Burnham Love and Weseltine Streeting – politicalbetting.com
Burnham Love and Weseltine Streeting – politicalbetting.com
Asked to rank eight potential leadership candidates in order of preference, Burnham and Starmer dominate first choicesBurnham: 47% first choiceStarmer: 31%Rayner: 8%Streeting: 4%Miliband: 3%Cooper: 3%Mahmood: 1%Carns: 0%yougov.com/en-gb/articl…
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Soz.
Unless it’s an Elvis reference.
SKS has left the building
When it comes to Labour members it is clear when they see Andy Burnham it is a case of ‘Lord Almighty, I feel my temperature risin’, mmm, Higher, higher, it’s burning through to my soul.’
Sabotage!
It was 5h30 after the Peterborough improvements in 1971-72.
It then drifted towards 5h40 (but remainded 5h3x) going up to 1977.
In 1977 with the line improvements for HSTs being implemented, the Flying Scotsman was reduced to ~5h27/5h28 with Deltics in their last year on the service.
The HSTs came in and reduced it to (IIRC) 4h47/4h50 in May 1978, then further 4h37/4h40 in May 1979.
4h35 in 1982, following linespeed improvements in Scotland
4h30 in 1985, following the Selby diversion
It drifted up a few mins after this before falling to an all-time best of 4h23 by 1988/9.
Under Diesel it was 6 hours 35 - the A4's weren't that fast.
All copied from https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/what-was-the-fastest-london-edinburgh-run-on-the-ecml.251091/
Are we going to have another thread derailed?
As I noted the other day
A reminder that Sir Keir Starmer is the greatest Leader of the Opposition since the end of WWII
https://www.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2026/05/15/a-reminder-that-sir-keir-starmer-is-the-greatest-leader-of-the-opposition-since-the-end-of-wwii/
If the polling stays like that (and when he wins the by-el it will likely improve), it would be irresponsible of Labour to subject us (and themselves) to a whole summer of infighting and instability, and should just get Burnham in place as soon as possible.
It's interesting that party membership has increasingly become more like a leadership fan club, rather than a long-term commitment to a party and its principles.
But that will cost billions so is way down the list of priorities - reality is it's going to be roughly 4 hours for ever more..
On social media, there is a long list of everything they can think of that gets pasted into every conversation.
And the content of the current one was written by Michael Gove personally. Having taught it, it's anything but as described. So if you think it is woke, either you have seriously misunderstood it or your daughter's teachers have found a remarkable way to manipulate it.
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
Remember that big row we had, a few days ago? When I had an epiphany on the train from Berwick to King’s X, and I realised the big problem with HS2 was the obsession with speed? As I said then, we don’t need the speed, Britain is tiny. We just need the extra capacity
Made a lot of PBers angry. Especially @Gallowgate
The Telegraph, today
“THE obsession with HS2’s speed is to blame for its failure, an official review has found.
“The project’s focus on achieving the “highest possible speeds” has led to spiralling costs that have crippled progress, according to Sir Stephen Lovegrove. The former national security adviser said the high-speed rail line had gone “disastrously wrong” because of the decision to “gold plate” the project and political pressure to “keep things moving”.”
https://digitaleditions.telegraph.co.uk/data/2437/reader/reader.html?social#!preferred/0/package/2437/pub/2437/page/14/article/NaN
I don’t need or expect grovelling apologies. I will, however, accept large financial gifts. DM me for my bank deets
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
The issue comes down to not employing a single set of people and then leaving them to deliver it..
Every so often I will make a random observation. “You don’t need speed”. “The necklace”. “There’s a pandemic coming.” “Antique coffee cans from about 1800-1830 are stupidly cheap and beautiful”. And a flunky next to me will slavishly write it down, send it to HMG, and save the nation BILLIONS
*with the POSSIBLE exception of what3words
What board is this? Her essay on Mice and Men (for example) included none of this, and she got a very high grade on the coursework element.
