So...potential terrorist gets on at a tiny halt station. There's going to be a scanner there, huh? And somebody to make sure he goes through it?
Riiiiight.....
I see a slight problem with that plan.
I really hope we don't get this. One of the great joys of rail travel is swinging into the station on your bicycle, grabbing a coffee and plonking yourself down with 20 seconds to spare. As horrible as this incident is, I don't think that is worth giving up.
A muppet with a couple of sparklers stuck in his trainers changed world air travel, so..
TBF they didn't intriduce scanners for the Underground or whoever operates double-decker buses in London.
So...potential terrorist gets on at a tiny halt station. There's going to be a scanner there, huh? And somebody to make sure he goes through it?
Riiiiight.....
I see a slight problem with that plan.
I really hope we don't get this. One of the great joys of rail travel is swinging into the station on your bicycle, grabbing a coffee and plonking yourself down with 20 seconds to spare. As horrible as this incident is, I don't think that is worth giving up.
A muppet with a couple of sparklers stuck in his trainers changed world air travel, so..
At least you can't use a train as a missile.
I recall someone being rather shocked at lunch discussion - everyone else agree that after 9/11 the only logical response to an attempted hijack on a plane was for the passengers to attempt kill the hijackers. Without hesitation or mercy.
Have to say I don't really get why it's necessary for the police to tell us then race of the attackers once they are in custody. It doesn't really make any difference. If they were still at large of course it would be vital to inform the public. But a "Black British national" doesn't mean anything anyway does it?
Was it to counter misinformation on social media about their background and heritage?
I'd say that.
It's to stop speculation feeding hysteria / potential reactions.
The Transport Salaried Staffs Association, a union representing rail and transport workers, is calling for a security review after the knife attack in Huntingdon.
The union's general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust describes the attack as "appalling".
"Our immediate priority is for the welfare of the injured and all those traumatised by what has happened," she said.
Eslamdoust added: "Transport networks must be safe for everyone, both the travelling public and the staff who serve them.
"We call on the operator and government to act swiftly to review security, to support the affected workers, and to ensure nothing like this happens again.""
Offer the Union a Glock and body armour per member of staff.
See how quickly they roll back…
Even better trains with no guards, just the occasional BTP officer.
The operators have been wanting this for years.
The operators DFT have been wanting this for years.
Fixed it for you.
DOO is a DFT obsession, despite it probably being approx 1000th place on the list of of "easy ways to save the railway network money". The operators privately mostly think it's considerably more trouble than it's worth, but have to publicly tow the DFT line.
I'm currently a bit player in a saga that is grounding an increasingly large number of a common type of train. The gist of it is that they need a peice of bespoke aluminium extrusion replacing. There was a container of spare extrusions ordered with the trains, but it was scrapped a few years ago to save money on storage. Now no-one will bite the bullet on about £50k to get a batch made - but they are wasting time exploring every alternative possible route whilst the affected trains are stood costing someone £x every day (where x is a large sum of money) - but it's from a different pot to the buying new aluminium extrusions pot, so that's all OK.
Repeat the sort of stupidity all over the industry and you begin to realise why rail travel is so madly expensive.
I see it COP30 this week in Brazil. There’s been little fanfare about it in the lead up to it. A few years ago it would have had significant coverage.
Main countries aren’t bothering. Hard to see what it can achieve aside from the regular demand for ‘climate reparations’.
And, yet, the problem is more serious than ever.
It just goes to show how fickle and shallow much opinion is on this.
Just look at Greta. Completely forgotten about climate change and wrapped herself in a Palestinian flag.
Don’t make stuff up. I just looked at her Instagram. The majority of recent posts are about Sudan, while there are others about Palestine and about climate change.
Sudan? So she's found a new bandwagon to jump on.
She can’t win with you, can she? If she doesn’t say anything about Sudan, you’d accuse her of being too obsessed with Palestine and ignoring Sudan. If she does say something about Sudan, you accuse her of jumping on a bandwagon.
She's supposed to be an "environmental campaigner".
Neither Palestinian nor Sudan are part of that brief.
What do you mean, “She's supposed to be an "environmental campaigner".”? She’s a private individual. She can do what she wants.
I think people are just surprised that having staged a school strike for years over the Climate to draw public attention to an issue she felt was absolutely critical to our survival - and massively sidelined - she's now, when it has yet again taken a back seat, and progress has stalled, deciding to focus most of her energy on Gaza.
Yes, she can do what she likes. Yes, you can find the odd post on Instagram that still mentions the climate but it makes some question whether what really drives her has changed.
She continues with her environmental campaigning; it's more than some Insta posts. She's being critical of COP30.
But so what if it wasn't? Do you have the same interests, the same focuses as when you were at school?
Also, what the f*** does it matter? She's a free person. She can do what she wants. You can do what you want. If you don't agree with her campaigning issues, fine, don't agree with them.
The Transport Salaried Staffs Association, a union representing rail and transport workers, is calling for a security review after the knife attack in Huntingdon.
The union's general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust describes the attack as "appalling".
"Our immediate priority is for the welfare of the injured and all those traumatised by what has happened," she said.
Eslamdoust added: "Transport networks must be safe for everyone, both the travelling public and the staff who serve them.
"We call on the operator and government to act swiftly to review security, to support the affected workers, and to ensure nothing like this happens again.""
Offer the Union a Glock and body armour per member of staff.
See how quickly they roll back…
Even better trains with no guards, just the occasional BTP officer.
The operators have been wanting this for years.
The operators DFT have been wanting this for years.
Fixed it for you.
DOO is a DFT obsession, despite it probably being approx 1000th place on the list of of "easy ways to save the railway network money".
I'm currently a bit player in a saga that is grounding an increasingly large number of a common type of train. The gist of it is that they need a peice of bespoke aluminium extrusion replacing. There was a container of spare extrusions ordered with the trains, but it was scrapped a few years ago to save money on storage. Now no-one will bite the bullet on about £50k to get a batch made - but they are wasting time exploring every alternative possible route whilst the affected trains are stood costing someone £x every day (where x is a large sum of money) - but it's from a different pot to the buying new aluminium extrusions pot, so that's all OK.
Repeat the sort of stupidity all over the industry and you begin to realise why rail travel is so madly expensive.
Has anyone told them that you can get the aluminium 3D printed for a lot less than getting custom set of extrusion rollers made, tested and setup?
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
This might herald the return of things like supercharged Saxos though, which I'm sure we can all get behind. Disabled folk with blue badges doing laps of the High Street on a Friday night.
The Transport Salaried Staffs Association, a union representing rail and transport workers, is calling for a security review after the knife attack in Huntingdon.
The union's general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust describes the attack as "appalling".
"Our immediate priority is for the welfare of the injured and all those traumatised by what has happened," she said.
Eslamdoust added: "Transport networks must be safe for everyone, both the travelling public and the staff who serve them.
"We call on the operator and government to act swiftly to review security, to support the affected workers, and to ensure nothing like this happens again.""
Offer the Union a Glock and body armour per member of staff.
See how quickly they roll back…
Even better trains with no guards, just the occasional BTP officer.
The operators have been wanting this for years.
The operators DFT have been wanting this for years.
Fixed it for you.
DOO is a DFT obsession, despite it probably being approx 1000th place on the list of of "easy ways to save the railway network money".
I'm currently a bit player in a saga that is grounding an increasingly large number of a common type of train. The gist of it is that they need a peice of bespoke aluminium extrusion replacing. There was a container of spare extrusions ordered with the trains, but it was scrapped a few years ago to save money on storage. Now no-one will bite the bullet on about £50k to get a batch made - but they are wasting time exploring every alternative possible route whilst the affected trains are stood costing someone £x every day (where x is a large sum of money) - but it's from a different pot to the buying new aluminium extrusions pot, so that's all OK.
Repeat the sort of stupidity all over the industry and you begin to realise why rail travel is so madly expensive.
Has anyone told them that you can get the aluminium 3D printed for a lot less than getting custom set of extrusion rollers made, tested and setup?
I'm not sure that's viable for these bits - they are nearly 8 meters long. Although I might make a couple of enquiries about that on Monday, just in case it's possible.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
That's a minefield, since people top it up from their own resources. Something like a modern Invacar would not be legal I think, under equality law - around stigmatisation and so on. I think it would also potentially cost more money (see prices of London Taxis).
What limitations would be imposed on my friend with 4 school age children? Is someone going to pay for taxis?
(She gets the lower rate so aiui may not qualify, but they use a disability adapted mid-size van.)
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
I see it COP30 this week in Brazil. There’s been little fanfare about it in the lead up to it. A few years ago it would have had significant coverage.
Main countries aren’t bothering. Hard to see what it can achieve aside from the regular demand for ‘climate reparations’.
And, yet, the problem is more serious than ever.
It just goes to show how fickle and shallow much opinion is on this.
Musk has spoken quite a bit in the last 48 hours about climate change. I think his view is correct. This doesn’t need to be solved at the cost of all else in the next 5 years, but it needs to have been addressed roughly by the time the century is out.
In truth, man made climate change is rather low down the list for likely causes of civilisational collapse.
That's not really how climate change works though, is it?
It's going to be exceptionally difficult to reverse and, while their is enormous uncertainty about the severity and nature of the ongoing damage, it's almost certainly better value to reduce emissions now than spend billions on flood defences and deal with mass migration from Africa, crop blight etc etc. Or at least it is if you are younger or care about the next few generations.
The same people who were denying climate change existed have now reached a final, late stage of denialism where they insist it's not worth doing anything about. It's pathetic and transparent.
It’s not worth it at the cost of all else, which is the Miliband approach. You do that which is most economic and not that which is not. It’s rather extraordinary by the way to characterise Musk as a climate denialist and rather undermines your opinion on this matter.
I didn't call Musk a denialist, did I? Miliband's approach is almost indistinguishable from the previous government.
Anyway, the logical outcome from this kind of debate is we need to think about investing much more in adaptation. Flooding is the obvious one (particularly SE England).
Dredge the rivers. Build more reservoirs to store the water, so we don't have winter floods and summer droughts every sodding year. Old school actual water management, as banned by the EU's absurd habitats regulations - the ones we no longer have to abide by. Next.
Does dredging rivers not increase floods at the lower end? Hence measures such as increased forest to slow down percolation into said rivers? I thought that was a basic.
It's the same reason we use Sustainable Drainage Systems in new developments.
I'd add reduced water usage as an obvious strategy, We use 25% more than our most efficient European peers (which is usually taken as Denmark).
'I thought that was a basic' is code here for 'I have zero evidence to back my claim up'.
And I would enjoy an explanation as to how reducing water usage is going to result in less flooding.
Efforts to get everyone to take shorter showers etc., as well as being revolting, are absurdly unnecessary in a country with water so abundant that we are discussing flood mitigation strategies. It is a sign of how absurd and perverse the discourse on this has become that it is even raised.
If you don’t have the reservoirs to store the water for when you need it then you can have both flooding and water shortages follow quickly one after the other.
Surely this is obvious?
Yes, it is obvious, that's why I said it.
681mm of rainfall at my allotment last year vs 322 this, for what it's worth
The Class 800 Azuma LNER service had departed Peterborough when the attack began and was scheduled to travel through Huntingdon at 125mph on a fast track that does not have access to a platform.
Within minutes, LNER staff had declared an emergency, alerting passengers to the jeopardy through the train’s tannoy system.
The driver, crew and signallers diverted the train from its inner rail track to Huntingdon station’s platform-side rail so that emergency services could rapidly board.
It stopped in Huntingdon just 14 minutes after departing Peterborough, where armed police officers, paramedics and an air ambulance were ready to respond.
The Transport Salaried Staffs Association, a union representing rail and transport workers, is calling for a security review after the knife attack in Huntingdon.
The union's general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust describes the attack as "appalling".
"Our immediate priority is for the welfare of the injured and all those traumatised by what has happened," she said.
Eslamdoust added: "Transport networks must be safe for everyone, both the travelling public and the staff who serve them.
"We call on the operator and government to act swiftly to review security, to support the affected workers, and to ensure nothing like this happens again.""
Offer the Union a Glock and body armour per member of staff.
See how quickly they roll back…
Even better trains with no guards, just the occasional BTP officer.
The operators have been wanting this for years.
The operators DFT have been wanting this for years.
Fixed it for you.
DOO is a DFT obsession, despite it probably being approx 1000th place on the list of of "easy ways to save the railway network money".
I'm currently a bit player in a saga that is grounding an increasingly large number of a common type of train. The gist of it is that they need a peice of bespoke aluminium extrusion replacing. There was a container of spare extrusions ordered with the trains, but it was scrapped a few years ago to save money on storage. Now no-one will bite the bullet on about £50k to get a batch made - but they are wasting time exploring every alternative possible route whilst the affected trains are stood costing someone £x every day (where x is a large sum of money) - but it's from a different pot to the buying new aluminium extrusions pot, so that's all OK.
Repeat the sort of stupidity all over the industry and you begin to realise why rail travel is so madly expensive.
Has anyone told them that you can get the aluminium 3D printed for a lot less than getting custom set of extrusion rollers made, tested and setup?
I'm not sure that's viable for these bits - they are nearly 8 meters long. Although I might make a couple of enquiries about that on Monday, just in case it's possible.
Does it have to be continuous? Would have been easier to make a single length of extrusion, originally.
There’s also some remarkable stuff you can do with multi-axis CNC. Depends how fun the profile is.
