I have thought (and said here) that Reform can't win the next election. This is becoming more true all the time. Moving on to what happens next is interesting.
Farage is on the downhill, but the reasons for the far right surge have not gone away. Farage not being centre stage leaves a horrible gap for some equally horrible people to fill, even though winning is out of the question.
As things stand only Labour can lead the next government, not because Labour are great but because the Tories are not close to being good enough. The moderate Tory middle class backbone of the country has dissolved, both in party terms and demographically.
Returning politics to sanity requires a Tory leader who, first of all, can set out an affirmative Burkean liberal and democratic vision as well as Burnham can set out his.
Central to this is, because of the far right, affirming the difference between controlling our borders (fine) and demonising millions of people who are already lawfully here (the roots of fascism). The centre right and the far right are not the same but the Tories have no really clarified the difference. I don't think Kemi is the person to do it. It needs a visionary communicator.
Being lawfully here and being a permanent resident are not the same thing. There is nothing fascistic about Shabana Mahmood's policy of extending the qualifying period for ILR, for example.
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
Yet a number of ancient woodlands have been bulldozed to make way for HS2. The inconsistency is what is so baffling - the idea is that you do a CBA that values all this stuff and therefore you reach an efficient outcome - but HS2 decisions seem to made at random.
I think at this point it would have been cheaper and faster to have bored a tunnel from London to Birmingham!
I've witnessed an interesting case study in getting infrastructure done these last 2 weeks in Turkey, particularly on the most recent stretch in the Erdogan heartland of the Black Sea region.
They are building roads, railways and airports at a breakneck pace. All through the Pontic mountains are new tunnels, vast arrays of diggers and construction equipment. It's impressive. But look closer and you realise why this couldn't be a recipe for Britain without cultural and regulatory changes that I'm not sure we're up for.
They don't close the road during construction, or notably cone off the works. You drive among it. That means:
1. For large stretches you're driving on unmade rough surfaces, kicking up dust (or mud in winter). I expect there are several dents and tyre blowouts from this daily. Can't imagine the British road user tolerating this. But it means they can work at great speed. 2. The health and safety implications don't bear thinking about. The whole set up looks like multiple accidents waiting to happen. But of course that will make things cheaper
Planning and property rights? Erdogan decrees, it gets built
Biodiversity and conservation? Not really something Turkey goes in for. No bat tunnels here.
And of course a low wage workforce with very few protections.
If we were a middle income country like Turkey then we could absolutely build HS2, NPR, a few new motorways and several new cities for a fraction of the cost and rapidly. The trouble is, we are not. So we need to work within What's culturally and socially acceptable.
As I understand it, the three things that made HS2 such a disaster costwise were home counties nimbyism, the way risks were shared in the contracts and the very high speed insisted on. The last of these I guess has some justification, the second seems like the civil service got fucked over drawing up the contracts and the first is a disgrace, they should have been told to get to fuck. Another Cameron era fuck up.
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
Yes. It's about local government not being sufficiently institutionalised, and an easy plaything of national government, which causes there to be little thinking beyond the short term and few resources, which guts capacity (we all know examples).
I'd point to the early-2010s taking off the restraints leading to all these weird investment programmes, whilst at the same time gutting the funding base so there was no capacity to manage them properly. But that has been characteristic of both parties when in Government.
A contrast was Victorian "strong northern cities", but we need one for the 21st century.
On the barriers point, there is also that "putting in a barrier to stop motorcycle ASBO" (or now scooter ASBO) is a nice, cheap, visible win for a local councillor with the people who have votes in the ward, against a target group who nobody talks to (I've started doing so, however). The claim is complete bollocks heavily exaggerated (being polite on a polite day), because they don't stop them (I have multiple videos), and normally there was little problem anyway, but that does not stop the political benefit, and then once it is in the locals start to believe that it *has* stopped a problem that does not exist now. So getting rid becomes like pulling teeth from a crocodile.
I have thought (and said here) that Reform can't win the next election. This is becoming more true all the time. Moving on to what happens next is interesting.
Farage is on the downhill, but the reasons for the far right surge have not gone away. Farage not being centre stage leaves a horrible gap for some equally horrible people to fill, even though winning is out of the question.
As things stand only Labour can lead the next government, not because Labour are great but because the Tories are not close to being good enough. The moderate Tory middle class backbone of the country has dissolved, both in party terms and demographically.
Returning politics to sanity requires a Tory leader who, first of all, can set out an affirmative Burkean liberal and democratic vision as well as Burnham can set out his.
Central to this is, because of the far right, affirming the difference between controlling our borders (fine) and demonising millions of people who are already lawfully here (the roots of fascism). The centre right and the far right are not the same but the Tories have no really clarified the difference. I don't think Kemi is the person to do it. It needs a visionary communicator.
In other words,
I think "Margot Leadbetter is dead" is a fairly good statement of where the Conservative Party now sits, tbh.
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
Yet a number of ancient woodlands have been bulldozed to make way for HS2. The inconsistency is what is so baffling - the idea is that you do a CBA that values all this stuff and therefore you reach an efficient outcome - but HS2 decisions seem to made at random.
I think at this point it would have been cheaper and faster to have bored a tunnel from London to Birmingham!
The user experience will mostly consist of tunnels and deep cuttings anyway. Once in a while the hapless passenger will emerge into bright sunlight (the upper Leam Valley viaduct, for example) only to be plunged back into the gloom of a cutting 10 seconds later, followed by a tunnel, followed by another cutting. One of the reasons for the outrageous cost is the need to lower the track due to Home Counties nimbyism.
Indeed, for all the messing about it would have been simpler to get rid of most of the objections by using a tunnel for most of the journey.
A high speed line is a pain to design at surface level, because it has to be very flat and with long corner radii, much easier to put the whole lot underground, with little evidence on the surface bar some air vents and emergency exits.
For me, the main joy of travelling by train is looking out of the window to watch the changing landscape. both rural and urban, unfurl as you speed by. I find the idea of travelling by tunnel, with the occasional cutting, pretty depressing and unappealing.
Indeed I agree with that, but the realities of the design criteria make it much more difficult.
The alternative would have been a long viaduct over much of the route, sadly that doesn’t curry favour with the locals although would give great views to the passengers.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
HS2 is a very good idea very badly executed. It remains a good idea though, and it needs to continue to Manchester and Leeds. Ideally it should continue to Edinburgh and Glasgow at some point. And another high speed line should be built to Bristol, South Wales and Plymouth. The UK is a relatively compact country whose economic geography would be utterly transformed by improved transport links. If we can't find a way to do it at a reasonable budget then get the Spanish or the Chinese in to do it.
Agree, except the last line.
It's not the fact that Brits can't do it and the Spanish and Chinese can. The Chinese do it because they don't give a shit about planning, land rights, the environment, or health and safety (saves a lot of momey) and Spain has a largely empty interior.
What is true here is that we gold plate process, very densely populated island, with expensive land, and have an adversarial planning system.
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
Yet a number of ancient woodlands have been bulldozed to make way for HS2. The inconsistency is what is so baffling - the idea is that you do a CBA that values all this stuff and therefore you reach an efficient outcome - but HS2 decisions seem to made at random.
I think at this point it would have been cheaper and faster to have bored a tunnel from London to Birmingham!
The user experience will mostly consist of tunnels and deep cuttings anyway. Once in a while the hapless passenger will emerge into bright sunlight (the upper Leam Valley viaduct, for example) only to be plunged back into the gloom of a cutting 10 seconds later, followed by a tunnel, followed by another cutting. One of the reasons for the outrageous cost is the need to lower the track due to Home Counties nimbyism.
And, of course, had that been around when the original railways had been proposed a lot of the promoters would have given up.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
I have thought (and said here) that Reform can't win the next election. This is becoming more true all the time. Moving on to what happens next is interesting.
Farage is on the downhill, but the reasons for the far right surge have not gone away. Farage not being centre stage leaves a horrible gap for some equally horrible people to fill, even though winning is out of the question.
As things stand only Labour can lead the next government, not because Labour are great but because the Tories are not close to being good enough. The moderate Tory middle class backbone of the country has dissolved, both in party terms and demographically.
Returning politics to sanity requires a Tory leader who, first of all, can set out an affirmative Burkean liberal and democratic vision as well as Burnham can set out his.
Central to this is, because of the far right, affirming the difference between controlling our borders (fine) and demonising millions of people who are already lawfully here (the roots of fascism). The centre right and the far right are not the same but the Tories have no really clarified the difference. I don't think Kemi is the person to do it. It needs a visionary communicator.
In other words,
I think "Margot Leadbetter is dead" is a fairly good statement of where the Conservative Party now sits, tbh.
This reminds me of Carragher at the end of last season lobbying for Arsenal to sack Arteta. If you think Farage is that rubbish you should want him to stay.
Without Farage the Reform vote would likely collapse. Zia Yusuf as leader would likely see Restore squeeze their vote heavily and Lee Anderson as leader would likely leak significantly to the Tories. However even against Burnham Labour Farage's Reform are still relatively resilient, only squeezed a little and still only a point or two behind
I presume you have some evidence for the first part of this or is it just some hopecasting from the Conservative side?
Since Reform is made up of both ex-Conservative and ex-Labour voters (as well as those who had previously not voted), it seems reasonable to suppose were their vote to fragment, it would go several ways including to Labour, Restore and Will Not Vote rather than going en bloc to the Conservatives.
The Reform vote was less than half what it is now before Farage returned to leave it. I highly doubt many Reform voters would to be that enthusiastic about a non white leader given and Anderson isn’t anywhere near as articulate and charismatic as Farage.
Of course a post Farage Reform vote would fragment but those Reform voters who voted Conservative in 2019 would likely mostly return to the Tories
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The HS2 project included a massive training centre, basically a college of railway engineering and construction, because they didn’t have enough people with the required skills.
It would be a massive waste of both money and human capital, if these skills end up lost again because there’s not sufficient work in the pipeline as the project concludes. Government and industry need to ensure that the pipeline continues, and people can seamlessly move from one project to the next.
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
Yet a number of ancient woodlands have been bulldozed to make way for HS2. The inconsistency is what is so baffling - the idea is that you do a CBA that values all this stuff and therefore you reach an efficient outcome - but HS2 decisions seem to made at random.
I think at this point it would have been cheaper and faster to have bored a tunnel from London to Birmingham!
(Snipped for brevity)
If we were a middle income country like Turkey then we could absolutely build HS2, NPR, a few new motorways and several new cities for a fraction of the cost and rapidly. The trouble is, we are not. So we need to work within What's culturally and socially acceptable.
That's fair - but it's also fair to point out that our infrastructure costs around half as much again as any of our closer European comparators.
We need seriously to tweak 'acceptable' practice. Certainly no one of my acquaintance regards how we do infrastructure stuff as anywhere near to socially or culturally ideal.
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
Yet a number of ancient woodlands have been bulldozed to make way for HS2. The inconsistency is what is so baffling - the idea is that you do a CBA that values all this stuff and therefore you reach an efficient outcome - but HS2 decisions seem to made at random.
I think at this point it would have been cheaper and faster to have bored a tunnel from London to Birmingham!
The user experience will mostly consist of tunnels and deep cuttings anyway. Once in a while the hapless passenger will emerge into bright sunlight (the upper Leam Valley viaduct, for example) only to be plunged back into the gloom of a cutting 10 seconds later, followed by a tunnel, followed by another cutting. One of the reasons for the outrageous cost is the need to lower the track due to Home Counties nimbyism.
And, of course, had that been around when the original railways had been proposed a lot of the promoters would have given up.
