Quite an interesting little thought provoker - look where people drive in slush to see which areas of the carriageway are "redundant". And therefore - in my head - which bits that we can consider recovering for pedestrians.
That's a very car-centric attitude. Why should everyone else have to accommodate the motorist? How about looking at where people want to walk and cycle, and then designing the roads so as to allow them to do do?
Ban all cars !!
Not at all. But designing our roads to make it easy to get around with or without a car makes good sense. Better that than regarding anything other than car transport as an afterthought.
Yes but whining about roads designed many years ago when priorities were different achieves nothing.
Clearly no one who designs and measure car parking spaces has ever driven a Car other than a Smart Car
I agree with that one ! My car is longer than the spaces at my local supermarket, which I assume are the minimum 2.4 x 4.8m.
Car spaces are from a different era. I discovered yesterday that Xpeng have a car coming to the UK that is 5.4m long - good luck parking that in your typical supermarket space
Back in 2004 I ended up with a Mercedes S Class, it used to occupy parts of four parking spots and I am an excellent parker, I needed all four when I opened a door.
I miss having a carriage clock in the car.
Apparently the looming problem with some car parks is that they cannot cope with extra weight of EV vehicles.
I think the bigger problem is the pick-up trucks, was in a small town centre car park last year and an idiot with a pick-up had managed to trap every other car in the car park. Though my EV is annoyingly over-sized, I'm not sure why VAG needed to make their EV floorpan so big.
It’s a pity I wasn’t allowed to buy a cybertruck..
- Sudanese national is in custody - Immigration status of individual is thought to be that he was given leave to remain, Home Office to say more - Individual is believed to have come to the UK via the Republic of Ireland, and was then given leave to remain after moving from Dublin to Belfast.
Before anyone else suggests it, wouldn't be a good idea to have a border between the Republic and Northern Ireland to stop this sort of thing? After all, there was one before.
Ben Stokes is, by some measures one of England's greatest ever Test cricket captains.
I'm amazed that we seem to be poised to throw that away over an issue with alcohol.
He's been a good captain but if he gets pissed and into trouble that's a problem. People can lose places on teams for that kind of thing.
The 'into trouble' is key.
I'd want to know more about what actually happened. I'm also surprised by what the ECB minders roles are in this. Do they suggest that the players need to go back to the hotel but have no actual power to compel?
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is a shift it seems, i was recently told the foreign born should not be able to stand for elections, no exceptions.
The person who told me that is a Trumper and Restorer, but it's still beyond the type of thing they used to say, openly at least.
A case study in why resisting reasonable development entirely can come back to bite you (if the developer ploy here works)? Work in the system to resist where you can, don't just pretend the system doesn't exist because you don't like it.
Council rejects 100 homes.
Developer wins appeal for 75 homes.
Developer then submits another 65 homes on the remaining land.
End result? Residents could get 140 homes instead of the original 100. Now they claim they’re being “picked on”.
we have the same population as France but 7 million fewer homes..
We've arrived at this point almost entirely by virtually unrestricted immigration and given the birth rate we could very easily shrink our population back again by making further immigration almost impossible.
That is a much better deal for almost everyone than continually concreting over the country to build horrible Barratt new builds without any accompanying infrastructure.
No more immigration, almost no more new housing, and in 15 years time housing will be affordable again. As a bonus, we can fill in the various holes in our labour force by redeployment of the people who are building houses to cope with immigration.
No one is building homes to cope with immigration, we aren’t building enough homes because not enough people can afford new ones. Largely flatlining wages after inflation , higher prices and supply and demand mean there are too few buyers who can afford them.
If we stop immigration the average age will be 45 in 2040 with far too few young people and a rapidly ageing population. Are the pensioners going to build their own houses.
In this scenario under sixteens would drop from 18% to 14%, the working population from 62% to 55% and the over 67’s would grow from about 19% to 29%…
So dependency would go from roughly 2:1 to close to 1:1.
Hey Presto not only no need for new houses with a collapsed economy no money to build them either!
Peter.
We've spent 25 years trying the approach of allowing mass immigration to increase the working age population in the face of what would otherwise be a natural decline and it has led to poor productivity growth, stagnant wages, inflated asset values and political instability. It's about time the people who advocated it learned to have some humility.
We have had 25 years of large scale immigration. We have increased the working age population. We have so far managed to avoid the economic cliff edge of a naturally declining population. We have had low productivity and low wage growth.
And you have abjectly failed to establish a causal link between them.
Other Countries with high immigration have had productivity growth; the US for one.
Developed Countries like Japan have had slow wage growth and little immigration.
Peter.
The onus isn't on me to prove a causal link. I have democracy on my side.
No you have Populism and what’s popular isn’t always right and what’s right isn’t always popular.
Essential you are adopting the Trumpian logic, that for something to be true the majority just has to believe it.
Much like his Meet the Press walk out. His evidence consisted of only what he believed, nothing more.
I am old fashioned, I like evidence based argument and still believe in objective truth.