Why is it that despite so much activity, legislation to ban knives, so much investment in mental health, we’re seeing more violence on our streets. What is causing this? Lots of people will be speculating - I think we should wait until more facts emerge. But there’s clearly something going wrong in our society right now, which I believe all politicians of all parties need to have a conversation about.
It would be helpful if context was added to this complaint about knife crime. What are the rates of knife crime like in other western democracies adjusted to best make it like for like comparisons as to what constitutes knife crime.
On the World Service this morning the correspondent was saying to the host and his guests that there were over 50,000 knife crimes in England and Wales last year to which one of the guests, an American who was the NYT Spain correspondent, was aghast and said that he was from Sam a Francisco so this was just unfathomable for him.
The thing is, every stat I’ve ever seen shows that knife attacks and injuries/death are infinitely higher in the US per head of population and the Americans love throwing our “knife crime” issue at us if we bring up their guns problem. Not only do they have a seriously worse gun crime problem but a worse knife problem to boot.
So is our knife problem especially huge compared to peers? Are we including too many incidents under the same grouping or just right or not enough.
Is there a figure which is actually “natural”, as in, in any population it is inevitable that nutters, miscreants, crims use an weapon which is very easily available to harm, threaten, defend and frankly it doesn’t matter what rules short of banning knifes from life and raiding every home until they are all gone so we can never eradicate it and might get overly worked up about something that can’t be fixed?
The nation needs to stop with the 'don't look back in anger'. We need to be livid, we need to be angry we need to show the inherent exceptionalism of British civilisation and express that anger to the institutions and the people that man them and their failure, not the individuals who shouldnt be here, or came because it was a rational choice for them to do so, but the people who let them in. Every politician needs to be afraid that the ballot box is coming for them. Every local government officer, every civil servant, every charity worker and activist who's charity is supping from the taxpayer and is complicit in how our nation has rapidly transformed over the last decade. But it makes me feel a bit dirty that the change is through Farage and Reform.
Thanks for taking the bait. This is the absurdity of you religious war warriors. Even now you are dancing round your handbag unwilling to state precisely which people you want to deport and why.
To say nothing of the ultimate absurdity. This is put down as "Christianity" against Islam. But most of the "we're Christians" mob aren't...
I'm fairly clear. I want to deport every damn illegal immigrant, every one of them. I wand the IRL rules changed that anyone with IRL who is convicted of a crime that involves a custodial sentence is added to the list of deportees. That's enough to be getting on with. I dont care what religion they are. I've not mentioned religion, directly or indirectly, or intended to infer.
Just so we are clear. You decry the endless posts from all the people who like you demand to deport all the illegals because they are "fighting age" muslims?
I'm nobody's keeper, or accountable for the actions and opinions of others. Go and have your straw man arguments with someone else.
Thats ok thanks. I am just curious because you appear to be the sole person wanting to deport all illegals who isn't foaming about Islam.
What are the reasons why you want to deport them? We've dismissed race. So why?
Is shouldn’t be too controversial to say that any foreigner sentenced to imprisonment should be deported, should it?
Race and religion have nothing to do with it, merely nationality and criminality.
If we know they’re not going to be imprisoned if we deport them, then is deporting them the right thing to do? If we know they’re going to executed on sight if we deport them, then is deporting them the right thing to do?
Surely how we deal with illegal immigrants who are also criminals is driven by what is the best outcome for us - i.e. them not being here and not costing us money - rather than for them?
Is it good for the victims (who are among us) if someone evades punishment? Is saving money more important that justice being seen to be done?
I thought your qualm was about them facing execution at home? That's a punishment, surely?
I mentioned two situation in which immediate deportation is a problem. One is where the person will go back to their country of origin and receive no punishment. The other is where the person will go back to their country of origin and receive an overly harsh punishment.
Let's consider the first. Say someone in the UK of Russian nationality assassinated the Ukrainian ambassador. They are arrested, found guilty and given a life sentence. You want them to be shipped back to Russia, where they are given a hero's welcome and Putin personally hands them the keys to a luxury flat in Moscow. That seems like a bad idea to me.
I see it COP30 this week in Brazil. There’s been little fanfare about it in the lead up to it. A few years ago it would have had significant coverage.
Main countries aren’t bothering. Hard to see what it can achieve aside from the regular demand for ‘climate reparations’.
And, yet, the problem is more serious than ever.
It just goes to show how fickle and shallow much opinion is on this.
Just look at Greta. Completely forgotten about climate change and wrapped herself in a Palestinian flag.
Don’t make stuff up. I just looked at her Instagram. The majority of recent posts are about Sudan, while there are others about Palestine and about climate change.
Sudan? So she's found a new bandwagon to jump on.
She can’t win with you, can she? If she doesn’t say anything about Sudan, you’d accuse her of being too obsessed with Palestine and ignoring Sudan. If she does say something about Sudan, you accuse her of jumping on a bandwagon.
Look, she's a young girl with rich and connected parents, it's vitally important that she's taken down a peg or two.
Ruddy sexism against a modern day Joan of Arc.
Jeanne and the Brits got on like a house on fire of if I remember correctly
We didn’t start the fire. It’s always been burning since the worlds been turning.
Why is it that despite so much activity, legislation to ban knives, so much investment in mental health, we’re seeing more violence on our streets. What is causing this? Lots of people will be speculating - I think we should wait until more facts emerge. But there’s clearly something going wrong in our society right now, which I believe all politicians of all parties need to have a conversation about.
It would be helpful if context was added to this complaint about knife crime. What are the rates of knife crime like in other western democracies adjusted to best make it like for like comparisons as to what constitutes knife crime.
On the World Service this morning the correspondent was saying to the host and his guests that there were over 50,000 knife crimes in England and Wales last year to which one of the guests, an American who was the NYT Spain correspondent, was aghast and said that he was from Sam a Francisco so this was just unfathomable for him.
The thing is, every stat I’ve ever seen shows that knife attacks and injuries/death are infinitely higher in the US per head of population and the Americans love throwing our “knife crime” issue at us if we bring up their guns problem. Not only do they have a seriously worse gun crime problem but a worse knife problem to boot.
So is our knife problem especially huge compared to peers? Are we including too many incidents under the same grouping or just right or not enough.
Is there a figure which is actually “natural”, as in, in any population it is inevitable that nutters, miscreants, crims use an weapon which is very easily available to harm, threaten, defend and frankly it doesn’t matter what rules short of banning knifes from life and raiding every home until they are all gone so we can never eradicate it and might get overly worked up about something that can’t be fixed?
Top countries for stabbing deaths per 100k in 2023:
1. Guyana 7.6 2. St Kitts & Nevis 6.4 3. St Lucia 6.1 4. Grenada 5.1 5. St Vincent 4.9
20. Argentina 1.0
23. Moldova 1.0, highest in Europe
25. Canada 0.6
28. US 0.5
The UK was way lower.
I don't see the point of quoting countries with tiny populations like St Kitts where one or two fatal stabbings could make the difference between having a very high or very low level per capita.
Why is it that despite so much activity, legislation to ban knives, so much investment in mental health, we’re seeing more violence on our streets. What is causing this? Lots of people will be speculating - I think we should wait until more facts emerge. But there’s clearly something going wrong in our society right now, which I believe all politicians of all parties need to have a conversation about.
It would be helpful if context was added to this complaint about knife crime. What are the rates of knife crime like in other western democracies adjusted to best make it like for like comparisons as to what constitutes knife crime.
On the World Service this morning the correspondent was saying to the host and his guests that there were over 50,000 knife crimes in England and Wales last year to which one of the guests, an American who was the NYT Spain correspondent, was aghast and said that he was from Sam a Francisco so this was just unfathomable for him.
The thing is, every stat I’ve ever seen shows that knife attacks and injuries/death are infinitely higher in the US per head of population and the Americans love throwing our “knife crime” issue at us if we bring up their guns problem. Not only do they have a seriously worse gun crime problem but a worse knife problem to boot.
So is our knife problem especially huge compared to peers? Are we including too many incidents under the same grouping or just right or not enough.
Is there a figure which is actually “natural”, as in, in any population it is inevitable that nutters, miscreants, crims use an weapon which is very easily available to harm, threaten, defend and frankly it doesn’t matter what rules short of banning knifes from life and raiding every home until they are all gone so we can never eradicate it and might get overly worked up about something that can’t be fixed?
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
That flies in the face of 40 years' values underlying our laws, and there would be hell to pay - especially since disabled people already have many extra expenses imposed on them at random because of their conditions.
There is, for example, a higher likelihood of poverty:
Disabled people also have lower incomes than average: the Resolution Foundation found in January 2023 that the gap in household income between adults with and without a disability was around 30% including disability benefits and 44% excluding disability benefits in the financial year 2020-21. A third of adults in the lowest household income decile are disabled. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0104/
Potentially there could be nuances, but it's a quagmire. Rachel Reeves will have much trouble not looking like an archetypal Tory. And Labour can't out-Farage Farage, either.
She'd be better off with a targeted approach to scope, rather than hitting everyone on the head with a Timmy Mallett hammer.
I guess we also need to note that the reporting is from the Telegraph - is it just them?
I've a hunch that the death of these mildly generous schemes will have an outsized affect on the 'small people economy'. By that I mean a lot of the excess goes straight back out to support the small businesses that small people use. They allow a little more margin and help subsidise provincial England, keeping it all ticking along.
I should add that I talk to quite a number of people that use the motability and they are profoundly disabled with very poor quality of life, Maybe not a good reason to keep some in a BMW but a little understanding that this is often all that keeps them leaving the house.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
That flies in the face of 40 years' values underlying our laws, and there would be hell to pay - especially since disabled people already have many extra expenses imposed on them at random because of their conditions.
There is, for example, a higher likelihood of poverty:
Disabled people also have lower incomes than average: the Resolution Foundation found in January 2023 that the gap in household income between adults with and without a disability was around 30% including disability benefits and 44% excluding disability benefits in the financial year 2020-21. A third of adults in the lowest household income decile are disabled. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0104/
Potentially there could be nuances, but it's a quagmire. Rachel Reeves will have much trouble not looking like an archetypal Tory. And Labour can't out-Farage Farage, either.
She'd be better off with a targeted approach to scope, rather than hitting everyone on the head with a Timmy Mallett hammer.
"Luxury" Car Tax is ultimate fiscal drag...It was brought in and set at a threshold of £40k.
So...potential terrorist gets on at a tiny halt station. There's going to be a scanner there, huh? And somebody to make sure he goes through it?
Riiiiight.....
I see a slight problem with that plan.
Quite. It is just kneejerk nonsense which we can all see is impossible to implement.
Its the "something must be seen to be done or considering to be done".
I'd say it's more likely the "media create the false impression of something being seriously considered that isn't" ruse.
In the immediate aftermath of mass food poisoning at a pizza restaurant event before there's been time to process what's happened, a minister is interviewed:
"Do you rule out regulating the toppings to ensure this can never happen again?"
Any answer other than "yes".
"Government set to ban pepperoni on pizzas. Pineapple also under threat".
So...potential terrorist gets on at a tiny halt station. There's going to be a scanner there, huh? And somebody to make sure he goes through it?
Riiiiight.....
I see a slight problem with that plan.
Quite. It is just kneejerk nonsense which we can all see is impossible to implement.
Its the "something must be seen to be done or considering to be done".
I'd say it's more likely the "media create the false impression of something being seriously considered that isn't" ruse.
In the immediate aftermath of mass food poisoning at a pizza restaurant event before there's been time to process what's happened, a minister is interviewed:
"Do you rule out regulating the toppings to ensure this can never happen again?"
Any answer other than "yes".
"Government set to ban pepperoni on pizzas. Pineapple also under threat".
Oh that too. But politicians also aren't brave enough to go don't be stupid that's a non-starter. Instead they go into default programming of "all options considered", "nothing off the table"....
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
Probably nearly all cars are luxury cars. Almost wherever you live people managed to live there before without cars.
There should be no free cars.
It's true that car ownership and use is highly correlated with income, and that millions of people in the UK get by without one.
However... the car is not free. It comes out of deductions of PIP, a non means-tested benefit for disabled people. There are tax allowances for the scheme, the idea being that some disabled people find the use of a car critically important for getting around given their disabilities. In the grand scheme of things, the cost per year in reduced tax isn't massive - about £1 billion.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
That flies in the face of 40 years' values underlying our laws, and there would be hell to pay - especially since disabled people already have many extra expenses imposed on them at random because of their conditions.
There is, for example, a higher likelihood of poverty:
Disabled people also have lower incomes than average: the Resolution Foundation found in January 2023 that the gap in household income between adults with and without a disability was around 30% including disability benefits and 44% excluding disability benefits in the financial year 2020-21. A third of adults in the lowest household income decile are disabled. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0104/
Potentially there could be nuances, but it's a quagmire. Rachel Reeves will have much trouble not looking like an archetypal Tory. And Labour can't out-Farage Farage, either.
She'd be better off with a targeted approach to scope, rather than hitting everyone on the head with a Timmy Mallett hammer.
"Luxury" Car Tax is ultimate fiscal drag...It was brought in and set at a threshold of £40k.
Why is it that despite so much activity, legislation to ban knives, so much investment in mental health, we’re seeing more violence on our streets. What is causing this? Lots of people will be speculating - I think we should wait until more facts emerge. But there’s clearly something going wrong in our society right now, which I believe all politicians of all parties need to have a conversation about.