It was, actually. That's why what is now the WCML (then the Grand Junction railway) cost three times the original estimate. Between buying land at grossly inflated prices and - ironically - digging tunnels to placate the most implacable landowners (ever wondered why there's a totally unnecessary and very inconvenient tunnel right in front of Shugborough?) the whole thing had costs balloon massively.
That was even a problem on the canals. Shelmore Great Bank on the Shropshire Union Canal between Gnosall and Nantwich which took eight years and cost literally hundreds of thousands to build, was only built because they had to divert around one landowner's pheasant shoot.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The speed does cost a lot more because you need far shallower gradients and curves, and therefore much more civil engineering, and slab based track rather than ballast, which is much more expensive. At that speed you also have to consider the pressure waves entering tunnels in front of and around trains due to "air hammer" which is because the trains are so fast you have to consider air as a fluid. It means their diameters are much larger.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The HS2 project included a massive training centre, basically a college of railway engineering and construction, because they didn’t have enough people with the required skills.
It would be a massive waste of both money and human capital, if these skills end up lost again because there’s not sufficient work in the pipeline as the project concludes. Government and industry need to ensure that the pipeline continues, and people can seamlessly move from one project to the next.
I pass by the one near YWP in Doncaster, it doesn't look like it has cost THAT much tbh.
Now the works going over the M45 re Birmingham.... I've passed those in what should be peak working time, couple of pieces of plant on the go with most sitting idle...
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
Yet a number of ancient woodlands have been bulldozed to make way for HS2. The inconsistency is what is so baffling - the idea is that you do a CBA that values all this stuff and therefore you reach an efficient outcome - but HS2 decisions seem to made at random.
I think at this point it would have been cheaper and faster to have bored a tunnel from London to Birmingham!
(Snipped for brevity)
If we were a middle income country like Turkey then we could absolutely build HS2, NPR, a few new motorways and several new cities for a fraction of the cost and rapidly. The trouble is, we are not. So we need to work within What's culturally and socially acceptable.
That's fair - but it's also fair to point out that our infrastructure costs around half as much again as any of our closer European comparators.
We need seriously to tweak 'acceptable' practice. Certainly no one of my acquaintance regards how we do infrastructure stuff as anywhere near to socially or culturally ideal.
If you walk past a building site in the UK vs France, Germany, Spain the UK one seems to have loads more going on in terms of safety and also "considerate construction", and even as a complete outsider it is obvious that there is significant extra cost in providing that environment.
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
Yet a number of ancient woodlands have been bulldozed to make way for HS2. The inconsistency is what is so baffling - the idea is that you do a CBA that values all this stuff and therefore you reach an efficient outcome - but HS2 decisions seem to made at random.
I think at this point it would have been cheaper and faster to have bored a tunnel from London to Birmingham!
I've witnessed an interesting case study in getting infrastructure done these last 2 weeks in Turkey, particularly on the most recent stretch in the Erdogan heartland of the Black Sea region.
They are building roads, railways and airports at a breakneck pace. All through the Pontic mountains are new tunnels, vast arrays of diggers and construction equipment. It's impressive. But look closer and you realise why this couldn't be a recipe for Britain without cultural and regulatory changes that I'm not sure we're up for.
They don't close the road during construction, or notably cone off the works. You drive among it. That means:
1. For large stretches you're driving on unmade rough surfaces, kicking up dust (or mud in winter). I expect there are several dents and tyre blowouts from this daily. Can't imagine the British road user tolerating this. But it means they can work at great speed. 2. The health and safety implications don't bear thinking about. The whole set up looks like multiple accidents waiting to happen. But of course that will make things cheaper
Planning and property rights? Erdogan decrees, it gets built
Biodiversity and conservation? Not really something Turkey goes in for. No bat tunnels here.
And of course a low wage workforce with very few protections.
If we were a middle income country like Turkey then we could absolutely build HS2, NPR, a few new motorways and several new cities for a fraction of the cost and rapidly. The trouble is, we are not. So we need to work within What's culturally and socially acceptable.
As I understand it, the three things that made HS2 such a disaster costwise were home counties nimbyism, the way risks were shared in the contracts and the very high speed insisted on. The last of these I guess has some justification, the second seems like the civil service got fucked over drawing up the contracts and the first is a disgrace, they should have been told to get to fuck. Another Cameron era fuck up.
South Korea is a crowded place, with a high level of development, modern safety standards.
They can build infrastructure better, faster and cheaper.
The issue is more, I think, to do with a culture of every pissant being given an ant hill to piss from. Domain knowledge is actively despised.
Without Farage the Reform vote would likely collapse. Zia Yusuf as leader would likely see Restore squeeze their vote heavily and Lee Anderson as leader would likely leak significantly to the Tories. However even against Burnham Labour Farage's Reform are still relatively resilient, only squeezed a little and still only a point or two behind
I presume you have some evidence for the first part of this or is it just some hopecasting from the Conservative side?
Since Reform is made up of both ex-Conservative and ex-Labour voters (as well as those who had previously not voted), it seems reasonable to suppose were their vote to fragment, it would go several ways including to Labour, Restore and Will Not Vote rather than going en bloc to the Conservatives.
The Reform vote was less than half what it is now before Farage returned to leave it. I highly doubt many Reform voters would to be that enthusiastic about a non white leader given and Anderson isn’t anywhere near as articulate and charismatic as Farage.
Of course a post Farage Reform vote would fragment but those Reform voters who voted Conservative in 2019 would likely mostly return to the Tories
That last paragraph is why you are going to lose the next election.
Yes, many of those who voted Reform in 2024 and indeed since were Conservative voters in 2019 (and quite likely LEAVE voters in 2016) but you can't assume a loyalty based on one vote at one election. Why should they return to the Conservatives - why not Labour or Restore?
Sharon Graham, left wing leader of Unite and strong advocate of workers rights now faces a challenge
Her crime. Criticising Ed Miliband and his net zero politics and undermining his bid to be Chancellor. As well as ‘not doing enough to beat Reform’ even though many of its members are supporters?
So she now faces a challenge due to her wrongthink.
She faces a challenge because it's an elected position, and a section of the membership don't like her. I don't see where "crime" comes in; it's just how the union system works.
It would have been simpler to say that she faces a challenge from the left.
And far less interesting. The article makes it clear the reasons for the challenge.
I felt it worth pointing out. There is a clear campaign to bolster Ed Miliband and his bid for the chancellorship. As we saw with Newsnight last night with Mazzucato out batting for him.
She faces a challenge due to her positioning and views.
She’s a strong advocate of members rights. She’s even been on picket lines up here.
Estimates suggest that renewables are roughly at parity with oil and gas for jobs, ~ 150000 each. Though some classifications of "green jobs" put them much higher. It's only going one way, Graham is backing the wrong horse.
I used to see that around nuclear when I was a member of MSF whilst working in Telecomms.
The Union is there to protect its members, so I would expect Graham to defend oil/gas, whilst also promoting Green alternatives.
Personally, my basic view is eking out what remains of existing NS oil/gas fields , whilst not actively drilling for new ones, as I think renewables will probably cover that first. I think Miliband should concede that due to chaged geopolitics and cutting off the opposition on this question.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The HS2 project included a massive training centre, basically a college of railway engineering and construction, because they didn’t have enough people with the required skills.
It would be a massive waste of both money and human capital, if these skills end up lost again because there’s not sufficient work in the pipeline as the project concludes. Government and industry need to ensure that the pipeline continues, and people can seamlessly move from one project to the next.
The original HS2 map was a reasonable stab at such a pipeline.
Out then go Germany and the Netherlands and this tournament starts to bubble along nicely. I'm on France to prevail - yes, I know, remember Agincourt, Crecy, Waterloo, Euston etc, etc.
On topic, Reform is and has never been just about Farage - all he has done is successfully articulate the often incoherent anger and frustrations of those who feel "the system" has failed them and the country. Now, whether that's because of perceptions about immigration, the economy, the British identity, our place in the world or a whole range of other gripes and whinges, I'm not sure but as long as the causes of the anger remain, that anger will find expression somewhere by someone somehow and that could be Anderson or Lowe or A.N Other.
What I found interesting about yesterday is both Burnham and Badenoch spoke and while the policies were very different as you might expect, the target audience was much the same - those who had formerly backed Labour or the Conservatives and were now with Reform. Faragists will claim it'stwo bald men fighting over a comb but I look at the Amber Valley question and I come back to it.
What will be the more important thing for the Amber Valley voter in 2029 - stopping a Labour Government or stopping a Reform Government?
By that logic shouldn’t everyone vote conservative?
The problem with your "logic" is in Amber Valley Labour are first, Reform second and the Conservatives third. You vote Labour to stop Reform, you vote Reform to stop Labour. Voting Conservative (and indeed Green, LD etc) in Amber Valley is a wasted vote.
Both Farage and Lowe are getting on a bit. I can see both stepping down (amidst much acrimony) which would enable the realists to try to merge the two parties together into one electoral outfit. That will make the Liberal/SDP merger look like a summer wedding, and the fallout will be magnificent to behold, but there's simply not enough room in the political spectrum for both organisations to flourish.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The HS2 project included a massive training centre, basically a college of railway engineering and construction, because they didn’t have enough people with the required skills.
It would be a massive waste of both money and human capital, if these skills end up lost again because there’s not sufficient work in the pipeline as the project concludes. Government and industry need to ensure that the pipeline continues, and people can seamlessly move from one project to the next.
I pass by the one near YWP in Doncaster, it doesn't look like it has cost THAT much tbh.
Think it has also closed now.
Metrolink was being expended from about 2008 for half a dozen years (phase 3 as it was known).
The skills built up during that time led to teams rolling from one project onto another and then straight onto the Trafford Centre line, all of which was delivered under budget and on time.
Having a rolling program of such works (see railway electrification as an obvious examplee) lead to the skills and supply chain being non existent so we take ages, do it badly and end up importing everything as there is no reliable ongoing investment to support UK based companies.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The HS2 project included a massive training centre, basically a college of railway engineering and construction, because they didn’t have enough people with the required skills.
It would be a massive waste of both money and human capital, if these skills end up lost again because there’s not sufficient work in the pipeline as the project concludes. Government and industry need to ensure that the pipeline continues, and people can seamlessly move from one project to the next.
Those skills have been lost but I would need to speak to my nephew as to how many of his fellow students still work in the railways and also how many times they've been made redundant (I suspect some will be on their 3rd or even 4th employer).
As for my nephew he's still working mainly on safety reports - but he's 24/7 into railways, his weekend fun is track work on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway.
I have thought (and said here) that Reform can't win the next election. This is becoming more true all the time. Moving on to what happens next is interesting.
Farage is on the downhill, but the reasons for the far right surge have not gone away. Farage not being centre stage leaves a horrible gap for some equally horrible people to fill, even though winning is out of the question.
As things stand only Labour can lead the next government, not because Labour are great but because the Tories are not close to being good enough. The moderate Tory middle class backbone of the country has dissolved, both in party terms and demographically.
Returning politics to sanity requires a Tory leader who, first of all, can set out an affirmative Burkean liberal and democratic vision as well as Burnham can set out his.
Central to this is, because of the far right, affirming the difference between controlling our borders (fine) and demonising millions of people who are already lawfully here (the roots of fascism). The centre right and the far right are not the same but the Tories have no really clarified the difference. I don't think Kemi is the person to do it. It needs a visionary communicator.
At some point, when you have swallowed your pride, you will be ready to admit you made a mistake.
I will respect you more when that day comes, not less.
