cut costs. He/she pores over spreadsheets and determines that labour is their biggest cost, so in order to cut costs they cut staff. Easy!
Let's take kerbside refuse collectors. In a.medium sized authority it would be reasonable to assume a 100 collectors and drivers. So the CE decides after much calculation that they can make do with 70 ( it's always a cut of circa 30%). So we have just saved just under a third of our labour cost. We can also get rid of 30% of our vehicles and their associated costs. Happy days!
However householder start complaining that their bins/ recycling service is failing (and don't forget ratepayers pay their council tax for one thing, to get their bins emptied). So to offset the failing service they hire in first ten, then twenty, then thirty agency staff. These workers will require a corresponding number of vehicles and these will be hired in at an astronomical rate. It probably takes two years to get back up to 70 permanent staff and 30 expensive agency staff, by which time the CE who saved 30% on service provision costs has moved on to a bigger local authority to do the same.
The next CE comes in and is tasked with reducing agency and vehicle hire costs so he/she tupees over the 30 agency staff onto the books and buys the corresponding vehicles required.
So often, cost savings costs more than they save.
I suspect Kemi's civil service sackings maintain a similar result.
Has anyone ever established why the number of civil servants has increased since the middle of the 2010s?
I'm assuming it's related to the other big thing that happened in the middle of the 2010s, but that might just be horrible centrist prejudice.
Don't say it out loud. Whisper it- Brexit!
I said it quietly so I don't think anyone noticed.
To engage with this seriously for a moment, as well as the repatriation of regulatory bodies from Brussels with Brexit (essentially in-sourcing what had been an outsourced function), we’ve also seen a continued callcentre-isation of several departments.
HMRC is a good example. You generally need to replace one medium paid clerical worker with more than one low paid call centre worker, so your headcount goes up. False economies in many cases. The civil service has been going through the same shared services programme that many large private sector companies do, and the result is rarely headcount reduction. At least until automation comes along.
JD Vance calls Canterbury Cathedral exhibit 'ugly' ... Mr Vance said: "It is weird to me that these people don't see the irony of honoring 'marginalized communities' by making a beautiful historical building really ugly." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly64e0v34jo
Trendy vicar.
He is actually right though, it looks absolutely hideous. Shockingly inappropriate and utterly without any feeling for the building.
I mean, I don't know that somebody who has a face like a smacked arse and the soul of a Mafia Don is in a position to lecture. But he does, for once, have a point.
JD Vance sounds quite like Mr Bufton-Tufton mowing his lawn in Tunbridge Wells on a Saturday afternoon, harrumphing in time to the Flymo. But I don't think he likes his Christianity escaping from the small box where he keeps it, and asking him awkward questions; we've seen that before with him. (Side note: that's a human characteristic, we all do it, and we all need challenging sometimes.)
I think it's a fascinating exhibit. I'm in that part of Kent for a few days in December, and I'll go and have a look. A cathedral is a place where it is appropriate to ask questions about God, and cathedrals are - and always have been - buildings for everyone, so I think it's a great idea to poke some assumptions. Some people will huff and puff, and others will have think a bit more deeply.
It was Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey who famously said "The duty of the church is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable", which is hackneyed but a good aphorism.
We seem quite happy with Sheela-na-gigs, and this is far less provocative than those. I'd frame it far more as a Cathedral doing what cathedrals have always done.
Is this one of those exhibitions that tours round most cathedrals? Is each instance unique? How do they get the paint/medium off the stone?
(Addressed to anyone who knows, not to you specifically.)
I wonder how they'd feel if some unauthorised artist plastered graffiti on the outside walls!
I'd guess that it will be some peelable surface - which could be paint on or stick on.
I have used paint-on protection to pre-protect walls against graffiti (so you can just hose it all off and repaint to protect for next time), or once to waterproof a shower set against a stone house wall.
Amuses me that the link shows the explanation about the exhibition directly underneath their welcome to Sarah Mullaly, rather giving the impression that the exhibition is to welcome her.
Be interesting to hear if the exhibition does go on tour. Some of the exhibitions that tour cathedrals are amazing. I remember one about the moon.
FPT - I was startled to see in my Aeroplane Monthly that Rochester Cathedral recently put on show a locally made Shorts floatplane, showcasing the plane restoration volunteers' efforts and more generally engineering in the area (evidently from a local historical but also educational perspective with family activities, which usually means stuff for children).
They thereby helped out the plane restorers by giving them a display venue to make their work known. Which is nice.
More generally a key point about temporary exhibitions is that they will not be there for long. Another point is that they exist to do different things, sometimes experimental. So grumping about them is pointless, especially if it is to do with the Christian message anyway.
I have some great photos of my son under the Earth at Ely Cathederal a few years back. I'm unsure what that had to do with the Christian message.
Likewise, Chester Cathedral has, for the past few years, had a large model railway in it for a few weeks in the summer. Again, this seems more to do with pulling in the punters than it does religion (although the link between vicars and railways are much stronger than just Rev Awdry).
I'm not a fan of graffiti. But it'll be temporary, and won't have damaged the cathedral's fabric. Sometimes people should just shrug and say "That's not for me".
I am a born-again atheist, but when visiting Chester Cathedral a few years ago, I was shocked to find a bar! Well, some fridges stocked with alcohol and trestle tables in front. There were Mystery Plays or suchlike being performed in the evenings.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
Far from it, the Conservatives have shifted the parameters of the debate.
It's a great example of how strong political leadership can do that and break the consensus.
Before Kemi no-one was seriously questioning at a national level the wisdom of this law, even though no doubt many people will now "forget" this and pretend that they were.
The Tories are going to get demolished next May. English local elections. Welsh and Scottish national elections. And then nobody will say “yebbut she wants to abolish Stamp Duty”.
I’m not remotely wedded to Stamp Duty. We don’t have it in Scotland. But having suddenly decided Stamp Duty is bad, you actually need power again to do this thing you didn’t do when you were in power. Which means persuading people to vote for you. Which they won’t.
So what should they do? Just not propose anything?
I think we all know that the Tories are in a mire. That’s not news. And none of us expect them to be putting in a stellar performance in May.
From my side though, the conference, despite its funereal atmosphere at times, does seem to have left Badenoch and the Tories with a little more spring in their step. This could all be a false dawn, and nobody is saying that they are anywhere near challenging for power or having a popular renaissance right now. There are some cautious - very cautious - signs that they may be starting to think about some of the economic policies that need changing. I am less enamoured of their rush to authoritarianism on the cultural/immigration stuff, and there’s still too much of them trying to out-Farage Farage (which, like Labour, is doomed to fail). But I’m willing to at least give them a hearing, which I wasn’t before, though I wouldn’t vote for them right now.
I see very little which persuades me they will do any better with a different leader. Badenoch deserves a bit longer, whether she’ll get it I don’t know.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
Far from it, the Conservatives have shifted the parameters of the debate.
It's a great example of how strong political leadership can do that and break the consensus.
Before Kemi no-one was seriously questioning at a national level the wisdom of this law, even though no doubt many people will now "forget" this and pretend that they were.
The Tories are going to get demolished next May. English local elections. Welsh and Scottish national elections. And then nobody will say “yebbut she wants to abolish Stamp Duty”.
I’m not remotely wedded to Stamp Duty. We don’t have it in Scotland. But having suddenly decided Stamp Duty is bad, you actually need power again to do this thing you didn’t do when you were in power. Which means persuading people to vote for you. Which they won’t.
Errrr - we do, and it's a significantly higher tax here than down south (LBTT). It's starting to catch middle class people out in the central belt and that is anathema to the SNP, who are the masters of middle class bungs dressed up as progressive policy.
I'd suggest that it could become enough of a deal in Scotland for SCon to get double figures. If I buy with my partner it will cost me around £20k.
LBTT is not Stamp Duty, nor is it under the remit of Westminster. I listened to various podcasts yesterday and Ruth Davidson was scathing about Kemi not speaking about Scotland or Wales at all and that her big policy doesn't apply in those nations...
That's right, LBTT is completely different from SDLT.
LBTT is a tax at progressive rates, on the value of transactions in land and buildings thereon, whereas SDLT is a tax at progressive rates, on the value of transactions in land and buildings thereon.
JD Vance calls Canterbury Cathedral exhibit 'ugly' ... Mr Vance said: "It is weird to me that these people don't see the irony of honoring 'marginalized communities' by making a beautiful historical building really ugly." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly64e0v34jo
Trendy vicar.
He is actually right though, it looks absolutely hideous. Shockingly inappropriate and utterly without any feeling for the building.
I mean, I don't know that somebody who has a face like a smacked arse and the soul of a Mafia Don is in a position to lecture. But he does, for once, have a point.
JD Vance sounds quite like Mr Bufton-Tufton mowing his lawn in Tunbridge Wells on a Saturday afternoon, harrumphing in time to the Flymo. But I don't think he likes his Christianity escaping from the small box where he keeps it, and asking him awkward questions; we've seen that before with him. (Side note: that's a human characteristic, we all do it, and we all need challenging sometimes.)
I think it's a fascinating exhibit. I'm in that part of Kent for a few days in December, and I'll go and have a look. A cathedral is a place where it is appropriate to ask questions about God, and cathedrals are - and always have been - buildings for everyone, so I think it's a great idea to poke some assumptions. Some people will huff and puff, and others will have think a bit more deeply.
It was Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey who famously said "The duty of the church is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable", which is hackneyed but a good aphorism.
We seem quite happy with Sheela-na-gigs, and this is far less provocative than those. I'd frame it far more as a Cathedral doing what cathedrals have always done.
Is this one of those exhibitions that tours round most cathedrals? Is each instance unique? How do they get the paint/medium off the stone?
(Addressed to anyone who knows, not to you specifically.)
I wonder how they'd feel if some unauthorised artist plastered graffiti on the outside walls!
I'd guess that it will be some peelable surface - which could be paint on or stick on.
I have used paint-on protection to pre-protect walls against graffiti (so you can just hose it all off and repaint to protect for next time), or once to waterproof a shower set against a stone house wall.
Amuses me that the link shows the explanation about the exhibition directly underneath their welcome to Sarah Mullaly, rather giving the impression that the exhibition is to welcome her.
Be interesting to hear if the exhibition does go on tour. Some of the exhibitions that tour cathedrals are amazing. I remember one about the moon.
FPT - I was startled to see in my Aeroplane Monthly that Rochester Cathedral recently put on show a locally made Shorts floatplane, showcasing the plane restoration volunteers' efforts and more generally engineering in the area (evidently from a local historical but also educational perspective with family activities, which usually means stuff for children).
They thereby helped out the plane restorers by giving them a display venue to make their work known. Which is nice.
More generally a key point about temporary exhibitions is that they will not be there for long. Another point is that they exist to do different things, sometimes experimental. So grumping about them is pointless, especially if it is to do with the Christian message anyway.
I have some great photos of my son under the Earth at Ely Cathederal a few years back. I'm unsure what that had to do with the Christian message.
Likewise, Chester Cathedral has, for the past few years, had a large model railway in it for a few weeks in the summer. Again, this seems more to do with pulling in the punters than it does religion (although the link between vicars and railways are much stronger than just Rev Awdry).
I'm not a fan of graffiti. But it'll be temporary, and won't have damaged the cathedral's fabric. Sometimes people should just shrug and say "That's not for me".
I am a born-again atheist, but when visiting Chester Cathedral a few years ago, I was shocked to find a bar! Well, some fridges stocked with alcohol and trestle tables in front. There were Mystery Plays or suchlike being performed in the evenings.
It was such shocking behaviour that led the Cistercians to break away from the Cluniac Benedictines back in the day. Friar Tuck.
It is possible to target Net Zero while still seeking to maximise North Sea oil and gas extraction.
And when you have a government locking in demand for natural gas as part of its decarbonisation strategy, through CCGT and blue hydrogen plants with CO2 capture, there is every incentive to 'drill, baby, drill' rather than import LNG from Qatar.
I may have mentioned this previously.
Yes, "Net Zero" means balancing off emissions from more North Sea fossil with renewables. Its not "get rid of North Sea fossils".
I am going to be hammering this point hard in my run for Holyrood. The Reform clowns want to protect the NE by importing more gas into England and literally shutting down off-shore wind.
If you are going to campaign on this, please get it right. Residual emissions are offset by "GGR" - greenhouse gas removals. This includes direct air capture, direct ocean capture and "BECCS"- bio-energy with CO2 capture. Also nature-based solutions such as reforestation, peat bog restoration, etc.
If I was a farm family 20% IHT would be very annoying. But could 50% work better?
Land is expensive because it carries tax advantages.
If my core skill is to extract the profit from managing land effectively for the long term, I’d probably prefer to get my land cheapish.
It's sharp transitions between tax regimes which piss of those concerned most, as much as their longer term merits or demerits.
Hear hear. Sharp transitions and/or revising the taxation of something you've already made a long term commitment to, e.g. family farm run for decades, pension pot funded for decades...
On pensions, in the interests of balance, the original sin was Osborne giving far too generous tax treatment as well as huge flexibility in the 2015 changes to drawdown and death benefits. Higher tax on death was bound to come back in, it's just that HMT screwed it up by dragging schemes into IHT rather than tweaking pension-specific income tax charges.
Something had to be done to ease pension drawdown because annuity payments had become a lottery based on interest rates on your 65th birthday.
Something had already been done. Drawdown, even beyond age 75, was in the tax simplification rules that came in in 2006. All that was needed was to finesse those rules a bit, rather than blow the whole thing open. Most sensible industry insiders, including yours truly, were telling HMT and HMRC contacts at the time that they were storing up trouble
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The offset isn't real - if you are going to make people redundant you need to explicitly say what government functions are going to be reduced or binned off.
Because there are often obvious consequences that the last Tory Government was too thick to understand.
Reduce the number of people processing asylum claims those awaiting their claim to be processed take longer to be processed which means they need to be housed for longer
which means you need to house more people than you have space for so suddenly that little staff saving results in £10bn being spent to hire run down hotels.
I have given this example on here many times but after 35 years of working with local authorities a cycle applies, and it happened 35 years ago and it still happens.
A journeyman (or woman) Chief Executive is brought in to cut costs. He/she pores over spreadsheets and determines that labour is their biggest cost, so in order to cut costs they cut staff. Easy!
Let's take kerbside refuse collectors. In a.medium sized authority it would be reasonable to assume a 100 collectors and drivers. So the CE decides after much calculation that they can make do with 70 ( it's always a cut of circa 30%). So we have just saved just under a third of our labour cost. We can also get rid of 30% of our vehicles and their associated costs. Happy days!
However householder start complaining that their bins/ recycling service is failing (and don't forget ratepayers pay their council tax for one thing, to get their bins emptied). So to offset the failing service they hire in first ten, then twenty, then thirty agency staff. These workers will require a corresponding number of vehicles and these will be hired in at an astronomical rate. It probably takes two years to get back up to 70 permanent staff and 30 expensive agency staff, by which time the CE who saved 30% on service provision costs has moved on to a bigger local authority to do the same.
The next CE comes in and is tasked with reducing agency and vehicle hire costs so he/she tupees over the 30 agency staff onto the books and buys the corresponding vehicles required.
So often, cost savings costs more than they save.
I suspect Kemi's civil service sackings maintain a similar result.
A recruitment freeze would be needed as well so no agency staff can be brought in if she really wants to get numbers down. It must also only be non essential staff cut
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
Before North Sea Gas, we used to have hydrogen as our domestic gas supply. But it was safer then, as it was blended with carbon monoxide.
Seriously, modern plastic gas mains should be fine. All the old cast iron stuff is being eliminated.
And what cost per kWh ?
What cost fossil fuels if you include the full cost of negative externalities?
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
Far from it, the Conservatives have shifted the parameters of the debate.