It would be helpful if context was added to this complaint about knife crime. What are the rates of knife crime like in other western democracies adjusted to best make it like for like comparisons as to what constitutes knife crime.
On the World Service this morning the correspondent was saying to the host and his guests that there were over 50,000 knife crimes in England and Wales last year to which one of the guests, an American who was the NYT Spain correspondent, was aghast and said that he was from Sam a Francisco so this was just unfathomable for him.
The thing is, every stat I’ve ever seen shows that knife attacks and injuries/death are infinitely higher in the US per head of population and the Americans love throwing our “knife crime” issue at us if we bring up their guns problem. Not only do they have a seriously worse gun crime problem but a worse knife problem to boot.
So is our knife problem especially huge compared to peers? Are we including too many incidents under the same grouping or just right or not enough.
Is there a figure which is actually “natural”, as in, in any population it is inevitable that nutters, miscreants, crims use an weapon which is very easily available to harm, threaten, defend and frankly it doesn’t matter what rules short of banning knifes from life and raiding every home until they are all gone so we can never eradicate it and might get overly worked up about something that can’t be fixed?
Top countries for stabbing deaths per 100k in 2023:
1. Guyana 7.6 2. St Kitts & Nevis 6.4 3. St Lucia 6.1 4. Grenada 5.1 5. St Vincent 4.9
20. Argentina 1.0
23. Moldova 1.0, highest in Europe
25. Canada 0.6
28. US 0.5
The UK was way lower.
Surprise surprise someone from the NYT peddles falsehoods about the grimness of life in Britain.
That paper seems to have as its mission statement to obsess about the invented failings of a country it doesn’t understand.
The NYT chap wasn’t peddling falsehoods, he was more an example of the ludicrous situation where Americans think that we are uniquely stabby as a nation without knowing that they are in fact not only champions at shooting anyone that moves but also have a bigger stabbing problem than we do.
I was pretty irritated that neither the host nor the BBC correspondent knew this and could put the standings in some sort of perspective. I’m not sure you can start solving an issue if the people writing the news stories and hosting the news discussions don’t have any real awareness as they spout bollocks which riles up the public which results in politicians making knee jerk decisions.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
That flies in the face of 40 years' values underlying our laws, and there would be hell to pay - especially since disabled people already have many extra expenses imposed on them at random because of their conditions.
There is, for example, a higher likelihood of poverty:
Disabled people also have lower incomes than average: the Resolution Foundation found in January 2023 that the gap in household income between adults with and without a disability was around 30% including disability benefits and 44% excluding disability benefits in the financial year 2020-21. A third of adults in the lowest household income decile are disabled. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0104/
Potentially there could be nuances, but it's a quagmire. Rachel Reeves will have much trouble not looking like an archetypal Tory. And Labour can't out-Farage Farage, either.
She'd be better off with a targeted approach to scope, rather than hitting everyone on the head with a Timmy Mallett hammer.
"Luxury" Car Tax is ultimate fiscal drag...It was brought in and set at a threshold of £40k.
I can't see Reeves changing this as if she did Labour MPs won't let it fly. There will be too many hard luck stories.
I had no idea such a tax existed. Nuts.
£425 a year for the five years following the first tax payment i.e. years 2 to 6. And now includes ALL cars i.e. EVs. So massive inflation in the new car market means you really don't have to be buying anything that baller to hit £40k now, particularly an EV.
I read somewhere the other day the Chinese Jaecoo is now one of the top selling cars in the UK and its because you get a SUV for £30-35k.
So...potential terrorist gets on at a tiny halt station. There's going to be a scanner there, huh? And somebody to make sure he goes through it?
Riiiiight.....
I see a slight problem with that plan.
Quite. It is just kneejerk nonsense which we can all see is impossible to implement.
Its the "something must be seen to be done or considering to be done".
I'd say it's more likely the "media create the false impression of something being seriously considered that isn't" ruse.
In the immediate aftermath of mass food poisoning at a pizza restaurant event before there's been time to process what's happened, a minister is interviewed:
"Do you rule out regulating the toppings to ensure this can never happen again?"
Any answer other than "yes".
"Government set to ban pepperoni on pizzas. Pineapple also under threat".
Oh that too. But politicians also aren't brave enough to go don't be stupid that's a non-starter. Instead they go into default programming of "all options considered", "nothing off the table"....
Why is it that despite so much activity, legislation to ban knives, so much investment in mental health, we’re seeing more violence on our streets. What is causing this? Lots of people will be speculating - I think we should wait until more facts emerge. But there’s clearly something going wrong in our society right now, which I believe all politicians of all parties need to have a conversation about.
It would be helpful if context was added to this complaint about knife crime. What are the rates of knife crime like in other western democracies adjusted to best make it like for like comparisons as to what constitutes knife crime.
On the World Service this morning the correspondent was saying to the host and his guests that there were over 50,000 knife crimes in England and Wales last year to which one of the guests, an American who was the NYT Spain correspondent, was aghast and said that he was from Sam a Francisco so this was just unfathomable for him.
The thing is, every stat I’ve ever seen shows that knife attacks and injuries/death are infinitely higher in the US per head of population and the Americans love throwing our “knife crime” issue at us if we bring up their guns problem. Not only do they have a seriously worse gun crime problem but a worse knife problem to boot.
So is our knife problem especially huge compared to peers? Are we including too many incidents under the same grouping or just right or not enough.
Is there a figure which is actually “natural”, as in, in any population it is inevitable that nutters, miscreants, crims use an weapon which is very easily available to harm, threaten, defend and frankly it doesn’t matter what rules short of banning knifes from life and raiding every home until they are all gone so we can never eradicate it and might get overly worked up about something that can’t be fixed?
Top countries for stabbing deaths per 100k in 2023:
1. Guyana 7.6 2. St Kitts & Nevis 6.4 3. St Lucia 6.1 4. Grenada 5.1 5. St Vincent 4.9
20. Argentina 1.0
23. Moldova 1.0, highest in Europe
25. Canada 0.6
28. US 0.5
The UK was way lower.
Surprise surprise someone from the NYT peddles falsehoods about the grimness of life in Britain.
That paper seems to have as its mission statement to obsess about the invented failings of a country it doesn’t understand.
The NYT chap wasn’t peddling falsehoods, he was more an example of the ludicrous situation where Americans think that we are uniquely stabby as a nation without knowing that they are in fact not only champions at shooting anyone that moves but also have a bigger stabbing problem than we do.
I was pretty irritated that neither the host nor the BBC correspondent knew this and could put the standings in some sort of perspective. I’m not sure you can start solving an issue if the people writing the news stories and hosting the news discussions don’t have any real awareness as they spout bollocks which riles up the public which results in politicians making knee jerk decisions.
Actually the U.K. stabbing deaths was 31 for 2023 which works out to about 0.43 per 100k
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
That flies in the face of 40 years' values underlying our laws, and there would be hell to pay - especially since disabled people already have many extra expenses imposed on them at random because of their conditions.
There is, for example, a higher likelihood of poverty:
Disabled people also have lower incomes than average: the Resolution Foundation found in January 2023 that the gap in household income between adults with and without a disability was around 30% including disability benefits and 44% excluding disability benefits in the financial year 2020-21. A third of adults in the lowest household income decile are disabled. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0104/
Potentially there could be nuances, but it's a quagmire. Rachel Reeves will have much trouble not looking like an archetypal Tory. And Labour can't out-Farage Farage, either.
She'd be better off with a targeted approach to scope, rather than hitting everyone on the head with a Timmy Mallett hammer.
"Luxury" Car Tax is ultimate fiscal drag...It was brought in and set at a threshold of £40k.
I can't see Reeves changing this as if she did Labour MPs won't let it fly. There will be too many hard luck stories.
I had no idea such a tax existed. Nuts.
£425 a year for the five years following the first tax payment i.e. years 2 to 6. And now includes ALL cars i.e. EVs. So massive inflation in the new car market means you really don't have to be buying anything that baller to hit £40k now, particularly an EV.
How do they collect it? (Please tell me not via tax returns!)
Having read the Telegraph piece, I don't see any purchase for the luxury argument except at the margins - as PIP payments to Motability are a basic flat rate for everyone.
Any gains will be by addressing scope, or improving assessment process.
It won't save money except through detailed work, and when the consequences are taken into account eg people unable to work it may cost more.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
That flies in the face of 40 years' values underlying our laws, and there would be hell to pay - especially since disabled people already have many extra expenses imposed on them at random because of their conditions.
There is, for example, a higher likelihood of poverty:
Disabled people also have lower incomes than average: the Resolution Foundation found in January 2023 that the gap in household income between adults with and without a disability was around 30% including disability benefits and 44% excluding disability benefits in the financial year 2020-21. A third of adults in the lowest household income decile are disabled. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0104/
Potentially there could be nuances, but it's a quagmire. Rachel Reeves will have much trouble not looking like an archetypal Tory. And Labour can't out-Farage Farage, either.
She'd be better off with a targeted approach to scope, rather than hitting everyone on the head with a Timmy Mallett hammer.
"Luxury" Car Tax is ultimate fiscal drag...It was brought in and set at a threshold of £40k.
I can't see Reeves changing this as if she did Labour MPs won't let it fly. There will be too many hard luck stories.
I had no idea such a tax existed. Nuts.
It’s pretty much impossible now to know the annual road tax due on a car without the VIN. There’s so many variables that plug into the algorithm. There’s some surprising cars that crash in value on the used market because they cost £1,000+ to tax every year.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
That flies in the face of 40 years' values underlying our laws, and there would be hell to pay - especially since disabled people already have many extra expenses imposed on them at random because of their conditions.
There is, for example, a higher likelihood of poverty:
Disabled people also have lower incomes than average: the Resolution Foundation found in January 2023 that the gap in household income between adults with and without a disability was around 30% including disability benefits and 44% excluding disability benefits in the financial year 2020-21. A third of adults in the lowest household income decile are disabled. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0104/
Potentially there could be nuances, but it's a quagmire. Rachel Reeves will have much trouble not looking like an archetypal Tory. And Labour can't out-Farage Farage, either.
She'd be better off with a targeted approach to scope, rather than hitting everyone on the head with a Timmy Mallett hammer.
"Luxury" Car Tax is ultimate fiscal drag...It was brought in and set at a threshold of £40k.
I can't see Reeves changing this as if she did Labour MPs won't let it fly. There will be too many hard luck stories.
I had no idea such a tax existed. Nuts.
£425 a year for the five years following the first tax payment i.e. years 2 to 6. And now includes ALL cars i.e. EVs. So massive inflation in the new car market means you really don't have to be buying anything that baller to hit £40k now, particularly an EV.
How do they collect it? (Please tell me not via tax returns!)
Its included when you go to get road tax for your car.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
That flies in the face of 40 years' values underlying our laws, and there would be hell to pay - especially since disabled people already have many extra expenses imposed on them at random because of their conditions.
There is, for example, a higher likelihood of poverty:
Disabled people also have lower incomes than average: the Resolution Foundation found in January 2023 that the gap in household income between adults with and without a disability was around 30% including disability benefits and 44% excluding disability benefits in the financial year 2020-21. A third of adults in the lowest household income decile are disabled. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0104/
Potentially there could be nuances, but it's a quagmire. Rachel Reeves will have much trouble not looking like an archetypal Tory. And Labour can't out-Farage Farage, either.
She'd be better off with a targeted approach to scope, rather than hitting everyone on the head with a Timmy Mallett hammer.
"Luxury" Car Tax is ultimate fiscal drag...It was brought in and set at a threshold of £40k.
I can't see Reeves changing this as if she did Labour MPs won't let it fly. There will be too many hard luck stories.
That's not example of fiscal drag, given the luxury car tax was only introduced this year. It's just a new tax.
(Fiscal drag is when a threshold - £40k in this case - is not updated for inflation. The fact car prices have exploded over the last 15 years is irrelevant in this case).
Why is it that despite so much activity, legislation to ban knives, so much investment in mental health, we’re seeing more violence on our streets. What is causing this? Lots of people will be speculating - I think we should wait until more facts emerge. But there’s clearly something going wrong in our society right now, which I believe all politicians of all parties need to have a conversation about.
It would be helpful if context was added to this complaint about knife crime. What are the rates of knife crime like in other western democracies adjusted to best make it like for like comparisons as to what constitutes knife crime.
On the World Service this morning the correspondent was saying to the host and his guests that there were over 50,000 knife crimes in England and Wales last year to which one of the guests, an American who was the NYT Spain correspondent, was aghast and said that he was from Sam a Francisco so this was just unfathomable for him.
The thing is, every stat I’ve ever seen shows that knife attacks and injuries/death are infinitely higher in the US per head of population and the Americans love throwing our “knife crime” issue at us if we bring up their guns problem. Not only do they have a seriously worse gun crime problem but a worse knife problem to boot.
So is our knife problem especially huge compared to peers? Are we including too many incidents under the same grouping or just right or not enough.
Is there a figure which is actually “natural”, as in, in any population it is inevitable that nutters, miscreants, crims use an weapon which is very easily available to harm, threaten, defend and frankly it doesn’t matter what rules short of banning knifes from life and raiding every home until they are all gone so we can never eradicate it and might get overly worked up about something that can’t be fixed?