Without Farage the Reform vote would likely collapse. Zia Yusuf as leader would likely see Restore squeeze their vote heavily and Lee Anderson as leader would likely leak significantly to the Tories. However even against Burnham Labour Farage's Reform are still relatively resilient, only squeezed a little and still only a point or two behind
I presume you have some evidence for the first part of this or is it just some hopecasting from the Conservative side?
Since Reform is made up of both ex-Conservative and ex-Labour voters (as well as those who had previously not voted), it seems reasonable to suppose were their vote to fragment, it would go several ways including to Labour, Restore and Will Not Vote rather than going en bloc to the Conservatives.
The Reform vote was less than half what it is now before Farage returned to leave it. I highly doubt many Reform voters would to be that enthusiastic about a non white leader given and Anderson isn’t anywhere near as articulate and charismatic as Farage.
Of course a post Farage Reform vote would fragment but those Reform voters who voted Conservative in 2019 would likely mostly return to the Tories
That last paragraph is why you are going to lose the next election.
Yes, many of those who voted Reform in 2024 and indeed since were Conservative voters in 2019 (and quite likely LEAVE voters in 2016) but you can't assume a loyalty based on one vote at one election. Why should they return to the Conservatives - why not Labour or Restore?
Farage will likely lead Reform into the next general election, a post Farage Reform likely won’t happen unless and until Reform lose that general election.
The clear majority of current Reform voters voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 and some of them even voted Conservative in 2014. Those voters aren’t going Labour, certainly not under leftwing Burnham and only the Reform diehard core white nationalist core vote, some of whom are ex UKIP and Brexit party would go Restore
I think it reasonable to expect that a council housebuilding programme could be sustained with a capital subsidy of £100k per home, enough to build substantial homes and to fund the financing costs from the remaining reduced rents. It might even be a bit less than that.
So for a cost of £100bn, the country could have ended up with 1 million new council houses, transforming the lives of people across this country with the countless long term benefits that brings for social cohesion as well as huge long term savings for the government through housing benefit, avoiding childrens social care bills etc.
Instead we've wasted £100bn on a railway that achieves next to nothing and will be an uneconomic millstone even when operational. I write as someone from the West Midlands for whom HS2 will not cut the journey time to London because it will probably be quicker and certainly less stressful and convenient to continue use the WCML because of its better connectivity. And no doubt cheaper too.
1 million council homes v a useless railway. What an epic cock up.
Both Farage and Lowe are getting on a bit. I can see both stepping down (amidst much acrimony) which would enable the realists to try to merge the two parties together into one electoral outfit. That will make the Liberal/SDP merger look like a summer wedding, and the fallout will be magnificent to behold, but there's simply not enough room in the political spectrum for both organisations to flourish.
That very much depends what you mean by flourish? Make their leaders tens of millions from US billionaires or win a lot of MPs?
I have thought (and said here) that Reform can't win the next election. This is becoming more true all the time. Moving on to what happens next is interesting.
Farage is on the downhill, but the reasons for the far right surge have not gone away. Farage not being centre stage leaves a horrible gap for some equally horrible people to fill, even though winning is out of the question.
As things stand only Labour can lead the next government, not because Labour are great but because the Tories are not close to being good enough. The moderate Tory middle class backbone of the country has dissolved, both in party terms and demographically.
Returning politics to sanity requires a Tory leader who, first of all, can set out an affirmative Burkean liberal and democratic vision as well as Burnham can set out his.
Central to this is, because of the far right, affirming the difference between controlling our borders (fine) and demonising millions of people who are already lawfully here (the roots of fascism). The centre right and the far right are not the same but the Tories have no really clarified the difference. I don't think Kemi is the person to do it. It needs a visionary communicator.
In other words,
I think "Margot Leadbetter is dead" is a fairly good statement of where the Conservative Party now sits, tbh.
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
Yet a number of ancient woodlands have been bulldozed to make way for HS2. The inconsistency is what is so baffling - the idea is that you do a CBA that values all this stuff and therefore you reach an efficient outcome - but HS2 decisions seem to made at random.
I think at this point it would have been cheaper and faster to have bored a tunnel from London to Birmingham!
I've witnessed an interesting case study in getting infrastructure done these last 2 weeks in Turkey, particularly on the most recent stretch in the Erdogan heartland of the Black Sea region.
They are building roads, railways and airports at a breakneck pace. All through the Pontic mountains are new tunnels, vast arrays of diggers and construction equipment. It's impressive. But look closer and you realise why this couldn't be a recipe for Britain without cultural and regulatory changes that I'm not sure we're up for.
They don't close the road during construction, or notably cone off the works. You drive among it. That means:
1. For large stretches you're driving on unmade rough surfaces, kicking up dust (or mud in winter). I expect there are several dents and tyre blowouts from this daily. Can't imagine the British road user tolerating this. But it means they can work at great speed. 2. The health and safety implications don't bear thinking about. The whole set up looks like multiple accidents waiting to happen. But of course that will make things cheaper
Planning and property rights? Erdogan decrees, it gets built
Biodiversity and conservation? Not really something Turkey goes in for. No bat tunnels here.
And of course a low wage workforce with very few protections.
If we were a middle income country like Turkey then we could absolutely build HS2, NPR, a few new motorways and several new cities for a fraction of the cost and rapidly. The trouble is, we are not. So we need to work within What's culturally and socially acceptable.
As I understand it, the three things that made HS2 such a disaster costwise were home counties nimbyism, the way risks were shared in the contracts and the very high speed insisted on. The last of these I guess has some justification, the second seems like the civil service got fucked over drawing up the contracts and the first is a disgrace, they should have been told to get to fuck. Another Cameron era fuck up.
There is another cost, buried so deep that we scarcely notice it: political uncertainty. How can contractors plan ahead when some numpty like Sunak can wake up in the morning and cancel it?
This stuff takes decades of workforce and capital investment. You’d be mad to base that investment on the whims of the UK government. The only area they are reasonably reliable is building submarines - and therefore the cost is (relatively) cheap, considering how astonishingly complicated and sophisticated they are.
That’s why I think the planning and legislative requirements for cancellation should be at least as long as commissioning something.
If Burnham wants economic development away from London then the way to achieve that is by building roads.
Within a few yards of every home, every place of work, every business, industrial, retail location, every educational, medical and recreational facility is a road.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The speed does cost a lot more because you need far shallower gradients and curves, and therefore much more civil engineering, and slab based track rather than ballast, which is much more expensive. At that speed you also have to consider the pressure waves entering tunnels in front of and around trains due to "air hammer" which is because the trains are so fast you have to consider air as a fluid. It means their diameters are much larger.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
I remember this argument at the start of the interminable arguments over the project. Very few people accepted that the (completely unnecessary) top speed would cost a lot more. A common attitude was the reducing the headline figure was penny pinching.
A better informed debate might have avoided some if the years of delay.
How are Bunrham's council houses going to be built when the construction sector is already suffocated by regulatory constraints and workforce shortages ?
Hasn't he noticed that Starmer's housing targets have already been a complete failure ?
Without Farage the Reform vote would likely collapse. Zia Yusuf as leader would likely see Restore squeeze their vote heavily and Lee Anderson as leader would likely leak significantly to the Tories. However even against Burnham Labour Farage's Reform are still relatively resilient, only squeezed a little and still only a point or two behind
I presume you have some evidence for the first part of this or is it just some hopecasting from the Conservative side?
Since Reform is made up of both ex-Conservative and ex-Labour voters (as well as those who had previously not voted), it seems reasonable to suppose were their vote to fragment, it would go several ways including to Labour, Restore and Will Not Vote rather than going en bloc to the Conservatives.
The Reform vote was less than half what it is now before Farage returned to leave it. I highly doubt many Reform voters would to be that enthusiastic about a non white leader given and Anderson isn’t anywhere near as articulate and charismatic as Farage.
Of course a post Farage Reform vote would fragment but those Reform voters who voted Conservative in 2019 would likely mostly return to the Tories
That last paragraph is why you are going to lose the next election.
Yes, many of those who voted Reform in 2024 and indeed since were Conservative voters in 2019 (and quite likely LEAVE voters in 2016) but you can't assume a loyalty based on one vote at one election. Why should they return to the Conservatives - why not Labour or Restore?
Farage will likely lead Reform into the next general election, a post Farage Reform likely won’t happen unless and until Reform lose that general election.
The clear majority of current Reform voters voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 and some of them even voted Conservative in 2014. Those voters aren’t going Labour, certainly not under leftwing Burnham and only the Reform diehard core white nationalist core vote, some of whom are ex UKIP and Brexit party would go Restore
Sorry, ‘some of them even voted Conservative in 2024’
Out then go Germany and the Netherlands and this tournament starts to bubble along nicely. I'm on France to prevail - yes, I know, remember Agincourt, Crecy, Waterloo, Euston etc, etc.
On topic, Reform is and has never been just about Farage - all he has done is successfully articulate the often incoherent anger and frustrations of those who feel "the system" has failed them and the country. Now, whether that's because of perceptions about immigration, the economy, the British identity, our place in the world or a whole range of other gripes and whinges, I'm not sure but as long as the causes of the anger remain, that anger will find expression somewhere by someone somehow and that could be Anderson or Lowe or A.N Other.
What I found interesting about yesterday is both Burnham and Badenoch spoke and while the policies were very different as you might expect, the target audience was much the same - those who had formerly backed Labour or the Conservatives and were now with Reform. Faragists will claim it'stwo bald men fighting over a comb but I look at the Amber Valley question and I come back to it.
What will be the more important thing for the Amber Valley voter in 2029 - stopping a Labour Government or stopping a Reform Government?
So I even googled Euston battle in case their was one I didn't know about!
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
HS2 is a very good idea very badly executed. It remains a good idea though, and it needs to continue to Manchester and Leeds. Ideally it should continue to Edinburgh and Glasgow at some point. And another high speed line should be built to Bristol, South Wales and Plymouth. The UK is a relatively compact country whose economic geography would be utterly transformed by improved transport links. If we can't find a way to do it at a reasonable budget then get the Spanish or the Chinese in to do it.
Fat chance of it ever getting to south west, wales, Scotland and even north England, there will be too many pet projects for London and south east for that.
I have thought (and said here) that Reform can't win the next election. This is becoming more true all the time. Moving on to what happens next is interesting.
Farage is on the downhill, but the reasons for the far right surge have not gone away. Farage not being centre stage leaves a horrible gap for some equally horrible people to fill, even though winning is out of the question.
As things stand only Labour can lead the next government, not because Labour are great but because the Tories are not close to being good enough. The moderate Tory middle class backbone of the country has dissolved, both in party terms and demographically.
Returning politics to sanity requires a Tory leader who, first of all, can set out an affirmative Burkean liberal and democratic vision as well as Burnham can set out his.
Central to this is, because of the far right, affirming the difference between controlling our borders (fine) and demonising millions of people who are already lawfully here (the roots of fascism). The centre right and the far right are not the same but the Tories have no really clarified the difference. I don't think Kemi is the person to do it. It needs a visionary communicator.
In other words,
I think "Margot Leadbetter is dead" is a fairly good statement of where the Conservative Party now sits, tbh.
Audrey Fforbes Hamilton would certainly still be a Tory, she might vote LD only on a forced choice tactical vote to beat Reform or Burnham Labour
She would not face that tactical choice as she would live in a Conservative/LD marginal. I think you are right on Audrey but may well have lost Margot. Both would be conflicted in a way that would have felt inconceivable to them a few decades ago.
How are Bunrham's council houses going to be built when the construction sector is already suffocated by regulatory constraints and workforce shortages ?
Hasn't he noticed that Starmer's housing targets have already been a complete failure ?