Peter.
That’s not Trumpoan logic. It’s politics.
We’ve had governance by opinion poll for many years.
It hasn't worked very well.
So, you don't like democracy then?
The problem is people having factually wrong opinions. On immigration for example you can legitimately want less of it, or be comfortable with a high level. But it's a problem if people think that immigration is currently very high when it isn't, or that most new housing goes to immigrants when it doesn't, and politicians devise policies based on those demonstrably wrong perceptions.
I think your biggest problem (and that of your liberal ilk) is that you think you're always right - and any contrary opinion is therefore "wrong" - and are totally blind to the fact you have an ideology of your own; you genuinely think the facts support it.
I'd anchor that ideology around the complete fungibility of all individuals, and championing things like choosing your own identity and free movement regardless of any evidence of the social problems this causes.
We all suffer from cognitive bias, whether we are liberal or illiberal. We get comfort from people who think like us and get frustrated by people who don't. We all look for evidence that supports our views and ignore evidence that doesn't. We all do.
The remedy is to be aware of that behaviour and actively manage it when it comes to evidence.
But our opinions also depend on our values and these are not evidence based but deeply and emotionally ingrained. It takes a lot to shift them.
So we can amicably disagree when it comes to values, but we shouldn't accept "alternative facts" when the evidence contradicts them.
My wife likes to say that I always think I am right, which she appears to find irritating. My response is always, of course I think I am right. Everybody thinks they are right. If I thought I was wrong I would have changed my mind. This is a criticism I really can't understand.
Not necessarily. Some people can express an opinion on balance but allow a significant chance probability that they might be wrong. Or acknowledge that on many questions, especially questions of morality, more than one opinion is possible.
Scepticism, humility and empathy always allow for the possibility of error, or alternative right answers.
Admittedly, such qualities aren't always prominent on this site though ...
- Sudanese national is in custody - Immigration status of individual is thought to be that he was given leave to remain, Home Office to say more - Individual is believed to have come to the UK via the Republic of Ireland, and was then given leave to remain after moving from Dublin to Belfast.
Before anyone else suggests it, wouldn't be a good idea to have a border between the Republic and Northern Ireland to stop this sort of thing? After all, there was one before.
Thinking about a route where I cross between Ireland and NI about 5 times in a 3 mile journey - are you sure about that
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is no way any politician can reduce migration to the extent people will notice. That’s why the right is doing well across all of Europe
The goalposts keep moving anyway. The last figures released if one takes account of students and others on a guaranteed return is a net of around plus 70,000. Farage has stated it doesn't count because the people leaving are nice people who Farage likes, whilst those arriving are nasty people Farage doesn't like.
Farage just wants to chuck everyone out who isn't a gurning pasty twat like him.
You'll all be sorry when anyone who is allowed to stay has to look like Farage.
The nice people/nasty people division is fundamental to immigration though. The political problem isn't the numbers - literally noone minds students from New Zealand being here; hardly anyone minds families from Hong Kong - it's the visibility of boat people, and it's the incidents like the one in Belfast today. Farage's proposed solution to all this response to this has been incoherent, unrealistic, and not particularly attuned, I don't think, to what people actually want - but on the basis that he's the only one making a noise about the problem - which people very much do recognise - he gets the political credit. Many on the left seem to genuinely see the worst thing about a stabbing as 'but Nigel Farage might say something bad about this!' This does not necessarily reassure voters that the problem is being taken seriously.
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is a shift it seems, i was recently told the foreign born should not be able to stand for elections, no exceptions.
The person who told me that is a Trumper abd Restorer, but it's still beyond the type of thing they used to say, openly at least.
Well, that would scupper my lad's political ambitions. On the plus side, though, it would have saved us from Boris's machinations.
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is no way any politician can reduce migration to the extent people will notice. That’s why the right is doing well across all of Europe
The goalposts keep moving anyway. The last figures released if one takes account of students and others on a guaranteed return is a net of around plus 70,000. Farage has stated it doesn't count because the people leaving are nice people who Farage likes, whilst those arriving are nasty people Farage doesn't like.
Farage just wants to chuck everyone out who isn't a gurning pasty twat like him.
You'll all be sorry when anyone who is allowed to stay has to look like Farage.
The nice people/nasty people division is fundamental to immigration though. The political problem isn't the numbers - literally noone minds students from New Zealand being here; hardly anyone minds families from Hong Kong - it's the visibility of boat people, and it's the incidents like the one in Belfast today. Farage's proposed solution to all this response to this has been incoherent, unrealistic, and not particularly attuned, I don't think, to what people actually want - but on the basis that he's the only one making a noise about the problem - which people very much do recognise - he gets the political credit. Many on the left seem to genuinely see the worst thing about a stabbing as 'but Nigel Farage might say something bad about this!' This does not necessarily reassure voters that the problem is being taken seriously.
That's a potential case of of what I call the overreaction trap.
Where people are so worried about a potential overreaction, that they fail to actually react at all.
