Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
Sadly, creating storage caverns with large nuclear weapons doesn't work either.
UK gas consumption has been falling for 20 years. 2024 saw the lowest consumption since 1992, I believe. Big investment in storage capacity does not seem like a priority.
There is little prospect that we won't need some form of gas backup for decades to come. No matter what the Greens try to claim, renewables are not reliable enough at present to provide security of supply. And since we are dragging our feet over those non-hydrocarbon fuel sources which are reliable - nuclear and wave power - gas is really the only viable alternative. If you believe, as I do, that the world is becoming less secure for the foreseeable future then we do need some form of storage that will help assure our supply.
We should also build far more coal fired power stations. It generated our electricity for decades, it's abundant globally, it's easy to store and it's relatively cheap. The Chinese are building dozens.
That, reopening the North Sea, axing the green crap and abandoning the insane marginal pricing rule would start to bring our energy prices down to competitive levels.
Coal and gas prices are highly correlated, they have higher higher capital and maintenance costs than natural gas, and they deal very poorly with being turned on and off.
They give the appearance of increasing energy security, when mostly they just add to everyone's electricity cost.
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
More than half of Reform voters want to deport my kids. I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with this information, other than doing everything I can to ensure they don't get to run the country.
Probably applies to a vast number of people in this country even if they don't realise it. If Reform come up with their own version of the Nurumberg Laws then I might be in the firing line with Irish grandparents.
There are trains passing through the station - local services.
Yesterday, trains from the south were stopping at Carlisle and turning back - this morning it seems they are going as far as Motherwell and presumably buses are being provided for the rest of the journey.
I think it's possible to get to Queen Street from Edinburgh and that line could be used to get more services into Glasgow - from memory (a walk on a cold Monday morning in the 1990s) it's not a long walk from Central to Queen Street (does it involve Buchanan Street?). From the latter you can get services to places like Oban and Fort William.
Why are people still pushing the ridiculous conspiracy theories about Epstein “being murdered”, or whatever. I’m sick and tired of it. This is just the latest vapid bilge from the Telegraph
“The last prison guard to see Jeffrey Epstein alive made suspicious cash deposits in the 12 months before his death, US Department of Justice (DoJ) files reveal.
“Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York on Aug 10, 2019. His death was ruled a suicide.
“Tova Noel, 37, one of two officers accused of falsifying prisoner record checks that night, made a final cash deposit of $5,000 (£3,729) into her bank account less than a fortnight earlier on July 30.
“A total of 12 ATM cash deposits, beginning in October 2018, were flagged by her bank to the FBI in a “suspicious activity report” in November 2019.
“Ms Noel and her colleague Michael Thomas were fired after being accused of falsifying records to claim they checked on Epstein during the night before his suicide on Aug 10 that year.
“CCTV footage revealed the pair did not check on Epstein for eight hours, despite his cell being just 15 feet from the guards’ desk.
Criminal charges against them were later dropped.”
Why can’t people just let it go? Jeffrey Epstein was a nasty criminal but in the end he was better and he realised he’d done bad things and stuff, and decided to off himself as a punishment to himself. Indeed he was so honourable at the end he killed himself when it wouldn’t be too upsetting because all the guards were asleep. Just accept it and stop talking about it.
It's such a ludicrously small amount of cash it has the ring of truth to it. Always surprising how little it takes for someone to do something like that.
Such a small amount of cash it's best kept in the house and spent ad-hoc rather than banking it too...
Why are people still pushing the ridiculous conspiracy theories about Epstein “being murdered”, or whatever. I’m sick and tired of it. This is just the latest vapid bilge from the Telegraph
“The last prison guard to see Jeffrey Epstein alive made suspicious cash deposits in the 12 months before his death, US Department of Justice (DoJ) files reveal.
“Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York on Aug 10, 2019. His death was ruled a suicide.
“Tova Noel, 37, one of two officers accused of falsifying prisoner record checks that night, made a final cash deposit of $5,000 (£3,729) into her bank account less than a fortnight earlier on July 30.
“A total of 12 ATM cash deposits, beginning in October 2018, were flagged by her bank to the FBI in a “suspicious activity report” in November 2019.
“Ms Noel and her colleague Michael Thomas were fired after being accused of falsifying records to claim they checked on Epstein during the night before his suicide on Aug 10 that year.
“CCTV footage revealed the pair did not check on Epstein for eight hours, despite his cell being just 15 feet from the guards’ desk.
Criminal charges against them were later dropped.”
Why can’t people just let it go? Jeffrey Epstein was a nasty criminal but in the end he was better and he realised he’d done bad things and stuff, and decided to off himself as a punishment to himself. Indeed he was so honourable at the end he killed himself when it wouldn’t be too upsetting because all the guards were asleep. Just accept it and stop talking about it.
Funny. Of all the conspiracy theories you buy into and THIS is the one that is a step too far?
I think Leon is having a little joke.
The real mystery about Epstein is why so many people voted for his best friend to be President.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Naval clickbait from the Telegraph. It doesn't have to be the French navy; it could be America, or anyone really. But not us because with the MoD's usual joined-up thinking we've sent our only available (nearly) destroyer to Cyprus.
But saying it is the French makes it sooooo much worse
Anyway, I thought we had some sort of naval treaty with the French specifically for this sort of situation?
Why are people still pushing the ridiculous conspiracy theories about Epstein “being murdered”, or whatever. I’m sick and tired of it. This is just the latest vapid bilge from the Telegraph
“The last prison guard to see Jeffrey Epstein alive made suspicious cash deposits in the 12 months before his death, US Department of Justice (DoJ) files reveal.
“Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York on Aug 10, 2019. His death was ruled a suicide.
“Tova Noel, 37, one of two officers accused of falsifying prisoner record checks that night, made a final cash deposit of $5,000 (£3,729) into her bank account less than a fortnight earlier on July 30.
“A total of 12 ATM cash deposits, beginning in October 2018, were flagged by her bank to the FBI in a “suspicious activity report” in November 2019.
“Ms Noel and her colleague Michael Thomas were fired after being accused of falsifying records to claim they checked on Epstein during the night before his suicide on Aug 10 that year.
“CCTV footage revealed the pair did not check on Epstein for eight hours, despite his cell being just 15 feet from the guards’ desk.
Criminal charges against them were later dropped.”
Why can’t people just let it go? Jeffrey Epstein was a nasty criminal but in the end he was better and he realised he’d done bad things and stuff, and decided to off himself as a punishment to himself. Indeed he was so honourable at the end he killed himself when it wouldn’t be too upsetting because all the guards were asleep. Just accept it and stop talking about it.
Funny. Of all the conspiracy theories you buy into and THIS is the one that is a step too far?
I think Leon is having a little joke.
A joke vastly improved by most of PB not getting it
You oversell yourself, sir.
It was about as subtle as one of @TSE's thread headers.
And yet it seemed to mystify most of PB, who took it at face value. Unless they were double bluffing with meta-sarcasm
Either way, it’s given me a chuckle. Which is what counts on a slightly grey Monday morning
You're not wrong about the need for a chuckle on days like this....
Why are people still pushing the ridiculous conspiracy theories about Epstein “being murdered”, or whatever. I’m sick and tired of it. This is just the latest vapid bilge from the Telegraph
“The last prison guard to see Jeffrey Epstein alive made suspicious cash deposits in the 12 months before his death, US Department of Justice (DoJ) files reveal.
“Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York on Aug 10, 2019. His death was ruled a suicide.
“Tova Noel, 37, one of two officers accused of falsifying prisoner record checks that night, made a final cash deposit of $5,000 (£3,729) into her bank account less than a fortnight earlier on July 30.
“A total of 12 ATM cash deposits, beginning in October 2018, were flagged by her bank to the FBI in a “suspicious activity report” in November 2019.
“Ms Noel and her colleague Michael Thomas were fired after being accused of falsifying records to claim they checked on Epstein during the night before his suicide on Aug 10 that year.
“CCTV footage revealed the pair did not check on Epstein for eight hours, despite his cell being just 15 feet from the guards’ desk.
Criminal charges against them were later dropped.”
Why can’t people just let it go? Jeffrey Epstein was a nasty criminal but in the end he was better and he realised he’d done bad things and stuff, and decided to off himself as a punishment to himself. Indeed he was so honourable at the end he killed himself when it wouldn’t be too upsetting because all the guards were asleep. Just accept it and stop talking about it.
Funny. Of all the conspiracy theories you buy into and THIS is the one that is a step too far?
I think Leon is having a little joke.
A joke vastly improved by most of PB not getting it
You oversell yourself, sir.
It was about as subtle as one of @TSE's thread headers.
And yet it seemed to mystify most of PB, who took it at face value. Unless they were double bluffing with meta-sarcasm
Either way, it’s given me a chuckle. Which is what counts on a slightly grey Monday morning
Seemed a bit forced to me, which is why I wondered if you were pushing a new piece.
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
More than half of Reform voters want to deport my kids. I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with this information, other than doing everything I can to ensure they don't get to run the country.
What does Reforms official policy say ?
I cannot see any party ever deporting children like yours. They’re as British as any of us
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
Sadly, creating storage caverns with large nuclear weapons doesn't work either.
UK gas consumption has been falling for 20 years. 2024 saw the lowest consumption since 1992, I believe. Big investment in storage capacity does not seem like a priority.
It would have made some sense, I think, to have more capacity than we do.
I'm not entirely convinced that "we have a diversified pipeline network instead" will be a sufficient alternative.
My expectation is that Iran will keep pressure on the Staits of Hormuz to maintain pressure, and either a ceasefire of some sort will be reached will arrangements that might include a new regime or a payment to Trump, or Trump may do a variety of TACO.
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
More than half of Reform voters want to deport my kids. I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with this information, other than doing everything I can to ensure they don't get to run the country.
Quite a few of their candidates, too. Voting to keep them out of government is the best solution.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
Are there any instances in history of people rising up to overthrow tyrannical rulers (indigenous, not invaders) as a result of foreign intervention?
I think the Kurds in Iraq would meet that one in 1991. Though they were incited to rebellion by the USA in 1975.
In both cases they were aiui betrayed and abandoned to their fate, which might explain their hesitancy to take Trump at his word now.
(Pipes interests me, but I I'll make another comment.)
Morning all! IANAE on the Middle East (should that stop me commenting here?) but I have the strong impression that the Kurds have been very badly treated over the past century, BUT they do seem to feature almost as much as Albanians when dodgy dealings are discussed.
While the Greens have narrowly held on in the 2026 Baden-Württemberg state election, they did lose seats. The big stories are the big gains by the CDU and AfD and big losses by the SPD and FDP.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
This is your area of expertise and I am quite willing to accept what you say but have we not reached a point when there are sufficient interconnectors to make it relatively unimportant where the gas is burned? Of course storage makes us less vulnerable to peaks in pricing but we should be able to get energy should we not?
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There are trains passing through the station - local services.
Yesterday, trains from the south were stopping at Carlisle and turning back - this morning it seems they are going as far as Motherwell and presumably buses are being provided for the rest of the journey.
I think it's possible to get to Queen Street from Edinburgh and that line could be used to get more services into Glasgow - from memory (a walk on a cold Monday morning in the 1990s) it's not a long walk from Central to Queen Street (does it involve Buchanan Street?). From the latter you can get services to places like Oban and Fort William.
It’s a 5 minute walk, issue is you can’t run that many more trains to Edinburgh on the Carlisle tracks - from memory it’s a single track at some points (may be wrong it’s difficult to quickly check).
There are trains passing through the station - local services.
Yesterday, trains from the south were stopping at Carlisle and turning back - this morning it seems they are going as far as Motherwell and presumably buses are being provided for the rest of the journey.
I think it's possible to get to Queen Street from Edinburgh and that line could be used to get more services into Glasgow - from memory (a walk on a cold Monday morning in the 1990s) it's not a long walk from Central to Queen Street (does it involve Buchanan Street?). From the latter you can get services to places like Oban and Fort William.
It’s five blocks, around 500yds, between Queen St and Central stations. Yes Buchanan St is part of the route, you can walk up it or cross over it.
Yes QS trains go to Edinburgh, but not sure where the lines cross. @Sunil_Prasannan is your man for trains!
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
We do have other storage in the form of LNG landing tanks. The risk we would protect against with extremely expensive redundant storage is that the Dutch could break contract on - steal essentially - gas storage that we're not bothering to fill anyway. Not saying No, but we do have a lot of other necessary investments this would compete with.
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
At the next general election Reform voters will vote Reform, the Tories will win very few back while Farage leads Reform. Hence Tory MPs and councillors need anti Reform Labour and LD tactical votes
And as I’ve said no Labour or LD is going to tactically vote for them - for the reasons in my previous reply.
You can say all you want - it simply isn’t going to happen
Which is bullshit. Yougov had 45% of LDs and a third of Labour voters and even a quarter of Greens willing to tactically vote Conservative in a Conservative held seat to beat Reform
Notice one thing about all those figures it’s less than half of all voters.
Now let’s move on to the next issue - where are those seats where the Tories are the clear opposition to Reform, as there are only 116 such seats.
Basically the Tories are fighting to keep the seats they have at the next election
If the Tories held those seats and gained Chelsea and Fulham, Chipping Barnet and Welwyn Hatfield and a few other seats where Reform are weak from Labour that could give them more seats than Reform in a hung parliament. Though anti Reform voters will not only need to vote Labour, LD or Green but Tory in Tory held seats to stop a Reform majority
While the Greens have narrowly held on in the 2026 Baden-Württemberg state election, they did lose seats. The big stories are the big gains by the CDU and AfD and big losses by the SPD and FDP.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
This is your area of expertise and I am quite willing to accept what you say but have we not reached a point when there are sufficient interconnectors to make it relatively unimportant where the gas is burned? Of course storage makes us less vulnerable to peaks in pricing but we should be able to get energy should we not?
Not even close I'm afraid. Total import capacity is about 9.2 GW. Currently this morning we are using just under 40GW with 46% of that coming from gas generation.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
Surely everyone realised four years ago, when Russia turned overnight from a tolerable but necessary bad place to a pariah state, that a national strategic supply of fuel was a good idea?
There are trains passing through the station - local services.
Yesterday, trains from the south were stopping at Carlisle and turning back - this morning it seems they are going as far as Motherwell and presumably buses are being provided for the rest of the journey.