It's a great example of how strong political leadership can do that and break the consensus.
Before Kemi no-one was seriously questioning at a national level the wisdom of this law, even though no doubt many people will now "forget" this and pretend that they were.
The Tories are going to get demolished next May. English local elections. Welsh and Scottish national elections. And then nobody will say “yebbut she wants to abolish Stamp Duty”.
I’m not remotely wedded to Stamp Duty. We don’t have it in Scotland. But having suddenly decided Stamp Duty is bad, you actually need power again to do this thing you didn’t do when you were in power. Which means persuading people to vote for you. Which they won’t.
Most of England doesn't have local elections next year but London does and all out local elections too. The Stamp Duty cut will be most welcomed in London given even the average first time buyer price in London is still well above the £300k threshold. So the cut was largely to save Tory councillors in London next year, win a few boroughs back from Labour like Westminster, Wandsworth and Barnet, where most Jews also hate Starmer's recognition of Palestine made before Hamas even freed hostages and Kemi hopes save her job.
Holyrood and Senedd elections will be poor but the Tories never win in Scotland and Wales anyway, though they will hope to still win in some rural areas on an anti family farm tax platform
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The offset isn't real - if you are going to make people redundant you need to explicitly say what government functions are going to be reduced or binned off.
Because there are often obvious consequences that the last Tory Government was too thick to understand.
Reduce the number of people processing asylum claims those awaiting their claim to be processed take longer to be processed which means they need to be housed for longer
which means you need to house more people than you have space for so suddenly that little staff saving results in £10bn being spent to hire run down hotels.
I have given this example on here many times but after 35 years of working with local authorities a cycle applies, and it happened 35 years ago and it still happens.
A journeyman (or woman) Chief Executive is brought in to cut costs. He/she pores over spreadsheets and determines that labour is their biggest cost, so in order to cut costs they cut staff. Easy!
Let's take kerbside refuse collectors. In a.medium sized authority it would be reasonable to assume a 100 collectors and drivers. So the CE decides after much calculation that they can make do with 70 ( it's always a cut of circa 30%). So we have just saved just under a third of our labour cost. We can also get rid of 30% of our vehicles and their associated costs. Happy days!
However householder start complaining that their bins/ recycling service is failing (and don't forget ratepayers pay their council tax for one thing, to get their bins emptied). So to offset the failing service they hire in first ten, then twenty, then thirty agency staff. These workers will require a corresponding number of vehicles and these will be hired in at an astronomical rate. It probably takes two years to get back up to 70 permanent staff and 30 expensive agency staff, by which time the CE who saved 30% on service provision costs has moved on to a bigger local authority to do the same.
The next CE comes in and is tasked with reducing agency and vehicle hire costs so he/she tupees over the 30 agency staff onto the books and buys the corresponding vehicles required.
So often, cost savings costs more than they save.
I suspect Kemi's civil service sackings maintain a similar result.
A recruitment freeze would be needed as well so no agency staff can be brought in if she really wants to get numbers down. It must also only be non essential staff cut
That is where your problem starts and finishes. Who are the "non essential staff"?
It happens every few years in local authorities and the outcome is ALWAYS the same.
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Okay. You’ve succinctly holed the first argument below waterline, what about the second one?
“pledge to remove 750,000 migrants under borders plan”
I might be missing something with some of the questions asked - so I thought you could help out by putting answers next to them.
How realistic is this policy to implement? Who exactly is being deported? If The undocumented, the Windrush Scandal says hi. Where are the deportees? How will they be found, rounded up, at what financial cost? Are deportees entitled to due process and a hearing? If so, where are they waiting for their due process to play out - locked in detention centres? Will they get a hearing from a judge, before detained? And to where, and how, are they being deported? Will families be ripped apart?
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The offset isn't real - if you are going to make people redundant you need to explicitly say what government functions are going to be reduced or binned off.
Because there are often obvious consequences that the last Tory Government was too thick to understand.
Reduce the number of people processing asylum claims those awaiting their claim to be processed take longer to be processed which means they need to be housed for longer
which means you need to house more people than you have space for so suddenly that little staff saving results in £10bn being spent to hire run down hotels.
I have given this example on here many times but after 35 years of working with local authorities a cycle applies, and it happened 35 years ago and it still happens.
A journeyman (or woman) Chief Executive is brought in to cut costs. He/she pores over spreadsheets and determines that labour is their biggest cost, so in order to cut costs they cut staff. Easy!
Let's take kerbside refuse collectors. In a.medium sized authority it would be reasonable to assume a 100 collectors and drivers. So the CE decides after much calculation that they can make do with 70 ( it's always a cut of circa 30%). So we have just saved just under a third of our labour cost. We can also get rid of 30% of our vehicles and their associated costs. Happy days!
However householder start complaining that their bins/ recycling service is failing (and don't forget ratepayers pay their council tax for one thing, to get their bins emptied). So to offset the failing service they hire in first ten, then twenty, then thirty agency staff. These workers will require a corresponding number of vehicles and these will be hired in at an astronomical rate. It probably takes two years to get back up to 70 permanent staff and 30 expensive agency staff, by which time the CE who saved 30% on service provision costs has moved on to a bigger local authority to do the same.
The next CE comes in and is tasked with reducing agency and vehicle hire costs so he/she tupees over the 30 agency staff onto the books and buys the corresponding vehicles required.
So often, cost savings costs more than they save.
I suspect Kemi's civil service sackings maintain a similar result.
A recruitment freeze would be needed as well so no agency staff can be brought in if she really wants to get numbers down. It must also only be non essential staff cut
Local authorities have had sod all money for coming on 15 years - I seriously can't imagine any of them have any staff someone doesn't deem completely essential...
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Talking of fundamentally dishonest, here’s a global SSTA history from the 19th century to now.
The banning of marine sulphates occurred in 2020. It’s clearly had a very impressive retrospective effect on temperatures since 1900.
1900-2020 being of course a period during which marine sulphate emissions increased exponentially. Yet still the oceans warmed. Weird, eh! I wonder what on earth might have caused that?
I don't doubt the trend, but I do have some scepticism about data sets that proclaim accuracy back to the 1850s for this sort of data, especially globally.
If only the 19th Century had a global power stationing scientists all around the world. Oh wait, it did – Britain.
Indeed we did. They were not necessarily out at sea all the time measuring sea temperatures to within a fraction of a degree. And the people that were measuring water temperatures - e.g. steamships via the bucket method - were not interested in fractions of a degree. Or even to the nearest degree.
I am not saying that water temperatures are not increasing. I just wish there was some realism about historic data in this sort of context.
From the conclusion: "Accurate temperatures can be obtained with either the bucket or intake method. However, measurements cannot be expected to be of high accuracy or precision when obtained by untrained sailors using poorly-calibrated, low-resolution thermometers"
If I was a farm family 20% IHT would be very annoying. But could 50% work better?
Land is expensive because it carries tax advantages.
If my core skill is to extract the profit from managing land effectively for the long term, I’d probably prefer to get my land cheapish.
There is no vast demand for buying farmland from those who want to work it 365 days a year .
It is family farms who have the knowledge and commitment to actually grow crops and manage livestock in all weathers throughout the year. They may be asset rich but are often income poor. Hence the family farm tax is rightly so hated
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The offset isn't real - if you are going to make people redundant you need to explicitly say what government functions are going to be reduced or binned off.
Because there are often obvious consequences that the last Tory Government was too thick to understand.
Reduce the number of people processing asylum claims those awaiting their claim to be processed take longer to be processed which means they need to be housed for longer
which means you need to house more people than you have space for so suddenly that little staff saving results in £10bn being spent to hire run down hotels.
I have given this example on here many times but after 35 years of working with local authorities a cycle applies, and it happened 35 years ago and it still happens.
A journeyman (or woman) Chief Executive is brought in to cut costs. He/she pores over spreadsheets and determines that labour is their biggest cost, so in order to cut costs they cut staff. Easy!
Let's take kerbside refuse collectors. In a.medium sized authority it would be reasonable to assume a 100 collectors and drivers. So the CE decides after much calculation that they can make do with 70 ( it's always a cut of circa 30%). So we have just saved just under a third of our labour cost. We can also get rid of 30% of our vehicles and their associated costs. Happy days!
However householder start complaining that their bins/ recycling service is failing (and don't forget ratepayers pay their council tax for one thing, to get their bins emptied). So to offset the failing service they hire in first ten, then twenty, then thirty agency staff. These workers will require a corresponding number of vehicles and these will be hired in at an astronomical rate. It probably takes two years to get back up to 70 permanent staff and 30 expensive agency staff, by which time the CE who saved 30% on service provision costs has moved on to a bigger local authority to do the same.
The next CE comes in and is tasked with reducing agency and vehicle hire costs so he/she tupees over the 30 agency staff onto the books and buys the corresponding vehicles required.
So often, cost savings costs more than they save.
I suspect Kemi's civil service sackings maintain a similar result.
A recruitment freeze would be needed as well so no agency staff can be brought in if she really wants to get numbers down. It must also only be non essential staff cut
That is where your problem starts and finishes. Who are the "non essential staff"?
It happens every few years in local authorities and the outcome is ALWAYS the same.
Not just local authorities. I worked for one of the IT giants in the 80s. We went around the regular loop of laying off several thousand employees every few years or so and then having to recruit back their replacement over a short period of time. Usually within the first few months a number of the fired staff were taken back as contractors and getting paid significantly more before full time replacements were found.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The offset isn't real - if you are going to make people redundant you need to explicitly say what government functions are going to be reduced or binned off.
Because there are often obvious consequences that the last Tory Government was too thick to understand.
Reduce the number of people processing asylum claims those awaiting their claim to be processed take longer to be processed which means they need to be housed for longer
which means you need to house more people than you have space for so suddenly that little staff saving results in £10bn being spent to hire run down hotels.
I have given this example on here many times but after 35 years of working with local authorities a cycle applies, and it happened 35 years ago and it still happens.
A journeyman (or woman) Chief Executive is brought in to cut costs. He/she pores over spreadsheets and determines that labour is their biggest cost, so in order to cut costs they cut staff. Easy!
Let's take kerbside refuse collectors. In a.medium sized authority it would be reasonable to assume a 100 collectors and drivers. So the CE decides after much calculation that they can make do with 70 ( it's always a cut of circa 30%). So we have just saved just under a third of our labour cost. We can also get rid of 30% of our vehicles and their associated costs. Happy days!
However householder start complaining that their bins/ recycling service is failing (and don't forget ratepayers pay their council tax for one thing, to get their bins emptied). So to offset the failing service they hire in first ten, then twenty, then thirty agency staff. These workers will require a corresponding number of vehicles and these will be hired in at an astronomical rate. It probably takes two years to get back up to 70 permanent staff and 30 expensive agency staff, by which time the CE who saved 30% on service provision costs has moved on to a bigger local authority to do the same.
The next CE comes in and is tasked with reducing agency and vehicle hire costs so he/she tupees over the 30 agency staff onto the books and buys the corresponding vehicles required.
So often, cost savings costs more than they save.
I suspect Kemi's civil service sackings maintain a similar result.
A recruitment freeze would be needed as well so no agency staff can be brought in if she really wants to get numbers down. It must also only be non essential staff cut
That is where your problem starts and finishes. Who are the "non essential staff"?
It happens every few years in local authorities and the outcome is ALWAYS the same.
Not just local authorities. I worked for one of the IT giants in the 80s. We went around the regular loop of laying off several thousand employees every few years or so and then having to recruit back their replacement over a short period of time. Usually within the first few months a number of the fired staff were taken back as contractors and getting paid significantly more before full time replacements were found.
I was at Company X/Y for five years. In that time, we had about four recruitment rounds and five redundancy rounds. It seemed a crazy way to operate.
I have been surprised how little traction Jenrick's tack to the fat right gained. Badenoch's best Conference speech since Johnson's last Conference speech seemed to take the wind out of his sails.
Farage said he loved Jenrick's speech and all but anointed him as his heir as leader of the nationalist populist right in the UK though. Even if Tories rallied behind Kemi to stay their leader
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Talking of fundamentally dishonest, here’s a global SSTA history from the 19th century to now.
The banning of marine sulphates occurred in 2020. It’s clearly had a very impressive retrospective effect on temperatures since 1900.
1900-2020 being of course a period during which marine sulphate emissions increased exponentially. Yet still the oceans warmed. Weird, eh! I wonder what on earth might have caused that?
Another very common facet of the green troll is the bad faith argument - for example, there could be a recent issue like the banning of sulphur in marine fuels, raised within the context of recent warming of the seas, which the user of the bad faith argument has acknowledged has caused warming way beyond the flow of patterns that include manmade global warming 'ripping off the plaster' I believe you called it, and the troll will exploit the fact that the word 'recent' was not used to present some sort of 'gotcha'.
I did, and I bothered to follow it. Especially with us both coming from areas of Scotland that have been devastated by poor SNP governance for years and now Labour policies that have really affected our areas too?! I am sorry, but that kind of cheap dig really gets me when I think of the fact that the only real effective opposition to the SNP & SGreens has been the Scottish Conservatives!! Thank god for Scottish Conservatives and the last Conservative government at Westminster when it came to protecting women's rights. And also after just a few days ago when Douglas Ross's Right to Recovery bill all about promoting wider drug rehabilatation was voted down by the SNP and SGreens in Holyrood and in the country with the biggest drug deaths, particularly in Dundee!
Also coming from the North East of Scotland, I remain really angry at the impact of the SNP, SGreens and now the Labour Government at Westminster's devasting impact on the North Sea Gas and Oil Industry here. So your flippant lads together comment really jarred with someone else who actually lives in the North East of Scotland right now! I am fed up watching the only Opposition party in Scotland knocking its head against a brick wall and getting dismissed in this way by a long time dismissive snobbish group on here! When I arrived on this site twenty years ago, I was out loud and a proud female Scottish Conservative and I remain so thanks to their bloody hard work protecting my rights as a biological woman here in Scotland!!
So Kemi, you go girl!
Morning! I encountered a very loyal Andrew Bowie voter in Banchory, because the "Tories protect my industry". We discussed the large numbers of job losses and the huge Tory flip flops on energy and Net Zero. He was resolute.
Point is, the Tories can hardly claim to have been stalwart defenders of an industry they have run down. And not just energy, as I pointed out earlier the local farmers are fuming at both their treatment by the party and by the rank arrogance of Bowie et al assuming their vote remains secure...
Look, as long as kids who identify as cats are prevented from using litter trays, that’s the main thing.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
Far from it, the Conservatives have shifted the parameters of the debate.
It's a great example of how strong political leadership can do that and break the consensus.
Before Kemi no-one was seriously questioning at a national level the wisdom of this law, even though no doubt many people will now "forget" this and pretend that they were.
The Tories are going to get demolished next May. English local elections. Welsh and Scottish national elections. And then nobody will say “yebbut she wants to abolish Stamp Duty”.
I’m not remotely wedded to Stamp Duty. We don’t have it in Scotland. But having suddenly decided Stamp Duty is bad, you actually need power again to do this thing you didn’t do when you were in power. Which means persuading people to vote for you. Which they won’t.
Errrr - we do, and it's a significantly higher tax here than down south (LBTT). It's starting to catch middle class people out in the central belt and that is anathema to the SNP, who are the masters of middle class bungs dressed up as progressive policy.
I'd suggest that it could become enough of a deal in Scotland for SCon to get double figures. If I buy with my partner it will cost me around £20k.
LBTT is not Stamp Duty, nor is it under the remit of Westminster. I listened to various podcasts yesterday and Ruth Davidson was scathing about Kemi not speaking about Scotland or Wales at all and that her big policy doesn't apply in those nations...