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is no way any politician can reduce migration to the extent people will notice. That’s why the right is doing well across all of Europe
The only way to then reduce public anger is to win the political argument for immigration. Politicians have spent decades pretending that they were going to control immigration, that it was going to be clamped down on. If that was never possible they shouldn't have promised it.
Prior to 2017 - most of the immigration was white Eastern Europeans - I wonder what caused the change in skin colour
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is a shift it seems, i was recently told the foreign born should not be able to stand for elections, no exceptions.
The person who told me that is a Trumper and Restorer, but it's still beyond the type of thing they used to say, openly at least.
Specially designed cycle paths on the hill out of Brixham and towards Paignton. Specifically introduced to help cyclist safety from large articulated fish lorries, and seasonal traffic.
Cyclists generally ignore it, block traffic cause gridlock.
Many with more fecking cameras on them than GCHQ... Ready to report you for yelling "get on the fucking cycle path" as you drive past.
I’m a cyclist.
Did ten miles this morning. Round Pelton and back. I have been a regular cyclist round here for over a decade.
Unlike the resident cyclist hating loons I recognise we all need to share the roads.
I grew up in Denmark, where cycle lanes are ubiquitous and traffic is therefore separate, no problem. There's an obvious problem in Britain with lots of narrowish streets with room for a pedestrian pavement and one car each way. Cyclists solve the issue differently, guaranteeing unpopularity. But basically the general rule is that the slowest should have priority - pedestrians over cyclists, and cyclists over cars.
The previous Government had some decent guidance on things like reviews at network level, but it vanished when they went "culture war".
I'm really interested in the Oxfordshire Quiet Lanes pilot, turning duplicated rural into essentially primarily motorised and primarily non-motorised, which is an unpronouncable Dutch concept which translates approximately to "unravelling the modes" - a bit like London's quietways.
I try to work towards a subset of the Public Footpath and Council-owned path network being made more accessible, which can be part of the same thing.
A case study in why resisting reasonable development entirely can come back to bite you (if the developer ploy here works)? Work in the system to resist where you can, don't just pretend the system doesn't exist because you don't like it.
Council rejects 100 homes.
Developer wins appeal for 75 homes.
Developer then submits another 65 homes on the remaining land.
End result? Residents could get 140 homes instead of the original 100. Now they claim they’re being “picked on”.
we have the same population as France but 7 million fewer homes..
We've arrived at this point almost entirely by virtually unrestricted immigration and given the birth rate we could very easily shrink our population back again by making further immigration almost impossible.
That is a much better deal for almost everyone than continually concreting over the country to build horrible Barratt new builds without any accompanying infrastructure.
No more immigration, almost no more new housing, and in 15 years time housing will be affordable again. As a bonus, we can fill in the various holes in our labour force by redeployment of the people who are building houses to cope with immigration.
No one is building homes to cope with immigration, we aren’t building enough homes because not enough people can afford new ones. Largely flatlining wages after inflation , higher prices and supply and demand mean there are too few buyers who can afford them.
If we stop immigration the average age will be 45 in 2040 with far too few young people and a rapidly ageing population. Are the pensioners going to build their own houses.
In this scenario under sixteens would drop from 18% to 14%, the working population from 62% to 55% and the over 67’s would grow from about 19% to 29%…
So dependency would go from roughly 2:1 to close to 1:1.
Hey Presto not only no need for new houses with a collapsed economy no money to build them either!
Peter.
We've spent 25 years trying the approach of allowing mass immigration to increase the working age population in the face of what would otherwise be a natural decline and it has led to poor productivity growth, stagnant wages, inflated asset values and political instability. It's about time the people who advocated it learned to have some humility.
We have had 25 years of large scale immigration. We have increased the working age population. We have so far managed to avoid the economic cliff edge of a naturally declining population. We have had low productivity and low wage growth.
And you have abjectly failed to establish a causal link between them.
Other Countries with high immigration have had productivity growth; the US for one.
Developed Countries like Japan have had slow wage growth and little immigration.
Peter.
The onus isn't on me to prove a causal link. I have democracy on my side.
No you have Populism and what’s popular isn’t always right and what’s right isn’t always popular.
Essential you are adopting the Trumpian logic, that for something to be true the majority just has to believe it.
Much like his Meet the Press walk out. His evidence consisted of only what he believed, nothing more.
I am old fashioned, I like evidence based argument and still believe in objective truth.
Peter.
That’s not Trumpoan logic. It’s politics.
We’ve had governance by opinion poll for many years.
It hasn't worked very well.
So, you don't like democracy then?
The problem is people having factually wrong opinions. On immigration for example you can legitimately want less of it, or be comfortable with a high level. But it's a problem if people think that immigration is currently very high when it isn't, or that most new housing goes to immigrants when it doesn't, and politicians devise policies based on those demonstrably wrong perceptions.
I think your biggest problem (and that of your liberal ilk) is that you think you're always right - and any contrary opinion is therefore "wrong" - and are totally blind to the fact you have an ideology of your own; you genuinely think the facts support it.