Mass apprenticeships for Neets is the obvious answer. But little of this is happening before a GE.
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
Yet a number of ancient woodlands have been bulldozed to make way for HS2. The inconsistency is what is so baffling - the idea is that you do a CBA that values all this stuff and therefore you reach an efficient outcome - but HS2 decisions seem to made at random.
I think at this point it would have been cheaper and faster to have bored a tunnel from London to Birmingham!
The user experience will mostly consist of tunnels and deep cuttings anyway. Once in a while the hapless passenger will emerge into bright sunlight (the upper Leam Valley viaduct, for example) only to be plunged back into the gloom of a cutting 10 seconds later, followed by a tunnel, followed by another cutting. One of the reasons for the outrageous cost is the need to lower the track due to Home Counties nimbyism.
And, of course, had that been around when the original railways had been proposed a lot of the promoters would have given up.
It was, actually. That's why what is now the WCML (then the Grand Junction railway) cost three times the original estimate. Between buying land at grossly inflated prices and - ironically - digging tunnels to placate the most implacable landowners (ever wondered why there's a totally unnecessary and very inconvenient tunnel right in front of Shugborough?) the whole thing had costs balloon massively.
That was even a problem on the canals. Shelmore Great Bank on the Shropshire Union Canal between Gnosall and Nantwich which took eight years and cost literally hundreds of thousands to build, was only built because they had to divert around one landowner's pheasant shoot.
I've read that some landowners drove a bargain to acquire a station conveniently handy to their property.
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
Yet a number of ancient woodlands have been bulldozed to make way for HS2. The inconsistency is what is so baffling - the idea is that you do a CBA that values all this stuff and therefore you reach an efficient outcome - but HS2 decisions seem to made at random.
I think at this point it would have been cheaper and faster to have bored a tunnel from London to Birmingham!
The user experience will mostly consist of tunnels and deep cuttings anyway. Once in a while the hapless passenger will emerge into bright sunlight (the upper Leam Valley viaduct, for example) only to be plunged back into the gloom of a cutting 10 seconds later, followed by a tunnel, followed by another cutting. One of the reasons for the outrageous cost is the need to lower the track due to Home Counties nimbyism.
And, of course, had that been around when the original railways had been proposed a lot of the promoters would have given up.
It was, actually. That's why what is now the WCML (then the Grand Junction railway) cost three times the original estimate. Between buying land at grossly inflated prices and - ironically - digging tunnels to placate the most implacable landowners (ever wondered why there's a totally unnecessary and very inconvenient tunnel right in front of Shugborough?) the whole thing had costs balloon massively.
That was even a problem on the canals. Shelmore Great Bank on the Shropshire Union Canal between Gnosall and Nantwich which took eight years and cost literally hundreds of thousands to build, was only built because they had to divert around one landowner's pheasant shoot.
I've read that some landowners drove a bargain to acquire a station conveniently handy to their property.
That’s how it worked in Scotland too. Now a brilliant asset for walking and cycling.
A Reform implosion might be bad news for Labour and good news for the Tories but any person wanting to wake up after election night without a terrible sense of dread needs to accept that the main priority is stopping Reform and living in a country that doesn’t become a hate fuelled cesspit .
If that means a Tory win then I can live with that even though their position on the EU and ECHR would be a bitter pill to swallow .
How are Bunrham's council houses going to be built when the construction sector is already suffocated by regulatory constraints and workforce shortages ?
Hasn't he noticed that Starmer's housing targets have already been a complete failure ?
Mass apprenticeships for Neets is the obvious answer. But little of this is happening before a GE.
Burnham's biggest problem is that SKS has wasted 2 years..
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
Yet a number of ancient woodlands have been bulldozed to make way for HS2. The inconsistency is what is so baffling - the idea is that you do a CBA that values all this stuff and therefore you reach an efficient outcome - but HS2 decisions seem to made at random.
I think at this point it would have been cheaper and faster to have bored a tunnel from London to Birmingham!
I've witnessed an interesting case study in getting infrastructure done these last 2 weeks in Turkey, particularly on the most recent stretch in the Erdogan heartland of the Black Sea region.
They are building roads, railways and airports at a breakneck pace. All through the Pontic mountains are new tunnels, vast arrays of diggers and construction equipment. It's impressive. But look closer and you realise why this couldn't be a recipe for Britain without cultural and regulatory changes that I'm not sure we're up for.
They don't close the road during construction, or notably cone off the works. You drive among it. That means:
1. For large stretches you're driving on unmade rough surfaces, kicking up dust (or mud in winter). I expect there are several dents and tyre blowouts from this daily. Can't imagine the British road user tolerating this. But it means they can work at great speed. 2. The health and safety implications don't bear thinking about. The whole set up looks like multiple accidents waiting to happen. But of course that will make things cheaper
Planning and property rights? Erdogan decrees, it gets built
Biodiversity and conservation? Not really something Turkey goes in for. No bat tunnels here.
And of course a low wage workforce with very few protections.
If we were a middle income country like Turkey then we could absolutely build HS2, NPR, a few new motorways and several new cities for a fraction of the cost and rapidly. The trouble is, we are not. So we need to work within What's culturally and socially acceptable.
As I understand it, the three things that made HS2 such a disaster costwise were home counties nimbyism, the way risks were shared in the contracts and the very high speed insisted on. The last of these I guess has some justification, the second seems like the civil service got fucked over drawing up the contracts and the first is a disgrace, they should have been told to get to fuck. Another Cameron era fuck up.
South Korea is a crowded place, with a high level of development, modern safety standards.
They can build infrastructure better, faster and cheaper.
The issue is more, I think, to do with a culture of every pissant being given an ant hill to piss from. Domain knowledge is actively despised.
A lot of S Korea is so hilly that there aren't any arguments over tunnels - if you want to get anywhere, there's no other choice.
And it had the other advantages of being a dictatorship until the end of the 80s, and not having much in the way of legacy Victorian infrastructure, so they didn't have many decades to forget how to do stuff.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The HS2 project included a massive training centre, basically a college of railway engineering and construction, because they didn’t have enough people with the required skills.
It would be a massive waste of both money and human capital, if these skills end up lost again because there’s not sufficient work in the pipeline as the project concludes. Government and industry need to ensure that the pipeline continues, and people can seamlessly move from one project to the next.
The original HS2 map was a reasonable stab at such a pipeline.
All-in-all, one of Rishi's worse decisions.
Yes absolutely. A new PM Burnham could do a lot worse than to immediately resurrect these plans. IIRC the sections North of Birmingham are significantly easier to build from a technical standpoint, and serve as the anchor for other projects across the North.
They do need to show that the costs are under control though, they can’t be allowed to run away as happened to the Southern section.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The speed does cost a lot more because you need far shallower gradients and curves, and therefore much more civil engineering, and slab based track rather than ballast, which is much more expensive. At that speed you also have to consider the pressure waves entering tunnels in front of and around trains due to "air hammer" which is because the trains are so fast you have to consider air as a fluid. It means their diameters are much larger.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
I remember this argument at the start of the interminable arguments over the project. Very few people accepted that the (completely unnecessary) top speed would cost a lot more. A common attitude was the reducing the headline figure was penny pinching.
A better informed debate might have avoided some if the years of delay.
Politicians love things which can be describe as 'world beating' or 'biggest in Europe'.
There was lots more money to be made for lawyers and consultants from a high speed railway than an ordinary railway.
Put them together and the mentality of "if we're building a new railway it might as well be high speed".
Now consider how you would view a business which wanted a new car and said "if we're buying a new car it might as well be a Ferrari".
How are Bunrham's council houses going to be built when the construction sector is already suffocated by regulatory constraints and workforce shortages ?
Hasn't he noticed that Starmer's housing targets have already been a complete failure ?
Burnham will use primary legislation to create skills.
But like passing a law declaring Rwanda to be a safe country.
How are Bunrham's council houses going to be built when the construction sector is already suffocated by regulatory constraints and workforce shortages ?
Hasn't he noticed that Starmer's housing targets have already been a complete failure ?
Mass apprenticeships for Neets is the obvious answer. But little of this is happening before a GE.
Burnham's biggest problem is that SKS has wasted 2 years..
Depends how you look at it. If Starmer hadn't wasted two years, Burnham wouldn't have gained power.
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
Yet a number of ancient woodlands have been bulldozed to make way for HS2. The inconsistency is what is so baffling - the idea is that you do a CBA that values all this stuff and therefore you reach an efficient outcome - but HS2 decisions seem to made at random.
I think at this point it would have been cheaper and faster to have bored a tunnel from London to Birmingham!
The user experience will mostly consist of tunnels and deep cuttings anyway. Once in a while the hapless passenger will emerge into bright sunlight (the upper Leam Valley viaduct, for example) only to be plunged back into the gloom of a cutting 10 seconds later, followed by a tunnel, followed by another cutting. One of the reasons for the outrageous cost is the need to lower the track due to Home Counties nimbyism.
And, of course, had that been around when the original railways had been proposed a lot of the promoters would have given up.
It was, actually. That's why what is now the WCML (then the Grand Junction railway) cost three times the original estimate. Between buying land at grossly inflated prices and - ironically - digging tunnels to placate the most implacable landowners (ever wondered why there's a totally unnecessary and very inconvenient tunnel right in front of Shugborough?) the whole thing had costs balloon massively.
That was even a problem on the canals. Shelmore Great Bank on the Shropshire Union Canal between Gnosall and Nantwich which took eight years and cost literally hundreds of thousands to build, was only built because they had to divert around one landowner's pheasant shoot.
I've read that some landowners drove a bargain to acquire a station conveniently handy to their property.
The big difference with the railways (and canals) was that the horse trading happened before the parliamentary bills.
Once that was done, the engineers ran the projects.
Out then go Germany and the Netherlands and this tournament starts to bubble along nicely. I'm on France to prevail - yes, I know, remember Agincourt, Crecy, Waterloo, Euston etc, etc.
On topic, Reform is and has never been just about Farage - all he has done is successfully articulate the often incoherent anger and frustrations of those who feel "the system" has failed them and the country. Now, whether that's because of perceptions about immigration, the economy, the British identity, our place in the world or a whole range of other gripes and whinges, I'm not sure but as long as the causes of the anger remain, that anger will find expression somewhere by someone somehow and that could be Anderson or Lowe or A.N Other.
What I found interesting about yesterday is both Burnham and Badenoch spoke and while the policies were very different as you might expect, the target audience was much the same - those who had formerly backed Labour or the Conservatives and were now with Reform. Faragists will claim it'stwo bald men fighting over a comb but I look at the Amber Valley question and I come back to it.
What will be the more important thing for the Amber Valley voter in 2029 - stopping a Labour Government or stopping a Reform Government?
By that logic shouldn’t everyone vote conservative?
The problem with your "logic" is in Amber Valley Labour are first, Reform second and the Conservatives third. You vote Labour to stop Reform, you vote Reform to stop Labour. Voting Conservative (and indeed Green, LD etc) in Amber Valley is a wasted vote.
A Tory vote is a wasted vote.
It's worth reflecting on why the "wasted vote" argument works so well. If you primarily vote to stop someone, then yes (though your single vote is unlikely to do anything). But if you primarily vote because you like something, it shouldn't work. We've quietly allowed politics to drift into negativism in Britain, and if Burnham, or indeed anyone in any party, can reverse that, more power to them.
I have thought (and said here) that Reform can't win the next election. This is becoming more true all the time. Moving on to what happens next is interesting.
Farage is on the downhill, but the reasons for the far right surge have not gone away. Farage not being centre stage leaves a horrible gap for some equally horrible people to fill, even though winning is out of the question.