Yes it is. It just has a different name. The same as PAWHP = WFP. The Conservatives even have the benefit of never being in power here (with no prospect of it), which puts them in a strong position - particularly as LBTT is so much higher.
It does a similar thing, but it is a different tax which is wholly devolved. Again, *Ruth Davidson* was railing at this on Electoral Disfunction.
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Talking of fundamentally dishonest, here’s a global SSTA history from the 19th century to now.
The banning of marine sulphates occurred in 2020. It’s clearly had a very impressive retrospective effect on temperatures since 1900.
1900-2020 being of course a period during which marine sulphate emissions increased exponentially. Yet still the oceans warmed. Weird, eh! I wonder what on earth might have caused that?
I don't doubt the trend, but I do have some scepticism about data sets that proclaim accuracy back to the 1850s for this sort of data, especially globally.
If only the 19th Century had a global power stationing scientists all around the world. Oh wait, it did – Britain.
Indeed we did. They were not necessarily out at sea all the time measuring sea temperatures to within a fraction of a degree. And the people that were measuring water temperatures - e.g. steamships via the bucket method - were not interested in fractions of a degree. Or even to the nearest degree.
I am not saying that water temperatures are not increasing. I just wish there was some realism about historic data in this sort of context.
From the conclusion: "Accurate temperatures can be obtained with either the bucket or intake method. However, measurements cannot be expected to be of high accuracy or precision when obtained by untrained sailors using poorly-calibrated, low-resolution thermometers"
Does it matter exactly what the temperatures are? Surely it's the trend which matters?
I did, and I bothered to follow it. Especially with us both coming from areas of Scotland that have been devastated by poor SNP governance for years and now Labour policies that have really affected our areas too?! I am sorry, but that kind of cheap dig really gets me when I think of the fact that the only real effective opposition to the SNP & SGreens has been the Scottish Conservatives!! Thank god for Scottish Conservatives and the last Conservative government at Westminster when it came to protecting women's rights. And also after just a few days ago when Douglas Ross's Right to Recovery bill all about promoting wider drug rehabilatation was voted down by the SNP and SGreens in Holyrood and in the country with the biggest drug deaths, particularly in Dundee!
Also coming from the North East of Scotland, I remain really angry at the impact of the SNP, SGreens and now the Labour Government at Westminster's devasting impact on the North Sea Gas and Oil Industry here. So your flippant lads together comment really jarred with someone else who actually lives in the North East of Scotland right now! I am fed up watching the only Opposition party in Scotland knocking its head against a brick wall and getting dismissed in this way by a long time dismissive snobbish group on here! When I arrived on this site twenty years ago, I was out loud and a proud female Scottish Conservative and I remain so thanks to their bloody hard work protecting my rights as a biological woman here in Scotland!!
So Kemi, you go girl!
Morning! I encountered a very loyal Andrew Bowie voter in Banchory, because the "Tories protect my industry". We discussed the large numbers of job losses and the huge Tory flip flops on energy and Net Zero. He was resolute.
Point is, the Tories can hardly claim to have been stalwart defenders of an industry they have run down. And not just energy, as I pointed out earlier the local farmers are fuming at both their treatment by the party and by the rank arrogance of Bowie et al assuming their vote remains secure...
Your weakness on these policy issues in the North East of Scotland is showing, I have unlike you lived in the North East of Scotland and have been married to someone who has worked in the Oil and Gas industry here for 40 years, also now spent 20 years living in a rural area where many of our friends are farmers. There is a good reason why Andrew Bowie held onto his seat at the last GE and the fact he knows his constiuency both rural and industrial in Aberdeenshire and in Aberdeen helped a lot. So don't knock a bloody good local MP what ever his party colours!
I'm not knocking him! As the party look to be reduced to a rump he could be the next leader!
Now that we have set the "you're not from round here" point aside (and I accept I am not) can we go back to the points I am making?
A big run down of the industry under the Tories. A lot of job losses. The whole net zero thing was Tory, with all that entails. Not funding CCS here was Tory. The slashing of farming subsidy in a direct betrayal of promises made was Tory. Its not us saying these things to farmers and energy workers. They are saying it to us. And Bowie got short shrift at several of the local agricultural fairs, and more so when the Tractors for Truth came into the area.
The discontent is real, hence the decline in the vote.
I wish more of your former voters would stick with you rather than switch to Reform.
OMG! You really don't have a clue about cyclical ups and downs of the North East Oil and Gas Industry or the farming industry here or elsewhere in the UK over the last 40 years and the long term impact it had on either indusrty!! I bet you never looked up being a sheep farmer in Scotland when they barely made a living looking after and feeding the sheep on their farms and even after they were bought by the supermarket a leg of lamb in the supermarket was too expensive for most folk despite the pittance they had paid for them!! Oh by the way, that was happening during the last Labour government!
I'm not a farmer, but having worked in the food industry for decades I am very well aware of the financial pressures on farmers on commodity prices.
But again, *the farmers are complaining to us about the Tories*.
If I was Mr Gobshite making this up then fair enough. Its *the farmers* pissed off having been screwed over. And you haven't wanted to engage on that which is the heart of the issue. Whatever happened to replacing the CAP subsidies? Promised and not delivered. No wonder they are pissed off.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The offset isn't real - if you are going to make people redundant you need to explicitly say what government functions are going to be reduced or binned off.
Because there are often obvious consequences that the last Tory Government was too thick to understand.
Reduce the number of people processing asylum claims those awaiting their claim to be processed take longer to be processed which means they need to be housed for longer
which means you need to house more people than you have space for so suddenly that little staff saving results in £10bn being spent to hire run down hotels.
I have given this example on here many times but after 35 years of working with local authorities a cycle applies, and it happened 35 years ago and it still happens.
A journeyman (or woman) Chief Executive is brought in to cut costs. He/she pores over spreadsheets and determines that labour is their biggest cost, so in order to cut costs they cut staff. Easy!
Let's take kerbside refuse collectors. In a.medium sized authority it would be reasonable to assume a 100 collectors and drivers. So the CE decides after much calculation that they can make do with 70 ( it's always a cut of circa 30%). So we have just saved just under a third of our labour cost. We can also get rid of 30% of our vehicles and their associated costs. Happy days!
However householder start complaining that their bins/ recycling service is failing (and don't forget ratepayers pay their council tax for one thing, to get their bins emptied). So to offset the failing service they hire in first ten, then twenty, then thirty agency staff. These workers will require a corresponding number of vehicles and these will be hired in at an astronomical rate. It probably takes two years to get back up to 70 permanent staff and 30 expensive agency staff, by which time the CE who saved 30% on service provision costs has moved on to a bigger local authority to do the same.
The next CE comes in and is tasked with reducing agency and vehicle hire costs so he/she tupees over the 30 agency staff onto the books and buys the corresponding vehicles required.
So often, cost savings costs more than they save.
I suspect Kemi's civil service sackings maintain a similar result.
A recruitment freeze would be needed as well so no agency staff can be brought in if she really wants to get numbers down. It must also only be non essential staff cut
What does essential mean? Can agency staff be brought in to do the job a politician decided wasn't essential, but turned out to have stymied the whole process?
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Talking of fundamentally dishonest, here’s a global SSTA history from the 19th century to now.
The banning of marine sulphates occurred in 2020. It’s clearly had a very impressive retrospective effect on temperatures since 1900.
1900-2020 being of course a period during which marine sulphate emissions increased exponentially. Yet still the oceans warmed. Weird, eh! I wonder what on earth might have caused that?
I don't doubt the trend, but I do have some scepticism about data sets that proclaim accuracy back to the 1850s for this sort of data, especially globally.
If only the 19th Century had a global power stationing scientists all around the world. Oh wait, it did – Britain.
Indeed we did. They were not necessarily out at sea all the time measuring sea temperatures to within a fraction of a degree. And the people that were measuring water temperatures - e.g. steamships via the bucket method - were not interested in fractions of a degree. Or even to the nearest degree.
I am not saying that water temperatures are not increasing. I just wish there was some realism about historic data in this sort of context.
From the conclusion: "Accurate temperatures can be obtained with either the bucket or intake method. However, measurements cannot be expected to be of high accuracy or precision when obtained by untrained sailors using poorly-calibrated, low-resolution thermometers"
Does it matter exactly what the temperatures are? Surely it's the trend which matters?
Yes and no. The trend does indeed matter; but the trend can be obscured if the data is obtained by a different, more accurate method. That link's quite interesting for showing the way that buckets (including different bucket types) and engine intake temperatures can vary - and that's in a modernish context.
Again, I'm not saying ocean temperatures are not rising.
JD Vance calls Canterbury Cathedral exhibit 'ugly' ... Mr Vance said: "It is weird to me that these people don't see the irony of honoring 'marginalized communities' by making a beautiful historical building really ugly." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly64e0v34jo
Trendy vicar.
He is actually right though, it looks absolutely hideous. Shockingly inappropriate and utterly without any feeling for the building.
I mean, I don't know that somebody who has a face like a smacked arse and the soul of a Mafia Don is in a position to lecture. But he does, for once, have a point.
JD Vance sounds quite like Mr Bufton-Tufton mowing his lawn in Tunbridge Wells on a Saturday afternoon, harrumphing in time to the Flymo. But I don't think he likes his Christianity escaping from the small box where he keeps it, and asking him awkward questions; we've seen that before with him. (Side note: that's a human characteristic, we all do it, and we all need challenging sometimes.)
I think it's a fascinating exhibit. I'm in that part of Kent for a few days in December, and I'll go and have a look. A cathedral is a place where it is appropriate to ask questions about God, and cathedrals are - and always have been - buildings for everyone, so I think it's a great idea to poke some assumptions. Some people will huff and puff, and others will have think a bit more deeply.
It was Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey who famously said "The duty of the church is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable", which is hackneyed but a good aphorism.
We seem quite happy with Sheela-na-gigs, and this is far less provocative than those. I'd frame it far more as a Cathedral doing what cathedrals have always done.
Is this one of those exhibitions that tours round most cathedrals? Is each instance unique? How do they get the paint/medium off the stone?
(Addressed to anyone who knows, not to you specifically.)
I wonder how they'd feel if some unauthorised artist plastered graffiti on the outside walls!
I'd guess that it will be some peelable surface - which could be paint on or stick on.
I have used paint-on protection to pre-protect walls against graffiti (so you can just hose it all off and repaint to protect for next time), or once to waterproof a shower set against a stone house wall.
Amuses me that the link shows the explanation about the exhibition directly underneath their welcome to Sarah Mullaly, rather giving the impression that the exhibition is to welcome her.
Be interesting to hear if the exhibition does go on tour. Some of the exhibitions that tour cathedrals are amazing. I remember one about the moon.
FPT - I was startled to see in my Aeroplane Monthly that Rochester Cathedral recently put on show a locally made Shorts floatplane, showcasing the plane restoration volunteers' efforts and more generally engineering in the area (evidently from a local historical but also educational perspective with family activities, which usually means stuff for children).
They thereby helped out the plane restorers by giving them a display venue to make their work known. Which is nice.
More generally a key point about temporary exhibitions is that they will not be there for long. Another point is that they exist to do different things, sometimes experimental. So grumping about them is pointless, especially if it is to do with the Christian message anyway.
I have some great photos of my son under the Earth at Ely Cathederal a few years back. I'm unsure what that had to do with the Christian message.
Likewise, Chester Cathedral has, for the past few years, had a large model railway in it for a few weeks in the summer. Again, this seems more to do with pulling in the punters than it does religion (although the link between vicars and railways are much stronger than just Rev Awdry).
I'm not a fan of graffiti. But it'll be temporary, and won't have damaged the cathedral's fabric. Sometimes people should just shrug and say "That's not for me".
Naves of English cathedrals have been used for non worship purposes since medieval times when they hosted markets and plays for instance.
As long as the altar is reserved for communion and worship having a temporary model railway in the nave is a great idea
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The offset isn't real - if you are going to make people redundant you need to explicitly say what government functions are going to be reduced or binned off.
Because there are often obvious consequences that the last Tory Government was too thick to understand.
Reduce the number of people processing asylum claims those awaiting their claim to be processed take longer to be processed which means they need to be housed for longer
which means you need to house more people than you have space for so suddenly that little staff saving results in £10bn being spent to hire run down hotels.
I have given this example on here many times but after 35 years of working with local authorities a cycle applies, and it happened 35 years ago and it still happens.
A journeyman (or woman) Chief Executive is brought in to cut costs. He/she pores over spreadsheets and determines that labour is their biggest cost, so in order to cut costs they cut staff. Easy!
Let's take kerbside refuse collectors. In a.medium sized authority it would be reasonable to assume a 100 collectors and drivers. So the CE decides after much calculation that they can make do with 70 ( it's always a cut of circa 30%). So we have just saved just under a third of our labour cost. We can also get rid of 30% of our vehicles and their associated costs. Happy days!
However householder start complaining that their bins/ recycling service is failing (and don't forget ratepayers pay their council tax for one thing, to get their bins emptied). So to offset the failing service they hire in first ten, then twenty, then thirty agency staff. These workers will require a corresponding number of vehicles and these will be hired in at an astronomical rate. It probably takes two years to get back up to 70 permanent staff and 30 expensive agency staff, by which time the CE who saved 30% on service provision costs has moved on to a bigger local authority to do the same.
The next CE comes in and is tasked with reducing agency and vehicle hire costs so he/she tupees over the 30 agency staff onto the books and buys the corresponding vehicles required.
So often, cost savings costs more than they save.
I suspect Kemi's civil service sackings maintain a similar result.
A recruitment freeze would be needed as well so no agency staff can be brought in if she really wants to get numbers down. It must also only be non essential staff cut
That is where your problem starts and finishes. Who are the "non essential staff"?
It happens every few years in local authorities and the outcome is ALWAYS the same.
Not just local authorities. I worked for one of the IT giants in the 80s. We went around the regular loop of laying off several thousand employees every few years or so and then having to recruit back their replacement over a short period of time. Usually within the first few months a number of the fired staff were taken back as contractors and getting paid significantly more before full time replacements were found.
I was at Company X/Y for five years. In that time, we had about four recruitment rounds and five redundancy rounds. It seemed a crazy way to operate.
Some journeyman normally gets a promotion to another sucker organisation.
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Okay. You’ve succinctly holed the first argument below waterline, what about the second one?
“pledge to remove 750,000 migrants under borders plan”
I might be missing something with some of the questions asked - so I thought you could help out by putting answers next to them.
How realistic is this policy to implement? Who exactly is being deported? If The undocumented, the Windrush Scandal says hi. Where are the deportees? How will they be found, rounded up, at what financial cost? Are deportees entitled to due process and a hearing? If so, where are they waiting for their due process to play out - locked in detention centres? Will they get a hearing from a judge, before detained? And to where, and how, are they being deported? Will families be ripped apart?
The question you didn't ask ties in with HYUFD's point. What are these people doing now? I suppose the answer will be they are non essential. Personally I look forward to being cared for in my dotage not by a foreigner with empathy and experience, but by a white person with a string of minor convictions who has spent five years out of work on a mental health waiting list. Others may differ.
If I was a farm family 20% IHT would be very annoying. But could 50% work better?
Land is expensive because it carries tax advantages.
If my core skill is to extract the profit from managing land effectively for the long term, I’d probably prefer to get my land cheapish.
It's sharp transitions between tax regimes which piss of those concerned most, as much as their longer term merits or demerits.
Hear hear. Sharp transitions and/or revising the taxation of something you've already made a long term commitment to, e.g. family farm run for decades, pension pot funded for decades...
On pensions, in the interests of balance, the original sin was Osborne giving far too generous tax treatment as well as huge flexibility in the 2015 changes to drawdown and death benefits. Higher tax on death was bound to come back in, it's just that HMT screwed it up by dragging schemes into IHT rather than tweaking pension-specific income tax charges.