I think it's possible to get to Queen Street from Edinburgh and that line could be used to get more services into Glasgow - from memory (a walk on a cold Monday morning in the 1990s) it's not a long walk from Central to Queen Street (does it involve Buchanan Street?). From the latter you can get services to places like Oban and Fort William.
It’s five blocks, around 500yds, between Queen St and Central stations. Yes Buchanan St is part of the route, you can walk up it or cross over it.
Yes QS trains go to Edinburgh, but not sure where the lines cross. @Sunil_Prasannan is your man for trains!
QS is the main Glasgow departure point for Edinburgh trains.
Are there any instances in history of people rising up to overthrow tyrannical rulers (indigenous, not invaders) as a result of foreign intervention?
I think the Kurds in Iraq would meet that one in 1991. Though they were incited to rebellion by the USA in 1975.
In both cases they were aiui betrayed and abandoned to their fate, which might explain their hesitancy to take Trump at his word now.
(Pipes interests me, but I I'll make another comment.)
The Marsh Arabs in Southern Iraq similarly. Encouraged to rebel against Saddam back in 1991 and then abandoned when the West decided not to pursue regime change.
Should it be unusual for a party that has just lost power after 14 years not to have recovered in voters eyes yet - absolutely not - Tories by 1999 hadn't shifted brand perception at all from 1997, but they didn't have a challenger party to their right, there was time (13 years in fact!) 18:27 · 8 Mar 2026
I'd say the common comparison is that the Tories in both cases were ploughing their failed furrow from before the Election.
After 2000 it took Michael Howard for them to begin getting a grip.
I have yet to see any signs that Kemi Badenoch has confronted their past.
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
At the next general election Reform voters will vote Reform, the Tories will win very few back while Farage leads Reform. Hence Tory MPs and councillors need anti Reform Labour and LD tactical votes
And as I’ve said no Labour or LD is going to tactically vote for them - for the reasons in my previous reply.
You can say all you want - it simply isn’t going to happen
Which is bullshit. Yougov had 45% of LDs and a third of Labour voters and even a quarter of Greens willing to tactically vote Conservative in a Conservative held seat to beat Reform
Notice one thing about all those figures it’s less than half of all voters.
Now let’s move on to the next issue - where are those seats where the Tories are the clear opposition to Reform, as there are only 116 such seats.
Basically the Tories are fighting to keep the seats they have at the next election
If the Tories held those seats and gained Chelsea and Fulham, Chipping Barnet and Welwyn Hatfield and a few other seats where Reform are weak from Labour that could give them more seats than Reform in a hung parliament. Though anti Reform voters will not only need to vote Labour, LD or Green but Tory in Tory held seats to stop a Reform majority
Yes, and the further Kemi moves the Tories to the right, the harder it becomes for non-Tory voters like me to vote tactically for them. I really don't want to risk Reform taking my safe Conservative constituency and would consider voting Conservative to stop them, but for me Kemi has crossed a line with her abandonment of net zero. If Conservative policies are indistinguishable from those of Reform in the area that I care most about, what is the point of voting tactically for the Tories?
While the Greens have narrowly held on in the 2026 Baden-Württemberg state election, they did lose seats. The big stories are the big gains by the CDU and AfD and big losses by the SPD and FDP.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
We do have other storage in the form of LNG landing tanks. The risk we would protect against with extremely expensive redundant storage is that the Dutch could break contract on - steal essentially - gas storage that we're not bothering to fill anyway. Not saying No, but we do have a lot of other necessary investments this would compete with.
I would suggest that keeping the lights on and our homes warm is pretty high on the list of priorities for any Government. Though I accept that with Miliband in charge this is by no means a certainty.
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
More than half of Reform voters want to deport my kids. I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with this information, other than doing everything I can to ensure they don't get to run the country.
What does Reforms official policy say ?
I cannot see any party ever deporting children like yours. They’re as British as any of us
Had a scan at the weekend with a lovely ex-Philippino nurse. Now a British national and loves it here (been 14 years). Why would anyone want to deport such people?
Should it be unusual for a party that has just lost power after 14 years not to have recovered in voters eyes yet - absolutely not - Tories by 1999 hadn't shifted brand perception at all from 1997, but they didn't have a challenger party to their right, there was time (13 years in fact!) 18:27 · 8 Mar 2026
I'd say the common comparison is that the Tories in both cases were ploughing their failed furrow from before the Election.
After 2000 it took Michael Howard for them to begin getting a grip.
I have yet to see any signs that Kemi Badenoch has confronted their past.
Student fees? Whether it matters and what she'd do about it, I don't know, but it's a start.
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
More than half of Reform voters want to deport my kids. I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with this information, other than doing everything I can to ensure they don't get to run the country.
What does Reforms official policy say ?
I cannot see any party ever deporting children like yours. They’re as British as any of us
I'm watching erstwhile Trump supporters getting rounded up by ICE saying I didn't think he meant people like me, and I'm thinking being complacent about this stuff is not a good strategy. More than half of Reform supporters want to deport non-white Britons who were not born in the UK. That is two of my children, my brothers in law, my parents in law... There's that saying, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
We do have other storage in the form of LNG landing tanks. The risk we would protect against with extremely expensive redundant storage is that the Dutch could break contract on - steal essentially - gas storage that we're not bothering to fill anyway. Not saying No, but we do have a lot of other necessary investments this would compete with.
I would suggest that keeping the lights on and our homes warm is pretty high on the list of priorities for any Government. Though I accept that with Miliband in charge this is by no means a certainty.
Should be second highest priority behind only defence of the nation.
All governments should have plans in place for events outside their control, including where necessary keeping strategic stocks of important things we import. That lesson should have been learned six years ago, but the covid inquiry seems much more interested in who said what to whom at a No.10 ‘party’.
This week I found out the UAE has a strategic emergency food supply, good for 11m people for 4-6 months. Now it’s going to be mostly rice and flour, rather than the contents of my local Waitrose, but when you import 90% of your food it’s damn important. Supermarkets are totally fine here by the way, despite what the Western press might be saying. Cargo flights are still getting through, and alternative shipping routes exist.
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
More than half of Reform voters want to deport my kids. I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with this information, other than doing everything I can to ensure they don't get to run the country.
What does Reforms official policy say ?
I cannot see any party ever deporting children like yours. They’re as British as any of us
I'm watching erstwhile Trump supporters getting rounded up by ICE saying I didn't think he meant people like me, and I'm thinking being complacent about this stuff is not a good strategy. More than half of Reform supporters want to deport non-white Britons who were not born in the UK. That is two of my children, my brothers in law, my parents in law... There's that saying, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Its good not to be complacent, but I honestly believe that the UK is not the USA and there are enough decent people to never allow a Reform government to happen. I think they may well have peaked. No doubt there will still be paroxysms of joy for them (May's locals) but I cannot believe that they will get in power.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
Surely everyone realised four years ago, when Russia turned overnight from a tolerable but necessary bad place to a pariah state, that a national strategic supply of fuel was a good idea?
It’s like spending on the military - the problem is too big, so the people raising the problem become the problem.
Herman Kahn noted this when he suggested a Swiss style bomb shelter rule for housing.
Example - we don’t have the right formations for storage (mostly) in the UK.
So do a deal with the Dutch. If you are worried about them playing games, setup the storage so there is no connection to the Dutch gas network.