I'd anchor that ideology around the complete fungibility of all individuals, and championing things like choosing your own identity and free movement regardless of any evidence of the social problems this causes.
We all suffer from cognitive bias, whether we are liberal or illiberal. We get comfort from people who think like us and get frustrated by people who don't. We all look for evidence that supports our views and ignore evidence that doesn't. We all do.
The remedy is to be aware of that behaviour and actively manage it when it comes to evidence.
But our opinions also depend on our values and these are not evidence based but deeply and emotionally ingrained. It takes a lot to shift them.
So we can amicably disagree when it comes to values, but we shouldn't accept "alternative facts" when the evidence contradicts them.
My wife likes to say that I always think I am right, which she appears to find irritating. My response is always, of course I think I am right. Everybody thinks they are right. If I thought I was wrong I would have changed my mind. This is a criticism I really can't understand.
I suspect the irritation is less that you think your opinion is correct and more the certainty with which you hold it. Sometimes the most honest answer is simply, “I don’t know.”
That applies to all of us. We hold views because we think they’re right, but the confidence we have in those views should depend on the strength of the evidence behind them.
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is no way any politician can reduce migration to the extent people will notice. That’s why the right is doing well across all of Europe
The only way to then reduce public anger is to win the political argument for immigration. Politicians have spent decades pretending that they were going to control immigration, that it was going to be clamped down on. If that was never possible they shouldn't have promised it.
Prior to 2017 - most of the immigration was white Eastern Europeans - I wonder what caused the change in skin colour
Specially designed cycle paths on the hill out of Brixham and towards Paignton. Specifically introduced to help cyclist safety from large articulated fish lorries, and seasonal traffic.
Cyclists generally ignore it, block traffic cause gridlock.
Many with more fecking cameras on them than GCHQ... Ready to report you for yelling "get on the fucking cycle path" as you drive past.
There are three types of cycle path.
1. Well-designed cycle paths that make cycling better - cyclists will use these paths. 2. Badly-designed cycle paths that make cycling more dangerous, or less convenient - cyclists will not use these paths. 3. Paint on the road surface - car drivers will ignore these.
Which category are the ones you are talking about?
Much though I hate to defend that poster, that's not altogether true. Next to the A449 from Wolverhampton to Penkridge (on both sides) is a cycleway that's beautifully laid out. It's wide, straight, surfaced properly, grade separated, no pedestrians and has pelican crossings so you can navigate safely. It must be the best cycleway in the whole Midlands.
Some utter twat persists, every day, in cycling rather slowly up the middle of the nearside lane of the dual carriageway, causing total chaos.
There is no excuse for that other than to be a total arsehole. Unless this person is such a total idiot he has not noticed the cycleway signs literally at his elbow, in which case he should probably not be allowed out without an escort.
If that total idiot was in a car he would not be causing traffic either.
This is what our can't misguided think-beyond-their-own-experiences city dwellers fail to comprehend. Roads that typically travel at or about the speed limit can be seriously damaged by one individual who is not doing the limit that then snarls everyone behind them until they can get into a different lane to overtake.
Whether that one individual be an agricultural vehicle, the bin lorry, a cyclist or an elderly driver afraid to drive properly.
Shared spaces mean they can all be on the road, but the idea its great that they are and should be celebrated is not necessarily correct and depends upon the circumstances.
It's not a matter of celebrating that one is stuck behind someone driving more slowly than you are comfortable doing. It's a matter of co-operating with other road users so everyone gets to their final destination in one piece.
There are too many drivers who seem to have either a death wish, or believe that they are invincible, or in their rage at being slightly inconvenienced and delayed lose all sense of proportion and put everyone else on the road in the vicinity at risk of death or serious injury.
My 14-year old daughter* is doing a sponsored coast to coast bike ride the weekend after next, so I have an unusually heightened sense of cycle safety at the moment (not least after the headmaster at her school was killed cycling home a couple of months back). I'm generally fairly relaxed about sharing a road with vehicle traffic, but you notice driver behaviour a lot more when your daughter is on the road. My perspective is that almost all drivers are pretty considerate, especially in towns or on small country lanes. Trying to force an overtake which isn't there is very rare; they will almost always wait to be waved on. The roads which worry me though are country A roads. With my daughter, I will go a long way out of my way to avoid these. It's not even that I blame the drivers: but if the expectation is that you can be travelling at 60mph, you can very quickly be on a slow moving vehicle you didn't expect to be there.
*actually the two of us - but she is the one fundraising; I'm just there to keep an eye.
Good luck to her (and you, of course!) Who is she fundraising for?
Thank you! She's doing a Camps International trip in 2027 to Cambodia - one of those where teenagers go and Do Practical and Useful Things for Impoverished Communities - so it's fundraising for that. We've been doing a fair bit of training, so - while it's considerably further than she's been before, and further than I've been before come to that - I'm feeling broadly confident. Well, broadly confident of her cycling ability. I'm still worried about weather, possible mechanical issues, making the train connections and packing two people's stuff in my saddlebags!