As things stand only Labour can lead the next government, not because Labour are great but because the Tories are not close to being good enough. The moderate Tory middle class backbone of the country has dissolved, both in party terms and demographically.
Returning politics to sanity requires a Tory leader who, first of all, can set out an affirmative Burkean liberal and democratic vision as well as Burnham can set out his.
Central to this is, because of the far right, affirming the difference between controlling our borders (fine) and demonising millions of people who are already lawfully here (the roots of fascism). The centre right and the far right are not the same but the Tories have no really clarified the difference. I don't think Kemi is the person to do it. It needs a visionary communicator.
In other words,
I think "Margot Leadbetter is dead" is a fairly good statement of where the Conservative Party now sits, tbh.
Audrey Fforbes Hamilton would certainly still be a Tory, she might vote LD only on a forced choice tactical vote to beat Reform or Burnham Labour
She would not face that tactical choice as she would live in a Conservative/LD marginal. I think you are right on Audrey but may well have lost Margot. Both would be conflicted in a way that would have felt inconceivable to them a few decades ago.
Peter de Vere is probably still voting Conservative, but Audrey is too maternalistic, if such a word exists. The sort of lady who believes in fixing the church roof, and that strand of the Tory tradition has very largely wandered off.
Incidentally if devolution is all the rage now wont that stop all future HS2 style megaprojects ?
As every devolved authority concentrates on what benefits itself rather than what Whitehall thinks benefits the country as a whole and/or London in particular.
Good morning everyone. By no means as warm and bright today. Perhaps it will improve; I hope so!
It is perhaps a demonstration on the overwhelmingly maleness of this site that today we are discussing trains and there has been no mention of the, to me, extraordinary report on maternity services. What `I would like to know, apropos of that report, is whether maternity services have declined somewhat over the past however many years or whether there have always been the problems outlined and no-one has done anything about them.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The speed does cost a lot more because you need far shallower gradients and curves, and therefore much more civil engineering, and slab based track rather than ballast, which is much more expensive. At that speed you also have to consider the pressure waves entering tunnels in front of and around trains due to "air hammer" which is because the trains are so fast you have to consider air as a fluid. It means their diameters are much larger.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
I remember this argument at the start of the interminable arguments over the project. Very few people accepted that the (completely unnecessary) top speed would cost a lot more. A common attitude was the reducing the headline figure was penny pinching.
A better informed debate might have avoided some if the years of delay.
Politicians love things which can be describe as 'world beating' or 'biggest in Europe'.
There was lots more money to be made for lawyers and consultants from a high speed railway than an ordinary railway.
Put them together and the mentality of "if we're building a new railway it might as well be high speed".
Now consider how you would view a business which wanted a new car and said "if we're buying a new car it might as well be a Ferrari".
My first act as PM would be to ban the phrase "world beating".
How are Bunrham's council houses going to be built when the construction sector is already suffocated by regulatory constraints and workforce shortages ?
Hasn't he noticed that Starmer's housing targets have already been a complete failure ?
One interesting commentary on housing, suggesting that a bog-standard 3-bed Barrett Box now costs over £220k to construct purely in materials and labour.
That’s before you’ve got the land and planning permission, and before the builder covers their infrastructure and marketing costs.
There needs to be a significant rollback of building codes and a serious look at alternative construction methods, if there’s to be millions of new houses built.
Without Farage the Reform vote would likely collapse. Zia Yusuf as leader would likely see Restore squeeze their vote heavily and Lee Anderson as leader would likely leak significantly to the Tories. However even against Burnham Labour Farage's Reform are still relatively resilient, only squeezed a little and still only a point or two behind
I presume you have some evidence for the first part of this or is it just some hopecasting from the Conservative side?
Since Reform is made up of both ex-Conservative and ex-Labour voters (as well as those who had previously not voted), it seems reasonable to suppose were their vote to fragment, it would go several ways including to Labour, Restore and Will Not Vote rather than going en bloc to the Conservatives.
This left-right split within Reform reminds me of the LibDems. Some very right of centre Liberals and left leaning Social Democrats.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The speed does cost a lot more because you need far shallower gradients and curves, and therefore much more civil engineering, and slab based track rather than ballast, which is much more expensive. At that speed you also have to consider the pressure waves entering tunnels in front of and around trains due to "air hammer" which is because the trains are so fast you have to consider air as a fluid. It means their diameters are much larger.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
I remember this argument at the start of the interminable arguments over the project. Very few people accepted that the (completely unnecessary) top speed would cost a lot more. A common attitude was the reducing the headline figure was penny pinching.
A better informed debate might have avoided some if the years of delay.
Politicians love things which can be describe as 'world beating' or 'biggest in Europe'.
There was lots more money to be made for lawyers and consultants from a high speed railway than an ordinary railway.
Put them together and the mentality of "if we're building a new railway it might as well be high speed".
Now consider how you would view a business which wanted a new car and said "if we're buying a new car it might as well be a Ferrari".
My first act as PM would be to ban the phrase "world beating".
The NHS is the envy of the world, said no-one who’s ever lived in another OECD country.
Incidentally if devolution is all the rage now wont that stop all future HS2 style megaprojects ?
As every devolved authority concentrates on what benefits itself rather than what Whitehall thinks benefits the country as a whole and/or London in particular.
Nope - we would still have national projects.
In fact it would be simpler as the terminal projects would be clearly local ones so we wouldn’t have the mess of HS2 having to include both the Euston platforms and the replacement underground station. It would be 3 projects
Track to Euston - national Station improvements at Euston - local Tfl improvements - local
And this is something I’ve highlighted before we end up with multiple projects all under the same banner due to our inability to separate things out
Good morning everyone. By no means as warm and bright today. Perhaps it will improve; I hope so!
It is perhaps a demonstration on the overwhelmingly maleness of this site that today we are discussing trains and there has been no mention of the, to me, extraordinary report on maternity services. What `I would like to know, apropos of that report, is whether maternity services have declined somewhat over the past however many years or whether there have always been the problems outlined and no-one has done anything about them.
OKC, almost certainly the latter and it was better suppressed, though things were run by Matrons in those days and they knew what they were doing. Now it is all management and US soap doctors who are just money grubbers first and job a distant second , patients are an inconvenience nowadays.
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
There is a clear problem here. But it is also complicated - as he states himself the council is trying (and not doing very well) to provide access that also keeps out twats on motorbikes. He also presents an unusual situation - he can ride trike perfectly well but cannot reverse it at all. I totally support his efforts and councils really ought to be engaging with this, but he also should accept that it is difficult to achieve everything that everyone wants.
How are Bunrham's council houses going to be built when the construction sector is already suffocated by regulatory constraints and workforce shortages ?
Hasn't he noticed that Starmer's housing targets have already been a complete failure ?
One interesting commentary on housing, suggesting that a bog-standard 3-bed Barrett Box now costs over £220k to construct purely in materials and labour.
That’s before you’ve got the land and planning permission, and before the builder covers their infrastructure and marketing costs.
There needs to be a significant rollback of building codes and a serious look at alternative construction methods, if there’s to be millions of new houses built.
Apparently my house has an implied land value of around -£80k according to a rebuild and value calculator cost !
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The speed does cost a lot more because you need far shallower gradients and curves, and therefore much more civil engineering, and slab based track rather than ballast, which is much more expensive. At that speed you also have to consider the pressure waves entering tunnels in front of and around trains due to "air hammer" which is because the trains are so fast you have to consider air as a fluid. It means their diameters are much larger.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
I remember this argument at the start of the interminable arguments over the project. Very few people accepted that the (completely unnecessary) top speed would cost a lot more. A common attitude was the reducing the headline figure was penny pinching.
A better informed debate might have avoided some if the years of delay.
Politicians love things which can be describe as 'world beating' or 'biggest in Europe'.
There was lots more money to be made for lawyers and consultants from a high speed railway than an ordinary railway.
Put them together and the mentality of "if we're building a new railway it might as well be high speed".
Now consider how you would view a business which wanted a new car and said "if we're buying a new car it might as well be a Ferrari".
My first act as PM would be to ban the phrase "world beating".
The UK terror attacks you don’t hear about – and how they go under the radar
Terror attacks against Muslims in the UK are going unnoticed by members of the public because it is taking authorities as long as nine months to identify them as terrorism, The i Paper can reveal.
A quarter of the terror attacks in Britain over the past decade have targeted Muslims, but delays in confirming the offenders’ motivations mean the public may not be aware of the scale of the threat, the UK’s former head of Counter Terrorism Policing has said.
A European Central Bank paper entitled "The Immigration Impact on Population, Labor Productivity, Investments and TFP in OECD Countries"
OECD countries, and particularly Europe's leading economies, have experienced a significant decline in native population growth alongside large increases in net immigration. We compile a new and comprehensive dataset of net immigration rates from all origins to OECD countries and document the characteristics of these flows, establishing that most of the net immigration increase was from non-OECD countries and was significantly high-skilled, over the period 1990–2024. We show that the substantial cross-country heterogeneity in immigration dynamics is difficult to explain by push factors or network effects, while immigration policy – as captured by summary indices – account for only a small share of the observed variation. Unexpected immigration shocks and surges were relevant phenomena of these years. We then examine the relationship between immigration and growth in population and GDP per capita, focusing on labor productivity, capital investment, and total factor productivity (TFP), using local projections and several sources of identifying variation. We find that immigration from non-OECD countries has been a significant driver of GDP per worker growth, primarily through higher investment. High-skilled immigration, in particular, is associated with stronger human capital accumulation, faster TFP growth, and greater capital deepening. Positive immigration shocks and surges and more open immigration policies, are likewise associated with improved economic performance. By contrast, native population growth has either no effect or a weakly negative effect on GDP per capita and productivity growth. The estimated coefficients on immigration, while positive, are often imprecisely estimated. Still, their magnitude and direction are important and consistent with a large and growing literature documenting the positive effects of immigration – especially high-skilled immigration – on productivity, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.
How are Bunrham's council houses going to be built when the construction sector is already suffocated by regulatory constraints and workforce shortages ?
Hasn't he noticed that Starmer's housing targets have already been a complete failure ?
Burnham will use primary legislation to create skills.
But like passing a law declaring Rwanda to be a safe country.
The definition of "safe" is a subjective judgement, so primary legislation (Sufficiently well drafted which it probably wasn't) probably can make somewhere legally 'safe' (The Home Office changes this all the time for various places with red/amber travel alerts etc). Skills are obviously not.
Without Farage the Reform vote would likely collapse. Zia Yusuf as leader would likely see Restore squeeze their vote heavily and Lee Anderson as leader would likely leak significantly to the Tories. However even against Burnham Labour Farage's Reform are still relatively resilient, only squeezed a little and still only a point or two behind
I presume you have some evidence for the first part of this or is it just some hopecasting from the Conservative side?
Since Reform is made up of both ex-Conservative and ex-Labour voters (as well as those who had previously not voted), it seems reasonable to suppose were their vote to fragment, it would go several ways including to Labour, Restore and Will Not Vote rather than going en bloc to the Conservatives.
This left-right split within Reform reminds me of the LibDems. Some very right of centre Liberals and left leaning Social Democrats.
You're not wrong and as often been pointed out, were we to finally get some form of proportional voting system, it's quite likely you would see a classical Liberal Party emerge and a residual Social Democratic & Liberal party (perhaps calling themselves the Radical Liberals).
A Reform implosion might be bad news for Labour and good news for the Tories but any person wanting to wake up after election night without a terrible sense of dread needs to accept that the main priority is stopping Reform and living in a country that doesn’t become a hate fuelled cesspit .