We’d just buy/rent some of their subsurface at a fixed rate. Pipeline to the UK.
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
More than half of Reform voters want to deport my kids. I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with this information, other than doing everything I can to ensure they don't get to run the country.
What does Reforms official policy say ?
I cannot see any party ever deporting children like yours. They’re as British as any of us
Had a scan at the weekend with a lovely ex-Philippino nurse. Now a British national and loves it here (been 14 years). Why would anyone want to deport such people?
I’ve always wondered if there’s any nurses left in the Philippines? About 80% of nurses in the sandpit are from there, as well as many more in the UK and US.
They must train twice as many as they actually need domestically!
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
More than half of Reform voters want to deport my kids. I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with this information, other than doing everything I can to ensure they don't get to run the country.
What does Reforms official policy say ?
I cannot see any party ever deporting children like yours. They’re as British as any of us
Had a scan at the weekend with a lovely ex-Philippino nurse. Now a British national and loves it here (been 14 years). Why would anyone want to deport such people?
I’ve always wondered if there’s any nurses left in the Philippines? About 80% of nurses in the sandpit are from there, as well as many more in the UK and US.
They must train twice as many as they actually need domestically!
They do.
Hence my suggestion to use their training capacity to train U.K. doctors and nurses, while we try to increase training capacity here.
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
More than half of Reform voters want to deport my kids. I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with this information, other than doing everything I can to ensure they don't get to run the country.
What does Reforms official policy say ?
I cannot see any party ever deporting children like yours. They’re as British as any of us
I'm watching erstwhile Trump supporters getting rounded up by ICE saying I didn't think he meant people like me, and I'm thinking being complacent about this stuff is not a good strategy. More than half of Reform supporters want to deport non-white Britons who were not born in the UK. That is two of my children, my brothers in law, my parents in law... There's that saying, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Its good not to be complacent, but I honestly believe that the UK is not the USA and there are enough decent people to never allow a Reform government to happen. I think they may well have peaked. No doubt there will still be paroxysms of joy for them (May's locals) but I cannot believe that they will get in power.
I agree with you but I will never be complacent as the safety of my children is on the line.
The numbers of Section 21 Evictions they quote as 'peak before the act comes in' seems low - peaking 3,000 per quarter in the graph.
It looks relatively modest.
It probably makes sense for LLs to move into short term lets, as an alternative to second homes that are left empty - that will concentrate use of the housing stock.
Should it be unusual for a party that has just lost power after 14 years not to have recovered in voters eyes yet - absolutely not - Tories by 1999 hadn't shifted brand perception at all from 1997, but they didn't have a challenger party to their right, there was time (13 years in fact!) 18:27 · 8 Mar 2026
I'd say the common comparison is that the Tories in both cases were ploughing their failed furrow from before the Election.
After 2000 it took Michael Howard for them to begin getting a grip.
I have yet to see any signs that Kemi Badenoch has confronted their past.
Until a zeitgeist event happens the Tories are held in pincers. This is made even more obvious by the fact they have not advanced despite the government being unpopular, bad at communicating and times are tough.
The trap is simple: they hold few seats, every seat they need to win is strongly contested, every seat they hold is strongly contested, they don't have a monopoly on the Right of Centre ground, the One Nation party has vanished, they aren't, and can't be, trusted not to sustain Reform in government, they don't have a compelling new set of visions for the country, they have a record of failure, they are tied to a Brexit most don't want and to a USA that is now hated. And last week Kemi gave an unstatesmanlike display of not being a great LOTO in time of war.
Apart from that my former party is doing fine. And the nearest thing (though not near enough) to the old centre ground remains the highly flawed and not very good Labour party.
As a result I think the Left of Centre will win 325+ seats in 2029, and Labour will have a plurality of those seats.
(And the best way of looking at the contest for next government at this moment is not party by party but as 'Left of Centre' v 'Right of Centre' - where in % polling terms they are very level.)
There are trains passing through the station - local services.
Yesterday, trains from the south were stopping at Carlisle and turning back - this morning it seems they are going as far as Motherwell and presumably buses are being provided for the rest of the journey.
I think it's possible to get to Queen Street from Edinburgh and that line could be used to get more services into Glasgow - from memory (a walk on a cold Monday morning in the 1990s) it's not a long walk from Central to Queen Street (does it involve Buchanan Street?). From the latter you can get services to places like Oban and Fort William.
It’s five blocks, around 500yds, between Queen St and Central stations. Yes Buchanan St is part of the route, you can walk up it or cross over it.
Yes QS trains go to Edinburgh, but not sure where the lines cross. @Sunil_Prasannan is your man for trains!
QS is the main Glasgow departure point for Edinburgh trains.
Thoigh there are FOUR different routes across the Central Belt! Some from Central.
Should it be unusual for a party that has just lost power after 14 years not to have recovered in voters eyes yet - absolutely not - Tories by 1999 hadn't shifted brand perception at all from 1997, but they didn't have a challenger party to their right, there was time (13 years in fact!) 18:27 · 8 Mar 2026
I'd say the common comparison is that the Tories in both cases were ploughing their failed furrow from before the Election.
After 2000 it took Michael Howard for them to begin getting a grip.
I have yet to see any signs that Kemi Badenoch has confronted their past.
In retrospect, Hague faced an impossible task trying to dent the Labour majority in 2001 yet in some areas the Conservatives actually went further back from 1997 which had seemed the nadir.
Arguably, the lower turnout saved the Conservatives from an even worse beating - I believe there was some polling of non voters which showed them breaking 2:1 to Labour over the Conservatives.
It's been argued elsewhere Howard should have led after 1997 and Hague would have been the choice post IDS - I'm not sure and whether it would have made enough difference to, for example, reduce Blair's third majority to 20 rather than 60 I don't know.
On current polling, Badenoch's Conservatives will go backwards in many areas from 2024 - their saving grace will be they will fall slower and less far than Labour and rather as with the SNP last year, the further and deeper fall of their main opponents may help them win and hold more seats than the voting shares might suggest.
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
More than half of Reform voters want to deport my kids. I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with this information, other than doing everything I can to ensure they don't get to run the country.
What does Reforms official policy say ?
I cannot see any party ever deporting children like yours. They’re as British as any of us
Had a scan at the weekend with a lovely ex-Philippino nurse. Now a British national and loves it here (been 14 years). Why would anyone want to deport such people?
I’ve always wondered if there’s any nurses left in the Philippines? About 80% of nurses in the sandpit are from there, as well as many more in the UK and US.
They must train twice as many as they actually need domestically!
They do.
Hence my suggestion to use their training capacity to train U.K. doctors and nurses, while we try to increase training capacity here.
Yes, I’ve long had the idea of setting up an “NHS teaching hospital” in somewhere like Manila or Mumbai.
You’d need a few retireds to go there on a secondment to monitor standards, but you could train to UK qualifications both locals and Brits, with transfer to NHS jobs in the UK available when qualified.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
We do have other storage in the form of LNG landing tanks. The risk we would protect against with extremely expensive redundant storage is that the Dutch could break contract on - steal essentially - gas storage that we're not bothering to fill anyway. Not saying No, but we do have a lot of other necessary investments this would compete with.
I would suggest that keeping the lights on and our homes warm is pretty high on the list of priorities for any Government. Though I accept that with Miliband in charge this is by no means a certainty.