Something had to be done to ease pension drawdown because annuity payments had become a lottery based on interest rates on your 65th birthday.
Something had already been done. Drawdown, even beyond age 75, was in the tax simplification rules that came in in 2006. All that was needed was to finesse those rules a bit, rather than blow the whole thing open. Most sensible industry insiders, including yours truly, were telling HMT and HMRC contacts at the time that they were storing up trouble
As an insider, what was it that Rishi did that was criticised as a deferred pension raid? Something to do with gilt yields maybe? I could be completely misremembering but I think there was something about index-linked gilts and pensions.
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Okay. You’ve succinctly holed the first argument below waterline, what about the second one?
“pledge to remove 750,000 migrants under borders plan”
I might be missing something with some of the questions asked - so I thought you could help out by putting answers next to them.
How realistic is this policy to implement? Who exactly is being deported? If The undocumented, the Windrush Scandal says hi. Where are the deportees? How will they be found, rounded up, at what financial cost? Are deportees entitled to due process and a hearing? If so, where are they waiting for their due process to play out - locked in detention centres? Will they get a hearing from a judge, before detained? And to where, and how, are they being deported? Will families be ripped apart?
The question you didn't ask ties in with HYUFD's point. What are these people doing now? I suppose the answer will be they are non essential. Personally I look forward to being cared for in my dotage not by a foreigner with empathy and experience, but by a white person with a string of minor convictions who has spent five years out of work on a mental health waiting list. Others may differ.
I suspect you could make a fair dint in that 750,000 just with people delivering takeaways on bikes or standing around idly in dubious barber or vape shops.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
Far from it, the Conservatives have shifted the parameters of the debate.
It's a great example of how strong political leadership can do that and break the consensus.
Before Kemi no-one was seriously questioning at a national level the wisdom of this law, even though no doubt many people will now "forget" this and pretend that they were.
The Tories are going to get demolished next May. English local elections. Welsh and Scottish national elections. And then nobody will say “yebbut she wants to abolish Stamp Duty”.
I’m not remotely wedded to Stamp Duty. We don’t have it in Scotland. But having suddenly decided Stamp Duty is bad, you actually need power again to do this thing you didn’t do when you were in power. Which means persuading people to vote for you. Which they won’t.
So what should they do? Just not propose anything?
I think we all know that the Tories are in a mire. That’s not news. And none of us expect them to be putting in a stellar performance in May.
From my side though, the conference, despite its funereal atmosphere at times, does seem to have left Badenoch and the Tories with a little more spring in their step. This could all be a false dawn, and nobody is saying that they are anywhere near challenging for power or having a popular renaissance right now. There are some cautious - very cautious - signs that they may be starting to think about some of the economic policies that need changing. I am less enamoured of their rush to authoritarianism on the cultural/immigration stuff, and there’s still too much of them trying to out-Farage Farage (which, like Labour, is doomed to fail). But I’m willing to at least give them a hearing, which I wasn’t before, though I wouldn’t vote for them right now.
I see very little which persuades me they will do any better with a different leader. Badenoch deserves a bit longer, whether she’ll get it I don’t know.
What should they do? Lay out a new direction. A new philosophy. The country is *broken* and I don't blame only the Tories. We need Big Politics to fix this, and instead we're getting "we looked at scrapping stamp duty but were frit but we'll do it now I promise"
Is that it? Far too much money is tied up in mortgages and rent, with young professionals finding it impossible to get on the housing ladder. A policy to turbocharge transactions and drive prices even higher does what exactly to fix the structural problems.
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Talking of fundamentally dishonest, here’s a global SSTA history from the 19th century to now.
The banning of marine sulphates occurred in 2020. It’s clearly had a very impressive retrospective effect on temperatures since 1900.
1900-2020 being of course a period during which marine sulphate emissions increased exponentially. Yet still the oceans warmed. Weird, eh! I wonder what on earth might have caused that?
Another very common facet of the green troll is the bad faith argument - for example, there could be a recent issue like the banning of sulphur in marine fuels, raised within the context of recent warming of the seas, which the user of the bad faith argument has acknowledged has caused warming way beyond the flow of patterns that include manmade global warming 'ripping off the plaster' I believe you called it, and the troll will exploit the fact that the word 'recent' was not used to present some sort of 'gotcha'.
You wrote that “The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels”. That’s so bad faith as to be laughable.
Look at the fucking chart. Look at it. It’s like saying “the crème brûlée is cooked largely due to the chef flaming the sugar on top”.
I’d like to believe you are trolling, Leon style. But I think it’s worse than that. You actually believe this stuff.
The Tories can take some small mercies from their conference: there was only the usual amount of plotting and anyway, since there were so few attending conference this year, their hearts weren't really in it. The party did not self destruct, and Kemi Badenoch surprised a bit on the upside.
Yet too many Tories conclude that Reform policies are what the Conservatives need to beat Reform. However, as with Brexit itself, these policies are questionable at best and mostly a confused and unworkable mess.
Science doesn't give a toss about Tory rejection of net zero- carbon pollution will be a reality whether the Tories believe in it or not. Protecting the environment is not some gimmick, it is central to building a sustainable future for the planet. How you do this is open to debate, but the science is unarguable: anthropic climate change is happening now, what are humans going to do about it? The current Tory answer is stupid: scrap meaningful changes and ignore the problem.
Likewise with immigration, reality doesn't give a stuff about Tory policies. The 14 year car crash created a massive wave of immigration without any consent from the governed. Tories now want to wish it away by destroying civil liberties and using force. not only unworkable, but actively dangerous. Leaving the ECHR is a Trumpian idea that would fail to change anything. Anyway hard line anti-immigration policies look hypocritical and ridiculous in the mouth or a woman who grew up in Nigeria and the US. In the end the conference merely exposed the chaotic strategic thinking at the heart of the party.
Yet there is a tiny glimmer: the economy. The stamp duty idea hit home because it could actually work as part of addressing the can of worms that is the UK housing market. If the Tories began to talk economics instead of the Reform agenda of social conservatism and borderline authoritarianism, maybe there is a way back. Being a bit libertarian and having a far more free market bottom line might remind people why the Tories could have a purpose.
The Tories were always two parties: that Tebbit and Rifkind were in the same cabinet is always jarring to me. The Tebbit wing is flirting very hard with Farage, but the party in its current form is not a party of wealth and aspiration any more- losing the Waitrose voters to the Lib Dems is an astonishing defeat. Can the Tories at least start to ask the right questions? No one knows, and if this conference showed anything, it is that they are still megaparsecs from finding a coherent set of answers.
The fat lady is clearing her throat for the Tories, but they may have one last chance, if they ignore the Alan B'stard wing of Jenrick and his ilk and focus on serious reform of the economy and especially of public administration.
Aspiration is not only for the wealthy unaffected by, or even benefitting from, upward pressure on house prices and downward pressure on wages.
Its also for those born with less privilege for whom endless immigration and ever higher energy costs severely restrict their life opportunities.
I'm not in favour of those things, directly or indirectly- so your point falls.
As a LibDem supporter you are indirectly in favour of those things.
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Okay. You’ve succinctly holed the first argument below waterline, what about the second one?
“pledge to remove 750,000 migrants under borders plan”
I might be missing something with some of the questions asked - so I thought you could help out by putting answers next to them.
How realistic is this policy to implement? Who exactly is being deported? If The undocumented, the Windrush Scandal says hi. Where are the deportees? How will they be found, rounded up, at what financial cost? Are deportees entitled to due process and a hearing? If so, where are they waiting for their due process to play out - locked in detention centres? Will they get a hearing from a judge, before detained? And to where, and how, are they being deported? Will families be ripped apart?
The question you didn't ask ties in with HYUFD's point. What are these people doing now? I suppose the answer will be they are non essential. Personally I look forward to being cared for in my dotage not by a foreigner with empathy and experience, but by a white person with a string of minor convictions who has spent five years out of work on a mental health waiting list. Others may differ.
I've had carers much of the time for the last three years. They have included 'traditional' Brits, and immigrants. One was the daughter of a US serviceman who'd preferred it here .... he was Afro-American. Two others were Polish who'd stayed here after Brexit. Another was Ecuadorean who'd been here for years. I've had a Filipino and a Thai, a Zambian and a Zimbabwean. I've had 'good' British and 'poor' British, 'good' immigrants and 'poor' immigrants.
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Talking of fundamentally dishonest, here’s a global SSTA history from the 19th century to now.
The banning of marine sulphates occurred in 2020. It’s clearly had a very impressive retrospective effect on temperatures since 1900.
1900-2020 being of course a period during which marine sulphate emissions increased exponentially. Yet still the oceans warmed. Weird, eh! I wonder what on earth might have caused that?
I don't doubt the trend, but I do have some scepticism about data sets that proclaim accuracy back to the 1850s for this sort of data, especially globally.
If only the 19th Century had a global power stationing scientists all around the world. Oh wait, it did – Britain.
Indeed we did. They were not necessarily out at sea all the time measuring sea temperatures to within a fraction of a degree. And the people that were measuring water temperatures - e.g. steamships via the bucket method - were not interested in fractions of a degree. Or even to the nearest degree.
I am not saying that water temperatures are not increasing. I just wish there was some realism about historic data in this sort of context.
From the conclusion: "Accurate temperatures can be obtained with either the bucket or intake method. However, measurements cannot be expected to be of high accuracy or precision when obtained by untrained sailors using poorly-calibrated, low-resolution thermometers"
Does it matter exactly what the temperatures are? Surely it's the trend which matters?
Yes and no. The trend does indeed matter; but the trend can be obscured if the data is obtained by a different, more accurate method. That link's quite interesting for showing the way that buckets (including different bucket types) and engine intake temperatures can vary - and that's in a modernish context.
Again, I'm not saying ocean temperatures are not rising.
Partly it's a question of when people formed their ideas on all this climate stuff.
Until... 2000 or so? it was just about possible to squint at the data and say "variations, cycles, uncertainty" and conclude that there might not be a problem. (It was a stretch, but not an impossible one).
Add the points since then and that is infinitely less credible. Even if sulfate reduction has given a bit more of an uptick in the last few years.
Another thing. The Bjørn Lomborg thesis boiled down to the idea that the world should get richer, so it could afford to deal with global warming. Sort of arguable then, but less so now.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The offset isn't real - if you are going to make people redundant you need to explicitly say what government functions are going to be reduced or binned off.
Because there are often obvious consequences that the last Tory Government was too thick to understand.
Reduce the number of people processing asylum claims those awaiting their claim to be processed take longer to be processed which means they need to be housed for longer
which means you need to house more people than you have space for so suddenly that little staff saving results in £10bn being spent to hire run down hotels.
I have given this example on here many times but after 35 years of working with local authorities a cycle applies, and it happened 35 years ago and it still happens.
A journeyman (or woman) Chief Executive is brought in to cut costs. He/she pores over spreadsheets and determines that labour is their biggest cost, so in order to cut costs they cut staff. Easy!
Let's take kerbside refuse collectors. In a.medium sized authority it would be reasonable to assume a 100 collectors and drivers. So the CE decides after much calculation that they can make do with 70 ( it's always a cut of circa 30%). So we have just saved just under a third of our labour cost. We can also get rid of 30% of our vehicles and their associated costs. Happy days!
However householder start complaining that their bins/ recycling service is failing (and don't forget ratepayers pay their council tax for one thing, to get their bins emptied). So to offset the failing service they hire in first ten, then twenty, then thirty agency staff. These workers will require a corresponding number of vehicles and these will be hired in at an astronomical rate. It probably takes two years to get back up to 70 permanent staff and 30 expensive agency staff, by which time the CE who saved 30% on service provision costs has moved on to a bigger local authority to do the same.
The next CE comes in and is tasked with reducing agency and vehicle hire costs so he/she tupees over the 30 agency staff onto the books and buys the corresponding vehicles required.
So often, cost savings costs more than they save.
I suspect Kemi's civil service sackings maintain a similar result.
A recruitment freeze would be needed as well so no agency staff can be brought in if she really wants to get numbers down. It must also only be non essential staff cut
That is where your problem starts and finishes. Who are the "non essential staff"?
It happens every few years in local authorities and the outcome is ALWAYS the same.
Not just local authorities. I worked for one of the IT giants in the 80s. We went around the regular loop of laying off several thousand employees every few years or so and then having to recruit back their replacement over a short period of time. Usually within the first few months a number of the fired staff were taken back as contractors and getting paid significantly more before full time replacements were found.
I was at Company X/Y for five years. In that time, we had about four recruitment rounds and five redundancy rounds. It seemed a crazy way to operate.
The unspoken agenda is to enforce turnover generally. Back in the day you had redundancy rounds because a business could no longer afford its staffing level due to trading conditions. Now they happen on clockwork.
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Talking of fundamentally dishonest, here’s a global SSTA history from the 19th century to now.
The banning of marine sulphates occurred in 2020. It’s clearly had a very impressive retrospective effect on temperatures since 1900.
1900-2020 being of course a period during which marine sulphate emissions increased exponentially. Yet still the oceans warmed. Weird, eh! I wonder what on earth might have caused that?
Another very common facet of the green troll is the bad faith argument - for example, there could be a recent issue like the banning of sulphur in marine fuels, raised within the context of recent warming of the seas, which the user of the bad faith argument has acknowledged has caused warming way beyond the flow of patterns that include manmade global warming 'ripping off the plaster' I believe you called it, and the troll will exploit the fact that the word 'recent' was not used to present some sort of 'gotcha'.
You wrote that “The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels”. That’s so bad faith as to be laughable.
Look at the fucking chart. Look at it. It’s like saying “the crème brûlée is cooked largely due to the chef flaming the sugar on top”.
I’d like to believe you are trolling, Leon style. But I think it’s worse than that. You actually believe this stuff.
If he had said: "“The recent rise in sea temperatures is believed to belargelyin part due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels” then he might have more of a point.
There is data for this; and what is more, the mechanism is understood. It'll also probably be temporary.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
Far from it, the Conservatives have shifted the parameters of the debate.
It's a great example of how strong political leadership can do that and break the consensus.
Before Kemi no-one was seriously questioning at a national level the wisdom of this law, even though no doubt many people will now "forget" this and pretend that they were.
The Tories are going to get demolished next May. English local elections. Welsh and Scottish national elections. And then nobody will say “yebbut she wants to abolish Stamp Duty”.
I’m not remotely wedded to Stamp Duty. We don’t have it in Scotland. But having suddenly decided Stamp Duty is bad, you actually need power again to do this thing you didn’t do when you were in power. Which means persuading people to vote for you. Which they won’t.
So what should they do? Just not propose anything?
I think we all know that the Tories are in a mire. That’s not news. And none of us expect them to be putting in a stellar performance in May.
From my side though, the conference, despite its funereal atmosphere at times, does seem to have left Badenoch and the Tories with a little more spring in their step. This could all be a false dawn, and nobody is saying that they are anywhere near challenging for power or having a popular renaissance right now. There are some cautious - very cautious - signs that they may be starting to think about some of the economic policies that need changing. I am less enamoured of their rush to authoritarianism on the cultural/immigration stuff, and there’s still too much of them trying to out-Farage Farage (which, like Labour, is doomed to fail). But I’m willing to at least give them a hearing, which I wasn’t before, though I wouldn’t vote for them right now.
I see very little which persuades me they will do any better with a different leader. Badenoch deserves a bit longer, whether she’ll get it I don’t know.
What should they do? Lay out a new direction. A new philosophy. The country is *broken* and I don't blame only the Tories. We need Big Politics to fix this, and instead we're getting "we looked at scrapping stamp duty but were frit but we'll do it now I promise"
Is that it? Far too much money is tied up in mortgages and rent, with young professionals finding it impossible to get on the housing ladder. A policy to turbocharge transactions and drive prices even higher does what exactly to fix the structural problems.