Imagine that you're a Head of English. You are going to be judged on the percentage of Year 11 pupils who get high grades in your subject. In Lit, the main tool you have at your disposal is the texts you choose to study, and the best choices are the ones where the analysis is easy to teach. So you get fairly superficial texts- Of Mice and Men, An Inspector Calls (spoiler: Inspector Goole is a ghost) and so on. Or Noughts and Crosses, which is about Issues and Young People and doesn't need too much background context. And then, one of the directions that superficiality can go is the worst sort of woke.
Here are the texts studied at GCSE at the famously unwoke Michaela School in Brent;
A Christmas Carol
Animal Farm
Macbeth
An Inspector Calls
Not all that woke, but certainly efficient to teach.
Moreover, we are entering the era of fast safe driverless cars and buses and, soon, driverless helidrones. The future for fixed track expensive trains is not entirely clear
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czx2plkvg45o
Unemployment up, vacancies down, youth unemployment highest for 11 years, wage growth down. It doesn't really tally with the large economic growth reported a few days ago.
Not suggesting anything dodgy, I wonder where the mismatch is. Just reporting lag between growth and employment figures, much higher productivity via AI, something else?
There was disucssion the other day about hospitality and again mismatch in number of opening / closures now versus employment opportunities in that sector. Is that venues just opening for a much more limited amount of time? Or again reporting lag and that there is now a lot more closures?
Growing signs in Devon and Cornwall, specifically Torbay of a stay cation boom.
Concerns about Flights, Jet Fuel, Safety etc has seen what was sluggish and slow holiday occupancy rates June to October increase markedly in past few weeks.
Very significant trend too from 7 day bookings to long weekend and 4 day midweek bookings.
The Hospitality, Retail, Cleaning sector already starting to seek and advertise for summer staff having realised that their reduced staffing won't cope.
It could be a bumper summer for UK tourism IF the weather plays ball.
Ed M only seems to pick up from 3rd choice onwards, which would be a very late run through the middle.
If Burnham doesn't win in Makerfield then I can see Starmer hanging on
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/pep-guardiola-man-city-live-33969521
How he left A Christmas Carol in on that basis I've no idea but I suppose that is at least by an English author.
But if Burnham does not win the by-election, there may be new polls showing Wes is more competitive against Starmer. Or not.
Circa '91 IIRC London to Newcastle had some 2hr 30 trains, then it was privatised and went up to 3hrs+
Re the train times. A journey between Scotlands most southern station and its most northern (Stranraer to Thurso) takes approx 10 hours 46, with 4 changes.
In a car, that journey is 7 hours 28 mins, comparable with a car journey between Waverley and Euston taking 7 hours 44. People living near the main line, millions of them, are fortunate to have such a quick way to travel.
I'm not advocating branch lines should be made HS2, there is lot of disparity away from the main lines. More chance of these lines being closed than upgraded.
East coast main line has always felt journey times are much faster than West, HS2 problems seem to be much of it going underground, digging up Camden etc as you have said and refining it to a stupidly high spec for speed.
The Chinese are probably laughing at the UK government for how much it spends on bat tunnels
It’s all about Burnham trying to find a seat. I’m not sure this is very effective.
Massive new Ibis and Mercure hotels in Paignton and stunning new top end IHG Group hotel in Torquay opened in last 12 months
New Shopping developments in Paignton and Torquay. Much needed visible regeneration Tory Council using Labour Government grants and funding
Brixham extending Harbour capacity and plans for a new harbour wall to increase Harbour size.
Massive new Marina and Hospitality site under development Nos Marina on River Dart up river from Dartmouth.
Very positive signs of growth, regeneration in South Devon
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
I still think it would be better to have actual copies and refer to it all the way through though.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
It's not about speed. It's about capacity. Fixed track is still the most efficient way of transporting large numbers of people. And it's not even primarily about, say, Manchester - London capacity. It's about taking the Manchester-London (the logic works just as well for other city pairings) trains off the local network so you can run far more trains on the local network in Greater Manchester and Staffordshire and so on.