The two essentials for any Government are a) the distribution of food and water and b) the administration of law. Everything else, for a longer or shorter period, isn't vital.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
We do have other storage in the form of LNG landing tanks. The risk we would protect against with extremely expensive redundant storage is that the Dutch could break contract on - steal essentially - gas storage that we're not bothering to fill anyway. Not saying No, but we do have a lot of other necessary investments this would compete with.
I would suggest that keeping the lights on and our homes warm is pretty high on the list of priorities for any Government. Though I accept that with Miliband in charge this is by no means a certainty.
The two essentials for any Government are a) the distribution of food and water and b) the administration of law. Everything else, for a longer or shorter period, isn't vital.
Both of those would be very much at risk if we had serious cuts in our power supply.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
We do have other storage in the form of LNG landing tanks. The risk we would protect against with extremely expensive redundant storage is that the Dutch could break contract on - steal essentially - gas storage that we're not bothering to fill anyway. Not saying No, but we do have a lot of other necessary investments this would compete with.
I would suggest that keeping the lights on and our homes warm is pretty high on the list of priorities for any Government. Though I accept that with Miliband in charge this is by no means a certainty.
The two essentials for any Government are a) the distribution of food and water and b) the administration of law. Everything else, for a longer or shorter period, isn't vital.
Both of those would be very much at risk if we had serious cuts in our power supply.
The Buncefield fire 20 years ago left the food distribution network perilously close to collapse.
Should it be unusual for a party that has just lost power after 14 years not to have recovered in voters eyes yet - absolutely not - Tories by 1999 hadn't shifted brand perception at all from 1997, but they didn't have a challenger party to their right, there was time (13 years in fact!) 18:27 · 8 Mar 2026
I'd say the common comparison is that the Tories in both cases were ploughing their failed furrow from before the Election.
After 2000 it took Michael Howard for them to begin getting a grip.
I have yet to see any signs that Kemi Badenoch has confronted their past.
In retrospect, Hague faced an impossible task trying to dent the Labour majority in 2001 yet in some areas the Conservatives actually went further back from 1997 which had seemed the nadir.
Arguably, the lower turnout saved the Conservatives from an even worse beating - I believe there was some polling of non voters which showed them breaking 2:1 to Labour over the Conservatives.
It's been argued elsewhere Howard should have led after 1997 and Hague would have been the choice post IDS - I'm not sure and whether it would have made enough difference to, for example, reduce Blair's third majority to 20 rather than 60 I don't know.
On current polling, Badenoch's Conservatives will go backwards in many areas from 2024 - their saving grace will be they will fall slower and less far than Labour and rather as with the SNP last year, the further and deeper fall of their main opponents may help them win and hold more seats than the voting shares might suggest.
Morning all. A question re the Tories is whether we will see any efficiency come back into their vote. Part of the 2024 disaster was the proportionate nature of the collapse. Will we see some areas hold up and come back a little? They might find short term they are better off than now on, say, 21% but the loss is all the progress in the red wall 2010 to 2019 utterly disintegrating . Longer term trying to get a majority it would be a catastrophe of course.
All part of the reason ill be keeping a close eye on Norfolk/Suffolk - is the 2024 vote holding up here?
Apple will reportedly launch a 'MacBook Ultra' this year featuring an OLED display, touchscreen, and a higher price
An ultra luxury iPhone Ultra and now a Macbook Ultra, going to be an expensive year in TSE household.
I managed to spec a new BM Pro on the UK Apple Store up to £7,448.
Not sure what an even more expensive one looks like.
I suspect 128gb of memory will be essential for Devs going forward given how AI works - I think the spec for the 14” Mb I would get is £5500 ish - although as I bought a Studio earlier this year I can’t justify it just yet
Interesting video from HI Sutton ("Covert Shores") looking at how Iran could block the Persian Gulf. It was made at the time of the 12-day war last year.
He discounts the navy, and focuses on mines, missiles, fast boats and submarines. 12 minutes.
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
At the next general election Reform voters will vote Reform, the Tories will win very few back while Farage leads Reform. Hence Tory MPs and councillors need anti Reform Labour and LD tactical votes
And as I’ve said no Labour or LD is going to tactically vote for them - for the reasons in my previous reply.
You can say all you want - it simply isn’t going to happen
Which is bullshit. Yougov had 45% of LDs and a third of Labour voters and even a quarter of Greens willing to tactically vote Conservative in a Conservative held seat to beat Reform
Notice one thing about all those figures it’s less than half of all voters.
Now let’s move on to the next issue - where are those seats where the Tories are the clear opposition to Reform, as there are only 116 such seats.
Basically the Tories are fighting to keep the seats they have at the next election
If the Tories held those seats and gained Chelsea and Fulham, Chipping Barnet and Welwyn Hatfield and a few other seats where Reform are weak from Labour that could give them more seats than Reform in a hung parliament. Though anti Reform voters will not only need to vote Labour, LD or Green but Tory in Tory held seats to stop a Reform majority
Yes, and the further Kemi moves the Tories to the right, the harder it becomes for non-Tory voters like me to vote tactically for them. I really don't want to risk Reform taking my safe Conservative constituency and would consider voting Conservative to stop them, but for me Kemi has crossed a line with her abandonment of net zero. If Conservative policies are indistinguishable from those of Reform in the area that I care most about, what is the point of voting tactically for the Tories?
Badenoch (and Davey but not to the same extent) will have to answer the key question before the next election. Would a Conservative Party led by her offer any kind of support (from Confidence & Supply upwards) to a minority Reform Government?
How that question is answered will be critical - IF she offers Reform any kind of support, she will lose the anti-Reform tactical vote instantly. IF she declines to offer any kind of support to Reform, the next question would be what kind of support (if any) would she offer to a Labour-LD minority Government ?
Now, the Conservatives COULD opt out and simply abstain on a minority Reform Government King's Speech OR a minority Labour-LD Government King's Speech but that would look weak and indecisive and effectively empower either or both depending on the numbers.
Equidistance (as the LDs found out in 2010) only gets you so far. The worst thing (and I wouldn't put it past Badenoch but I hope I'm wrong) would be to same one thing before the election and do something differemt after.
Apple will reportedly launch a 'MacBook Ultra' this year featuring an OLED display, touchscreen, and a higher price
An ultra luxury iPhone Ultra and now a Macbook Ultra, going to be an expensive year in TSE household.
I managed to spec a new BM Pro on the UK Apple Store up to £7,448.
Not sure what an even more expensive one looks like.
I suspect 128gb of memory will be essential for Devs going forward given how AI works - I think the spec for the 14” Mb I would get is £5500 ish - although as I bought a Studio earlier this year I can’t justify it just yet
The MB Pro Max top model has 48GB RAM as standard, upgrade to 128GB costs £1,000 extra.
I managed to spec a Studio up to £12,299. That one has 256GB.
I get why bookies will never have markets based on mortality, but if they did it would be interesting to have a spread bet market on how long he is in office for.
One imagines it will be either a very short, or very long time.
I think the Tory problem is simple. If you want a Reform government you vote Reform. If you don't, you vote for the party that can beat Reform in your seat AND certainly won't help them govern. It doesn't matter what they say, people will believe the Tories might sustain a Reform government.
If (like me) you want an old fashioned One Nation Tory government, tough.