Yes, they do need a new vision. I don’t disagree there. But that does take time. From listening to Badenoch’s speech, I saw some bits and pieces in there that suggested that she ‘gets’ some of the issues. But for a party in the state the Tories are in, and coming off the back of 14 years in government , that isn’t going to change overnight. Will it change enough to persuade some voters back? We’ll see.
I don’t have a particular concern with the stamp duty policy on its own. We need incentives for people to downsize, and that is one of the blockers. As others have said, an alternative form of property taxation is likely needed (and obviously that’s one the Tories have conveniently sidestepped for now).
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The offset isn't real - if you are going to make people redundant you need to explicitly say what government functions are going to be reduced or binned off.
Because there are often obvious consequences that the last Tory Government was too thick to understand.
Reduce the number of people processing asylum claims those awaiting their claim to be processed take longer to be processed which means they need to be housed for longer
which means you need to house more people than you have space for so suddenly that little staff saving results in £10bn being spent to hire run down hotels.
I have given this example on here many times but after 35 years of working with local authorities a cycle applies, and it happened 35 years ago and it still happens.
A journeyman (or woman) Chief Executive is brought in to cut costs. He/she pores over spreadsheets and determines that labour is their biggest cost, so in order to cut costs they cut staff. Easy!
Let's take kerbside refuse collectors. In a.medium sized authority it would be reasonable to assume a 100 collectors and drivers. So the CE decides after much calculation that they can make do with 70 ( it's always a cut of circa 30%). So we have just saved just under a third of our labour cost. We can also get rid of 30% of our vehicles and their associated costs. Happy days!
However householder start complaining that their bins/ recycling service is failing (and don't forget ratepayers pay their council tax for one thing, to get their bins emptied). So to offset the failing service they hire in first ten, then twenty, then thirty agency staff. These workers will require a corresponding number of vehicles and these will be hired in at an astronomical rate. It probably takes two years to get back up to 70 permanent staff and 30 expensive agency staff, by which time the CE who saved 30% on service provision costs has moved on to a bigger local authority to do the same.
The next CE comes in and is tasked with reducing agency and vehicle hire costs so he/she tupees over the 30 agency staff onto the books and buys the corresponding vehicles required.
So often, cost savings costs more than they save.
I suspect Kemi's civil service sackings maintain a similar result.
A recruitment freeze would be needed as well so no agency staff can be brought in if she really wants to get numbers down. It must also only be non essential staff cut
That is where your problem starts and finishes. Who are the "non essential staff"?
It happens every few years in local authorities and the outcome is ALWAYS the same.
Not just local authorities. I worked for one of the IT giants in the 80s. We went around the regular loop of laying off several thousand employees every few years or so and then having to recruit back their replacement over a short period of time. Usually within the first few months a number of the fired staff were taken back as contractors and getting paid significantly more before full time replacements were found.
I was at Company X/Y for five years. In that time, we had about four recruitment rounds and five redundancy rounds. It seemed a crazy way to operate.
The unspoken agenda is to enforce turnover generally. Back in the day you had redundancy rounds because a business could no longer afford its staffing level due to trading conditions. Now they happen on clockwork.
Doesn't do a lot for company loyalty obviously.
In that case, it was because of chaos. Company X became Company Y after a takeover, and the new company kept on changing its mind what to do with this rebellious little band of geniuses (*) with lots of interesting legacy tech. We would persuade them to start a project, and then they would look to cut costs, and our satellite office doing none-core work was always an easy target.
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Talking of fundamentally dishonest, here’s a global SSTA history from the 19th century to now.
The banning of marine sulphates occurred in 2020. It’s clearly had a very impressive retrospective effect on temperatures since 1900.
1900-2020 being of course a period during which marine sulphate emissions increased exponentially. Yet still the oceans warmed. Weird, eh! I wonder what on earth might have caused that?
I don't doubt the trend, but I do have some scepticism about data sets that proclaim accuracy back to the 1850s for this sort of data, especially globally.
If only the 19th Century had a global power stationing scientists all around the world. Oh wait, it did – Britain.
Indeed we did. They were not necessarily out at sea all the time measuring sea temperatures to within a fraction of a degree. And the people that were measuring water temperatures - e.g. steamships via the bucket method - were not interested in fractions of a degree. Or even to the nearest degree.
I am not saying that water temperatures are not increasing. I just wish there was some realism about historic data in this sort of context.
From the conclusion: "Accurate temperatures can be obtained with either the bucket or intake method. However, measurements cannot be expected to be of high accuracy or precision when obtained by untrained sailors using poorly-calibrated, low-resolution thermometers"
Does it matter exactly what the temperatures are? Surely it's the trend which matters?
Yes and no. The trend does indeed matter; but the trend can be obscured if the data is obtained by a different, more accurate method. That link's quite interesting for showing the way that buckets (including different bucket types) and engine intake temperatures can vary - and that's in a modernish context.
Again, I'm not saying ocean temperatures are not rising.
Partly it's a question of when people formed their ideas on all this climate stuff.
Until... 2000 or so? it was just about possible to squint at the data and say "variations, cycles, uncertainty" and conclude that there might not be a problem. (It was a stretch, but not an impossible one).
Add the points since then and that is infinitely less credible. Even if sulfate reduction has given a bit more of an uptick in the last few years.
Another thing. The Bjørn Lomborg thesis boiled down to the idea that the world should get richer, so it could afford to deal with global warming. Sort of arguable then, but less so now.
The trouble is you only need the weakest counter arguments, the tiniest bit of grit in the system, and the status quo will reassert itself. Combating climate change is like trying to build HS2. There’s always a reason to curtail it or delay it. We’re heading for the net zero equivalent of terminating at Old Oak Common.
Every time one denialist talking point is debunked, another one comes along. Often a recycled one that was already debunked.
Nottinghamshire County Council has spent an additional £25m on adult social care this year just to meet the increase in the national living wage and increase employers’ NICs.
Combined with children’s social services, care makes up 75pc of Nottinghamshire County Council’s annual spending.
Telegraph
The other councils are all similar says article.
A really good political move - albeit entirely disingenuous - would for central government to fund care directly through payments to councils.
That’s £35bn on central government deficit but the numbers are so large that people’s eyes glaze over.
Insist that local councils cut councils by 50% and use the rest to fund local services /repay debt.
Campaign in the local elections on the basis of a massive cut in council tax
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Talking of fundamentally dishonest, here’s a global SSTA history from the 19th century to now.
The banning of marine sulphates occurred in 2020. It’s clearly had a very impressive retrospective effect on temperatures since 1900.
1900-2020 being of course a period during which marine sulphate emissions increased exponentially. Yet still the oceans warmed. Weird, eh! I wonder what on earth might have caused that?
I don't doubt the trend, but I do have some scepticism about data sets that proclaim accuracy back to the 1850s for this sort of data, especially globally.
If only the 19th Century had a global power stationing scientists all around the world. Oh wait, it did – Britain.
Indeed we did. They were not necessarily out at sea all the time measuring sea temperatures to within a fraction of a degree. And the people that were measuring water temperatures - e.g. steamships via the bucket method - were not interested in fractions of a degree. Or even to the nearest degree.
I am not saying that water temperatures are not increasing. I just wish there was some realism about historic data in this sort of context.
From the conclusion: "Accurate temperatures can be obtained with either the bucket or intake method. However, measurements cannot be expected to be of high accuracy or precision when obtained by untrained sailors using poorly-calibrated, low-resolution thermometers"
Does it matter exactly what the temperatures are? Surely it's the trend which matters?
Yes and no. The trend does indeed matter; but the trend can be obscured if the data is obtained by a different, more accurate method. That link's quite interesting for showing the way that buckets (including different bucket types) and engine intake temperatures can vary - and that's in a modernish context.
Again, I'm not saying ocean temperatures are not rising.
Partly it's a question of when people formed their ideas on all this climate stuff.
Until... 2000 or so? it was just about possible to squint at the data and say "variations, cycles, uncertainty" and conclude that there might not be a problem. (It was a stretch, but not an impossible one).
Add the points since then and that is infinitely less credible. Even if sulfate reduction has given a bit more of an uptick in the last few years.
Another thing. The Bjørn Lomborg thesis boiled down to the idea that the world should get richer, so it could afford to deal with global warming. Sort of arguable then, but less so now.
I've always been slightly sceptical, if only because of the political aspects that many (not all) 'green' lobbyists force into their arguments. But I'm intensely relaxed about it all now, as I see it as a great opportunity for the world. Yes, green policies cost money, but I reckon in the long run it may well not just improve the environment, but provide massive economic improvements. It may also make the world more stable.
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Talking of fundamentally dishonest, here’s a global SSTA history from the 19th century to now.
The banning of marine sulphates occurred in 2020. It’s clearly had a very impressive retrospective effect on temperatures since 1900.
1900-2020 being of course a period during which marine sulphate emissions increased exponentially. Yet still the oceans warmed. Weird, eh! I wonder what on earth might have caused that?
Another very common facet of the green troll is the bad faith argument - for example, there could be a recent issue like the banning of sulphur in marine fuels, raised within the context of recent warming of the seas, which the user of the bad faith argument has acknowledged has caused warming way beyond the flow of patterns that include manmade global warming 'ripping off the plaster' I believe you called it, and the troll will exploit the fact that the word 'recent' was not used to present some sort of 'gotcha'.
You wrote that “The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels”. That’s so bad faith as to be laughable.
Look at the fucking chart. Look at it. It’s like saying “the crème brûlée is cooked largely due to the chef flaming the sugar on top”.
I’d like to believe you are trolling, Leon style. But I think it’s worse than that. You actually believe this stuff.
If he had said: "“The recent rise in sea temperatures is believed to belargelyin part due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels” then he might have more of a point.
There is data for this; and what is more, the mechanism is understood. It'll also probably be temporary.
Indeed, and it’s been vociferously debated on here by the same characters in the past. I recall he was performatively shocked at my suggestion that we shouldn’t keep dumping carcinogenic chemicals in the air that cause tens of thousands of deaths per year, apparently because somehow 3 years of ocean warming caused by sulphate abatement is a big problem but the century of much greater ocean warming that preceded it is a mere bagatelle.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Talking of fundamentally dishonest, here’s a global SSTA history from the 19th century to now.
The banning of marine sulphates occurred in 2020. It’s clearly had a very impressive retrospective effect on temperatures since 1900.
1900-2020 being of course a period during which marine sulphate emissions increased exponentially. Yet still the oceans warmed. Weird, eh! I wonder what on earth might have caused that?
I don't doubt the trend, but I do have some scepticism about data sets that proclaim accuracy back to the 1850s for this sort of data, especially globally.
If only the 19th Century had a global power stationing scientists all around the world. Oh wait, it did – Britain.
Indeed we did. They were not necessarily out at sea all the time measuring sea temperatures to within a fraction of a degree. And the people that were measuring water temperatures - e.g. steamships via the bucket method - were not interested in fractions of a degree. Or even to the nearest degree.
I am not saying that water temperatures are not increasing. I just wish there was some realism about historic data in this sort of context.
From the conclusion: "Accurate temperatures can be obtained with either the bucket or intake method. However, measurements cannot be expected to be of high accuracy or precision when obtained by untrained sailors using poorly-calibrated, low-resolution thermometers"
Does it matter exactly what the temperatures are? Surely it's the trend which matters?
Yes and no. The trend does indeed matter; but the trend can be obscured if the data is obtained by a different, more accurate method. That link's quite interesting for showing the way that buckets (including different bucket types) and engine intake temperatures can vary - and that's in a modernish context.
Again, I'm not saying ocean temperatures are not rising.
Partly it's a question of when people formed their ideas on all this climate stuff.
Until... 2000 or so? it was just about possible to squint at the data and say "variations, cycles, uncertainty" and conclude that there might not be a problem. (It was a stretch, but not an impossible one).
Add the points since then and that is infinitely less credible. Even if sulfate reduction has given a bit more of an uptick in the last few years.
Another thing. The Bjørn Lomborg thesis boiled down to the idea that the world should get richer, so it could afford to deal with global warming. Sort of arguable then, but less so now.
I've always been slightly sceptical, if only because of the political aspects that many (not all) 'green' lobbyists force into their arguments. But I'm intensely relaxed about it all now, as I see it as a great opportunity for the world. Yes, green policies cost money, but I reckon in the long run it may well not just improve the environment, but provide massive economic improvements. It may also make the world more stable.
It's a great opportunity.
There have been several unhelpful aspects of green politics around this in the last 2 decades:
- a technophobia that equates capitalism and progress with pollution, and which sets up precisely the false dichotomy the sceptics love - a reflexive anti nuclear ideology which is self defeating - treating emissions reduction as a question of personal morality rather than, as one campaigner has sensibly put it, “a question of industrial waste management” which is what it actually is
Green industrial growth shoots 2 of these foxes, and the rise of solar and storage renders the second one moot.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
I'm not sure it would be my policy choice (because I'm not that fussed about decarbonising everything), but surely the easiest route to it would be a load of cheap Korean nuclear baseload stations and go for electrical heating of one sort or another.
If you can get the unit electric price low enough, you could go for straight electric convection heating rather than heat pumps - it's quite possibly cheaper to spend the capex on extra cookie-cutter build nuclear powerstations than fitting elaborate heat pump systems to all our housing stock.
Obviously, a prerequisite for this strategy would be "nuking" our entire nuclear approvals system and starting again without the gold plating, and completely exempting the power station sites from planning and environmental legislation. Otherwise each plant will be £25Bn in approvals then £5bn to build.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
As a poster wrote sarcastically on the previous thread, “ Deploying facts to discount a PB faithful narrative will never catch on. I suspect you will have posters pushing back with whataboutery before you know it.” so MexicanPete will no doubt have made his post based on facts and not something pulled out of his arse.
I have been surprised how little traction Jenrick's tack to the fat right gained. Badenoch's best Conference speech since Johnson's last Conference speech seemed to take the wind out of his sails.
I like the concept of the fat right. By contrast the thin right sounds much healthier. Nice typo!
Because of his rigorously gruelling gym and running programmes to get in trim for his forthcoming premiership, the "fat right" is perhaps unfair.
Indeed. Yond Jenrick has a lean and hungry look.
I think its more likely to be May than the Ides of March though.
Charts of North Sea oil and gas production tell a national story. Combine these with windfalls from successive privatisations, the demographic gifts of a historically low dependency ratio, and the reduced need for defence spending from 1991 onwards, and it’s no wonder governments of the era were able to preside over boom times. In fact it’s a puzzle why we didn’t do even better in the 80s and 90s.
And since then we've had the financial crash, Brexit, the Covid pandemic, and now Trump2. Switch the political midgets of today for the giants of yesteryear, and vice versa, and how much difference would it really make or have made? You'd like to think plenty but I'm not so sure. It's an increasingly strong belief of mine that the ability of our politicians to create radical change in any sort of electoral timescale is skewed heavily to the negative variety. By which I mean they can't (quickly enough so you'd notice) make things much better but they can make things a whole lot worse. This is the number one reason to avoid populists of all stripes. Anyone promising speedy transformation of the country as a consequence of them being elected should on no account be elected.
It is possible to target Net Zero while still seeking to maximise North Sea oil and gas extraction.
And when you have a government locking in demand for natural gas as part of its decarbonisation strategy, through CCGT and blue hydrogen plants with CO2 capture, there is every incentive to 'drill, baby, drill' rather than import LNG from Qatar.
I may have mentioned this previously.
Blue hydrogen is a ludicrously expensive non solution to climate change even more ridiculous than the current CO2 capture plans.
But otherwise, agreed.
Blue hydrogen is part of the CO2 capture plans. CO2 capture is integral to blue hydrogen.