If that means a Tory win then I can live with that even though their position on the EU and ECHR would be a bitter pill to swallow .
IMO a large chunk of Reform voters simply won't bother voting at all if Reform implodes. Anyone who thinks they will cross over to Badenoch en masse is in for a shock. I agree with you though that a Labour v Tory battle at the next GE is the most appealing option.
Incidentally if devolution is all the rage now wont that stop all future HS2 style megaprojects ?
As every devolved authority concentrates on what benefits itself rather than what Whitehall thinks benefits the country as a whole and/or London in particular.
Nope - we would still have national projects.
In fact it would be simpler as the terminal projects would be clearly local ones so we wouldn’t have the mess of HS2 having to include both the Euston platforms and the replacement underground station. It would be 3 projects
Track to Euston - national Station improvements at Euston - local Tfl improvements - local
And this is something I’ve highlighted before we end up with multiple projects all under the same banner due to our inability to separate things out
So our national project good, your devolved interests bad.
The distinction isn't about how those who benefit make their local decisions but about how those who lose out get the right to say no.
And if those who lose out are unable to say no then that's not devolution.
The UK terror attacks you don’t hear about – and how they go under the radar
Terror attacks against Muslims in the UK are going unnoticed by members of the public because it is taking authorities as long as nine months to identify them as terrorism, The i Paper can reveal.
A quarter of the terror attacks in Britain over the past decade have targeted Muslims, but delays in confirming the offenders’ motivations mean the public may not be aware of the scale of the threat, the UK’s former head of Counter Terrorism Policing has said.
See: Edinburgh, where we had a rampaging terrorist attack and no one can quite bring themselves to recognise it as such.
Sharon Graham, left wing leader of Unite and strong advocate of workers rights now faces a challenge
Her crime. Criticising Ed Miliband and his net zero politics and undermining his bid to be Chancellor. As well as ‘not doing enough to beat Reform’ even though many of its members are supporters?
So she now faces a challenge due to her wrongthink.
She faces a challenge because it's an elected position, and a section of the membership don't like her. I don't see where "crime" comes in; it's just how the union system works.
It would have been simpler to say that she faces a challenge from the left.
And far less interesting. The article makes it clear the reasons for the challenge.
I felt it worth pointing out. There is a clear campaign to bolster Ed Miliband and his bid for the chancellorship. As we saw with Newsnight last night with Mazzucato out batting for him.
She faces a challenge due to her positioning and views.
She’s a strong advocate of members rights. She’s even been on picket lines up here.
I've just noticed Miliband down at 1.62 to be Chancellor.
I don't think it should be understated that Miliband is the same generation as Burnham. They were in government together at a similar time, and were in shadow government together too..
The Chancellor decision will be his first test. I'd be inclined to regard choosing Miliband as a fail.
Perhaps we should wait to see whatever the new chancellor does before deciding they are a failure?
Ed M is the obvious choice, alongside Yvette Cooper. He's got an economics background and Treasury experience.
I don't disagree on the point that we then have to judge him on what he does. It's only a first test.
But the choice itself is likely to significantly influence policy, and I am not at all convinced by Milliband's record at Energy, where his economic background doesn't seem to have led to any useful insights.
You might not like his policies at energy but he has been consistent in his goal of decarbonisation of the economy. Most of our govt have dithered.
He's overseen enormous increases in renewable capacity, removed harmful ban on onshore wind, pushed through large solar farms past pointless planning delays, championed British nuclear, funded Sizewell C and faced down the threats from American lobby, launched Great British energy etc.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The speed does cost a lot more because you need far shallower gradients and curves, and therefore much more civil engineering, and slab based track rather than ballast, which is much more expensive. At that speed you also have to consider the pressure waves entering tunnels in front of and around trains due to "air hammer" which is because the trains are so fast you have to consider air as a fluid. It means their diameters are much larger.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
I remember this argument at the start of the interminable arguments over the project. Very few people accepted that the (completely unnecessary) top speed would cost a lot more. A common attitude was the reducing the headline figure was penny pinching.
A better informed debate might have avoided some if the years of delay.
Politicians love things which can be describe as 'world beating' or 'biggest in Europe'.
There was lots more money to be made for lawyers and consultants from a high speed railway than an ordinary railway.
Put them together and the mentality of "if we're building a new railway it might as well be high speed".
Now consider how you would view a business which wanted a new car and said "if we're buying a new car it might as well be a Ferrari".
My first act as PM would be to ban the phrase "world beating".
I'd prefer you banned it at pace.
Two years into government, just before I'm replaced ?
Sharon Graham, left wing leader of Unite and strong advocate of workers rights now faces a challenge
Her crime. Criticising Ed Miliband and his net zero politics and undermining his bid to be Chancellor. As well as ‘not doing enough to beat Reform’ even though many of its members are supporters?
So she now faces a challenge due to her wrongthink.
She faces a challenge because it's an elected position, and a section of the membership don't like her. I don't see where "crime" comes in; it's just how the union system works.
It would have been simpler to say that she faces a challenge from the left.
And far less interesting. The article makes it clear the reasons for the challenge.
I felt it worth pointing out. There is a clear campaign to bolster Ed Miliband and his bid for the chancellorship. As we saw with Newsnight last night with Mazzucato out batting for him.
She faces a challenge due to her positioning and views.
She’s a strong advocate of members rights. She’s even been on picket lines up here.
I've just noticed Miliband down at 1.62 to be Chancellor.
I don't think it should be understated that Miliband is the same generation as Burnham. They were in government together at a similar time, and were in shadow government together too..
The Chancellor decision will be his first test. I'd be inclined to regard choosing Miliband as a fail.
Perhaps we should wait to see whatever the new chancellor does before deciding they are a failure?
Ed M is the obvious choice, alongside Yvette Cooper. He's got an economics background and Treasury experience.
I don't disagree on the point that we then have to judge him on what he does. It's only a first test.
But the choice itself is likely to significantly influence policy, and I am not at all convinced by Milliband's record at Energy, where his economic background doesn't seem to have led to any useful insights.
You might not like his policies at energy but he has been consistent in his goal of decarbonisation of the economy. Most of our govt have dithered.
He's overseen enormous increases in renewable capacity, removed harmful ban on onshore wind, pushed through large solar farms past pointless planning delays, championed British nuclear, funded Sizewell C and faced down the threats from American lobby, launched Great British energy etc.
New CCGT and first come first served transmission connections too.
Without Farage the Reform vote would likely collapse. Zia Yusuf as leader would likely see Restore squeeze their vote heavily and Lee Anderson as leader would likely leak significantly to the Tories. However even against Burnham Labour Farage's Reform are still relatively resilient, only squeezed a little and still only a point or two behind
I presume you have some evidence for the first part of this or is it just some hopecasting from the Conservative side?
Since Reform is made up of both ex-Conservative and ex-Labour voters (as well as those who had previously not voted), it seems reasonable to suppose were their vote to fragment, it would go several ways including to Labour, Restore and Will Not Vote rather than going en bloc to the Conservatives.
This left-right split within Reform reminds me of the LibDems. Some very right of centre Liberals and left leaning Social Democrats.
You're not wrong and as often been pointed out, were we to finally get some form of proportional voting system, it's quite likely you would see a classical Liberal Party emerge and a residual Social Democratic & Liberal party (perhaps calling themselves the Radical Liberals).
For now, everyone jogs along in relative amity.
One reason I've been a member so long. There's no real factionalism and any drama such as exists is of the individual variety. Most are just nice.
Without Farage the Reform vote would likely collapse. Zia Yusuf as leader would likely see Restore squeeze their vote heavily and Lee Anderson as leader would likely leak significantly to the Tories. However even against Burnham Labour Farage's Reform are still relatively resilient, only squeezed a little and still only a point or two behind
I presume you have some evidence for the first part of this or is it just some hopecasting from the Conservative side?
Since Reform is made up of both ex-Conservative and ex-Labour voters (as well as those who had previously not voted), it seems reasonable to suppose were their vote to fragment, it would go several ways including to Labour, Restore and Will Not Vote rather than going en bloc to the Conservatives.
The Reform vote was less than half what it is now before Farage returned to leave it. I highly doubt many Reform voters would to be that enthusiastic about a non white leader given and Anderson isn’t anywhere near as articulate and charismatic as Farage.
Of course a post Farage Reform vote would fragment but those Reform voters who voted Conservative in 2019 would likely mostly return to the Tories
That last paragraph is why you are going to lose the next election.
Yes, many of those who voted Reform in 2024 and indeed since were Conservative voters in 2019 (and quite likely LEAVE voters in 2016) but you can't assume a loyalty based on one vote at one election. Why should they return to the Conservatives - why not Labour or Restore?
Farage will likely lead Reform into the next general election, a post Farage Reform likely won’t happen unless and until Reform lose that general election.
The clear majority of current Reform voters voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 and some of them even voted Conservative in 2014. Those voters aren’t going Labour, certainly not under leftwing Burnham and only the Reform diehard core white nationalist core vote, some of whom are ex UKIP and Brexit party would go Restore
I'm not sure that's true.
The 2017 election certainly had a high Labour vote share and in seats like Amber Valley Labour improved its VI taking a share of those who voted UKIP in 2015.
In 2019, Nigel Mills had a majority of nearly 17,000 but in 2024 his vote collapsed roughly 3: 1 in favour of Reform over Labour. The Labour share went up to the 2010 level (below 2017 but not far below) while the Conservative share crashed to its lowest level in a seat which is a good barometer. Had all the 2019 Conservative vote gone to Reform, Reform would have won the seat - about a quarter went to Labour and I imagine a smaller group abstained.
I think there's much more volatility out there and to lazily assume because people once or twice voted Conservative and then switched to Reform at both national and local elections they will automatically come back to the Conservatives might be valid in Brentwood & Ongar but I'm less convinced about Amber Valley.
Without Farage the Reform vote would likely collapse. Zia Yusuf as leader would likely see Restore squeeze their vote heavily and Lee Anderson as leader would likely leak significantly to the Tories. However even against Burnham Labour Farage's Reform are still relatively resilient, only squeezed a little and still only a point or two behind
I presume you have some evidence for the first part of this or is it just some hopecasting from the Conservative side?
Since Reform is made up of both ex-Conservative and ex-Labour voters (as well as those who had previously not voted), it seems reasonable to suppose were their vote to fragment, it would go several ways including to Labour, Restore and Will Not Vote rather than going en bloc to the Conservatives.
This left-right split within Reform reminds me of the LibDems. Some very right of centre Liberals and left leaning Social Democrats.
You're not wrong and as often been pointed out, were we to finally get some form of proportional voting system, it's quite likely you would see a classical Liberal Party emerge and a residual Social Democratic & Liberal party (perhaps calling themselves the Radical Liberals).
For now, everyone jogs along in relative amity.
One reason I've been a member so long. There's no real factionalism and any drama such as exists is of the individual variety. Most are just nice.
That was my experience when I was a member. Oddly enough, I was too busy being an activist to get involved with political and policy debate until I went to Conference.
It's true to say the party didn't do personality differences well - I saw a couple of examples of local council groups fall apart because of internal bickering not based on policy but personality.
I am told that there is (finally) a "Barrier Removal Programme" starting to move - the Council "put aside a fund"! in 2021.
I'd be interested to hear If anyone notices.
This after a friend who is a Professor at York University who has multiple sclerosis, and now uses a 3-wheeled mobility aid (having gone from cycle to stabilised cycle over the years). sued the Council under the Equality Act 2020 after they blocked the entrance to a green space (Hob Moor) with the following custom-made anti-wheelchair obstruction, which was uniquely abusive of them. They spent taxpayers' money installing barriers quite widely, at several thousand a pop to implement law breaking. Before that he attempted to engage the Council for 3 years. They did the usual things - ignore him, ask for more time, dissemble, then cave at a cost of several thousand.