The Tory dilemma may be insoluble for now.
The problem is if the Tories rule out supporting Reform the follow up questions are likely to result in the Tories calling Reform out as the racists they are.
And you can’t call your potential voters racist.
At the next general election Reform voters will vote Reform, the Tories will win very few back while Farage leads Reform. Hence Tory MPs and councillors need anti Reform Labour and LD tactical votes
And as I’ve said no Labour or LD is going to tactically vote for them - for the reasons in my previous reply.
You can say all you want - it simply isn’t going to happen
Which is bullshit. Yougov had 45% of LDs and a third of Labour voters and even a quarter of Greens willing to tactically vote Conservative in a Conservative held seat to beat Reform
Notice one thing about all those figures it’s less than half of all voters.
Now let’s move on to the next issue - where are those seats where the Tories are the clear opposition to Reform, as there are only 116 such seats.
Basically the Tories are fighting to keep the seats they have at the next election
If the Tories held those seats and gained Chelsea and Fulham, Chipping Barnet and Welwyn Hatfield and a few other seats where Reform are weak from Labour that could give them more seats than Reform in a hung parliament. Though anti Reform voters will not only need to vote Labour, LD or Green but Tory in Tory held seats to stop a Reform majority
Yes, and the further Kemi moves the Tories to the right, the harder it becomes for non-Tory voters like me to vote tactically for them. I really don't want to risk Reform taking my safe Conservative constituency and would consider voting Conservative to stop them, but for me Kemi has crossed a line with her abandonment of net zero. If Conservative policies are indistinguishable from those of Reform in the area that I care most about, what is the point of voting tactically for the Tories?
Badenoch (and Davey but not to the same extent) will have to answer the key question before the next election. Would a Conservative Party led by her offer any kind of support (from Confidence & Supply upwards) to a minority Reform Government?
How that question is answered will be critical - IF she offers Reform any kind of support, she will lose the anti-Reform tactical vote instantly. IF she declines to offer any kind of support to Reform, the next question would be what kind of support (if any) would she offer to a Labour-LD minority Government ?
Now, the Conservatives COULD opt out and simply abstain on a minority Reform Government King's Speech OR a minority Labour-LD Government King's Speech but that would look weak and indecisive and effectively empower either or both depending on the numbers.
Equidistance (as the LDs found out in 2010) only gets you so far. The worst thing (and I wouldn't put it past Badenoch but I hope I'm wrong) would be to same one thing before the election and do something differemt after.
There is not a snowball's chance in hell of that question being answered in any other way than that they are seeking to win and seek a majority on their own terms.
Whether it is plausible or not is moot, they will never admit to being a third party before the votes are tallied.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
This is particularly true because the UK power generators tend to rely on spot LNG cargoes.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
We do have other storage in the form of LNG landing tanks. The risk we would protect against with extremely expensive redundant storage is that the Dutch could break contract on - steal essentially - gas storage that we're not bothering to fill anyway. Not saying No, but we do have a lot of other necessary investments this would compete with.
I would suggest that keeping the lights on and our homes warm is pretty high on the list of priorities for any Government. Though I accept that with Miliband in charge this is by no means a certainty.
Well yes, but if they aren't using capacity they do have available in the Netherlands, incurring a very substantial capital cost for other storage again for the off chance the Dutch steal the gas they are not storing makes the investment case rather harder when it would displace other investments addressing more pressing concerns.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
We do have other storage in the form of LNG landing tanks. The risk we would protect against with extremely expensive redundant storage is that the Dutch could break contract on - steal essentially - gas storage that we're not bothering to fill anyway. Not saying No, but we do have a lot of other necessary investments this would compete with.
I would suggest that keeping the lights on and our homes warm is pretty high on the list of priorities for any Government. Though I accept that with Miliband in charge this is by no means a certainty.
Well yes, but if they aren't using capacity they do have available in the Netherlands, incurring a very substantial capital cost for other storage again for the off chance the Dutch steal the gas they are not storing makes the investment case rather harder when it would displace other investments addressing more pressing concerns.
There are two good solutions and storage is only one of them.
If we were generating sufficient throughput to cover our needs, and were a net exporter, then we would not need storage.
The problem is we deliberately are not doing either.
Rising fuel prices are great for the chancellor all that tax ontop of tax.
This crisis does afford an opportunity to the government to re-set fuel duty structures.
Pump prices have been historically low for some time, after repeated freezes of duty and that “temporary” 5p cut that never got reversed. From being some of the highest in Europe we are now among the lowest. Until this week they were the same in 2026 as in 2013, and that’s not even adjusting for inflation.
But raising fuel duty is always politically toxic, even if it’s just reversing a cut. It’s like abandoning the triple lock. However, a crisis means the possibility of a quid pro quo: if the government introduces an automatic stabilisation mechanism that essentially dulls volatility, easing peaks in times of high prices and moderating troughs, then if they set the range right they could help motorists now while booking a significant windfall down the line if, as seems likely, we enter another period of low prices.
Same logic has been discussed for North Sea ring fence taxation too, which would increase predictability and avoid situations like the current one (well, until Trump’s adventure) where the numbers don’t add up for investment.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
The massive gas storage facility which Conservative governments decided wasn't worth the cost of subsidising would have probably been the most cost effective mitigation.
As a I understand it the North Sea would make an excellent gas storage facility, if we hadn't drilled it so extensively. That's why Rough is unusual for being a decent UK option, neglected until 2022 and the Ukraine invasion.
Richard_Tyndall is online however so he can put me straight.
The problem is not how much we have drilled. Indeed drilling/producing a field is a pre-requisite to reduce the existing volumes/pressures in the formation so you can then use it to store gas. And the cement we use to abandon wells is, by necessity, stronger than the surrounding formations. This is my job these days, abandoning hundreds of wells across the North Sea and Denmark. As long as it is done properly then it has no impact on the storage capabilities.
The problem with the gas storage is that continualy pumping gas into and out of the formation weakens it over time. Rough has no where near the capacity it had at the start of its storage life because of this. And suprisingly the number of fields suitable for such storage are vanishingly small. I am not aware currently of any other serious contenders for gas storage in the UK sector - although some of those being looked at for CCS might be suitable. Germany generally uses salt as the storage formation for its gas reserves which is much more stable but in the North Sea the Zechstein Salts are much deeper which causes a lot of additional problems as the pressures are higher and salt under pressure acts like a fluid and flows.
I am sure there are suitable targets but successive governments over the last 40 years have not really invested in looking for or apppraising them.
The other thing is the Netherlands has oodles of gas storage capacity suitable for the purpose, so we don't need old North Sea fields, unless we start getting worried about the Dutch
Its not so much being worried about the Dutch. More that if things get really tight then there is no gaurantee that gas will head our way. For a start they have their own domestic needs (they currently have just enough stored for their needs) and after that we are simply another customer along with the whole of the rest of Europe. Bear in mind the Norwegians were planning on cutting back supplies to the UK last year as well.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
We do have other storage in the form of LNG landing tanks. The risk we would protect against with extremely expensive redundant storage is that the Dutch could break contract on - steal essentially - gas storage that we're not bothering to fill anyway. Not saying No, but we do have a lot of other necessary investments this would compete with.