Green hydrogen is more expensive than green. At present.
And ? Does that change ludicrously expensive ?
What's your figure for cost per kWh ? (Including the add on cost to fossil fuel generation from CCS.)
Green hydrogen awaits both zero marginal cost renewables, and a few breakthroughs in efficiency.
Charts of North Sea oil and gas production tell a national story. Combine these with windfalls from successive privatisations, the demographic gifts of a historically low dependency ratio, and the reduced need for defence spending from 1991 onwards, and it’s no wonder governments of the era were able to preside over boom times. In fact it’s a puzzle why we didn’t do even better in the 80s and 90s.
And since then we've had the financial crash, Brexit, the Covid pandemic, and now Trump2. Switch the political midgets of today for the giants of yesteryear, and vice versa, and how much difference would it really make or have made? You'd like to think plenty but I'm not so sure. It's an increasingly strong belief of mine that the ability of our politicians to create radical change in any sort of electoral timescale is skewed heavily to the negative variety. By which I mean they can't (quickly enough so you'd notice) make things much better but they can make things a whole lot worse. This is the number one reason to avoid populists of all stripes. Anyone promising speedy transformation of the country as a consequence of them being elected should on no account be elected.
I make partisan points - I know that so this is going to sound hypocritical:
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
Storage heaters. It baffles me no-one seems to be pursuing this obvious solution. It needs just three simple updates to the basic 1960s models:
A variable tariff that offers electricity at essentially no cost when supply outstrips demand. Which also solves the nations energy storage problem - excess energy is stored as heat in storage heaters.
Decent lagging on the heaters so they can last out the period of peak demand.
App to control the storage and release of energy according to prices, weather and temperature in the room.
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Okay. You’ve succinctly holed the first argument below waterline, what about the second one?
“pledge to remove 750,000 migrants under borders plan”
I might be missing something with some of the questions asked - so I thought you could help out by putting answers next to them.
How realistic is this policy to implement? Who exactly is being deported? If The undocumented, the Windrush Scandal says hi. Where are the deportees? How will they be found, rounded up, at what financial cost? Are deportees entitled to due process and a hearing? If so, where are they waiting for their due process to play out - locked in detention centres? Will they get a hearing from a judge, before detained? And to where, and how, are they being deported? Will families be ripped apart?
The question you didn't ask ties in with HYUFD's point. What are these people doing now? I suppose the answer will be they are non essential. Personally I look forward to being cared for in my dotage not by a foreigner with empathy and experience, but by a white person with a string of minor convictions who has spent five years out of work on a mental health waiting list. Others may differ.
You are hoping for Tommy Robinson (better known as Steven Yaxley-Lennon) to be your carer?
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
As a poster wrote sarcastically on the previous thread, “ Deploying facts to discount a PB faithful narrative will never catch on. I suspect you will have posters pushing back with whataboutery before you know it.” so MexicanPete will no doubt have made his post based on facts and not something pulled out of his arse.
If I was a farm family 20% IHT would be very annoying. But could 50% work better?
Land is expensive because it carries tax advantages.
If my core skill is to extract the profit from managing land effectively for the long term, I’d probably prefer to get my land cheapish.
Land is a finite resource, and land banking is now rife is many parts of the UK, while conglomerates hoover up large tracts, farming enterprises get bigger. I don't think we will see a land price crash any time soon. Larger corporate entities will often rent, and won't fall foul of the IHT changes as they only fall on individuals.
Rumours there is a change afoot on the proposals in the coming budget ... watch this space
I did, and I bothered to follow it. Especially with us both coming from areas of Scotland that have been devastated by poor SNP governance for years and now Labour policies that have really affected our areas too?! I am sorry, but that kind of cheap dig really gets me when I think of the fact that the only real effective opposition to the SNP & SGreens has been the Scottish Conservatives!! Thank god for Scottish Conservatives and the last Conservative government at Westminster when it came to protecting women's rights. And also after just a few days ago when Douglas Ross's Right to Recovery bill all about promoting wider drug rehabilatation was voted down by the SNP and SGreens in Holyrood and in the country with the biggest drug deaths, particularly in Dundee!
Also coming from the North East of Scotland, I remain really angry at the impact of the SNP, SGreens and now the Labour Government at Westminster's devasting impact on the North Sea Gas and Oil Industry here. So your flippant lads together comment really jarred with someone else who actually lives in the North East of Scotland right now! I am fed up watching the only Opposition party in Scotland knocking its head against a brick wall and getting dismissed in this way by a long time dismissive snobbish group on here! When I arrived on this site twenty years ago, I was out loud and a proud female Scottish Conservative and I remain so thanks to their bloody hard work protecting my rights as a biological woman here in Scotland!!
So Kemi, you go girl!
Morning! I encountered a very loyal Andrew Bowie voter in Banchory, because the "Tories protect my industry". We discussed the large numbers of job losses and the huge Tory flip flops on energy and Net Zero. He was resolute.
Point is, the Tories can hardly claim to have been stalwart defenders of an industry they have run down. And not just energy, as I pointed out earlier the local farmers are fuming at both their treatment by the party and by the rank arrogance of Bowie et al assuming their vote remains secure...
Your weakness on these policy issues in the North East of Scotland is showing, I have unlike you lived in the North East of Scotland and have been married to someone who has worked in the Oil and Gas industry here for 40 years, also now spent 20 years living in a rural area where many of our friends are farmers. There is a good reason why Andrew Bowie held onto his seat at the last GE and the fact he knows his constiuency both rural and industrial in Aberdeenshire and in Aberdeen helped a lot. So don't knock a bloody good local MP what ever his party colours!
There's certainly more chance of Andrew Bowie holding onto his seat than any other Tory in Scotland at present. Braemar and Royal Deeside (along with parts of Scottish Borders) are less vulnerable to the Ref UK surge
I make partisan points - I know that so this is going to sound hypocritical:
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
Especially when it comes to funding care, council funding, the triple lock, public sector pensions.
All things needing reform and all parties play politics on it.
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Talking of fundamentally dishonest, here’s a global SSTA history from the 19th century to now.
The banning of marine sulphates occurred in 2020. It’s clearly had a very impressive retrospective effect on temperatures since 1900.
1900-2020 being of course a period during which marine sulphate emissions increased exponentially. Yet still the oceans warmed. Weird, eh! I wonder what on earth might have caused that?
I don't doubt the trend, but I do have some scepticism about data sets that proclaim accuracy back to the 1850s for this sort of data, especially globally.
If only the 19th Century had a global power stationing scientists all around the world. Oh wait, it did – Britain.
Indeed we did. They were not necessarily out at sea all the time measuring sea temperatures to within a fraction of a degree. And the people that were measuring water temperatures - e.g. steamships via the bucket method - were not interested in fractions of a degree. Or even to the nearest degree.
I am not saying that water temperatures are not increasing. I just wish there was some realism about historic data in this sort of context.
From the conclusion: "Accurate temperatures can be obtained with either the bucket or intake method. However, measurements cannot be expected to be of high accuracy or precision when obtained by untrained sailors using poorly-calibrated, low-resolution thermometers"
Does it matter exactly what the temperatures are? Surely it's the trend which matters?
Yes and no. The trend does indeed matter; but the trend can be obscured if the data is obtained by a different, more accurate method. That link's quite interesting for showing the way that buckets (including different bucket types) and engine intake temperatures can vary - and that's in a modernish context.
Again, I'm not saying ocean temperatures are not rising.
Partly it's a question of when people formed their ideas on all this climate stuff.
Until... 2000 or so? it was just about possible to squint at the data and say "variations, cycles, uncertainty" and conclude that there might not be a problem. (It was a stretch, but not an impossible one).
Add the points since then and that is infinitely less credible. Even if sulfate reduction has given a bit more of an uptick in the last few years.
Another thing. The Bjørn Lomborg thesis boiled down to the idea that the world should get richer, so it could afford to deal with global warming. Sort of arguable then, but less so now.
I've always been slightly sceptical, if only because of the political aspects that many (not all) 'green' lobbyists force into their arguments. But I'm intensely relaxed about it all now, as I see it as a great opportunity for the world. Yes, green policies cost money, but I reckon in the long run it may well not just improve the environment, but provide massive economic improvements. It may also make the world more stable.
It's a great opportunity.
That's the great point, as exemplified in a cartoon sometime ago. "What if we were all wrong about Global Warming/Climate and we ended up with a clean, sustainable planet, not pollution, renewable power etc for nothing".
I have huge issues with a very small number of climate scientists, who I am sure are not representative of the mass. An unwillingness to share data is a red flag. An extremely spiky attitude to legitimate criticism from other scientists is a red flag. And a failure to correct issues with data is a red flag.
I think also that what a lot of people get het up about is actually activism portrayed as science. Then there is the media's need to use the most extreme cases to get media attention.
And lastly there are some communists who have adopted the guise of greenery to try to achieve their political ends - the watermelon approach.
Hi BigG - I had a very rough 24 hours after my flu and covid vaccination double whammy. Started 13 h after the jabs and wasn't really happy until 48 h. Stick with it, its worth the short dose of pain.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
Storage heaters. It baffles me no-one seems to be pursuing this obvious solution. It needs just three simple updates to the basic 1960s models:
A variable tariff that offers electricity at essentially no cost when supply outstrips demand. Which also solves the nations energy storage problem - excess energy is stored as heat in storage heaters.
Decent lagging on the heaters so they can last out the period of peak demand.
App to control the storage and release of energy according to prices, weather and temperature in the room.
That's pretty much what domestic batteries, smart meters and funky power companies do. Whilst batteries are more expensive than storage heaters, the energy is much more useful stored as battery charge than as heat. (Once you turn energy into heat, you're not efficiently getting it back to do anything else with it.)
I make partisan points - I know that so this is going to sound hypocritical:
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
Does that include trans? Because one person's fact does not seem to be the same for everyone.
Charts of North Sea oil and gas production tell a national story. Combine these with windfalls from successive privatisations, the demographic gifts of a historically low dependency ratio, and the reduced need for defence spending from 1991 onwards, and it’s no wonder governments of the era were able to preside over boom times. In fact it’s a puzzle why we didn’t do even better in the 80s and 90s.
And since then we've had the financial crash, Brexit, the Covid pandemic, and now Trump2. Switch the political midgets of today for the giants of yesteryear, and vice versa, and how much difference would it really make or have made? You'd like to think plenty but I'm not so sure. It's an increasingly strong belief of mine that the ability of our politicians to create radical change in any sort of electoral timescale is skewed heavily to the negative variety. By which I mean they can't (quickly enough so you'd notice) make things much better but they can make things a whole lot worse. This is the number one reason to avoid populists of all stripes. Anyone promising speedy transformation of the country as a consequence of them being elected should on no account be elected.
This. Oh yes indeed.
Common ground between hard left social democrat and one nation tory 🙂
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Okay. You’ve succinctly holed the first argument below waterline, what about the second one?
“pledge to remove 750,000 migrants under borders plan”
I might be missing something with some of the questions asked - so I thought you could help out by putting answers next to them.
How realistic is this policy to implement? Who exactly is being deported? If The undocumented, the Windrush Scandal says hi. Where are the deportees? How will they be found, rounded up, at what financial cost? Are deportees entitled to due process and a hearing? If so, where are they waiting for their due process to play out - locked in detention centres? Will they get a hearing from a judge, before detained? And to where, and how, are they being deported? Will families be ripped apart?
The question you didn't ask ties in with HYUFD's point. What are these people doing now? I suppose the answer will be they are non essential. Personally I look forward to being cared for in my dotage not by a foreigner with empathy and experience, but by a white person with a string of minor convictions who has spent five years out of work on a mental health waiting list. Others may differ.
What an odd comment as if that is the binary choice.
I’d like to be cared for by someone professional irrespective of where they’re from.
My neighbour has a chronic health condition and her carers are a mixture of white brits and foreigners. They’re all good and all appreciated
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
Storage heaters. It baffles me no-one seems to be pursuing this obvious solution. It needs just three simple updates to the basic 1960s models:
A variable tariff that offers electricity at essentially no cost when supply outstrips demand. Which also solves the nations energy storage problem - excess energy is stored as heat in storage heaters.
Decent lagging on the heaters so they can last out the period of peak demand.
App to control the storage and release of energy according to prices, weather and temperature in the room.
Are too many people simply scarred by older, rubbish storage heaters?
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
As a poster wrote sarcastically on the previous thread, “ Deploying facts to discount a PB faithful narrative will never catch on. I suspect you will have posters pushing back with whataboutery before you know it.” so MexicanPete will no doubt have made his post based on facts and not something pulled out of his arse.
I make partisan points - I know that so this is going to sound hypocritical:
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
Facts are up for debate, that's not fascism that's free speech and healthy.
Fascism is saying that facts aren't up for debate and imposing one person's facts onto others who don't agree with them.
Almost all facts are subjective and need debating, accepting what one person says unquestioningly leads to Orwellian abuses.
JD Vance calls Canterbury Cathedral exhibit 'ugly' ... Mr Vance said: "It is weird to me that these people don't see the irony of honoring 'marginalized communities' by making a beautiful historical building really ugly." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly64e0v34jo
Trendy vicar.
He is actually right though, it looks absolutely hideous. Shockingly inappropriate and utterly without any feeling for the building.
I mean, I don't know that somebody who has a face like a smacked arse and the soul of a Mafia Don is in a position to lecture. But he does, for once, have a point.
JD Vance sounds quite like Mr Bufton-Tufton mowing his lawn in Tunbridge Wells on a Saturday afternoon, harrumphing in time to the Flymo. But I don't think he likes his Christianity escaping from the small box where he keeps it, and asking him awkward questions; we've seen that before with him. (Side note: that's a human characteristic, we all do it, and we all need challenging sometimes.)
I think it's a fascinating exhibit. I'm in that part of Kent for a few days in December, and I'll go and have a look. A cathedral is a place where it is appropriate to ask questions about God, and cathedrals are - and always have been - buildings for everyone, so I think it's a great idea to poke some assumptions. Some people will huff and puff, and others will have think a bit more deeply.
It was Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey who famously said "The duty of the church is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable", which is hackneyed but a good aphorism.
We seem quite happy with Sheela-na-gigs, and this is far less provocative than those. I'd frame it far more as a Cathedral doing what cathedrals have always done.
Is this one of those exhibitions that tours round most cathedrals? Is each instance unique? How do they get the paint/medium off the stone?
(Addressed to anyone who knows, not to you specifically.)
I wonder how they'd feel if some unauthorised artist plastered graffiti on the outside walls!
I'd guess that it will be some peelable surface - which could be paint on or stick on.
I have used paint-on protection to pre-protect walls against graffiti (so you can just hose it all off and repaint to protect for next time), or once to waterproof a shower set against a stone house wall.
Amuses me that the link shows the explanation about the exhibition directly underneath their welcome to Sarah Mullaly, rather giving the impression that the exhibition is to welcome her.
Be interesting to hear if the exhibition does go on tour. Some of the exhibitions that tour cathedrals are amazing. I remember one about the moon.
FPT - I was startled to see in my Aeroplane Monthly that Rochester Cathedral recently put on show a locally made Shorts floatplane, showcasing the plane restoration volunteers' efforts and more generally engineering in the area (evidently from a local historical but also educational perspective with family activities, which usually means stuff for children).
They thereby helped out the plane restorers by giving them a display venue to make their work known. Which is nice.
More generally a key point about temporary exhibitions is that they will not be there for long. Another point is that they exist to do different things, sometimes experimental. So grumping about them is pointless, especially if it is to do with the Christian message anyway.
I have some great photos of my son under the Earth at Ely Cathederal a few years back. I'm unsure what that had to do with the Christian message.