Top countries for stabbing deaths per 100k in 2023:
1. Guyana 7.6 2. St Kitts & Nevis 6.4 3. St Lucia 6.1 4. Grenada 5.1 5. St Vincent 4.9
20. Argentina 1.0
23. Moldova 1.0, highest in Europe
25. Canada 0.6
28. US 0.5
The UK was way lower.
Surprise surprise someone from the NYT peddles falsehoods about the grimness of life in Britain.
That paper seems to have as its mission statement to obsess about the invented failings of a country it doesn’t understand.
The NYT chap wasn’t peddling falsehoods, he was more an example of the ludicrous situation where Americans think that we are uniquely stabby as a nation without knowing that they are in fact not only champions at shooting anyone that moves but also have a bigger stabbing problem than we do.
I was pretty irritated that neither the host nor the BBC correspondent knew this and could put the standings in some sort of perspective. I’m not sure you can start solving an issue if the people writing the news stories and hosting the news discussions don’t have any real awareness as they spout bollocks which riles up the public which results in politicians making knee jerk decisions.
Actually the U.K. stabbing deaths was 31 for 2023 which works out to about 0.43 per 100k
The US was on 0.49
Right, but the Americans can just shoot people. So perhaps that's why it's as low as 0.49.
I've a hunch that the death of these mildly generous schemes will have an outsized affect on the 'small people economy'. By that I mean a lot of the excess goes straight back out to support the small businesses that small people use. They allow a little more margin and help subsidise provincial England, keeping it all ticking along.
I should add that I talk to quite a number of people that use the motability and they are profoundly disabled with very poor quality of life, Maybe not a good reason to keep some in a BMW but a little understanding that this is often all that keeps them leaving the house.
They are not mildly generous, they are a complete abuse of the taxpayer. That said, of course it will impact the economy - you don't need a hunch to tell you that. If Motability is severely constrained, it will decimate car dealerships as well as damage car makers. It now accounts for 20% of all new cars bought in the UK a year. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done though - it must be done.
The same is true of any 'waste' spending. Even the waste of Bank of England interest being paid to commercial banks on their QE holdings is likely to have some unfortunate consequences as those banks tighten their belts.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
With the explosive of availability of car financing* and leasing, its kinda of has become much more normal. I forgotten the percentages but the vast vast majority are all on the never never. Standard lease is normally 3 years. It feels like something that should have gone pop but hasn't.
* this whole scandal that is leading to a load of pay outs was based around dealers being able to add 1-2% interest rate ontop of the finance deal and pushing them through like sub-prime mortgages back in the day where they work it so it meets £x / month "affordability" but the total balance is sky high and people are under water for years.
Having read the Telegraph piece, I don't see any purchase for the luxury argument except at the margins - as PIP payments to Motability are a basic flat rate for everyone.
Yep - got to say it doesn't make sense - if you want a BMW or similar the driver / leasee gives BMW £10,000 upfront and that upfront payment reduces the amount left so that the PIP payment enough to lease the expensive car..
I can see why people don't like the idea of disabled people driving expensive cars but some people can afford it..
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
With the explosive of availability of car financing* and leasing, its kinda of has become much more normal. I forgotten the percentages but the vast vast majority are all on the never never. Standard lease is normally 3 years. It feels like something that should have gone pop but hasn't.
* this whole scandal that is leading to a load of pay outs was based around dealers being able to add 1-2% interest rate ontop of the finance deal and pushing them through like sub-prime mortgages back in the day where they work it so it meets £x / month affordability.
Majority of new cars, sure. But there are second hand cars.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
With the explosive of availability of car financing* and leasing, its kinda of has become much more normal. I forgotten the percentages but the vast vast majority are all on the never never. Standard lease is normally 3 years. It feels like something that should have gone pop but hasn't.
* this whole scandal that is leading to a load of pay outs was based around dealers being able to add 1-2% interest rate ontop of the finance deal and pushing them through like sub-prime mortgages back in the day where they work it so it meets £x / month affordability.
Majority of new cars, sure. But there are second hand cars.
People are financing second hand cars like crazy as well. And they aren't cheap now.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
Most things you would hope to get 10 years out of. Phones don't quite make that. Computers, Washing machines, Dishwashers, Fridges, Boilers... they're all around 10 years.
Why is it that despite so much activity, legislation to ban knives, so much investment in mental health, we’re seeing more violence on our streets. What is causing this? Lots of people will be speculating - I think we should wait until more facts emerge. But there’s clearly something going wrong in our society right now, which I believe all politicians of all parties need to have a conversation about.
It would be helpful if context was added to this complaint about knife crime. What are the rates of knife crime like in other western democracies adjusted to best make it like for like comparisons as to what constitutes knife crime.
On the World Service this morning the correspondent was saying to the host and his guests that there were over 50,000 knife crimes in England and Wales last year to which one of the guests, an American who was the NYT Spain correspondent, was aghast and said that he was from Sam a Francisco so this was just unfathomable for him.
The thing is, every stat I’ve ever seen shows that knife attacks and injuries/death are infinitely higher in the US per head of population and the Americans love throwing our “knife crime” issue at us if we bring up their guns problem. Not only do they have a seriously worse gun crime problem but a worse knife problem to boot.
So is our knife problem especially huge compared to peers? Are we including too many incidents under the same grouping or just right or not enough.
Is there a figure which is actually “natural”, as in, in any population it is inevitable that nutters, miscreants, crims use an weapon which is very easily available to harm, threaten, defend and frankly it doesn’t matter what rules short of banning knifes from life and raiding every home until they are all gone so we can never eradicate it and might get overly worked up about something that can’t be fixed?
Top countries for stabbing deaths per 100k in 2023:
1. Guyana 7.6 2. St Kitts & Nevis 6.4 3. St Lucia 6.1 4. Grenada 5.1 5. St Vincent 4.9
20. Argentina 1.0
23. Moldova 1.0, highest in Europe
25. Canada 0.6
28. US 0.5
The UK was way lower.
Surprise surprise someone from the NYT peddles falsehoods about the grimness of life in Britain.
That paper seems to have as its mission statement to obsess about the invented failings of a country it doesn’t understand.
The NYT chap wasn’t peddling falsehoods, he was more an example of the ludicrous situation where Americans think that we are uniquely stabby as a nation without knowing that they are in fact not only champions at shooting anyone that moves but also have a bigger stabbing problem than we do.
I was pretty irritated that neither the host nor the BBC correspondent knew this and could put the standings in some sort of perspective. I’m not sure you can start solving an issue if the people writing the news stories and hosting the news discussions don’t have any real awareness as they spout bollocks which riles up the public which results in politicians making knee jerk decisions.
Actually the U.K. stabbing deaths was 31 for 2023 which works out to about 0.43 per 100k
The US was on 0.49
Right, but the Americans can just shoot people. So perhaps that's why it's as low as 0.49.
Yup
“You’ve been charged with first degree murder. Also you are being sued by the NRA for using a knife in a murder, rather than a gun.”
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
That flies in the face of 40 years' values underlying our laws, and there would be hell to pay - especially since disabled people already have many extra expenses imposed on them at random because of their conditions.
There is, for example, a higher likelihood of poverty:
Disabled people also have lower incomes than average: the Resolution Foundation found in January 2023 that the gap in household income between adults with and without a disability was around 30% including disability benefits and 44% excluding disability benefits in the financial year 2020-21. A third of adults in the lowest household income decile are disabled. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0104/
Potentially there could be nuances, but it's a quagmire. Rachel Reeves will have much trouble not looking like an archetypal Tory. And Labour can't out-Farage Farage, either.
She'd be better off with a targeted approach to scope, rather than hitting everyone on the head with a Timmy Mallett hammer.
"Luxury" Car Tax is ultimate fiscal drag...It was brought in and set at a threshold of £40k.
I can't see Reeves changing this as if she did Labour MPs won't let it fly. There will be too many hard luck stories.
That's not example of fiscal drag, given the luxury car tax was only introduced this year. It's just a new tax.
(Fiscal drag is when a threshold - £40k in this case - is not updated for inflation. The fact car prices have exploded over the last 15 years is irrelevant in this case).
Luxury Car Tax came in 2017 as the "Expensive Car Supplement". The change Reeves made was it now applies to all cars including EVs.
Why is it that despite so much activity, legislation to ban knives, so much investment in mental health, we’re seeing more violence on our streets. What is causing this? Lots of people will be speculating - I think we should wait until more facts emerge. But there’s clearly something going wrong in our society right now, which I believe all politicians of all parties need to have a conversation about.
It would be helpful if context was added to this complaint about knife crime. What are the rates of knife crime like in other western democracies adjusted to best make it like for like comparisons as to what constitutes knife crime.
On the World Service this morning the correspondent was saying to the host and his guests that there were over 50,000 knife crimes in England and Wales last year to which one of the guests, an American who was the NYT Spain correspondent, was aghast and said that he was from Sam a Francisco so this was just unfathomable for him.
The thing is, every stat I’ve ever seen shows that knife attacks and injuries/death are infinitely higher in the US per head of population and the Americans love throwing our “knife crime” issue at us if we bring up their guns problem. Not only do they have a seriously worse gun crime problem but a worse knife problem to boot.
So is our knife problem especially huge compared to peers? Are we including too many incidents under the same grouping or just right or not enough.
Is there a figure which is actually “natural”, as in, in any population it is inevitable that nutters, miscreants, crims use an weapon which is very easily available to harm, threaten, defend and frankly it doesn’t matter what rules short of banning knifes from life and raiding every home until they are all gone so we can never eradicate it and might get overly worked up about something that can’t be fixed?
Top countries for stabbing deaths per 100k in 2023:
1. Guyana 7.6 2. St Kitts & Nevis 6.4 3. St Lucia 6.1 4. Grenada 5.1 5. St Vincent 4.9
20. Argentina 1.0
23. Moldova 1.0, highest in Europe
25. Canada 0.6
28. US 0.5
The UK was way lower.
Surprise surprise someone from the NYT peddles falsehoods about the grimness of life in Britain.
That paper seems to have as its mission statement to obsess about the invented failings of a country it doesn’t understand.
The NYT chap wasn’t peddling falsehoods, he was more an example of the ludicrous situation where Americans think that we are uniquely stabby as a nation without knowing that they are in fact not only champions at shooting anyone that moves but also have a bigger stabbing problem than we do.
I was pretty irritated that neither the host nor the BBC correspondent knew this and could put the standings in some sort of perspective. I’m not sure you can start solving an issue if the people writing the news stories and hosting the news discussions don’t have any real awareness as they spout bollocks which riles up the public which results in politicians making knee jerk decisions.
Actually the U.K. stabbing deaths was 31 for 2023 which works out to about 0.43 per 100k
The US was on 0.49
Right, but the Americans can just shoot people. So perhaps that's why it's as low as 0.49.
Yeah, the US homicide rate per capita is about 5+ times higher than in the UK.
Why is it that despite so much activity, legislation to ban knives, so much investment in mental health, we’re seeing more violence on our streets. What is causing this? Lots of people will be speculating - I think we should wait until more facts emerge. But there’s clearly something going wrong in our society right now, which I believe all politicians of all parties need to have a conversation about.
It would be helpful if context was added to this complaint about knife crime. What are the rates of knife crime like in other western democracies adjusted to best make it like for like comparisons as to what constitutes knife crime.
On the World Service this morning the correspondent was saying to the host and his guests that there were over 50,000 knife crimes in England and Wales last year to which one of the guests, an American who was the NYT Spain correspondent, was aghast and said that he was from Sam a Francisco so this was just unfathomable for him.
The thing is, every stat I’ve ever seen shows that knife attacks and injuries/death are infinitely higher in the US per head of population and the Americans love throwing our “knife crime” issue at us if we bring up their guns problem. Not only do they have a seriously worse gun crime problem but a worse knife problem to boot.
So is our knife problem especially huge compared to peers? Are we including too many incidents under the same grouping or just right or not enough.
Is there a figure which is actually “natural”, as in, in any population it is inevitable that nutters, miscreants, crims use an weapon which is very easily available to harm, threaten, defend and frankly it doesn’t matter what rules short of banning knifes from life and raiding every home until they are all gone so we can never eradicate it and might get overly worked up about something that can’t be fixed?
Top countries for stabbing deaths per 100k in 2023:
1. Guyana 7.6 2. St Kitts & Nevis 6.4 3. St Lucia 6.1 4. Grenada 5.1 5. St Vincent 4.9
20. Argentina 1.0
23. Moldova 1.0, highest in Europe
25. Canada 0.6
28. US 0.5
The UK was way lower.
Surprise surprise someone from the NYT peddles falsehoods about the grimness of life in Britain.
That paper seems to have as its mission statement to obsess about the invented failings of a country it doesn’t understand.
The NYT chap wasn’t peddling falsehoods, he was more an example of the ludicrous situation where Americans think that we are uniquely stabby as a nation without knowing that they are in fact not only champions at shooting anyone that moves but also have a bigger stabbing problem than we do.
I was pretty irritated that neither the host nor the BBC correspondent knew this and could put the standings in some sort of perspective. I’m not sure you can start solving an issue if the people writing the news stories and hosting the news discussions don’t have any real awareness as they spout bollocks which riles up the public which results in politicians making knee jerk decisions.
Actually the U.K. stabbing deaths was 31 for 2023 which works out to about 0.43 per 100k
The US was on 0.49
Right, but the Americans can just shoot people. So perhaps that's why it's as low as 0.49.