I would suggest that keeping the lights on and our homes warm is pretty high on the list of priorities for any Government. Though I accept that with Miliband in charge this is by no means a certainty.
Well yes, but if they aren't using capacity they do have available in the Netherlands, incurring a very substantial capital cost for other storage again for the off chance the Dutch steal the gas they are not storing makes the investment case rather harder when it would displace other investments addressing more pressing concerns.
As RCS has intimated, that isn't the way the market works. Moreover total Dutch storage capacity, whilst far greater than the UKs, is only just sufficient to meet Dutch domestic needs. Theysimply don't have the capacity to provide anywhere near the amount of gas required by the UK in addition to their own demands and the rest of Europe. Dutch storage capacity is about 14bcm. Their own demand is about 30bcm/year and they use about 11bcm of their own storage each winter.
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
I am in favour of stocking, but not using, coal in dual fuel gas powered electricity station
We should continue to extract from the North Sea although it's marginal given the exhaustion of supply. In principle the difference is the thin red line on this chart, although it may be more than that
Why would we buy and stock it if never going to use it.
Strategic reserve to be used only in times of stress. I don't want coal as a regular fuel.
Having looked into this a bit more, I'm not sure this does make sense and we might be better investing in more redundant renewables and energy storage. Often there just aren't any quick and cheap fixes.
Apple will reportedly launch a 'MacBook Ultra' this year featuring an OLED display, touchscreen, and a higher price
An ultra luxury iPhone Ultra and now a Macbook Ultra, going to be an expensive year in TSE household.
I managed to spec a new BM Pro on the UK Apple Store up to £7,448.
Not sure what an even more expensive one looks like.
I suspect 128gb of memory will be essential for Devs going forward given how AI works - I think the spec for the 14” Mb I would get is £5500 ish - although as I bought a Studio earlier this year I can’t justify it just yet
The MB Pro Max top model has 48GB RAM as standard, upgrade to 128GB costs £1,000 extra.
I managed to spec a Studio up to £12,299. That one has 256GB.
Only because the entire run of 512gb M3 Ultras have been sold far earlier than Apple planned
Surely this latest war is just more evidence we need to stop importing energy which surely means more renewables? How can anyone disagree.
There are some alternatives. We could have massive strategic reserves of gas and oil that the government can release in an emergency (see Japan). We could nationalise and massively subsidise O&G production to isolate the industry from global energy prices and boost domestic production. Coal in theory could work because it's easy to store, we'd just need to import lots of it and, again, nationalise it in preperation for a period like this.
These aren't cost-free options though.
I am in favour of stocking, but not using, coal in dual fuel gas powered electricity station
We should continue to extract from the North Sea although it's marginal given the exhaustion of supply. In principle the difference is the thin red line on this chart, although it may be more than that
Why would we buy and stock it if never going to use it.
Strategic reserve to be used only in times of stress. I don't want coal as a regular fuel.
Having looked into this a bit more, I'm not sure this does make sense and we might be better investing in more redundant renewables and energy storage. Often there just aren't any quick and cheap fixes.
Coal was always useful for base load. We have wind and solar now.
Has anyone used the governments new petrol price finder website? Perhaps it also has a code for "no fuel available..."
Some sites have new functionality...
Is this going to be like that incident from a few years ago, when a couple of stations in a specific area ran out of petrol, but Radio 5 Live could talk about nothing else for six hours, treating it as a national emergency and setting off panic buying among all the road warriors who spend their days listening to the radio.
..It's crazy that this worked. The uploaded fly has 91% behavior accuracy with only 4 things:
1. the graph of connections 2. the weights as determined by the number of synapses connecting those neurons 3. a map of excitatory and inhibitory neurons 4. leaky-integrate-and-fire
This shows how much information is captured by the architecture itself, rather than the neuron model, which is great for the feasibility of full emulation..
Rising fuel prices are great for the chancellor all that tax ontop of tax.
This crisis does afford an opportunity to the government to re-set fuel duty structures.
Pump prices have been historically low for some time, after repeated freezes of duty and that “temporary” 5p cut that never got reversed. From being some of the highest in Europe we are now among the lowest. Until this week they were the same in 2026 as in 2013, and that’s not even adjusting for inflation.
But raising fuel duty is always politically toxic, even if it’s just reversing a cut. It’s like abandoning the triple lock. However, a crisis means the possibility of a quid pro quo: if the government introduces an automatic stabilisation mechanism that essentially dulls volatility, easing peaks in times of high prices and moderating troughs, then if they set the range right they could help motorists now while booking a significant windfall down the line if, as seems likely, we enter another period of low prices.
Same logic has been discussed for North Sea ring fence taxation too, which would increase predictability and avoid situations like the current one (well, until Trump’s adventure) where the numbers don’t add up for investment.
Weirdly fuel duty is a price stabiliser because it's fixed - in proportionate terms, tax is actually going to fall on fuel over the next few weeks (months, years?).
Comments
They give the appearance of increasing energy security, when mostly they just add to everyone's electricity cost.
In both cases they were aiui betrayed and abandoned to their fate, which might explain their hesitancy to take Trump at his word now.
(Pipes interests me, but I I'll make another comment.)
Yesterday, trains from the south were stopping at Carlisle and turning back - this morning it seems they are going as far as Motherwell and presumably buses are being provided for the rest of the journey.
I think it's possible to get to Queen Street from Edinburgh and that line could be used to get more services into Glasgow - from memory (a walk on a cold Monday morning in the 1990s) it's not a long walk from Central to Queen Street (does it involve Buchanan Street?). From the latter you can get services to places like Oban and Fort William.
Anyway, I thought we had some sort of naval treaty with the French specifically for this sort of situation?
Did deep wage slaves
I cannot see any party ever deporting children like yours. They’re as British as any of us
I'm not entirely convinced that "we have a diversified pipeline network instead" will be a sufficient alternative.
My expectation is that Iran will keep pressure on the Staits of Hormuz to maintain pressure, and either a ceasefire of some sort will be reached will arrangements that might include a new regime or a payment to Trump, or Trump may do a variety of TACO.
Voting to keep them out of government is the best solution.
The only way to have any form of security is to have our own storage capacity.
IANAE on the Middle East (should that stop me commenting here?) but I have the strong impression that the Kurds have been very badly treated over the past century, BUT they do seem to feature almost as much as Albanians when dodgy dealings are discussed.
King William Court is an outstanding development combining Studios, 1 & 2 bedroom contemporary apartments, featuring spacious interiors designed to make the most of light, space and clean lines wherever you turn located right in the heart of Chelmsford City Centre.
Truly giving the feel of luxurious living inside these beautifully finished homes that are perfect for first time buyers, down sizers, professionals and families looking to escape the rush of The City but with the benefits of amazing transport links into London.
Each apartment has been carefully designed with well-planned living areas, beautiful kitchens, modern bathrooms and stylish finishes built with superior craftsmanship. All with comfortably-proportioned bedrooms and elegantly-appointed main bathroom suites and en-suites to the 2 bedroom apartments. A number of selected apartments also come with home office space and some with balconies or terraces.
https://www.haart.co.uk/land-new-homes/king-william-court/
Yes QS trains go to Edinburgh, but not sure where the lines cross. @Sunil_Prasannan is your man for trains!