Likewise, Chester Cathedral has, for the past few years, had a large model railway in it for a few weeks in the summer. Again, this seems more to do with pulling in the punters than it does religion (although the link between vicars and railways are much stronger than just Rev Awdry).
I'm not a fan of graffiti. But it'll be temporary, and won't have damaged the cathedral's fabric. Sometimes people should just shrug and say "That's not for me".
It’s about finding ways to connect with people and bring them into a situation where they can hear the Christian message.
If only a handful of people who come to see the railway exhibition are inspired to ask why people spent so much time and effort building the cathedral and progress from that to faith it will have been worthwhile
I'm going to add a further perspective there. The first para is imo a bit too "them" and "us" - Church of England ecclesiology and theology is broader.
It is more inclusive, and the boundaries are blurred, and recognises on the one hand that people who are not "members" also have some orientation to spirituality, or the divine, or the numinous (choose your word), or the inspired by choral music, and welcome that. There are ancient and modern traditions (whether catholic, celtic, Orthodox, Benedictine, or others) which are very different to a transactional "I was saved" followed by a rationalistic religiosity. Close contact with many traditions is one of the advantages of the CofE.
On the other hand, the cathedral is part of the community, and the building is part of the town, looked after by the Cathedral Authorities, so model railways and so on are excellent. Ask nicely, and the choir will choose an appropriate song.
Cathedrals have always been at the centre of both sacred and secular (but not usually profane *) events, and have spent the last half century or more recovering that position. The "great unwashed" are welcome because
* Though from some particular perspectives some things may be perceived as profane. as the Celebration of the Car held in Coventry Cathedral some years ago by people with a green emphasis, or "Greens" seeing the opportunity for a PR stunt (there was a naked protest 'in the spirit of Lady Godiva').
That I think is the tenor of the attitude of the Telegraph coverage - Canterbury Cathedral is supposed to belong to "us" cultural conservatives (see Restore Trust), whilst Canterbury Cathedral would perhaps look more at the NT stories of JC being in company with tax collectors and other ne'er do wells, so having a responsibility to dialogue with all. That's also often the tenor of "Rave in the Nave" type events.
JD Vance calls Canterbury Cathedral exhibit 'ugly' ... Mr Vance said: "It is weird to me that these people don't see the irony of honoring 'marginalized communities' by making a beautiful historical building really ugly." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly64e0v34jo
Trendy vicar.
He is actually right though, it looks absolutely hideous. Shockingly inappropriate and utterly without any feeling for the building.
I mean, I don't know that somebody who has a face like a smacked arse and the soul of a Mafia Don is in a position to lecture. But he does, for once, have a point.
JD Vance sounds quite like Mr Bufton-Tufton mowing his lawn in Tunbridge Wells on a Saturday afternoon, harrumphing in time to the Flymo. But I don't think he likes his Christianity escaping from the small box where he keeps it, and asking him awkward questions; we've seen that before with him. (Side note: that's a human characteristic, we all do it, and we all need challenging sometimes.)
I think it's a fascinating exhibit. I'm in that part of Kent for a few days in December, and I'll go and have a look. A cathedral is a place where it is appropriate to ask questions about God, and cathedrals are - and always have been - buildings for everyone, so I think it's a great idea to poke some assumptions. Some people will huff and puff, and others will have think a bit more deeply.
It was Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey who famously said "The duty of the church is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable", which is hackneyed but a good aphorism.
We seem quite happy with Sheela-na-gigs, and this is far less provocative than those. I'd frame it far more as a Cathedral doing what cathedrals have always done.
Is this one of those exhibitions that tours round most cathedrals? Is each instance unique? How do they get the paint/medium off the stone?
(Addressed to anyone who knows, not to you specifically.)
I wonder how they'd feel if some unauthorised artist plastered graffiti on the outside walls!
I'd guess that it will be some peelable surface - which could be paint on or stick on.
I have used paint-on protection to pre-protect walls against graffiti (so you can just hose it all off and repaint to protect for next time), or once to waterproof a shower set against a stone house wall.
Amuses me that the link shows the explanation about the exhibition directly underneath their welcome to Sarah Mullaly, rather giving the impression that the exhibition is to welcome her.
Be interesting to hear if the exhibition does go on tour. Some of the exhibitions that tour cathedrals are amazing. I remember one about the moon.
FPT - I was startled to see in my Aeroplane Monthly that Rochester Cathedral recently put on show a locally made Shorts floatplane, showcasing the plane restoration volunteers' efforts and more generally engineering in the area (evidently from a local historical but also educational perspective with family activities, which usually means stuff for children).
They thereby helped out the plane restorers by giving them a display venue to make their work known. Which is nice.
More generally a key point about temporary exhibitions is that they will not be there for long. Another point is that they exist to do different things, sometimes experimental. So grumping about them is pointless, especially if it is to do with the Christian message anyway.
I have some great photos of my son under the Earth at Ely Cathederal a few years back. I'm unsure what that had to do with the Christian message.
Likewise, Chester Cathedral has, for the past few years, had a large model railway in it for a few weeks in the summer. Again, this seems more to do with pulling in the punters than it does religion (although the link between vicars and railways are much stronger than just Rev Awdry).
I'm not a fan of graffiti. But it'll be temporary, and won't have damaged the cathedral's fabric. Sometimes people should just shrug and say "That's not for me".
It’s about finding ways to connect with people and bring them into a situation where they can hear the Christian message.
If only a handful of people who come to see the railway exhibition are inspired to ask why people spent so much time and effort building the cathedral and progress from that to faith it will have been worthwhile
I'm going to add a further perspective there. The first para is imo a bit too "them" and "us" - Church of England ecclesiology and theology is broader.
It is more inclusive, and the boundaries are blurred, and recognises on the one hand that people who are not "members" also have some orientation to spirituality, or the divine, or the numinous (choose your word), and welcome that. There are ancient and modern traditions which are far more than a transactional "I was saved" followed by a rationalistic religiosity, whether catholic, celtic, Orthodox, or others. Close contact with many traditions is one of the advantages of the CofE.
On the other hand, the cathedral is part of the community, and the building is part of the town, looked after by the Cathedral Authorities, so model railways and so on are fine.
Cathedrals have always been at the centre of both sacred and secular (but not usually profane *) events, and have spent the last half century or more recovering that position. The "great unwashed" are welcome because
* Though from some particular perspectives some things may be perceived as profane. as the Celebration of the Car held in Coventry Cathedral some years ago by people with a green emphasis, or "Greens" seeing the opportunity for a PR stunt (there was a naked protest 'in the spirit of Lady Godiva').
That I think is the tenor of the attitude of the Telegraph coverage - Canterbury Cathedral is supposed to belong to "us" cultural conservatives (see Restore Trust), whilst Canterbury Cathedral would perhaps look more at the NT stories of JC being in company with tax collectors and other ne'er do wells, so having a responsibility to dialogue with all. That's also often the tenor of "Rave in the Nave" type events.
I'm not clear about this - have they actually spray painted the stonework? Is it reversible? If not that's fecking vandalism.
Reform is slightly socialist compared to the Tories.
Interesting - he must think his target voters don't want to buy new houses but tasteful old ones when they retire to Much Binding in the Wold or Walmington-on-Sea. And they don't want new houses spoiling the chocolate box picture, maybe?
I would prohibit the purchase of any new home as a second home
Well you've just destroyed the profit of builders and so reduced the number of new homes being built.
There are parts of the country where this experiment has already been run, it's not a pretty end result...
To be fair in Wales the council tax uplift between 150% - 300% is having an effect with Estate Agents telling me many second homes are coming into the market
Indeed, our daughter following her recent divorce has just bought one
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
Storage heaters. It baffles me no-one seems to be pursuing this obvious solution. It needs just three simple updates to the basic 1960s models:
A variable tariff that offers electricity at essentially no cost when supply outstrips demand. Which also solves the nations energy storage problem - excess energy is stored as heat in storage heaters.
Decent lagging on the heaters so they can last out the period of peak demand.
App to control the storage and release of energy according to prices, weather and temperature in the room.
That's pretty much what domestic batteries, smart meters and funky power companies do. Whilst batteries are more expensive than storage heaters, the energy is much more useful stored as battery charge than as heat. (Once you turn energy into heat, you're not efficiently getting it back to do anything else with it.)
I have lived in a couple of houses with storage heaters. Typically the houses were baking in the early hours of the morning, and freezing after 10am.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
Storage heaters. It baffles me no-one seems to be pursuing this obvious solution. It needs just three simple updates to the basic 1960s models:
A variable tariff that offers electricity at essentially no cost when supply outstrips demand. Which also solves the nations energy storage problem - excess energy is stored as heat in storage heaters.
Decent lagging on the heaters so they can last out the period of peak demand.
App to control the storage and release of energy according to prices, weather and temperature in the room.
Are too many people simply scarred by older, rubbish storage heaters?
Think it's more the transition from coal as a way to generate electricity.
When we mostly had coal fired power stations, there was an excess of electricity generated overnight; turning off a coal power station is a right pain. So it was worth incentivising overnight use by Economy 7 and storage heaters made sense. Once you had gas for the peaks, it was easier to just to switch the gas stations off.
With wind and solar, we're back to a situation where generation might not track consumption. But we have batteries. We had one installed this year, and half the business case is importing cheap electricity overnight and selling is back as expensive electricity in the early evening. Pretty sure the same is true of all those shipping containers full of batteries that are springing up everywhere.
I make partisan points - I know that so this is going to sound hypocritical:
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
Facts are up for debate, that's not fascism that's free speech and healthy.
Fascism is saying that facts aren't up for debate and imposing one person's facts onto others who don't agree with them.
Almost all facts are subjective and need debating, accepting what one person says unquestioningly leads to Orwellian abuses.
"Facts" which are up for debate have not been established as facts.
I make partisan points - I know that so this is going to sound hypocritical:
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
Facts are up for debate, that's not fascism that's free speech and healthy.
Fascism is saying that facts aren't up for debate and imposing one person's facts onto others who don't agree with them.
Almost all facts are subjective and need debating, accepting what one person says unquestioningly leads to Orwellian abuses.
I had an interesting little debate about "facts" the other day - with an atheist gent arguing against essentially Maga Evangelicalism, but using Dawkins (and Charlie Kirk style) proof texting quoting a blizzard of bible verses - like the "what we believe" web page from a Reformed church.
I asked whether his approach to Genesis etc was mistaken in accepting the evangelical framing as a literalist history book.
He (said) interestingly that in the context of eg Tolkien, Bilbo's finding of the One Ring was a "fact".
I'd still question the effectiveness of his method in that I don't think he will win Magas over by demonstrating inconsistencies in their positions, but ... interesting.
The Climate Change Act is a terrible piece of legislation. I really detest demonstrative legislation that politicians try to make a point about just to show how virtuous they are. Wishing the ends without giving any serious consideration to the means is equally uninspiring as is failing to see obvious consequences.
This is a different thing from having things that we used to have called policies. Policies to protect the environment and the climate are good things and I generally have no problem with them. So, we should be encouraging more renewable energy, we should be encouraging electric vehicles to improve the atmosphere and reduce pollution, we should encourage less waste etc etc.
As for the immigration policy, words fail me.
But it’s not just a demonstrative piece of legislation. That’s the point Moon Rabbit’s piece made.
This is the frustration with the push back from the right over Net Zero. Have some daft decisions been made about not licensing extraction? Sure, and they should be reversed. Extract everything that is commercially viable to extract.
But that only gets us so far, and as output continues to ramp down we leave ourselves increasingly exposed to exports.
The right insist that this is the right strategy - Reform clowns literally want to copy Trump and switch windfarms off.
The answer is both - extract all the oil and gas which is commercially viable to extract as we establish the renewables generation which will replace oil and gas.
But do we get that? No. Labour, the SNP and Scottish Greens want to shut oil and gas down quickly, leaving extractable fuel in the ground as we replace them with imports earlier. Tories and Reform want to pretend we don't need renewables because more oil and gas will sort us long term.
As @Richard_Tyndall has explained, one effect of the Climate Change Act is that, instead of drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea, we import it instead. That is perverse.
Not at all, the legislation's working exactly as intended.
May got to feel self-righteous. The current Government gets to feel self-righteous. We outsource the pollution, and the profits.
It's entirely against the national interest, of course, but that's not the purpose of the legislation.
It's almost the legislative equivalent of when someone buys you a birthday present, only they've given a donation to charity instead and just add your name to it with a tag of: "Your gift is a donated school desk to a third world child". With the potentially dubious charity taking a nice fat cut.
Do you have an example of a charity offering such gift options that takes an inappropriate “fat cut”, or are you just ranting?
Regarding storage heaters and the lack thereof, I'd say our [2.5 year old new build] house doesn't suffer from a lack of one, it is very well-insulated and takes very little gas to keep warm. Without gas, I'd imagine a heat pump could do the job, but we don't have one.
What is more of a shame I'd say is the lack of a hot water storage tank. In the morning in the summer it takes some time between turning the hot water tap on and hot water coming out, because the boiler needs to wake up, heat the water and then cycle the water around the house. Which means wasting cold water for a while until the hot comes through.
Saves gas, but wastes water, so environmental swings and roundabouts.
JD Vance calls Canterbury Cathedral exhibit 'ugly' ... Mr Vance said: "It is weird to me that these people don't see the irony of honoring 'marginalized communities' by making a beautiful historical building really ugly." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly64e0v34jo
Trendy vicar.
He is actually right though, it looks absolutely hideous. Shockingly inappropriate and utterly without any feeling for the building.
I mean, I don't know that somebody who has a face like a smacked arse and the soul of a Mafia Don is in a position to lecture. But he does, for once, have a point.
JD Vance sounds quite like Mr Bufton-Tufton mowing his lawn in Tunbridge Wells on a Saturday afternoon, harrumphing in time to the Flymo. But I don't think he likes his Christianity escaping from the small box where he keeps it, and asking him awkward questions; we've seen that before with him. (Side note: that's a human characteristic, we all do it, and we all need challenging sometimes.)
I think it's a fascinating exhibit. I'm in that part of Kent for a few days in December, and I'll go and have a look. A cathedral is a place where it is appropriate to ask questions about God, and cathedrals are - and always have been - buildings for everyone, so I think it's a great idea to poke some assumptions. Some people will huff and puff, and others will have think a bit more deeply.
It was Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey who famously said "The duty of the church is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable", which is hackneyed but a good aphorism.
We seem quite happy with Sheela-na-gigs, and this is far less provocative than those. I'd frame it far more as a Cathedral doing what cathedrals have always done.
Is this one of those exhibitions that tours round most cathedrals? Is each instance unique? How do they get the paint/medium off the stone?
(Addressed to anyone who knows, not to you specifically.)
I wonder how they'd feel if some unauthorised artist plastered graffiti on the outside walls!
I'd guess that it will be some peelable surface - which could be paint on or stick on.
I have used paint-on protection to pre-protect walls against graffiti (so you can just hose it all off and repaint to protect for next time), or once to waterproof a shower set against a stone house wall.
Amuses me that the link shows the explanation about the exhibition directly underneath their welcome to Sarah Mullaly, rather giving the impression that the exhibition is to welcome her.
Be interesting to hear if the exhibition does go on tour. Some of the exhibitions that tour cathedrals are amazing. I remember one about the moon.
FPT - I was startled to see in my Aeroplane Monthly that Rochester Cathedral recently put on show a locally made Shorts floatplane, showcasing the plane restoration volunteers' efforts and more generally engineering in the area (evidently from a local historical but also educational perspective with family activities, which usually means stuff for children).
They thereby helped out the plane restorers by giving them a display venue to make their work known. Which is nice.
More generally a key point about temporary exhibitions is that they will not be there for long. Another point is that they exist to do different things, sometimes experimental. So grumping about them is pointless, especially if it is to do with the Christian message anyway.