Yeah, the US homicide rate per capita is about 5+ times higher than in the UK.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
That flies in the face of 40 years' values underlying our laws, and there would be hell to pay - especially since disabled people already have many extra expenses imposed on them at random because of their conditions.
There is, for example, a higher likelihood of poverty:
Disabled people also have lower incomes than average: the Resolution Foundation found in January 2023 that the gap in household income between adults with and without a disability was around 30% including disability benefits and 44% excluding disability benefits in the financial year 2020-21. A third of adults in the lowest household income decile are disabled. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0104/
Potentially there could be nuances, but it's a quagmire. Rachel Reeves will have much trouble not looking like an archetypal Tory. And Labour can't out-Farage Farage, either.
She'd be better off with a targeted approach to scope, rather than hitting everyone on the head with a Timmy Mallett hammer.
"Luxury" Car Tax is ultimate fiscal drag...It was brought in and set at a threshold of £40k.
I can't see Reeves changing this as if she did Labour MPs won't let it fly. There will be too many hard luck stories.
That's not example of fiscal drag, given the luxury car tax was only introduced this year. It's just a new tax.
(Fiscal drag is when a threshold - £40k in this case - is not updated for inflation. The fact car prices have exploded over the last 15 years is irrelevant in this case).
Luxury Car Tax came in 2017 as the "Expensive Car Supplement". The change Reeves made was it now applies to all cars including EVs.
I was wrong - apologies.
(I adjust my argument to saying the fiscal drag element is restricted freeze relative to the change in CPI since 2017. Otherwise you get into a mess where you suggest all thresholds have to be uprated to some index of what they are taxing)
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
With the explosive of availability of car financing* and leasing, its kinda of has become much more normal. I forgotten the percentages but the vast vast majority are all on the never never. Standard lease is normally 3 years. It feels like something that should have gone pop but hasn't.
* this whole scandal that is leading to a load of pay outs was based around dealers being able to add 1-2% interest rate ontop of the finance deal and pushing them through like sub-prime mortgages back in the day where they work it so it meets £x / month "affordability" but the total balance is sky high and people are under water for years.
I don't drive. I'm not interested and even if I was it's far too expensive.
Having read the Telegraph piece, I don't see any purchase for the luxury argument except at the margins - as PIP payments to Motability are a basic flat rate for everyone.
Yep - got to say it doesn't make sense - if you want a BMW or similar the driver / leasee gives BMW £10,000 upfront and that upfront payment reduces the amount left so that the PIP payment enough to lease the expensive car..
I can see why people don't like the idea of disabled people driving expensive cars but some people can afford it..
It’s easy to see the problems that might occur more widely, if the only people on the street with a shiny new BMW in the driveway are those “on the sick”, unaffordable by anyone who works a job.
There’s more than enough of a sickness problem already, without incentivising people more to add to it. It’s another example that your average working man sees of “the system” being loaded against him.
The details of the scheme are almost irrelevant, it’s the perception that matters.
Why is it that despite so much activity, legislation to ban knives, so much investment in mental health, we’re seeing more violence on our streets. What is causing this? Lots of people will be speculating - I think we should wait until more facts emerge. But there’s clearly something going wrong in our society right now, which I believe all politicians of all parties need to have a conversation about.
It would be helpful if context was added to this complaint about knife crime. What are the rates of knife crime like in other western democracies adjusted to best make it like for like comparisons as to what constitutes knife crime.
On the World Service this morning the correspondent was saying to the host and his guests that there were over 50,000 knife crimes in England and Wales last year to which one of the guests, an American who was the NYT Spain correspondent, was aghast and said that he was from Sam a Francisco so this was just unfathomable for him.
The thing is, every stat I’ve ever seen shows that knife attacks and injuries/death are infinitely higher in the US per head of population and the Americans love throwing our “knife crime” issue at us if we bring up their guns problem. Not only do they have a seriously worse gun crime problem but a worse knife problem to boot.
So is our knife problem especially huge compared to peers? Are we including too many incidents under the same grouping or just right or not enough.
Is there a figure which is actually “natural”, as in, in any population it is inevitable that nutters, miscreants, crims use an weapon which is very easily available to harm, threaten, defend and frankly it doesn’t matter what rules short of banning knifes from life and raiding every home until they are all gone so we can never eradicate it and might get overly worked up about something that can’t be fixed?
Top countries for stabbing deaths per 100k in 2023:
1. Guyana 7.6 2. St Kitts & Nevis 6.4 3. St Lucia 6.1 4. Grenada 5.1 5. St Vincent 4.9
20. Argentina 1.0
23. Moldova 1.0, highest in Europe
25. Canada 0.6
28. US 0.5
The UK was way lower.
Surprise surprise someone from the NYT peddles falsehoods about the grimness of life in Britain.
That paper seems to have as its mission statement to obsess about the invented failings of a country it doesn’t understand.
The NYT chap wasn’t peddling falsehoods, he was more an example of the ludicrous situation where Americans think that we are uniquely stabby as a nation without knowing that they are in fact not only champions at shooting anyone that moves but also have a bigger stabbing problem than we do.
I was pretty irritated that neither the host nor the BBC correspondent knew this and could put the standings in some sort of perspective. I’m not sure you can start solving an issue if the people writing the news stories and hosting the news discussions don’t have any real awareness as they spout bollocks which riles up the public which results in politicians making knee jerk decisions.
Actually the U.K. stabbing deaths was 31 for 2023 which works out to about 0.43 per 100k
The US was on 0.49
The figures I could find for 2023 were 1688 stabbing fatalities in the US v 31 in the UK. So taking the UK population to be just short of one fifth of the US population then scaled up the UK rate would be 150 deaths which is a tenth of the US rate.
Now my maths might be shonky as brain addled from pain medication but it’s a huge difference that is glossed over by largely US commentators for their own ends.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
(Motability is one scheme, surely?)
I'd need to see the numbers on most cost effective lease period. Would 4 years or 5 years cost more or less money overall?
A problem with limited minimal options is that requirements and needs are very different. One size fits all does not work - what happens to an individual who needs a specialised (eg large) wheelchair?
"Oh you don't fit our tick boxes pulled out of thin air" so eff-off somewhere else will not be legal.
Perhaps if we had invested in mobility infra for the last 50 years the issue would be less acute. But we didn't and essentially force people into motor vehicles, and let the people who are unable to drive go hang. If you try and take a mobility scooter to my local hospital there are staggered pedestrian crossings with the middle island so tight that wheelchairs and mobility scooters cannot cross the road (yes, they are on my target list).
I'm not defending the current form, but I reject reform by kneejerk politics. Especially by the kind of bollocks-trading-on-prejudice projected by my MP Lee Anderson. Let's see what RR comes up with.
Really, there's a major element of people being cross that disabled citizens can have a decent lifestyle, isn't there?
Having read the Telegraph piece, I don't see any purchase for the luxury argument except at the margins - as PIP payments to Motability are a basic flat rate for everyone.
Yep - got to say it doesn't make sense - if you want a BMW or similar the driver / leasee gives BMW £10,000 upfront and that upfront payment reduces the amount left so that the PIP payment enough to lease the expensive car..
I can see why people don't like the idea of disabled people driving expensive cars but some people can afford it..
It’s easy to see the problems that might occur more widely, if the only people on the street with a shiny new BMW in the driveway are those “on the sick”, unaffordable by anyone who works a job.
There’s more than enough of a sickness problem already, without incentivising people more to add to it. It’s another example that your average working man sees of “the system” being loaded against him.
The deatils of the scheme are almost irrelevant, it’s the perception that matters.
This is because PIP isn't means-tested, so you can get people with serious money still getting it. The benefit of that is it doesn't provide a dis-incentive to work, but it does mean we are subsiding nice cars for rich (disabled) people.
Why is it that despite so much activity, legislation to ban knives, so much investment in mental health, we’re seeing more violence on our streets. What is causing this? Lots of people will be speculating - I think we should wait until more facts emerge. But there’s clearly something going wrong in our society right now, which I believe all politicians of all parties need to have a conversation about.
It would be helpful if context was added to this complaint about knife crime. What are the rates of knife crime like in other western democracies adjusted to best make it like for like comparisons as to what constitutes knife crime.
On the World Service this morning the correspondent was saying to the host and his guests that there were over 50,000 knife crimes in England and Wales last year to which one of the guests, an American who was the NYT Spain correspondent, was aghast and said that he was from Sam a Francisco so this was just unfathomable for him.
The thing is, every stat I’ve ever seen shows that knife attacks and injuries/death are infinitely higher in the US per head of population and the Americans love throwing our “knife crime” issue at us if we bring up their guns problem. Not only do they have a seriously worse gun crime problem but a worse knife problem to boot.
So is our knife problem especially huge compared to peers? Are we including too many incidents under the same grouping or just right or not enough.
Is there a figure which is actually “natural”, as in, in any population it is inevitable that nutters, miscreants, crims use an weapon which is very easily available to harm, threaten, defend and frankly it doesn’t matter what rules short of banning knifes from life and raiding every home until they are all gone so we can never eradicate it and might get overly worked up about something that can’t be fixed?
Top countries for stabbing deaths per 100k in 2023:
1. Guyana 7.6 2. St Kitts & Nevis 6.4 3. St Lucia 6.1 4. Grenada 5.1 5. St Vincent 4.9
20. Argentina 1.0
23. Moldova 1.0, highest in Europe
25. Canada 0.6
28. US 0.5
The UK was way lower.
Surprise surprise someone from the NYT peddles falsehoods about the grimness of life in Britain.
That paper seems to have as its mission statement to obsess about the invented failings of a country it doesn’t understand.
The NYT chap wasn’t peddling falsehoods, he was more an example of the ludicrous situation where Americans think that we are uniquely stabby as a nation without knowing that they are in fact not only champions at shooting anyone that moves but also have a bigger stabbing problem than we do.
I was pretty irritated that neither the host nor the BBC correspondent knew this and could put the standings in some sort of perspective. I’m not sure you can start solving an issue if the people writing the news stories and hosting the news discussions don’t have any real awareness as they spout bollocks which riles up the public which results in politicians making knee jerk decisions.
Actually the U.K. stabbing deaths was 31 for 2023 which works out to about 0.43 per 100k
The US was on 0.49
The figures I could find for 2023 were 1688 stabbing fatalities in the US v 31 in the UK. So taking the UK population to be just short of one fifth of the US population then scaled up the UK rate would be 150 deaths which is a tenth of the US rate.
Now my maths might be shonky as brain addled from pain medication but it’s a huge difference that is glossed over by largely US commentators for their own ends.
Were those deaths *from* stabbing or deaths *with* stabbing?
Having read the Telegraph piece, I don't see any purchase for the luxury argument except at the margins - as PIP payments to Motability are a basic flat rate for everyone.
Yep - got to say it doesn't make sense - if you want a BMW or similar the driver / leasee gives BMW £10,000 upfront and that upfront payment reduces the amount left so that the PIP payment enough to lease the expensive car..
I can see why people don't like the idea of disabled people driving expensive cars but some people can afford it..
It’s easy to see the problems that might occur more widely, if the only people on the street with a shiny new BMW in the driveway are those “on the sick”, unaffordable by anyone who works a job.
There’s more than enough of a sickness problem already, without incentivising people more to add to it. It’s another example that your average working man sees of “the system” being loaded against him.
The deatils of the scheme are almost irrelevant, it’s the perception that matters.
This is because PIP isn't means-tested, so you can get people with serious money still getting it. The benefit of that is it doesn't provide a dis-incentive to work, but it does mean we are subsiding nice cars for rich (disabled) people.
But those people are entitled to PIP - so the money would be going to them one way or another.
Now the question is do you really want to means test PIP...
Having read the Telegraph piece, I don't see any purchase for the luxury argument except at the margins - as PIP payments to Motability are a basic flat rate for everyone.
Yep - got to say it doesn't make sense - if you want a BMW or similar the driver / leasee gives BMW £10,000 upfront and that upfront payment reduces the amount left so that the PIP payment enough to lease the expensive car..
I can see why people don't like the idea of disabled people driving expensive cars but some people can afford it..
The Government doesn't charge VAT on cars purchased through motability - that feeds through to the lease price. On a luxury car, that's a lot more money. If someone can afford a luxury car, that's great - they can also afford the VAT on it.
Why is it that despite so much activity, legislation to ban knives, so much investment in mental health, we’re seeing more violence on our streets. What is causing this? Lots of people will be speculating - I think we should wait until more facts emerge. But there’s clearly something going wrong in our society right now, which I believe all politicians of all parties need to have a conversation about.
It would be helpful if context was added to this complaint about knife crime. What are the rates of knife crime like in other western democracies adjusted to best make it like for like comparisons as to what constitutes knife crime.
On the World Service this morning the correspondent was saying to the host and his guests that there were over 50,000 knife crimes in England and Wales last year to which one of the guests, an American who was the NYT Spain correspondent, was aghast and said that he was from Sam a Francisco so this was just unfathomable for him.
The thing is, every stat I’ve ever seen shows that knife attacks and injuries/death are infinitely higher in the US per head of population and the Americans love throwing our “knife crime” issue at us if we bring up their guns problem. Not only do they have a seriously worse gun crime problem but a worse knife problem to boot.
So is our knife problem especially huge compared to peers? Are we including too many incidents under the same grouping or just right or not enough.