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is no way any politician can reduce migration to the extent people will notice. That’s why the right is doing well across all of Europe
The only way to then reduce public anger is to win the political argument for immigration. Politicians have spent decades pretending that they were going to control immigration, that it was going to be clamped down on. If that was never possible they shouldn't have promised it.
Prior to 2017 - most of the immigration was white Eastern Europeans - I wonder what caused the change in skin colour
In 2015 Farage was declaring that he preferred Indians (and Australians) to Eastern Europeans.
Specially designed cycle paths on the hill out of Brixham and towards Paignton. Specifically introduced to help cyclist safety from large articulated fish lorries, and seasonal traffic.
Cyclists generally ignore it, block traffic cause gridlock.
Many with more fecking cameras on them than GCHQ... Ready to report you for yelling "get on the fucking cycle path" as you drive past.
There are three types of cycle path.
1. Well-designed cycle paths that make cycling better - cyclists will use these paths. 2. Badly-designed cycle paths that make cycling more dangerous, or less convenient - cyclists will not use these paths. 3. Paint on the road surface - car drivers will ignore these.
Which category are the ones you are talking about?
Much though I hate to defend that poster, that's not altogether true. Next to the A449 from Wolverhampton to Penkridge (on both sides) is a cycleway that's beautifully laid out. It's wide, straight, surfaced properly, grade separated, no pedestrians and has pelican crossings so you can navigate safely. It must be the best cycleway in the whole Midlands.
Some utter twat persists, every day, in cycling rather slowly up the middle of the nearside lane of the dual carriageway, causing total chaos.
There is no excuse for that other than to be a total arsehole. Unless this person is such a total idiot he has not noticed the cycleway signs literally at his elbow, in which case he should probably not be allowed out without an escort.
If that total idiot was in a car he would not be causing traffic either.
This is what our can't misguided think-beyond-their-own-experiences city dwellers fail to comprehend. Roads that typically travel at or about the speed limit can be seriously damaged by one individual who is not doing the limit that then snarls everyone behind them until they can get into a different lane to overtake.
Whether that one individual be an agricultural vehicle, the bin lorry, a cyclist or an elderly driver afraid to drive properly.
Shared spaces mean they can all be on the road, but the idea its great that they are and should be celebrated is not necessarily correct and depends upon the circumstances.
It's not a matter of celebrating that one is stuck behind someone driving more slowly than you are comfortable doing. It's a matter of co-operating with other road users so everyone gets to their final destination in one piece.
There are too many drivers who seem to have either a death wish, or believe that they are invincible, or in their rage at being slightly inconvenienced and delayed lose all sense of proportion and put everyone else on the road in the vicinity at risk of death or serious injury.
My 14-year old daughter* is doing a sponsored coast to coast bike ride the weekend after next, so I have an unusually heightened sense of cycle safety at the moment (not least after the headmaster at her school was killed cycling home a couple of months back). I'm generally fairly relaxed about sharing a road with vehicle traffic, but you notice driver behaviour a lot more when your daughter is on the road. My perspective is that almost all drivers are pretty considerate, especially in towns or on small country lanes. Trying to force an overtake which isn't there is very rare; they will almost always wait to be waved on. The roads which worry me though are country A roads. With my daughter, I will go a long way out of my way to avoid these. It's not even that I blame the drivers: but if the expectation is that you can be travelling at 60mph, you can very quickly be on a slow moving vehicle you didn't expect to be there.
*actually the two of us - but she is the one fundraising; I'm just there to keep an eye.
Yes. Most car drivers are fine. But even if it's only ~1% of car drivers who are reckless, they put other people at risk.
In a similar way, most cyclists don't want to be in anyone else's way. But there's a pervasive attitude - which is what started this conversation - that they are being deliberately difficult and in some way deserve what's coming to them. I've experienced a lot of hostility from car drivers which basically boils down to them being enraged that I dare to be on the road (which actually I generally don't anymore, eventually I just couldn't take the worry).
Same here, sadly. I rarely cycle these days due to the increasing aggression from entitled wanker motorists. While the vast majority of motorists are (like me) considerate towards cyclists, there is a small but seemingly increasing proportion who are complete tossers.
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is no way any politician can reduce migration to the extent people will notice. That’s why the right is doing well across all of Europe
The only way to then reduce public anger is to win the political argument for immigration. Politicians have spent decades pretending that they were going to control immigration, that it was going to be clamped down on. If that was never possible they shouldn't have promised it.
Prior to 2017 - most of the immigration was white Eastern Europeans - I wonder what caused the change in skin colour
Lots of people voted for Brexit precisely because they were unhappy about immigration, and Cameron had spent years telling them he would reduce net migration to the tens of thousands and failed to do so (while Miliband posed about controlling immigration too).
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is no way any politician can reduce migration to the extent people will notice. That’s why the right is doing well across all of Europe
The only way to then reduce public anger is to win the political argument for immigration. Politicians have spent decades pretending that they were going to control immigration, that it was going to be clamped down on. If that was never possible they shouldn't have promised it.