I have some great photos of my son under the Earth at Ely Cathederal a few years back. I'm unsure what that had to do with the Christian message.
Likewise, Chester Cathedral has, for the past few years, had a large model railway in it for a few weeks in the summer. Again, this seems more to do with pulling in the punters than it does religion (although the link between vicars and railways are much stronger than just Rev Awdry).
I'm not a fan of graffiti. But it'll be temporary, and won't have damaged the cathedral's fabric. Sometimes people should just shrug and say "That's not for me".
It’s about finding ways to connect with people and bring them into a situation where they can hear the Christian message.
If only a handful of people who come to see the railway exhibition are inspired to ask why people spent so much time and effort building the cathedral and progress from that to faith it will have been worthwhile
I'm going to add a further perspective there. The first para is imo a bit too "them" and "us" - Church of England ecclesiology and theology is broader.
It is more inclusive, and the boundaries are blurred, and recognises on the one hand that people who are not "members" also have some orientation to spirituality, or the divine, or the numinous (choose your word), and welcome that. There are ancient and modern traditions which are far more than a transactional "I was saved" followed by a rationalistic religiosity, whether catholic, celtic, Orthodox, or others. Close contact with many traditions is one of the advantages of the CofE.
On the other hand, the cathedral is part of the community, and the building is part of the town, looked after by the Cathedral Authorities, so model railways and so on are fine.
Cathedrals have always been at the centre of both sacred and secular (but not usually profane *) events, and have spent the last half century or more recovering that position. The "great unwashed" are welcome because
* Though from some particular perspectives some things may be perceived as profane. as the Celebration of the Car held in Coventry Cathedral some years ago by people with a green emphasis, or "Greens" seeing the opportunity for a PR stunt (there was a naked protest 'in the spirit of Lady Godiva').
That I think is the tenor of the attitude of the Telegraph coverage - Canterbury Cathedral is supposed to belong to "us" cultural conservatives (see Restore Trust), whilst Canterbury Cathedral would perhaps look more at the NT stories of JC being in company with tax collectors and other ne'er do wells, so having a responsibility to dialogue with all. That's also often the tenor of "Rave in the Nave" type events.
I'm not clear about this - have they actually spray painted the stonework? Is it reversible? If not that's fecking vandalism.
I agree with Vance it looks awful but it is temporary stickers only
This is the frustration with the push back from the right over Net Zero. Have some daft decisions been made about not licensing extraction? Sure, and they should be reversed. Extract everything that is commercially viable to extract.
But that only gets us so far, and as output continues to ramp down we leave ourselves increasingly exposed to exports.
The right insist that this is the right strategy - Reform clowns literally want to copy Trump and switch windfarms off.
The answer is both - extract all the oil and gas which is commercially viable to extract as we establish the renewables generation which will replace oil and gas.
But do we get that? No. Labour, the SNP and Scottish Greens want to shut oil and gas down quickly, leaving extractable fuel in the ground as we replace them with imports earlier. Tories and Reform want to pretend we don't need renewables because more oil and gas will sort us long term.
Can't both sides recognise their folly?
We need oil and gas until we have sensibly transitioned and that could be 20.years or more
The key is sensible, not stop, nor turn off windfarms which is not conservative policy
Reform is slightly socialist compared to the Tories.
On nationalising Steel and removing the 2 child benefit cap, though they still at least tried Doge locally and have pledged to cut civil service numbers.
Blocking second home owners buying in local beauty spots is more classic Nimbyism than socialism though
Comments
Green hydrogen is more expensive than green. At present.
Kemi's Stamp Duty abolition was much more sensible, clear blue water distinctive from Farage, Starmer and Davey. If the Conservatives do get a poll boost next week that will be the reason, home buyers especially in London and the Home Counties will see it as very attractive. It is this the economy, keeping taxes and spending low which will keep voters voting Conservative, they won't out Reform Reform on the culture war
HMRC is a good example. You generally need to replace one medium paid clerical worker with more than one low paid call centre worker, so your headcount goes up. False economies in many cases. The civil service has been going through the same shared services programme that many large private sector companies do, and the result is rarely headcount reduction. At least until automation comes along.
I think we all know that the Tories are in a mire. That’s not news. And none of us expect them to be putting in a stellar performance in May.
From my side though, the conference, despite its funereal atmosphere at times, does seem to have left Badenoch and the Tories with a little more spring in their step. This could all be a false dawn, and nobody is saying that they are anywhere near challenging for power or having a popular renaissance right now. There are some cautious - very cautious - signs that they may be starting to think about some of the economic policies that need changing. I am less enamoured of their rush to authoritarianism on the cultural/immigration stuff, and there’s still too much of them trying to out-Farage Farage (which, like Labour, is doomed to fail). But I’m willing to at least give them a hearing, which I wasn’t before, though I wouldn’t vote for them right now.
I see very little which persuades me they will do any better with a different leader. Badenoch deserves a bit longer, whether she’ll get it I don’t know.
LBTT is a tax at progressive rates, on the value of transactions in land and buildings thereon, whereas SDLT is a tax at progressive rates, on the value of transactions in land and buildings thereon.
Barnet, where most Jews also
hate Starmer's recognition of
Palestine made before Hamas even freed hostages and Kemi hopes save her job.
Holyrood and Senedd elections will be poor but the Tories never win in Scotland and Wales anyway, though they will hope to still win in some rural areas on an anti family farm tax platform
It happens every few years in local authorities and the outcome is ALWAYS the same.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/second-homes/farage-only-locals-allowed-buy-houses-second-home-hotspots
“pledge to remove 750,000 migrants under borders plan”
I might be missing something with some of the questions asked - so I thought you could help out by putting answers next to them.
How realistic is this policy to implement?
Who exactly is being deported? If The undocumented, the Windrush Scandal says hi.
Where are the deportees? How will they be found, rounded up, at what financial cost?
Are deportees entitled to due process and a hearing?
If so, where are they waiting for their due process to play out - locked in detention centres?
Will they get a hearing from a judge, before detained?
And to where, and how, are they being deported?
Will families be ripped apart?
I am not saying that water temperatures are not increasing. I just wish there was some realism about historic data in this sort of context.
This is a *fascinating* study on the accuracy of bucket sampling.
https://os.copernicus.org/articles/9/683/2013/os-9-683-2013.pdf
From the conclusion:
"Accurate temperatures can be obtained with either the bucket or intake method. However, measurements cannot be expected to be of high accuracy or precision when obtained by untrained sailors using poorly-calibrated, low-resolution thermometers"
It is family farms who have the knowledge and commitment to actually grow crops and manage livestock in all weathers throughout the year. They may be asset rich but are often income poor. Hence the family farm tax is rightly so hated
But again, *the farmers are complaining to us about the Tories*.
If I was Mr Gobshite making this up then fair enough. Its *the farmers* pissed off having been screwed over. And you haven't wanted to engage on that which is the heart of the issue. Whatever happened to replacing the CAP subsidies? Promised and not delivered. No wonder they are pissed off.
Can agency staff be brought in to do the job a politician decided wasn't essential, but turned out to have stymied the whole process?
Again, I'm not saying ocean temperatures are not rising.
As long as the altar is reserved for communion and worship having a temporary model railway in the nave is a great idea
What are these people doing now?
I suppose the answer will be they are non essential.
Personally I look forward to being cared for in my dotage not by a foreigner with empathy and experience, but by a white person with a string of minor convictions who has spent five years out of work on a mental health waiting list.
Others may differ.
Is that it? Far too much money is tied up in mortgages and rent, with young professionals finding it impossible to get on the housing ladder. A policy to turbocharge transactions and drive prices even higher does what exactly to fix the structural problems.
Look at the fucking chart. Look at it. It’s like saying “the crème brûlée is cooked largely due to the chef flaming the sugar on top”.
I’d like to believe you are trolling, Leon style. But I think it’s worse than that. You actually believe this stuff.
I don't know if this possibility has ever occured to Nigel at all.
Until... 2000 or so? it was just about possible to squint at the data and say "variations, cycles, uncertainty" and conclude that there might not be a problem. (It was a stretch, but not an impossible one).
Add the points since then and that is infinitely less credible. Even if sulfate reduction has given a bit more of an uptick in the last few years.
Another thing. The Bjørn Lomborg thesis boiled down to the idea that the world should get richer, so it could afford to deal with global warming. Sort of arguable then, but less so now.
Doesn't do a lot for company loyalty obviously.
There is data for this; and what is more, the mechanism is understood. It'll also probably be temporary.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/
And:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01442-3
I don’t have a particular concern with the stamp duty policy on its own. We need incentives for people to downsize, and that is one of the blockers. As others have said, an alternative form of property taxation is likely needed (and obviously that’s one the Tories have conveniently sidestepped for now).
(*) Excluding myself, obvs.
Every time one denialist talking point is debunked, another one comes along. Often a recycled one that was already debunked.
That’s £35bn on central government deficit but the numbers are so large that people’s eyes glaze over.
Insist that local councils cut councils by 50% and use the rest to fund local services /repay debt.
Campaign in the local elections on the basis of a massive cut in council tax
It's a great opportunity.
https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/1976963602394628508
- a technophobia that equates capitalism and progress with pollution, and which sets up precisely the false dichotomy the sceptics love
- a reflexive anti nuclear ideology which is self defeating
- treating emissions reduction as a question of personal morality rather than, as one campaigner has sensibly put it, “a question of industrial waste management” which is what it actually is
Green industrial growth shoots 2 of these foxes, and the rise of solar and storage renders the second one moot.
If you can get the unit electric price low enough, you could go for straight electric convection heating rather than heat pumps - it's quite possibly cheaper to spend the capex on extra cookie-cutter build nuclear powerstations than fitting elaborate heat pump systems to all our housing stock.
Obviously, a prerequisite for this strategy would be "nuking" our entire nuclear approvals system and starting again without the gold plating, and completely exempting the power station sites from planning and environmental legislation. Otherwise each plant will be £25Bn in approvals then £5bn to build.
Does that change ludicrously expensive ?
What's your figure for cost per kWh ?
(Including the add on cost to fossil fuel generation from CCS.)
Green hydrogen awaits both zero marginal cost renewables, and a few breakthroughs in efficiency.
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
A variable tariff that offers electricity at essentially no cost when supply outstrips demand. Which also solves the nations energy storage problem - excess energy is stored as heat in storage heaters.
Decent lagging on the heaters so they can last out the period of peak demand.
App to control the storage and release of energy according to prices, weather and temperature in the room.
Rumours there is a change afoot on the proposals in the coming budget ... watch this space
Struggling today after covid and flu vaccinations yesterday but on @MoonRabbit two points I would say the following
Climate change is happening as recognised by Badenoch but my instinct is that any law that creates high energy prices and hits the poorest is bad law
The fact these laws have been signed by other countries does not make them good law and a responsible new look is welcome
As far as conservative immigration policy is concerned this is it as stated at the conference
It is rather a long read but largely makes sense
https://www.conservatives.com/news/conservatives-introduce-the-deportation-bill
All things needing reform and all parties play politics on it.
I have huge issues with a very small number of climate scientists, who I am sure are not representative of the mass. An unwillingness to share data is a red flag. An extremely spiky attitude to legitimate criticism from other scientists is a red flag. And a failure to correct issues with data is a red flag.
I think also that what a lot of people get het up about is actually activism portrayed as science. Then there is the media's need to use the most extreme cases to get media attention.
And lastly there are some communists who have adopted the guise of greenery to try to achieve their political ends - the watermelon approach.
I’d like to be cared for by someone professional irrespective of where they’re from.
My neighbour has a chronic health condition and her carers are a mixture of white brits and foreigners. They’re all good and all appreciated
Fascism is saying that facts aren't up for debate and imposing one person's facts onto others who don't agree with them.
Almost all facts are subjective and need debating, accepting what one person says unquestioningly leads to Orwellian abuses.
There are parts of the country where this experiment has already been run, it's not a pretty end result...
There isn’t a future for North Sea oil and gas.
https://theconversation.com/plans-to-maximise-extraction-of-north-sea-oil-and-gas-would-soon-run-into-geological-limits-264614
It is more inclusive, and the boundaries are blurred, and recognises on the one hand that people who are not "members" also have some orientation to spirituality, or the divine, or the numinous (choose your word), or the inspired by choral music, and welcome that. There are ancient and modern traditions (whether catholic, celtic, Orthodox, Benedictine, or others) which are very different to a transactional "I was saved" followed by a rationalistic religiosity. Close contact with many traditions is one of the advantages of the CofE.
On the other hand, the cathedral is part of the community, and the building is part of the town, looked after by the Cathedral Authorities, so model railways and so on are excellent. Ask nicely, and the choir will choose an appropriate song.
Cathedrals have always been at the centre of both sacred and secular (but not usually profane *) events, and have spent the last half century or more recovering that position. The "great unwashed" are welcome because
* Though from some particular perspectives some things may be perceived as profane. as the Celebration of the Car held in Coventry Cathedral some years ago by people with a green emphasis, or "Greens" seeing the opportunity for a PR stunt (there was a naked protest 'in the spirit of Lady Godiva').
That I think is the tenor of the attitude of the Telegraph coverage - Canterbury Cathedral is supposed to belong to "us" cultural conservatives (see Restore Trust), whilst Canterbury Cathedral would perhaps look more at the NT stories of JC being in company with tax collectors and other ne'er do wells, so having a responsibility to dialogue with all. That's also often the tenor of "Rave in the Nave" type events.
Indeed, our daughter following her recent divorce has just bought one
When we mostly had coal fired power stations, there was an excess of electricity generated overnight; turning off a coal power station is a right pain. So it was worth incentivising overnight use by Economy 7 and storage heaters made sense. Once you had gas for the peaks, it was easier to just to switch the gas stations off.
With wind and solar, we're back to a situation where generation might not track consumption. But we have batteries. We had one installed this year, and half the business case is importing cheap electricity overnight and selling is back as expensive electricity in the early evening. Pretty sure the same is true of all those shipping containers full of batteries that are springing up everywhere.
I asked whether his approach to Genesis etc was mistaken in accepting the evangelical framing as a literalist history book.
He (said) interestingly that in the context of eg Tolkien, Bilbo's finding of the One Ring was a "fact".
I'd still question the effectiveness of his method in that I don't think he will win Magas over by demonstrating inconsistencies in their positions, but ... interesting.
But that only gets us so far, and as output continues to ramp down we leave ourselves increasingly exposed to exports.
The right insist that this is the right strategy - Reform clowns literally want to copy Trump and switch windfarms off.
The answer is both - extract all the oil and gas which is commercially viable to extract as we establish the renewables generation which will replace oil and gas.
But do we get that? No.
Labour, the SNP and Scottish Greens want to shut oil and gas down quickly, leaving extractable fuel in the ground as we replace them with imports earlier.
Tories and Reform want to pretend we don't need renewables because more oil and gas will sort us long term.
Can't both sides recognise their folly?
Wind and especially solar is so cheap and competitive at this point that the govt doesn’t need to do much. It would be dumb to dump them
It might be worth looking again at nuclear and tidal schemes to see if they will ever provide value for money vs gas. Looks like a money pit.
There is a big gap for something reliable and cost effective that isn’t gas without paying a big premium. Battery storage might help with that.
What is more of a shame I'd say is the lack of a hot water storage tank. In the morning in the summer it takes some time between turning the hot water tap on and hot water coming out, because the boiler needs to wake up, heat the water and then cycle the water around the house. Which means wasting cold water for a while until the hot comes through.
Saves gas, but wastes water, so environmental swings and roundabouts.
The key is sensible, not stop, nor turn off windfarms which is not conservative policy
Blocking second home owners buying in local beauty spots is more classic Nimbyism than socialism though