By far the easiest and cheapest(!) way of doing this is new infrastructure. 4-tracking existing 2-track alignments is superficially attractive but 1) it is hugely expensive and difficult to tinker with the live railway rather than put in new off-line improvements, 2) every junction you meet you need to grade separate, which is eye-wateringly expensive, and 3) in most cases, towns have been built up to the railways built in Victorian times - there is rarely the land available, and aquiring and demolishing large numbers of houses is expensive and politically difficult.
And if you are going to construct a new alignment, you may as well engineer well so the new trains can go reasonably quickly.
I do strongly agree however that in a medium sized, densely populated country such as ours, you get diminishing returns on particularly high speeds. 200kph is probably fine, and considerably cheaper than 300kph.
(Much of the rationale for the speed was to make rail competitive with air between London and Glasgow, which does have some economic logic to it (the arguments here are complex so i'd ask you to trust me on this, which is a bold ask on an internet forum). However, there was never a plan to do anything new north of Wigan - i.e. for half the route - and because the new trains don't tilt, they would actually have to go more slowly than the existing trains between Wigan and Glasgow, losing some of the advantage of the southern half of the route and also potentially slowing down other traffic on the network. So not a great outcome even if you do get your speedy bits in South Britain.)
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
The client laptop screams (well fans at full tilt) for the entire time it’s connected to that layout
Because of the shared memory between cpu and gpu, for a good experience, the real limiting factor is amount of RAM. But 16Gb should be plenty to drive multiple monitors with ease. The M series chips really are a revolution.
Most servers in commercial application are Linux now.
If Europe was serious about technological independence, a European company backing a maintained Linux distro for desktop, with easy setup, is almost trivial thing.
Hell, the UK government could easily afford such - enough desktops in government.
But it would take spending money to save money.
I am so glad I work for an employer that uses Macs and not Windows.
Is it to give some grounding in our culture? Is it to teach critical analysis of texts? Is it to instill a love of reading as a pleasure? Or more depressingly is it to pass an exam with tick box answers?
In large part these are contradictory.
Likewise Glasgow and Cornwall when I know how work is playing out this year
SUSE used to be German, but it's long enough since I had to care about them that I've no idea whats happened with them.
When you look at west coast main line, there is a couple of large bends at the bottom of Cumbria near Kendal where the line obviously has to follow the valley.
I'm assuming that things like this, plus the volume of towns etc in Lancashire, and the more rugged landscape will add a fair bit more journey time on, compared to the east coast line, which seems to whiz past flat arable fields most of the time?
So as you say if you want speed, fly Glasgow to London (if you can afford the drop off)
WarEnglish Lit, huh, what is it good for....absolutely nuffin.I am joking btw.
Homestaycation? House-hols. Notgoingawaycation
Q. What does the poet mean by x?
A. Who knows? If he wanted to communicate what he meant, he would have written a concise essay, setting out his views and his reasons for them. Instead, he has vomited a lot of words on the page which neither rhyme nor scan and the meaning of which is shrouded in gnomic metaphor.
I can also confirm that the poetry studied at GCSE is woke.
If your daughter is expected to treat socialism as being correct, in her answers, that would be wrong.
That is what I said 2 external monitors. They are still artifically capping it as it could drive more. Its was the M1/M2 they were super naughty about limiting it to 1 when the hardware can definitely run more.
https://x.com/AndyBurnhamGM/status/2056452358809285006?s=20
https://x.com/kitty_donaldson/status/2056616676938936483?s=20
Who could have guessed it.
My impression is that English Lit is one of those subjects where you can get high marks for writing bullshit, so long as you write it elegantly enough.
I was lucky with To Kill A Mockingbird that I had read that years earlier, the book that proves lawyers are the best.
I suspect it’s that last bit that would be painful, everything else is easily achievable in Chromium if nothing else works
I suspect it’s that last bit that would be painful, everything else is easily achievable in Chromium if nothing else works