Is there a figure which is actually “natural”, as in, in any population it is inevitable that nutters, miscreants, crims use an weapon which is very easily available to harm, threaten, defend and frankly it doesn’t matter what rules short of banning knifes from life and raiding every home until they are all gone so we can never eradicate it and might get overly worked up about something that can’t be fixed?
Top countries for stabbing deaths per 100k in 2023:
1. Guyana 7.6 2. St Kitts & Nevis 6.4 3. St Lucia 6.1 4. Grenada 5.1 5. St Vincent 4.9
20. Argentina 1.0
23. Moldova 1.0, highest in Europe
25. Canada 0.6
28. US 0.5
The UK was way lower.
Surprise surprise someone from the NYT peddles falsehoods about the grimness of life in Britain.
That paper seems to have as its mission statement to obsess about the invented failings of a country it doesn’t understand.
The NYT chap wasn’t peddling falsehoods, he was more an example of the ludicrous situation where Americans think that we are uniquely stabby as a nation without knowing that they are in fact not only champions at shooting anyone that moves but also have a bigger stabbing problem than we do.
I was pretty irritated that neither the host nor the BBC correspondent knew this and could put the standings in some sort of perspective. I’m not sure you can start solving an issue if the people writing the news stories and hosting the news discussions don’t have any real awareness as they spout bollocks which riles up the public which results in politicians making knee jerk decisions.
Actually the U.K. stabbing deaths was 31 for 2023 which works out to about 0.43 per 100k
The US was on 0.49
The figures I could find for 2023 were 1688 stabbing fatalities in the US v 31 in the UK. So taking the UK population to be just short of one fifth of the US population then scaled up the UK rate would be 150 deaths which is a tenth of the US rate.
Now my maths might be shonky as brain addled from pain medication but it’s a huge difference that is glossed over by largely US commentators for their own ends.
Were those deaths *from* stabbing or deaths *with* stabbing?
I would imagine that when the ME or whoever judges the cause of death then that is added to the relevant stat. So if the knife nicking the jugular was the cause of death then it’s “from” and if someone was stabbed in the bum which made them stumble around wildly until they fell off the roof of a sky scraper then the fall and impact is the cause of death so won’t be in the death from stabbing column.
Having read the Telegraph piece, I don't see any purchase for the luxury argument except at the margins - as PIP payments to Motability are a basic flat rate for everyone.
Yep - got to say it doesn't make sense - if you want a BMW or similar the driver / leasee gives BMW £10,000 upfront and that upfront payment reduces the amount left so that the PIP payment enough to lease the expensive car..
I can see why people don't like the idea of disabled people driving expensive cars but some people can afford it..
It’s easy to see the problems that might occur more widely, if the only people on the street with a shiny new BMW in the driveway are those “on the sick”, unaffordable by anyone who works a job.
There’s more than enough of a sickness problem already, without incentivising people more to add to it. It’s another example that your average working man sees of “the system” being loaded against him.
The deatils of the scheme are almost irrelevant, it’s the perception that matters.
This is because PIP isn't means-tested, so you can get people with serious money still getting it. The benefit of that is it doesn't provide a dis-incentive to work, but it does mean we are subsiding nice cars for rich (disabled) people.
But those people are entitled to PIP - so the money would be going to them one way or another.
Now the question is do you really want to means test PIP...
That's one option. The other option is that you don't apply the tax breaks for people above a certain net income (though that would introduce another cliff-edge).
Having read the Telegraph piece, I don't see any purchase for the luxury argument except at the margins - as PIP payments to Motability are a basic flat rate for everyone.
Yep - got to say it doesn't make sense - if you want a BMW or similar the driver / leasee gives BMW £10,000 upfront and that upfront payment reduces the amount left so that the PIP payment enough to lease the expensive car..
I can see why people don't like the idea of disabled people driving expensive cars but some people can afford it..
It’s easy to see the problems that might occur more widely, if the only people on the street with a shiny new BMW in the driveway are those “on the sick”, unaffordable by anyone who works a job.
There’s more than enough of a sickness problem already, without incentivising people more to add to it. It’s another example that your average working man sees of “the system” being loaded against him.
The deatils of the scheme are almost irrelevant, it’s the perception that matters.
This is because PIP isn't means-tested, so you can get people with serious money still getting it. The benefit of that is it doesn't provide a dis-incentive to work, but it does mean we are subsiding nice cars for rich (disabled) people.
But those people are entitled to PIP - so the money would be going to them one way or another.
Now the question is do you really want to means test PIP...
PIP will be means tested long before the state pension. And I know we have some fans of that here…
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
(Motability is one scheme, surely?)
I'd need to see the numbers on most cost effective lease period. Would 4 years or 5 years cost more or less money overall?
A problem with limited minimal options is that requirements and needs are very different. One size fits all does not work - what happens to an individual who needs a specialised (eg large) wheelchair?
"Oh you don't fit our tick boxes pulled out of thin air" so eff-off somewhere else will not be legal.
Perhaps if we had invested in mobility infra for the last 50 years the issue would be less acute. But we didn't and essentially force people into motor vehicles, and let the people who are unable to drive go hang. If you try and take a mobility scooter to my local hospital there are staggered pedestrian crossings with the middle island so tight that wheelchairs and mobility scooters cannot cross the road (yes, they are on my target list).
I'm not defending the current form, but I reject reform by kneejerk politics. Especially by the kind of bollocks-trading-on-prejudice projected by my MP Lee Anderson. Let's see what RR comes up with.
Really, there's a major element of people being cross that disabled citizens can have a decent lifestyle, isn't there?
AIUI People over pension age aren't eligible for Motability. Unless they've had it before reaching pension age.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
(Motability is one scheme, surely?)
I'd need to see the numbers on most cost effective lease period. Would 4 years or 5 years cost more or less money overall?
A problem with limited minimal options is that requirements and needs are very different. One size fits all does not work - what happens to an individual who needs a specialised (eg large) wheelchair?
"Oh you don't fit our tick boxes pulled out of thin air" so eff-off somewhere else will not be legal.
Perhaps if we had invested in mobility infra for the last 50 years the issue would be less acute. But we didn't and essentially force people into motor vehicles, and let the people who are unable to drive go hang. If you try and take a mobility scooter to my local hospital there are staggered pedestrian crossings with the middle island so tight that wheelchairs and mobility scooters cannot cross the road (yes, they are on my target list).
I'm not defending the current form, but I reject reform by kneejerk politics. Especially by the kind of bollocks-trading-on-prejudice projected by my MP Lee Anderson. Let's see what RR comes up with.
Really, there's a major element of people being cross that disabled citizens can have a decent lifestyle, isn't there?
Less than ten per cent of motability vehicles are modified.
I suppose there are some vehicles which are wheelchair suitable without modification? So add those.
Throw the 85% of people who don't need it off the scheme, and no one would care.
My car cost £3000 and I've had it five years. I don't feel I'm not living a decent lifestyle.
Having read the Telegraph piece, I don't see any purchase for the luxury argument except at the margins - as PIP payments to Motability are a basic flat rate for everyone.
Yep - got to say it doesn't make sense - if you want a BMW or similar the driver / leasee gives BMW £10,000 upfront and that upfront payment reduces the amount left so that the PIP payment enough to lease the expensive car..
I can see why people don't like the idea of disabled people driving expensive cars but some people can afford it..
It’s easy to see the problems that might occur more widely, if the only people on the street with a shiny new BMW in the driveway are those “on the sick”, unaffordable by anyone who works a job.
There’s more than enough of a sickness problem already, without incentivising people more to add to it. It’s another example that your average working man sees of “the system” being loaded against him.
The deatils of the scheme are almost irrelevant, it’s the perception that matters.
This is because PIP isn't means-tested, so you can get people with serious money still getting it. The benefit of that is it doesn't provide a dis-incentive to work, but it does mean we are subsiding nice cars for rich (disabled) people.
But those people are entitled to PIP - so the money would be going to them one way or another.
Now the question is do you really want to means test PIP...
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
(Motability is one scheme, surely?)
I'd need to see the numbers on most cost effective lease period. Would 4 years or 5 years cost more or less money overall?
A problem with limited minimal options is that requirements and needs are very different. One size fits all does not work - what happens to an individual who needs a specialised (eg large) wheelchair?
"Oh you don't fit our tick boxes pulled out of thin air" so eff-off somewhere else will not be legal.
Perhaps if we had invested in mobility infra for the last 50 years the issue would be less acute. But we didn't and essentially force people into motor vehicles, and let the people who are unable to drive go hang. If you try and take a mobility scooter to my local hospital there are staggered pedestrian crossings with the middle island so tight that wheelchairs and mobility scooters cannot cross the road (yes, they are on my target list).
I'm not defending the current form, but I reject reform by kneejerk politics. Especially by the kind of bollocks-trading-on-prejudice projected by my MP Lee Anderson. Let's see what RR comes up with.
Really, there's a major element of people being cross that disabled citizens can have a decent lifestyle, isn't there?
AIUI People over pension age aren't eligible for Motability. Unless they've had it before reaching pension age.
Now that actually is an example of MattW's theory. They're pensioners so they're expected to accept less.
Trim motability overall and extend it to pensioners.
Have to say I don't really get why it's necessary for the police to tell us then race of the attackers once they are in custody. It doesn't really make any difference. If they were still at large of course it would be vital to inform the public. But a "Black British national" doesn't mean anything anyway does it?
I believe it was one black British and one British national of Caribbean descent. I may have it wrong but I interpreted the second as being a naturalised immigrant and the first as being born here?
Our Canadian daughter in law is returning to Vancouver tomorrow from Heathrow and took the Holyhead to Euston train via Crewe this morning only for it to break down in Chester
She eventually arrived in Euston, and whilst she was out and about met a friend out of the blue she had no idea was in London
Have to say I don't really get why it's necessary for the police to tell us then race of the attackers once they are in custody. It doesn't really make any difference. If they were still at large of course it would be vital to inform the public. But a "Black British national" doesn't mean anything anyway does it?
I believe it was one black British and one British national of Caribbean descent. I may have it wrong but I interpreted the second as being a naturalised immigrant and the first as being born here?
Both born here, I heard on the radio.
I wonder if we will Shamima one of them back to the Carribean.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
(Motability is one scheme, surely?)
I'd need to see the numbers on most cost effective lease period. Would 4 years or 5 years cost more or less money overall?
A problem with limited minimal options is that requirements and needs are very different. One size fits all does not work - what happens to an individual who needs a specialised (eg large) wheelchair?
"Oh you don't fit our tick boxes pulled out of thin air" so eff-off somewhere else will not be legal.
Perhaps if we had invested in mobility infra for the last 50 years the issue would be less acute. But we didn't and essentially force people into motor vehicles, and let the people who are unable to drive go hang. If you try and take a mobility scooter to my local hospital there are staggered pedestrian crossings with the middle island so tight that wheelchairs and mobility scooters cannot cross the road (yes, they are on my target list).
I'm not defending the current form, but I reject reform by kneejerk politics. Especially by the kind of bollocks-trading-on-prejudice projected by my MP Lee Anderson. Let's see what RR comes up with.
Really, there's a major element of people being cross that disabled citizens can have a decent lifestyle, isn't there?
AIUI People over pension age aren't eligible for Motability. Unless they've had it before reaching pension age.
Now that actually is an example of MattW's theory. They're pensioners so they're expected to accept less.
Trim motability overall and extend it to pensioners.
It is my understanding that the idea behind Motability was to help people to work, who either have disabilities themselves or are caring for people who have disabilities.
Having read the Telegraph piece, I don't see any purchase for the luxury argument except at the margins - as PIP payments to Motability are a basic flat rate for everyone.
Yep - got to say it doesn't make sense - if you want a BMW or similar the driver / leasee gives BMW £10,000 upfront and that upfront payment reduces the amount left so that the PIP payment enough to lease the expensive car..
I can see why people don't like the idea of disabled people driving expensive cars but some people can afford it..
The Government doesn't charge VAT on cars purchased through motability - that feeds through to the lease price. On a luxury car, that's a lot more money. If someone can afford a luxury car, that's great - they can also afford the VAT on it.
Is this a real question?
How many vehicles supplied through Motability are luxury cars?
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
Most things you would hope to get 10 years out of. Phones don't quite make that. Computers, Washing machines, Dishwashers, Fridges, Boilers... they're all around 10 years.
Dreadful incident on the train last evening - as a frequent train traveller, I know there have been stabbing incidents in Europe but never thought one would happen here. I've always thought such an incident on the Underground much more likely.
What can be done? Practically, not very much apart from an overall effort to reduce the number of people carrying knives. The idea of BTP on every train is a non-starter and to be honest authority is more likely to be concerned with ticket collection than preventing incidents such as this. In the past, trains with rival football fans have been the ones most likely to have a BTP presence.
I see the fixation with the ethnic identity and immigration status of the suspects has quickly come to the fore. Given the CCTV on each train I imagine footage of what happened will quickly be found - as to a motive, who knows? All will doubtless come out at the trial if not sooner and once the individuals are named, doubtless the papers will be questioning their families, neighbours, friends, acquaintances and anyone and everyone else (including school classmates and ex-girl or ex-boyfriends I imagine).
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
Most things you would hope to get 10 years out of. Phones don't quite make that. Computers, Washing machines, Dishwashers, Fridges, Boilers... they're all around 10 years.
Cars are too.
NMR spectrometers…
My bits and pieces don't need to resonate more than they already do, so I can't comment.