🚨 WATCH: Green MP Hannah Spencer is forced into a police car after anti-trans protesters fight in front of her in Manchester
https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/2030693982846484777?s=20
Should it be unusual for a party that has just lost power after 14 years not to have recovered in voters eyes yet - absolutely not - Tories by 1999 hadn't shifted brand perception at all from 1997, but they didn't have a challenger party to their right, there was time (13 years in fact!)
18:27 · 8 Mar 2026
I'd say the common comparison is that the Tories in both cases were ploughing their failed furrow from before the Election.
After 2000 it took Michael Howard for them to begin getting a grip.
I have yet to see any signs that Kemi Badenoch has confronted their past.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi50XIWHFJE
There's that saying, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
All governments should have plans in place for events outside their control, including where necessary keeping strategic stocks of important things we import. That lesson should have been learned six years ago, but the covid inquiry seems much more interested in who said what to whom at a No.10 ‘party’.
This week I found out the UAE has a strategic emergency food supply, good for 11m people for 4-6 months. Now it’s going to be mostly rice and flour, rather than the contents of my local Waitrose, but when you import 90% of your food it’s damn important. Supermarkets are totally fine here by the way, despite what the Western press might be saying. Cargo flights are still getting through, and alternative shipping routes exist.
Herman Kahn noted this when he suggested a Swiss style bomb shelter rule for housing.
Example - we don’t have the right formations for storage (mostly) in the UK.
So do a deal with the Dutch. If you are worried about them playing games, setup the storage so there is no connection to the Dutch gas network.
We’d just buy/rent some of their subsurface at a fixed rate. Pipeline to the UK.
They must train twice as many as they actually need domestically!
Hence my suggestion to use their training capacity to train U.K. doctors and nurses, while we try to increase training capacity here.
It looks relatively modest.
It probably makes sense for LLs to move into short term lets, as an alternative to second homes that are left empty - that will concentrate use of the housing stock.
An ultra luxury iPhone Ultra and now a Macbook Ultra, going to be an expensive year in TSE household.
The trap is simple: they hold few seats, every seat they need to win is strongly contested, every seat they hold is strongly contested, they don't have a monopoly on the Right of Centre ground, the One Nation party has vanished, they aren't, and can't be, trusted not to sustain Reform in government, they don't have a compelling new set of visions for the country, they have a record of failure, they are tied to a Brexit most don't want and to a USA that is now hated. And last week Kemi gave an unstatesmanlike display of not being a great LOTO in time of war.
Apart from that my former party is doing fine. And the nearest thing (though not near enough) to the old centre ground remains the highly flawed and not very good Labour party.
As a result I think the Left of Centre will win 325+ seats in 2029, and Labour will have a plurality of those seats.
(And the best way of looking at the contest for next government at this moment is not party by party but as 'Left of Centre' v 'Right of Centre' - where in % polling terms they are very level.)
Arguably, the lower turnout saved the Conservatives from an even worse beating - I believe there was some polling of non voters which showed them breaking 2:1 to Labour over the Conservatives.
It's been argued elsewhere Howard should have led after 1997 and Hague would have been the choice post IDS - I'm not sure and whether it would have made enough difference to, for example, reduce Blair's third majority to 20 rather than 60 I don't know.
On current polling, Badenoch's Conservatives will go backwards in many areas from 2024 - their saving grace will be they will fall slower and less far than Labour and rather as with the SNP last year, the further and deeper fall of their main opponents may help them win and hold more seats than the voting shares might suggest.
You’d need a few retireds to go there on a secondment to monitor standards, but you could train to UK qualifications both locals and Brits, with transfer to NHS jobs in the UK available when qualified.
If nothing else, the screen gets covered in fingerprints and always needs cleaning.
I have an iPad if I need a touch screen for something.
Not sure what an even more expensive one looks like.
https://bsky.app/profile/lukeoneil47.bsky.social/post/3mglvmq2fvc2y
A question re the Tories is whether we will see any efficiency come back into their vote. Part of the 2024 disaster was the proportionate nature of the collapse. Will we see some areas hold up and come back a little?
They might find short term they are better off than now on, say, 21% but the loss is all the progress in the red wall 2010 to 2019 utterly disintegrating .
Longer term trying to get a majority it would be a catastrophe of course.
All part of the reason ill be keeping a close eye on Norfolk/Suffolk - is the 2024 vote holding up here?
It also can’t cope with 2 27” screens with the fan whirring from the moment I switch it on at home
He discounts the navy, and focuses on mines, missiles, fast boats and submarines. 12 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTly35T4fz0
How that question is answered will be critical - IF she offers Reform any kind of support, she will lose the anti-Reform tactical vote instantly. IF she declines to offer any kind of support to Reform, the next question would be what kind of support (if any) would she offer to a Labour-LD minority Government ?
Now, the Conservatives COULD opt out and simply abstain on a minority Reform Government King's Speech OR a minority Labour-LD Government King's Speech but that would look weak and indecisive and effectively empower either or both depending on the numbers.
Equidistance (as the LDs found out in 2010) only gets you so far. The worst thing (and I wouldn't put it past Badenoch but I hope I'm wrong) would be to same one thing before the election and do something differemt after.
I managed to spec a Studio up to £12,299. That one has 256GB.
Tax rates should be cut.
I get why bookies will never have markets based on mortality, but if they did it would be interesting to have a spread bet market on how long he is in office for.
One imagines it will be either a very short, or very long time.
Whether it is plausible or not is moot, they will never admit to being a third party before the votes are tallied.
Tax the Crude Oil, then tax the Fuel, then add VAT on top.
If we were generating sufficient throughput to cover our needs, and were a net exporter, then we would not need storage.
The problem is we deliberately are not doing either.
It’ll probably be going up a bit in the next couple of weeks though! Thankfully I’m mostly working from home so won’t need to buy much of it!
Pump prices have been historically low for some time, after repeated freezes of duty and that “temporary” 5p cut that never got reversed. From being some of the highest in Europe we are now among the lowest. Until this week they were the same in 2026 as in 2013, and that’s not even adjusting for inflation.
But raising fuel duty is always politically toxic, even if it’s just reversing a cut. It’s like abandoning the triple lock. However, a crisis means the possibility of a quid pro quo: if the government introduces an automatic stabilisation mechanism that essentially dulls volatility, easing peaks in times of high prices and moderating troughs, then if they set the range right they could help motorists now while booking a significant windfall down the line if, as seems likely, we enter another period of low prices.
Same logic has been discussed for North Sea ring fence taxation too, which would increase predictability and avoid situations like the current one (well, until Trump’s adventure) where the numbers don’t add up for investment.
Some sites have new functionality...
*smug*
https://x.com/michaelandregg/status/2030764512488677736
We've uploaded a fruit fly. We took the @FlyWireNews connectome of the fruit fly brain, applied a simple neuron model ( @Philip_Shiu Nature 2024) and used it to control a MuJoCo physics-simulated body, closing the loop from neural activation to action...
..It's crazy that this worked. The uploaded fly has 91% behavior accuracy with only 4 things:
1. the graph of connections
2. the weights as determined by the number of synapses connecting those neurons
3. a map of excitatory and inhibitory neurons
4. leaky-integrate-and-fire
This shows how much information is captured by the architecture itself, rather than the neuron model, which is great for the feasibility of full emulation..
Brave new world.
It's the VAT that is going exacerbate it.