The problems with facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it, are covered in his article.
There is a deeper issue, here. A structural one.
The “facilities designed by people who do not understand disability, or without thinking about it”
This pattern repeats - something designed and created at great expense, that is rubbish. And often breaks the rules it is supposed to enforce.
The famous Bat Tunnel was founded on a stupid idea - perfect safety for bats rather than an assessed risk. Nothing can be perfectly safe - even at infinite cost. The specification was created by someone without even a passing interest in reading about engineering and managing physical projects.
It is this deep, ingrained, lack of knowledge that causes much damage in our society.
There is a clear problem here. But it is also complicated - as he states himself the council is trying (and not doing very well) to provide access that also keeps out twats on motorbikes. He also presents an unusual situation - he can ride trike perfectly well but cannot reverse it at all. I totally support his efforts and councils really ought to be engaging with this, but he also should accept that it is difficult to achieve everything that everyone wants.
If you show the slightest evidence of being conciliatory, you will be ignored.
Then people wonder why every pressure group is absolutist.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The speed does cost a lot more because you need far shallower gradients and curves, and therefore much more civil engineering, and slab based track rather than ballast, which is much more expensive. At that speed you also have to consider the pressure waves entering tunnels in front of and around trains due to "air hammer" which is because the trains are so fast you have to consider air as a fluid. It means their diameters are much larger.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
I remember this argument at the start of the interminable arguments over the project. Very few people accepted that the (completely unnecessary) top speed would cost a lot more. A common attitude was the reducing the headline figure was penny pinching.
A better informed debate might have avoided some if the years of delay.
Politicians love things which can be describe as 'world beating' or 'biggest in Europe'.
There was lots more money to be made for lawyers and consultants from a high speed railway than an ordinary railway.
Put them together and the mentality of "if we're building a new railway it might as well be high speed".
Now consider how you would view a business which wanted a new car and said "if we're buying a new car it might as well be a Ferrari".
My first act as PM would be to ban the phrase "world beating".
Yes, agree. I used to work for a small organisation that was genuinely up with world leaders in its primary field, but the directors/ managers seemed to think that meant that people in every supporting aspect had to be world-leading - even us IT people.
The UK terror attacks you don’t hear about – and how they go under the radar
Terror attacks against Muslims in the UK are going unnoticed by members of the public because it is taking authorities as long as nine months to identify them as terrorism, The i Paper can reveal.
A quarter of the terror attacks in Britain over the past decade have targeted Muslims, but delays in confirming the offenders’ motivations mean the public may not be aware of the scale of the threat, the UK’s former head of Counter Terrorism Policing has said.
See: Edinburgh, where we had a rampaging terrorist attack and no one can quite bring themselves to recognise it as such.
Only 9 months?
There has been discussion, over multiple years, that domestic violence by women against men is counted as domestic violence by men against women. Apparently it’s too tricky to count them separately.
Probably, terrorism against Muslims is counted as UFO sightings. And there is a chain of memos about changing that…
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The speed does cost a lot more because you need far shallower gradients and curves, and therefore much more civil engineering, and slab based track rather than ballast, which is much more expensive. At that speed you also have to consider the pressure waves entering tunnels in front of and around trains due to "air hammer" which is because the trains are so fast you have to consider air as a fluid. It means their diameters are much larger.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
I remember this argument at the start of the interminable arguments over the project. Very few people accepted that the (completely unnecessary) top speed would cost a lot more. A common attitude was the reducing the headline figure was penny pinching.
A better informed debate might have avoided some if the years of delay.
Politicians love things which can be describe as 'world beating' or 'biggest in Europe'.
There was lots more money to be made for lawyers and consultants from a high speed railway than an ordinary railway.
Put them together and the mentality of "if we're building a new railway it might as well be high speed".
Now consider how you would view a business which wanted a new car and said "if we're buying a new car it might as well be a Ferrari".
My first act as PM would be to ban the phrase "world beating".
The NHS is the envy of the world, said no-one who’s ever lived in another OECD country.
A couple of months ago I was watching our 4th year pharmacy students do presentations and one came out with a statement on those lines - i.e. NHS being the envy of the world etc. I asked her if she really thought that and if she thought people in other European nations (France, Germany, Italy etc) thought their systems were rubbish and pined for an NHS. After her talk she actually spoke to some of her friends from said countries and got back to me - she had started to realise her mistake, I think.
The culture of 'NHS is best' is so ingrained in this country. And ultimately its dangerous - we need to look around the world and see where best practice is.
Incidentally if devolution is all the rage now wont that stop all future HS2 style megaprojects ?
As every devolved authority concentrates on what benefits itself rather than what Whitehall thinks benefits the country as a whole and/or London in particular.
Could end up like the Japanese, running a relay train to connect two high speed lines because the prefecture won't stump up for their section:
I have thought (and said here) that Reform can't win the next election. This is becoming more true all the time. Moving on to what happens next is interesting.
Farage is on the downhill, but the reasons for the far right surge have not gone away. Farage not being centre stage leaves a horrible gap for some equally horrible people to fill, even though winning is out of the question.
As things stand only Labour can lead the next government, not because Labour are great but because the Tories are not close to being good enough. The moderate Tory middle class backbone of the country has dissolved, both in party terms and demographically.
Returning politics to sanity requires a Tory leader who, first of all, can set out an affirmative Burkean liberal and democratic vision as well as Burnham can set out his.
Central to this is, because of the far right, affirming the difference between controlling our borders (fine) and demonising millions of people who are already lawfully here (the roots of fascism). The centre right and the far right are not the same but the Tories have no really clarified the difference. I don't think Kemi is the person to do it. It needs a visionary communicator.
In other words,
I think "Margot Leadbetter is dead" is a fairly good statement of where the Conservative Party now sits, tbh.
Audrey Fforbes Hamilton would certainly still be a Tory, she might vote LD only on a forced choice tactical vote to beat Reform or Burnham Labour
She would not face that tactical choice as she would live in a Conservative/LD marginal. I think you are right on Audrey but may well have lost Margot. Both would be conflicted in a way that would have felt inconceivable to them a few decades ago.
Peter de Vere is probably still voting Conservative, but Audrey is too maternalistic, if such a word exists. The sort of lady who believes in fixing the church roof, and that strand of the Tory tradition has very largely wandered off.
The most salient question, one that any pundit worth their salt really ought to be asking themselves, is where is Alf Garnett in 2026?
Lost to the Tories, you'd have thought, but is he Reform or Restore?
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The speed does cost a lot more because you need far shallower gradients and curves, and therefore much more civil engineering, and slab based track rather than ballast, which is much more expensive. At that speed you also have to consider the pressure waves entering tunnels in front of and around trains due to "air hammer" which is because the trains are so fast you have to consider air as a fluid. It means their diameters are much larger.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
I remember this argument at the start of the interminable arguments over the project. Very few people accepted that the (completely unnecessary) top speed would cost a lot more. A common attitude was the reducing the headline figure was penny pinching.
A better informed debate might have avoided some if the years of delay.
Politicians love things which can be describe as 'world beating' or 'biggest in Europe'.
There was lots more money to be made for lawyers and consultants from a high speed railway than an ordinary railway.
Put them together and the mentality of "if we're building a new railway it might as well be high speed".
Now consider how you would view a business which wanted a new car and said "if we're buying a new car it might as well be a Ferrari".
My first act as PM would be to ban the phrase "world beating".
To be 'world beating' requires some combination of inherent ability, hard work and lots of money.
In the real world people have very little interaction with, or need for, 'world beating'.
What people need in their lives are things which are effective, efficient, reliable, good enough and good value for money.
A European Central Bank paper entitled "The Immigration Impact on Population, Labor Productivity, Investments and TFP in OECD Countries"
OECD countries, and particularly Europe's leading economies, have experienced a significant decline in native population growth alongside large increases in net immigration. We compile a new and comprehensive dataset of net immigration rates from all origins to OECD countries and document the characteristics of these flows, establishing that most of the net immigration increase was from non-OECD countries and was significantly high-skilled, over the period 1990–2024. We show that the substantial cross-country heterogeneity in immigration dynamics is difficult to explain by push factors or network effects, while immigration policy – as captured by summary indices – account for only a small share of the observed variation. Unexpected immigration shocks and surges were relevant phenomena of these years. We then examine the relationship between immigration and growth in population and GDP per capita, focusing on labor productivity, capital investment, and total factor productivity (TFP), using local projections and several sources of identifying variation. We find that immigration from non-OECD countries has been a significant driver of GDP per worker growth, primarily through higher investment. High-skilled immigration, in particular, is associated with stronger human capital accumulation, faster TFP growth, and greater capital deepening. Positive immigration shocks and surges and more open immigration policies, are likewise associated with improved economic performance. By contrast, native population growth has either no effect or a weakly negative effect on GDP per capita and productivity growth. The estimated coefficients on immigration, while positive, are often imprecisely estimated. Still, their magnitude and direction are important and consistent with a large and growing literature documenting the positive effects of immigration – especially high-skilled immigration – on productivity, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.
It's all good, chaps. Keep doing what you're doing.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The speed does cost a lot more because you need far shallower gradients and curves, and therefore much more civil engineering, and slab based track rather than ballast, which is much more expensive. At that speed you also have to consider the pressure waves entering tunnels in front of and around trains due to "air hammer" which is because the trains are so fast you have to consider air as a fluid. It means their diameters are much larger.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
I remember this argument at the start of the interminable arguments over the project. Very few people accepted that the (completely unnecessary) top speed would cost a lot more. A common attitude was the reducing the headline figure was penny pinching.
A better informed debate might have avoided some if the years of delay.
Politicians love things which can be describe as 'world beating' or 'biggest in Europe'.
There was lots more money to be made for lawyers and consultants from a high speed railway than an ordinary railway.
Put them together and the mentality of "if we're building a new railway it might as well be high speed".
Now consider how you would view a business which wanted a new car and said "if we're buying a new car it might as well be a Ferrari".
My first act as PM would be to ban the phrase "world beating".
The NHS is the envy of the world, said no-one who’s ever lived in another OECD country.
Well the NHS sits in the mid/high scores among OECD countries, notably on cost per patient treated- the US spends a fortune for pretty ho-hum results. The point about health, as with so many things in the UK is not that it is so terrible, it is that it is so patchy- when it is good it is very very good, when it is bad, it is horrid.
The problem for the UK is not that things are so disastrous, it is that they are so mediocre.
The UK terror attacks you don’t hear about – and how they go under the radar
Terror attacks against Muslims in the UK are going unnoticed by members of the public because it is taking authorities as long as nine months to identify them as terrorism, The i Paper can reveal.
A quarter of the terror attacks in Britain over the past decade have targeted Muslims, but delays in confirming the offenders’ motivations mean the public may not be aware of the scale of the threat, the UK’s former head of Counter Terrorism Policing has said.
See: Edinburgh, where we had a rampaging terrorist attack and no one can quite bring themselves to recognise it as such.
I think this is overblown. Thankfully no one died but if they had, it would have been a much bigger story. See also Henry Nowak's murder - if he lives its a much smaller story.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The speed does cost a lot more because you need far shallower gradients and curves, and therefore much more civil engineering, and slab based track rather than ballast, which is much more expensive. At that speed you also have to consider the pressure waves entering tunnels in front of and around trains due to "air hammer" which is because the trains are so fast you have to consider air as a fluid. It means their diameters are much larger.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
I remember this argument at the start of the interminable arguments over the project. Very few people accepted that the (completely unnecessary) top speed would cost a lot more. A common attitude was the reducing the headline figure was penny pinching.