(Just to be clear, readers, I have zero knowledge beyond what the words stand for about NMR)
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
Most things you would hope to get 10 years out of. Phones don't quite make that. Computers, Washing machines, Dishwashers, Fridges, Boilers... they're all around 10 years.
Cars are too.
NMR spectrometers…
My bits and pieces don't need to resonate more than they already do, so I can't comment.
(Just to be clear, readers, I have zero knowledge beyond what the words stand for about NMR)
Which may mean you have misinterpreted the first word… MRIs are not called NMRIs when they really ought to be!
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
(Motability is one scheme, surely?)
I'd need to see the numbers on most cost effective lease period. Would 4 years or 5 years cost more or less money overall?
A problem with limited minimal options is that requirements and needs are very different. One size fits all does not work - what happens to an individual who needs a specialised (eg large) wheelchair?
"Oh you don't fit our tick boxes pulled out of thin air" so eff-off somewhere else will not be legal.
Perhaps if we had invested in mobility infra for the last 50 years the issue would be less acute. But we didn't and essentially force people into motor vehicles, and let the people who are unable to drive go hang. If you try and take a mobility scooter to my local hospital there are staggered pedestrian crossings with the middle island so tight that wheelchairs and mobility scooters cannot cross the road (yes, they are on my target list).
I'm not defending the current form, but I reject reform by kneejerk politics. Especially by the kind of bollocks-trading-on-prejudice projected by my MP Lee Anderson. Let's see what RR comes up with.
Really, there's a major element of people being cross that disabled citizens can have a decent lifestyle, isn't there?
AIUI People over pension age aren't eligible for Motability. Unless they've had it before reaching pension age.
Now that actually is an example of MattW's theory. They're pensioners so they're expected to accept less.
Trim motability overall and extend it to pensioners.
It is my understanding that the idea behind Motability was to help people to work, who either have disabilities themselves or are caring for people who have disabilities.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
(Motability is one scheme, surely?)
I'd need to see the numbers on most cost effective lease period. Would 4 years or 5 years cost more or less money overall?
A problem with limited minimal options is that requirements and needs are very different. One size fits all does not work - what happens to an individual who needs a specialised (eg large) wheelchair?
"Oh you don't fit our tick boxes pulled out of thin air" so eff-off somewhere else will not be legal.
Perhaps if we had invested in mobility infra for the last 50 years the issue would be less acute. But we didn't and essentially force people into motor vehicles, and let the people who are unable to drive go hang. If you try and take a mobility scooter to my local hospital there are staggered pedestrian crossings with the middle island so tight that wheelchairs and mobility scooters cannot cross the road (yes, they are on my target list).
I'm not defending the current form, but I reject reform by kneejerk politics. Especially by the kind of bollocks-trading-on-prejudice projected by my MP Lee Anderson. Let's see what RR comes up with.
Really, there's a major element of people being cross that disabled citizens can have a decent lifestyle, isn't there?
AIUI People over pension age aren't eligible for Motability. Unless they've had it before reaching pension age.
Now that actually is an example of MattW's theory. They're pensioners so they're expected to accept less.
Trim motability overall and extend it to pensioners.
It is my understanding that the idea behind Motability was to help people to work, who either have disabilities themselves or are caring for people who have disabilities.
As I have noted, a minefield.
It's notable that the report that started this debate was from the Adam Smith Institute, and one of the things they want is applicability to second hand cars. One element of their alleged savings are related to comparison with average aged British cars, but they don't seem to take into account impact of eg increased breakdowns on disabled people.
To my eye, fairly normal ASI Daily Mail bait, with a few good points mixed in.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
(Motability is one scheme, surely?)
I'd need to see the numbers on most cost effective lease period. Would 4 years or 5 years cost more or less money overall?
A problem with limited minimal options is that requirements and needs are very different. One size fits all does not work - what happens to an individual who needs a specialised (eg large) wheelchair?
"Oh you don't fit our tick boxes pulled out of thin air" so eff-off somewhere else will not be legal.
Perhaps if we had invested in mobility infra for the last 50 years the issue would be less acute. But we didn't and essentially force people into motor vehicles, and let the people who are unable to drive go hang. If you try and take a mobility scooter to my local hospital there are staggered pedestrian crossings with the middle island so tight that wheelchairs and mobility scooters cannot cross the road (yes, they are on my target list).
I'm not defending the current form, but I reject reform by kneejerk politics. Especially by the kind of bollocks-trading-on-prejudice projected by my MP Lee Anderson. Let's see what RR comes up with.
Really, there's a major element of people being cross that disabled citizens can have a decent lifestyle, isn't there?
AIUI People over pension age aren't eligible for Motability. Unless they've had it before reaching pension age.
Now that actually is an example of MattW's theory. They're pensioners so they're expected to accept less.
Trim motability overall and extend it to pensioners.
It's not a Motability issue, its a PIP issue. PIP only goes to those of working age. After you reach SRP, PIP is replaced with Attendance Allowance.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
Most things you would hope to get 10 years out of. Phones don't quite make that. Computers, Washing machines, Dishwashers, Fridges, Boilers... they're all around 10 years.
Cars are too.
NMR spectrometers…
My bits and pieces don't need to resonate more than they already do, so I can't comment.
(Just to be clear, readers, I have zero knowledge beyond what the words stand for about NMR)
Which may mean you have misinterpreted the first word… MRIs are not called NMRIs when they really ought to be!
I see it COP30 this week in Brazil. There’s been little fanfare about it in the lead up to it. A few years ago it would have had significant coverage.
Main countries aren’t bothering. Hard to see what it can achieve aside from the regular demand for ‘climate reparations’.
And, yet, the problem is more serious than ever.
It just goes to show how fickle and shallow much opinion is on this.
Just look at Greta. Completely forgotten about climate change and wrapped herself in a Palestinian flag.
Don’t make stuff up. I just looked at her Instagram. The majority of recent posts are about Sudan, while there are others about Palestine and about climate change.
Sudan? So she's found a new bandwagon to jump on.
She can’t win with you, can she? If she doesn’t say anything about Sudan, you’d accuse her of being too obsessed with Palestine and ignoring Sudan. If she does say something about Sudan, you accuse her of jumping on a bandwagon.
Look, she's a young girl with rich and connected parents, it's vitally important that she's taken down a peg or two.
Ruddy sexism against a modern day Joan of Arc.
Jeanne and the Brits got on like a house on fire of if I remember correctly
We didn’t start the fire. It’s always been burning since the worlds been turning.
Friend of mine once told me that his family’s break out moment were that his forebear was the bloke who handed the burning brand to the guy who lit the fire
"Visitors to England from Saskatchewan should prepare themselves for large numbers of people. Despite England being less than one fifth the size of Saskatchewan, it has more than 50 times the population. It may help you to learn the meaning of phrases such as 'excuse me', and 'is this seat taken?'"
Plod say 2 British black males been arrested on suspicion of murder, but nothing to suggest this was a terrorist incident. They are a 32-year-old male black British male and 35-year-old British national of Caribbean descent.
I despair of this ‘not terror related’ stuff. It’s a mass stabbing. If it’s not terror related what is it?
Whether it gets labelled terrorism or not, at some point they'll have to say whether this was an on-board incident that escalated or whether this was a premeditated attack.
Not to mention dining cars. With silver service. Happy memory of them in the 1960s, en route from Edinburgh to London behind a nice Deltic (Mum used to book lunch there to help break up the long journey for me, so she told me, and - I now suspect - give herself a treat.)
GNER were still running silver service dining cars on the London-Edinburgh route until 2007 when, despite an excellent service they lost the franchise. Not sure what happened after that.
@Benpointer Enjoying your blog Ben, keep up the good work and hopefully you are recovering well.
How many people on the British mainland did the URA (sic) kill.
I'm a bit averse to answer this question, as it implies that casualties in NI don't count. But the function of a statistician is to answer questions, so as follows.
Location Count Belfast East 128 Belfast North 577 Belfast South 213 Belfast West 623 Britain 125 County Antrim 209 County Armagh 477 County Derry 123 County Down 243 County Fermanagh 112 County Tyrone 341 Derry 227 Europe 18 Republic of Ireland 116 TOTAL 3532
So of of the 3532 deaths attributed by Sutton to the Troubles, 125 were on the island of Great Britain
how many were in England, Scotland,Wales
I dont know about Scotland, but l believe there were zero in Wales. There was a story (cant confirm) that IRA had a policy of not targetting Wales - in the 1970s when there seemed to be a bombing every night and there was one bomb in Newport - it was put down to confusion on some maps of the time placing Monmouthshire in England.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
Most things you would hope to get 10 years out of. Phones don't quite make that. Computers, Washing machines, Dishwashers, Fridges, Boilers... they're all around 10 years.
Cars are too.
NMR spectrometers…
My bits and pieces don't need to resonate more than they already do, so I can't comment.
(Just to be clear, readers, I have zero knowledge beyond what the words stand for about NMR)
Which may mean you have misinterpreted the first word… MRIs are not called NMRIs when they really ought to be!
Perhaps, but I know a little more about MRIs.
If you know about MRIs then NMR is almost the same. Just a different application. And we expect to get 10 years out of them…
So...potential terrorist gets on at a tiny halt station. There's going to be a scanner there, huh? And somebody to make sure he goes through it?
Riiiiight.....
I see a slight problem with that plan.
Quite. It is just kneejerk nonsense which we can all see is impossible to implement.
Its the "something must be seen to be done or considering to be done".
I'd say it's more likely the "media create the false impression of something being seriously considered that isn't" ruse.
In the immediate aftermath of mass food poisoning at a pizza restaurant event before there's been time to process what's happened, a minister is interviewed:
"Do you rule out regulating the toppings to ensure this can never happen again?"
Any answer other than "yes".
"Government set to ban pepperoni on pizzas. Pineapple also under threat".
Oh that too. But politicians also aren't brave enough to go don't be stupid that's a non-starter. Instead they go into default programming of "all options considered", "nothing off the table"....
You mean they are only banning starters? That’s something at least!
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
That flies in the face of 40 years' values underlying our laws, and there would be hell to pay - especially since disabled people already have many extra expenses imposed on them at random because of their conditions.
There is, for example, a higher likelihood of poverty:
Disabled people also have lower incomes than average: the Resolution Foundation found in January 2023 that the gap in household income between adults with and without a disability was around 30% including disability benefits and 44% excluding disability benefits in the financial year 2020-21. A third of adults in the lowest household income decile are disabled. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0104/
Potentially there could be nuances, but it's a quagmire. Rachel Reeves will have much trouble not looking like an archetypal Tory. And Labour can't out-Farage Farage, either.
She'd be better off with a targeted approach to scope, rather than hitting everyone on the head with a Timmy Mallett hammer.
"Luxury" Car Tax is ultimate fiscal drag...It was brought in and set at a threshold of £40k.
I can't see Reeves changing this as if she did Labour MPs won't let it fly. There will be too many hard luck stories.
I had no idea such a tax existed. Nuts.
£425 a year for the five years following the first tax payment i.e. years 2 to 6. And now includes ALL cars i.e. EVs. So massive inflation in the new car market means you really don't have to be buying anything that baller to hit £40k now, particularly an EV.
How do they collect it? (Please tell me not via tax returns!)
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
The government already define it, hence the "luxury car tax". Its something I don't think people have noticed was part of the last budget that it now hits a lot more cars and will add £2.5k to your tax bill over 5 years.
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
So we are headed potentially down the "disabled people are not allowed to be like everybody else, and are required to be miserable and have poorer lifestyles" route - at least to some extent.
Having a new car every three years is not normal. I'm a nice middle class boy with nice middle class parents and neither I nor they have ever had a new car.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
Most things you would hope to get 10 years out of. Phones don't quite make that. Computers, Washing machines, Dishwashers, Fridges, Boilers... they're all around 10 years.
Cars are too.
NMR spectrometers…
My bits and pieces don't need to resonate more than they already do, so I can't comment.
(Just to be clear, readers, I have zero knowledge beyond what the words stand for about NMR)
Which may mean you have misinterpreted the first word… MRIs are not called NMRIs when they really ought to be!
Perhaps, but I know a little more about MRIs.
If you know about MRIs then NMR is almost the same. Just a different application. And we expect to get 10 years out of them…
"Visitors to England from Saskatchewan should prepare themselves for large numbers of people. Despite England being less than one fifth the size of Saskatchewan, it has more than 50 times the population. It may help you to learn the meaning of phrases such as 'excuse me', and 'is this seat taken?'"
Mrs C has a cousin in Vancouver, who is planning a visit next June. He does seem over-optimistic about the ease of driving in UK, especially how far he'll be able to drive in a day.
How many people on the British mainland did the URA (sic) kill.
I'm a bit averse to answer this question, as it implies that casualties in NI don't count. But the function of a statistician is to answer questions, so as follows.
Location Count Belfast East 128 Belfast North 577 Belfast South 213 Belfast West 623 Britain 125 County Antrim 209 County Armagh 477 County Derry 123 County Down 243 County Fermanagh 112 County Tyrone 341 Derry 227 Europe 18 Republic of Ireland 116 TOTAL 3532
So of of the 3532 deaths attributed by Sutton to the Troubles, 125 were on the island of Great Britain
how many were in England, Scotland,Wales
I dont know about Scotland, but l believe there were zero in Wales. There was a story (cant confirm) that IRA had a policy of not targetting Wales - in the 1970s when there seemed to be a bombing every night and there was one bomb in Newport - it was put down to confusion on some maps of the time placing Monmouthshire in England.