Prior to 2017 - most of the immigration was white Eastern Europeans - I wonder what caused the change in skin colour
Lots of people voted for Brexit precisely because they were unhappy about immigration, and Cameron had spent years telling them he would reduce net migration to the tens of thousands and failed to do so (while Miliband posed about controlling immigration too).
Was any pledge made initially so casually and then kept out of so little more than embarassment and then cause so much pain for governments?
From 2015:
"The pledge originated in a Thick-of-It style farce: it was an aspiration mentioned by Damian Green, then immigration spokesman, that caught media attention," he writes in a blog on the Spectator website.
"The Tories didn't want to make a fuss by disowning it, so this pledge ended up becoming party policy and then government policy."
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is a shift it seems, i was recently told the foreign born should not be able to stand for elections, no exceptions.
The person who told me that is a Trumper and Restorer, but it's still beyond the type of thing they used to say, openly at least.
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is no way any politician can reduce migration to the extent people will notice. That’s why the right is doing well across all of Europe
The only way to then reduce public anger is to win the political argument for immigration. Politicians have spent decades pretending that they were going to control immigration, that it was going to be clamped down on. If that was never possible they shouldn't have promised it.
Prior to 2017 - most of the immigration was white Eastern Europeans - I wonder what caused the change in skin colour
Lots of people voted for Brexit precisely because they were unhappy about immigration, and Cameron had spent years telling them he would reduce net migration to the tens of thousands and failed to do so (while Miliband posed about controlling immigration too).
Was any pledge made initially so casually and then kept out of so little more than embarassment and then cause so much pain for governments?
From 2015:
"The pledge originated in a Thick-of-It style farce: it was an aspiration mentioned by Damian Green, then immigration spokesman, that caught media attention," he writes in a blog on the Spectator website.
"The Tories didn't want to make a fuss by disowning it, so this pledge ended up becoming party policy and then government policy."
Notable that the election it did not appear as Tory policy was 2019. Boris DID disown it. He was the one leader in recent years to be honest and do what he said, even it is not what people assumed.
- Sudanese national is in custody - Immigration status of individual is thought to be that he was given leave to remain, Home Office to say more - Individual is believed to have come to the UK via the Republic of Ireland, and was then given leave to remain after moving from Dublin to Belfast.
Before anyone else suggests it, wouldn't be a good idea to have a border between the Republic and Northern Ireland to stop this sort of thing? After all, there was one before.
Thinking about a route where I cross between Ireland and NI about 5 times in a 3 mile journey - are you sure about that
Apparently there are 365 crossing points. One for every day of the year.
Specially designed cycle paths on the hill out of Brixham and towards Paignton. Specifically introduced to help cyclist safety from large articulated fish lorries, and seasonal traffic.
Cyclists generally ignore it, block traffic cause gridlock.
Many with more fecking cameras on them than GCHQ... Ready to report you for yelling "get on the fucking cycle path" as you drive past.
There are three types of cycle path.
1. Well-designed cycle paths that make cycling better - cyclists will use these paths. 2. Badly-designed cycle paths that make cycling more dangerous, or less convenient - cyclists will not use these paths. 3. Paint on the road surface - car drivers will ignore these.
Which category are the ones you are talking about?
Much though I hate to defend that poster, that's not altogether true. Next to the A449 from Wolverhampton to Penkridge (on both sides) is a cycleway that's beautifully laid out. It's wide, straight, surfaced properly, grade separated, no pedestrians and has pelican crossings so you can navigate safely. It must be the best cycleway in the whole Midlands.
Some utter twat persists, every day, in cycling rather slowly up the middle of the nearside lane of the dual carriageway, causing total chaos.
There is no excuse for that other than to be a total arsehole. Unless this person is such a total idiot he has not noticed the cycleway signs literally at his elbow, in which case he should probably not be allowed out without an escort.
If that total idiot was in a car he would not be causing traffic either.
This is what our can't misguided think-beyond-their-own-experiences city dwellers fail to comprehend. Roads that typically travel at or about the speed limit can be seriously damaged by one individual who is not doing the limit that then snarls everyone behind them until they can get into a different lane to overtake.
Whether that one individual be an agricultural vehicle, the bin lorry, a cyclist or an elderly driver afraid to drive properly.
Shared spaces mean they can all be on the road, but the idea its great that they are and should be celebrated is not necessarily correct and depends upon the circumstances.
It's not a matter of celebrating that one is stuck behind someone driving more slowly than you are comfortable doing. It's a matter of co-operating with other road users so everyone gets to their final destination in one piece.
There are too many drivers who seem to have either a death wish, or believe that they are invincible, or in their rage at being slightly inconvenienced and delayed lose all sense of proportion and put everyone else on the road in the vicinity at risk of death or serious injury.