How many people on the British mainland did the URA (sic) kill.
I'm a bit averse to answer this question, as it implies that casualties in NI don't count. But the function of a statistician is to answer questions, so as follows.
Location Count Belfast East 128 Belfast North 577 Belfast South 213 Belfast West 623 Britain 125 County Antrim 209 County Armagh 477 County Derry 123 County Down 243 County Fermanagh 112 County Tyrone 341 Derry 227 Europe 18 Republic of Ireland 116 TOTAL 3532
So of of the 3532 deaths attributed by Sutton to the Troubles, 125 were on the island of Great Britain
how many were in England, Scotland,Wales
I dont know about Scotland, but l believe there were zero in Wales. There was a story (cant confirm) that IRA had a policy of not targetting Wales - in the 1970s when there seemed to be a bombing every night and there was one bomb in Newport - it was put down to confusion on some maps of the time placing Monmouthshire in England.
Having read the Telegraph piece, I don't see any purchase for the luxury argument except at the margins - as PIP payments to Motability are a basic flat rate for everyone.
Yep - got to say it doesn't make sense - if you want a BMW or similar the driver / leasee gives BMW £10,000 upfront and that upfront payment reduces the amount left so that the PIP payment enough to lease the expensive car..
I can see why people don't like the idea of disabled people driving expensive cars but some people can afford it..
The Government doesn't charge VAT on cars purchased through motability - that feeds through to the lease price. On a luxury car, that's a lot more money. If someone can afford a luxury car, that's great - they can also afford the VAT on it.
Is this a real question?
How many vehicles supplied through Motability are luxury cars?
Why should any of the vehicles supplied through motability be luxury cars? Benefits are there to provide necessities that the recipients would not otherwise be able to afford. A BMW isn't that.
It's an interesting straw in the wind this. I was 70/30 that they were going to do the income tax thing, embrace the left, and sod the right - a core vote strategy. But this indicates that they have not abandoned the attempt to win over middle Britain. So perhaps the manifesto breaking tax rises got a little less likely...
Comments
It's to stop speculation feeding hysteria / potential reactions.
Something that isn't an Invacar? Not made of shite blue plastic, with no room for anyone or anything else? Got to be punitive, apparently (PB passim).
Fixed it for you.
DOO is a DFT obsession, despite it probably being approx 1000th place on the list of of "easy ways to save the railway network money". The operators privately mostly think it's considerably more trouble than it's worth, but have to publicly tow the DFT line.
I'm currently a bit player in a saga that is grounding an increasingly large number of a common type of train. The gist of it is that they need a peice of bespoke aluminium extrusion replacing. There was a container of spare extrusions ordered with the trains, but it was scrapped a few years ago to save money on storage. Now no-one will bite the bullet on about £50k to get a batch made - but they are wasting time exploring every alternative possible route whilst the affected trains are stood costing someone £x every day (where x is a large sum of money) - but it's from a different pot to the buying new aluminium extrusions pot, so that's all OK.
Repeat the sort of stupidity all over the industry and you begin to realise why rail travel is so madly expensive.
But so what if it wasn't? Do you have the same interests, the same focuses as when you were at school?
Also, what the f*** does it matter? She's a free person. She can do what she wants. You can do what you want. If you don't agree with her campaigning issues, fine, don't agree with them.
What limitations would be imposed on my friend with 4 school age children? Is someone going to pay for taxis?
(She gets the lower rate so aiui may not qualify, but they use a disability adapted mid-size van.)
The threshold is now such that if your blinge out your Nissan Qashqui a bit it can tip into luxury car tax territory.....
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/02/train-driver-quick-thinking-saved-lives-stabbing/
The Class 800 Azuma LNER service had departed Peterborough when the attack began and was scheduled to travel through Huntingdon at 125mph on a fast track that does not have access to a platform.
Within minutes, LNER staff had declared an emergency, alerting passengers to the jeopardy through the train’s tannoy system.
The driver, crew and signallers diverted the train from its inner rail track to Huntingdon station’s platform-side rail so that emergency services could rapidly board.
It stopped in Huntingdon just 14 minutes after departing Peterborough, where armed police officers, paramedics and an air ambulance were ready to respond.
There’s also some remarkable stuff you can do with multi-axis CNC. Depends how fun the profile is.
Top countries for stabbing deaths per 100k in 2023:
1. Guyana 7.6
2. St Kitts & Nevis 6.4
3. St Lucia 6.1
4. Grenada 5.1
5. St Vincent 4.9
20. Argentina 1.0
23. Moldova 1.0, highest in Europe
25. Canada 0.6
28. US 0.5
The UK was way lower.
Let's consider the first. Say someone in the UK of Russian nationality assassinated the Ukrainian ambassador. They are arrested, found guilty and given a life sentence. You want them to be shipped back to Russia, where they are given a hero's welcome and Putin personally hands them the keys to a luxury flat in Moscow. That seems like a bad idea to me.
There should be no free cars.
That paper seems to have as its mission statement to obsess about the invented failings of a country it doesn’t understand.
That flies in the face of 40 years' values underlying our laws, and there would be hell to pay - especially since disabled people already have many extra expenses imposed on them at random because of their conditions.
There is, for example, a higher likelihood of poverty:
Disabled people also have lower incomes than average: the Resolution Foundation found in January 2023 that the gap in household income between adults with and without a disability was around 30% including disability benefits and 44% excluding disability benefits in the financial year 2020-21. A third of adults in the lowest household income decile are disabled.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0104/
Potentially there could be nuances, but it's a quagmire. Rachel Reeves will have much trouble not looking like an archetypal Tory. And Labour can't out-Farage Farage, either.
She'd be better off with a targeted approach to scope, rather than hitting everyone on the head with a Timmy Mallett hammer.
I guess we also need to note that the reporting is from the Telegraph - is it just them?
I should add that I talk to quite a number of people that use the motability and they are profoundly disabled with very poor quality of life, Maybe not a good reason to keep some in a BMW but a little understanding that this is often all that keeps them leaving the house.
Over the past 15 years, new car has gone from an average of £22,868 to £52,342. This is almost 50% above inflation across the same period,
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/consumer/average-car-age-grows-new-car-prices-rocket-129-15-years
I can't see Reeves changing this as if she did Labour MPs won't let it fly. There will be too many hard luck stories.
In the immediate aftermath of mass food poisoning at a pizza restaurant event before there's been time to process what's happened, a minister is interviewed:
"Do you rule out regulating the toppings to ensure this can never happen again?"
Any answer other than "yes".
"Government set to ban pepperoni on pizzas. Pineapple also under threat".
However... the car is not free. It comes out of deductions of PIP, a non means-tested benefit for disabled people. There are tax allowances for the scheme, the idea being that some disabled people find the use of a car critically important for getting around given their disabilities. In the grand scheme of things, the cost per year in reduced tax isn't massive - about £1 billion.
I was pretty irritated that neither the host nor the BBC correspondent knew this and could put the standings in some sort of perspective. I’m not sure you can start solving an issue if the people writing the news stories and hosting the news discussions don’t have any real awareness as they spout bollocks which riles up the public which results in politicians making knee jerk decisions.
I read somewhere the other day the Chinese Jaecoo is now one of the top selling cars in the UK and its because you get a SUV for £30-35k.
The US was on 0.49
Any gains will be by addressing scope, or improving assessment process.
It won't save money except through detailed work, and when the consequences are taken into account eg people unable to work it may cost more.
Disabled people who need modified cars should have one scheme, with the VAT break.
Those who don't can make their own arrangements, with their PIP, and no VAT break.
(Fiscal drag is when a threshold - £40k in this case - is not updated for inflation. The fact car prices have exploded over the last 15 years is irrelevant in this case).
The same is true of any 'waste' spending. Even the waste of Bank of England interest being paid to commercial banks on their QE holdings is likely to have some unfortunate consequences as those banks tighten their belts.
* this whole scandal that is leading to a load of pay outs was based around dealers being able to add 1-2% interest rate ontop of the finance deal and pushing them through like sub-prime mortgages back in the day where they work it so it meets £x / month "affordability" but the total balance is sky high and people are under water for years.
I can see why people don't like the idea of disabled people driving expensive cars but some people can afford it..
As I say, I really expected it to go pop by now.
Cars are too.
“You’ve been charged with first degree murder. Also you are being sued by the NRA for using a knife in a murder, rather than a gun.”
In April 2017, the UK government introduced the ‘Expensive Car Supplement’, also known as the ‘luxury car tax’.
https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/tips-advice/363493/what-luxury-car-tax-expensive-car-supplement-explained
No increase in the threshold for 8 years when new car prices have exploded mostly in the last 5-6 years.
(I adjust my argument to saying the fiscal drag element is restricted freeze relative to the change in CPI since 2017. Otherwise you get into a mess where you suggest all thresholds have to be uprated to some index of what they are taxing)
There’s more than enough of a sickness problem already, without incentivising people more to add to it. It’s another example that your average working man sees of “the system” being loaded against him.
The details of the scheme are almost irrelevant, it’s the perception that matters.
Now my maths might be shonky as brain addled from pain medication but it’s a huge difference that is glossed over by largely US commentators for their own ends.
@MothinAli
I'm deeply concerned and saddened by the news of the incident at Huntingdon train station.
My thoughts are with the victims
If anyone has any information please provide anything that may hell to the security services.
https://x.com/MothinAli/status/1984747016694444071
One of his supporters earlier called him Mothball in a reply - again, I'm pretty sure, by mistake
I'd need to see the numbers on most cost effective lease period. Would 4 years or 5 years cost more or less money overall?
A problem with limited minimal options is that requirements and needs are very different. One size fits all does not work - what happens to an individual who needs a specialised (eg large) wheelchair?
"Oh you don't fit our tick boxes pulled out of thin air" so eff-off somewhere else will not be legal.
Perhaps if we had invested in mobility infra for the last 50 years the issue would be less acute. But we didn't and essentially force people into motor vehicles, and let the people who are unable to drive go hang. If you try and take a mobility scooter to my local hospital there are staggered pedestrian crossings with the middle island so tight that wheelchairs and mobility scooters cannot cross the road (yes, they are on my target list).
I'm not defending the current form, but I reject reform by kneejerk politics. Especially by the kind of bollocks-trading-on-prejudice projected by my MP Lee Anderson. Let's see what RR comes up with.
Really, there's a major element of people being cross that disabled citizens can have a decent lifestyle, isn't there?
Now the question is do you really want to means test PIP...
United Kingdom - Exercise a high degree of caution
Exercise a high degree of caution in the United Kingdom due to the threat of terrorism.
https://travel.gc.ca/destinations/united-kingdom
I suppose there are some vehicles which are wheelchair suitable without modification? So add those.
Throw the 85% of people who don't need it off the scheme, and no one would care.
My car cost £3000 and I've had it five years. I don't feel I'm not living a decent lifestyle.
Trim motability overall and extend it to pensioners.
Our Canadian daughter in law is returning to Vancouver tomorrow from Heathrow and took the Holyhead to Euston train via Crewe this morning only for it to break down in Chester
She eventually arrived in Euston, and whilst she was out and about met a friend out of the blue she had no idea was in London
Small world in many ways
I wonder if we will Shamima one of them back to the Carribean.
Q. After 2005 the government trialled scanners. Are you going to introduce them now?
A. Not immediately. British population… resilient… be vigilant. Once we know the facts we will draw any policy conclusions at that point.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/07/air-china-inflight-mag-condemned-for-racist-guide-to-london
How many vehicles supplied through Motability are luxury cars?
Dreadful incident on the train last evening - as a frequent train traveller, I know there have been stabbing incidents in Europe but never thought one would happen here. I've always thought such an incident on the Underground much more likely.
What can be done? Practically, not very much apart from an overall effort to reduce the number of people carrying knives. The idea of BTP on every train is a non-starter and to be honest authority is more likely to be concerned with ticket collection than preventing incidents such as this. In the past, trains with rival football fans have been the ones most likely to have a BTP presence.
I see the fixation with the ethnic identity and immigration status of the suspects has quickly come to the fore. Given the CCTV on each train I imagine footage of what happened will quickly be found - as to a motive, who knows? All will doubtless come out at the trial if not sooner and once the individuals are named, doubtless the papers will be questioning their families, neighbours, friends, acquaintances and anyone and everyone else (including school classmates and ex-girl or ex-boyfriends I imagine).
(Just to be clear, readers, I have zero knowledge beyond what the words stand for about NMR)
It's notable that the report that started this debate was from the Adam Smith Institute, and one of the things they want is applicability to second hand cars. One element of their alleged savings are related to comparison with average aged British cars, but they don't seem to take into account impact of eg increased breakdowns on disabled people.
To my eye, fairly normal ASI Daily Mail bait, with a few good points mixed in.
ASI Report:
https://www.adamsmith.org/press-releases/new-motability-vehicles-cost-more-than-the-entire-school-repairs-budget
Motability Response:
https://news.mo.co.uk/news/adam-smith-institute-proposals-would-push-up-costs
Consider me staggered.
https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/blogs/blog/87-contemporary-build-in-north-dorset/
https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/profile/13370-benpointer/
It's an interesting straw in the wind this. I was 70/30 that they were going to do the income tax thing, embrace the left, and sod the right - a core vote strategy. But this indicates that they have not abandoned the attempt to win over middle Britain. So perhaps the manifesto breaking tax rises got a little less likely...