My 14-year old daughter* is doing a sponsored coast to coast bike ride the weekend after next, so I have an unusually heightened sense of cycle safety at the moment (not least after the headmaster at her school was killed cycling home a couple of months back). I'm generally fairly relaxed about sharing a road with vehicle traffic, but you notice driver behaviour a lot more when your daughter is on the road. My perspective is that almost all drivers are pretty considerate, especially in towns or on small country lanes. Trying to force an overtake which isn't there is very rare; they will almost always wait to be waved on. The roads which worry me though are country A roads. With my daughter, I will go a long way out of my way to avoid these. It's not even that I blame the drivers: but if the expectation is that you can be travelling at 60mph, you can very quickly be on a slow moving vehicle you didn't expect to be there.
*actually the two of us - but she is the one fundraising; I'm just there to keep an eye.
Yes. Most car drivers are fine. But even if it's only ~1% of car drivers who are reckless, they put other people at risk.
In a similar way, most cyclists don't want to be in anyone else's way. But there's a pervasive attitude - which is what started this conversation - that they are being deliberately difficult and in some way deserve what's coming to them. I've experienced a lot of hostility from car drivers which basically boils down to them being enraged that I dare to be on the road (which actually I generally don't anymore, eventually I just couldn't take the worry).
Same here, sadly. I rarely cycle these days due to the increasing aggression from entitled wanker motorists. While the vast majority of motorists are (like me) considerate towards cyclists, there is a small but seemingly increasing proportion who are complete tossers.
Tosses on both sides.
I had a friend who driving to work one day was sitting at the lights when his neighbours BMW drew up, so he smiled at him. The guy gave him a cold stare and looked straight ahead and when the lights changed burst ahead!
A couple of weeks later he was out cycling wearing jeans and a tee shirt when again at a set of lights who draws up in full day-glow Lycra but his neighbour. My mate says he and the guy, turns stares straight ahead and stands on the pedals!
You can guess what he did when the lights changed!
Your final comment: yes, that’s what I was thinking when I read those Labour MPs’ claims.
Much easier to blame a football match than admit the reality - they were not popular enough to win because they had overseen a total mess up of the economy. (Which was, in fairness, not entirely their fault.)
Just as the Labour left constantly blame the Falklands War for 1983, when actually it was mostly due to their own terrible mistakes.
The Longest Suicide Note In History was what created 1983.
I remember, as a child, a trade union activist on stage at the (televised) Labour conference arguing that the U.K. should leave NATO and the EEC and join COMECON and the Warsaw Pact.
The Falklands War made the Conservative majority a bit bigger.
Classic correlation not causation.
Is that the Falklands, Labour’s manifesto, or the size of the bribe paid to the official in question by Moscow?
Thank goodness with Labour jettisoning socialism we no longer have any politicians left who would trouser dirty Russian money.
There's plenty of socialism that isn’t like the comic Suicide Note manifesto.
It’s not a choice between unfettered capitalism and East Germany. As large numbers of social democratic parties have proved, around the world.
If the Labour Party had been selling the politics of, say, the German SPD, in 1983, them there would have been no split. And they might well have won a majority at the election.
Instead they chose East Germany.
Thatcher clearly led best PM polls in 1983 so likely would have won anyway
Yes... but after, and as a result of, the Falklands
See if you can guess when the Falklands War took place on this timeline.
I did politics as part of my degree. One of the modules was taken by David Marquand, ex-SDP MP. He made the point - using the graph below - that the Conservatives by the 1983 election were at the point they would have been anyway with swingback (I don't think he called it that, but it's a term we all use). They had a spike with the Falklands War, but then started to fade back, before a final recovery in the way governing parties often do (and especially when the leader of the opposition is insanely left wing). His view was that had Argentina not invaded the Falklands the result in 1983 would have been pretty much exactly the same. It's worth noting that by the standards of GEs at the time, the Tories didn't do THAT well in terms of share of the popular vote - the landslide was delivered - as it always is - by how badly the party doing second had done.
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is no way any politician can reduce migration to the extent people will notice. That’s why the right is doing well across all of Europe
The only way to then reduce public anger is to win the political argument for immigration. Politicians have spent decades pretending that they were going to control immigration, that it was going to be clamped down on. If that was never possible they shouldn't have promised it.
Prior to 2017 - most of the immigration was white Eastern Europeans - I wonder what caused the change in skin colour
Lots of people voted for Brexit precisely because they were unhappy about immigration, and Cameron had spent years telling them he would reduce net migration to the tens of thousands and failed to do so (while Miliband posed about controlling immigration too).
Was any pledge made initially so casually and then kept out of so little more than embarassment and then cause so much pain for governments?
From 2015:
"The pledge originated in a Thick-of-It style farce: it was an aspiration mentioned by Damian Green, then immigration spokesman, that caught media attention," he writes in a blog on the Spectator website.
"The Tories didn't want to make a fuss by disowning it, so this pledge ended up becoming party policy and then government policy."
Andy Burnham to increase use of migrant detention centres. Socially right. Good.
Dunno. Sounds like something from the Blair years. The anger is coming from people who want migrants out of the country. They don't want them locked up in detention centres, they want them deported, or towed back to France. And the anger is in large part now about migrants with the legal right to live in the country.
So the question is whether Burnham is willing to make the case for legal migration, or if he is going to reduce migration to the extent that people notice the difference? If he does the same as every other politician for the last three decades - of falling between those two extremes - then he's not going to do anything to defuse the current anger.
There is no way any politician can reduce migration to the extent people will notice. That’s why the right is doing well across all of Europe
The goalposts keep moving anyway. The last figures released if one takes account of students and others on a guaranteed return is a net of around plus 70,000. Farage has stated it doesn't count because the people leaving are nice people who Farage likes, whilst those arriving are nasty people Farage doesn't like.
Farage just wants to chuck everyone out who isn't a gurning pasty twat like him.
You'll all be sorry when anyone who is allowed to stay has to look like Farage.
The nice people/nasty people division is fundamental to immigration though. The political problem isn't the numbers - literally noone minds students from New Zealand being here; hardly anyone minds families from Hong Kong - it's the visibility of boat people, and it's the incidents like the one in Belfast today. Farage's proposed solution to all this response to this has been incoherent, unrealistic, and not particularly attuned, I don't think, to what people actually want - but on the basis that he's the only one making a noise about the problem - which people very much do recognise - he gets the political credit. Many on the left seem to genuinely see the worst thing about a stabbing as 'but Nigel Farage might say something bad about this!' This does not necessarily reassure voters that the problem is being taken seriously.
Despite your four likes where does "stabbing" come into my narrative?
I was being far more general. Nigel likes people Nigel likes and doesn't like people Nigel doesn't like. There is probably a converse common denominator between the two
I can't be arsed to watch. So I am assuming this is the tearing up of the Equalities Act. So we can sack pregnant women for being pregnant come the next Tory Government?
Comments
The person who told me that is a Trumper and Restorer, but it's still beyond the type of thing they used to say, openly at least.
Scepticism, humility and empathy always allow for the possibility of error, or alternative right answers.
Admittedly, such qualities aren't always prominent on this site though ...
Farage's proposed solution to all this response to this has been incoherent, unrealistic, and not particularly attuned, I don't think, to what people actually want - but on the basis that he's the only one making a noise about the problem - which people very much do recognise - he gets the political credit.
Many on the left seem to genuinely see the worst thing about a stabbing as 'but Nigel Farage might say something bad about this!' This does not necessarily reassure voters that the problem is being taken seriously.
Where people are so worried about a potential overreaction, that they fail to actually react at all.
I'm really interested in the Oxfordshire Quiet Lanes pilot, turning duplicated rural into essentially primarily motorised and primarily non-motorised, which is an unpronouncable Dutch concept which translates approximately to "unravelling the modes" - a bit like London's quietways.
I try to work towards a subset of the Public Footpath and Council-owned path network being made more accessible, which can be part of the same thing.
I suspect the irritation is less that you think your opinion is correct and more the certainty with which you hold it. Sometimes the most honest answer is simply, “I don’t know.”
That applies to all of us. We hold views because we think they’re right, but the confidence we have in those views should depend on the strength of the evidence behind them.
We've been doing a fair bit of training, so - while it's considerably further than she's been before, and further than I've been before come to that - I'm feeling broadly confident. Well, broadly confident of her cycling ability. I'm still worried about weather, possible mechanical issues, making the train connections and packing two people's stuff in my saddlebags!
NEW THREAD
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2015/apr/22/election-2015-live-labour-to-pledge-150m-for-better-nhs-cancer-diagnosis
From 2015:
"The pledge originated in a Thick-of-It style farce: it was an aspiration mentioned by Damian Green, then immigration spokesman, that caught media attention," he writes in a blog on the Spectator website.
"The Tories didn't want to make a fuss by disowning it, so this pledge ended up becoming party policy and then government policy."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31638180
(Thank heavens no major UK politicians are mixed up with dodgy crypto people.)
Notable that the election it did not appear as Tory policy was 2019. Boris DID disown it. He was the one leader in recent years to be honest and do what he said, even it is not what people assumed.
But does anyone at all at the BBC have anything at all between their ears?
I had a friend who driving to work one day was sitting at the lights when his neighbours BMW drew up, so he smiled at him. The guy gave him a cold stare and looked straight ahead and when the lights changed burst ahead!
A couple of weeks later he was out cycling wearing jeans and a tee shirt when again at a set of lights who draws up in full day-glow Lycra but his neighbour. My mate says he and the guy, turns stares straight ahead and stands on the pedals!
You can guess what he did when the lights changed!
Peter.
https://www.weidenfeldandnicolson.co.uk/titles/david-marquand/britain-since-1918/9780753826065/
The Mad King is not happy
I was being far more general. Nigel likes people Nigel likes and doesn't like people Nigel doesn't like. There is probably a converse common denominator between the two
https://www.youtube.com/live/tLzfm--qSnw?feature=shared