A better informed debate might have avoided some if the years of delay.
Politicians love things which can be describe as 'world beating' or 'biggest in Europe'.
There was lots more money to be made for lawyers and consultants from a high speed railway than an ordinary railway.
Put them together and the mentality of "if we're building a new railway it might as well be high speed".
Now consider how you would view a business which wanted a new car and said "if we're buying a new car it might as well be a Ferrari".
My first act as PM would be to ban the phrase "world beating".
The NHS is the envy of the world, said no-one who’s ever lived in another OECD country.
A couple of months ago I was watching our 4th year pharmacy students do presentations and one came out with a statement on those lines - i.e. NHS being the envy of the world etc. I asked her if she really thought that and if she thought people in other European nations (France, Germany, Italy etc) thought their systems were rubbish and pined for an NHS. After her talk she actually spoke to some of her friends from said countries and got back to me - she had started to realise her mistake, I think.
The culture of 'NHS is best' is so ingrained in this country. And ultimately its dangerous - we need to look around the world and see where best practice is.
In the 70's, when I was running a small group of pharmacies, I used to host, for a month or so each summer, a pharmacy student from somewhere in Europe..... Dutch, Danish, German etc. The impression I gained from them was that some features of the NHS were better than in their home countries, some not so good.
Where does this idea come from that Farage doesn't want to be PM because it would be too much hard work?
The job is huge amounts of hard work if you do it properly (and also if you do it improperly, by being a control freak), but who said he has to do it properly?
Johnson wasn't exactly known for his diligence and hard work. Cameron was notorious for chillaxing as PM, though he at least was able to delegate most of the work to a Cabinet that had some sense of what it was trying to do.
Farage one hundred percent wants to be able to force the establishment to admit him as a member. It is his primary motivating force. Becoming PM would be the culmination of a lifelong crusade to exorcise the chip on his shoulder. He wants the job for the weekly chat with the Monarch alone.
What Farage cannot abide, is being a loser (again). He walked away from UKIP when he could see that the Brexit referendum result had made them temporarily irrelevant. He backed down in the 2019GE and stood down many of his candidates when he could see that the tide was running Johnson's way. He didn't re-enter the fray for GE2024 until he was confident it would be worth his while.
If he walks away from Reform it will be because he believes defeat at the next general election is inevitable, and he doesn't want any part of it. As long as he thinks he can win, he will stick with it.
As I said, there are significant political challenges for Andy Burnham's regional devolution strategy. But the hysterical reaction by some to the idea the British Prime Minister might spend a day or two out of London shows just how hard even incremental change actually is.
Sharon Graham, left wing leader of Unite and strong advocate of workers rights now faces a challenge
Her crime. Criticising Ed Miliband and his net zero politics and undermining his bid to be Chancellor. As well as ‘not doing enough to beat Reform’ even though many of its members are supporters?
So she now faces a challenge due to her wrongthink.
She faces a challenge because it's an elected position, and a section of the membership don't like her. I don't see where "crime" comes in; it's just how the union system works.
It would have been simpler to say that she faces a challenge from the left.
And far less interesting. The article makes it clear the reasons for the challenge.
I felt it worth pointing out. There is a clear campaign to bolster Ed Miliband and his bid for the chancellorship. As we saw with Newsnight last night with Mazzucato out batting for him.
She faces a challenge due to her positioning and views.
She’s a strong advocate of members rights. She’s even been on picket lines up here.
I've just noticed Miliband down at 1.62 to be Chancellor.
I don't think it should be understated that Miliband is the same generation as Burnham. They were in government together at a similar time, and were in shadow government together too..
The Chancellor decision will be his first test. I'd be inclined to regard choosing Miliband as a fail.
Perhaps we should wait to see whatever the new chancellor does before deciding they are a failure?
Ed M is the obvious choice, alongside Yvette Cooper. He's got an economics background and Treasury experience.
I don't disagree on the point that we then have to judge him on what he does. It's only a first test.
But the choice itself is likely to significantly influence policy, and I am not at all convinced by Milliband's record at Energy, where his economic background doesn't seem to have led to any useful insights.
You might not like his policies at energy but he has been consistent in his goal of decarbonisation of the economy. Most of our govt have dithered.
He's overseen enormous increases in renewable capacity, removed harmful ban on onshore wind, pushed through large solar farms past pointless planning delays, championed British nuclear, funded Sizewell C and faced down the threats from American lobby, launched Great British energy etc.
Yes, I really hope Ed Milliband doesn't become chancellor precisely of the good work he's been doing at Energy. He's put in the effort there and obviously has a passion for the job and, in the grand scheme of things, it's probably a more important job than chancellor.
Jeez. Already the media hyena pack are now off on one wondering out loud how many nights Burnham will sleep at No 10 and how many at home in the North and so on.
FFS.
Focus on something important for a change.
quite astute from burnham, get the meeja interested in frivolous stuff and not policy
It's one thing wanting this to happen, but realistically is there long enough left of this term to put it into practice? It's surely quite a big project, duplicating No 10? Suitable property to buy or build, for one thing.
House of Commons is falling apart anyway and needs a big refurb. Other countries manage having power spread out across different locations. Plus it will be a hugely visible change. It really is quite amusing watching all London elite getting vapours at the idea we might try something different
Closing Westminstrr for 5-10 years and moving Parliament to Manchester for the duration is an excellent idea.
Closing Westminster and moving Parliament elsewhere is a brilliant idea fullstop.
But unless you move Westminster to the NEC it's got to be a permanent move..
A permanent move is a truly stupid idea. It will cost vast billions and achieve nothing
Unless you really wanted to break the Westminster stranglehold on all things in this country.
Still a stupid idea. All you do is cause chaos in Government
The only first world country that has their seat of Government elsewhere than their capital is the Netherlands. And the distance from The Hague to Amsterdam? 37 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as from one side of Greater London to the other.
Only because you are defining it based on the capital and not based on their primary city.
Washington DC is a tertiary city compared to New York, Los Angeles etc Canberra is a tertiary city compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Ottowa is a tertiary city compared to Toronto, Vancouver etc
Actually separating the capital/seat of government from the primary cities which can concentrate on finance and other issues without government being there is quite common across the first world. Move government wholesale out of London.
Like I said an idiotic idea that will set back both governance and the economy in this country for decades. Don't get me wrong, I detest London and do everything I can to avoid going anywhere near it. But tghis is a truly stupid and self harming idea.
Tell me what infrastructure we have had approved by London up here in the past couple of decades?
London keeps getting new train lines. Crossrail, HS2 etc
Have we had any new train lines? Any new motorways? Anything?
The Civil Servants who make the decisions don't give a shit beyond London. Kick them out of the city and see how soon they wake up.
You call that setting things back? I can live with that.
Developed countries with successful cities and separate capitals tend to work very well, not badly.
This isn't true. HS2 was for the North, and there's the Transpennine Upgrade Programme and before that the West Coast Mainline Upgrade.
Northern Rail does get the shitty stick, and that needs to change, but let's not pretend that no-one cares.
PMSL!
Tell me how the absolute hell is a train line in the South of England that goes to London and terminates up in the Midlands in Birmingham is "for the North"?
If HS2 were actually for the North then it would have made sense to start construction with the Northern legs of it and deal with the Chilterns and South of England later on, and scrap that if anything were to be scrapped. But no, it was never for us.
Only a Southerner could think that what the North is desperately crying out for is another line in London.
It was originally for the North, that's why it was planned to go to Manchester and Leeds. The fact it's been cut back is a travesty, but you can't just represent it as a London thing. It was intended to provide a fast spine right up the whole country to deliver better economic integration for the Midlands and the North.
How much would HS2 have to cost before you conceded that cutting it back was not a "travesty"? From the tone of your comment it would be a lot more than the £100bn just for Euston (possibly) to East Birmingham alone, that is about £1 billion per mile.
I'm not here to defend how the Government cliented and sponsored it, I think the line speed spec and all the tunnels in the Chilterns were ridiculous and drove up cost - unnecessarily. Not to mention the flip-flopping.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
The tunnels aren't neccessary, I'm not so sure about the speed - I don't think it cost that much extra.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
The speed does cost a lot more because you need far shallower gradients and curves, and therefore much more civil engineering, and slab based track rather than ballast, which is much more expensive. At that speed you also have to consider the pressure waves entering tunnels in front of and around trains due to "air hammer" which is because the trains are so fast you have to consider air as a fluid. It means their diameters are much larger.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
I remember this argument at the start of the interminable arguments over the project. Very few people accepted that the (completely unnecessary) top speed would cost a lot more. A common attitude was the reducing the headline figure was penny pinching.
A better informed debate might have avoided some if the years of delay.
Politicians love things which can be describe as 'world beating' or 'biggest in Europe'.
There was lots more money to be made for lawyers and consultants from a high speed railway than an ordinary railway.
Put them together and the mentality of "if we're building a new railway it might as well be high speed".
Now consider how you would view a business which wanted a new car and said "if we're buying a new car it might as well be a Ferrari".
My first act as PM would be to ban the phrase "world beating".
The NHS is the envy of the world, said no-one who’s ever lived in another OECD country.
I dunno, someone like Daveigh Chase may well had an opinion about that
Sharon Graham, left wing leader of Unite and strong advocate of workers rights now faces a challenge
Her crime. Criticising Ed Miliband and his net zero politics and undermining his bid to be Chancellor. As well as ‘not doing enough to beat Reform’ even though many of its members are supporters?
So she now faces a challenge due to her wrongthink.
She faces a challenge because it's an elected position, and a section of the membership don't like her. I don't see where "crime" comes in; it's just how the union system works.
It would have been simpler to say that she faces a challenge from the left.
And far less interesting. The article makes it clear the reasons for the challenge.
I felt it worth pointing out. There is a clear campaign to bolster Ed Miliband and his bid for the chancellorship. As we saw with Newsnight last night with Mazzucato out batting for him.
She faces a challenge due to her positioning and views.
She’s a strong advocate of members rights. She’s even been on picket lines up here.
I've just noticed Miliband down at 1.62 to be Chancellor.
I don't think it should be understated that Miliband is the same generation as Burnham. They were in government together at a similar time, and were in shadow government together too..
The Chancellor decision will be his first test. I'd be inclined to regard choosing Miliband as a fail.
Perhaps we should wait to see whatever the new chancellor does before deciding they are a failure?
Ed M is the obvious choice, alongside Yvette Cooper. He's got an economics background and Treasury experience.
I don't disagree on the point that we then have to judge him on what he does. It's only a first test.
But the choice itself is likely to significantly influence policy, and I am not at all convinced by Milliband's record at Energy, where his economic background doesn't seem to have led to any useful insights.
You might not like his policies at energy but he has been consistent in his goal of decarbonisation of the economy. Most of our govt have dithered.
He's overseen enormous increases in renewable capacity, removed harmful ban on onshore wind, pushed through large solar farms past pointless planning delays, championed British nuclear, funded Sizewell C and faced down the threats from American lobby, launched Great British energy etc.
Yes, I really hope Ed Milliband doesn't become chancellor precisely of the good work he's been doing at Energy. He's put in the effort there and obviously has a passion for the job and, in the grand scheme of things, it's probably a more important job than chancellor.
Yes, bit perverse to move somebody who is well suited to where they are. He is the odds-on betting fav though.
Without Farage the Reform vote would likely collapse. Zia Yusuf as leader would likely see Restore squeeze their vote heavily and Lee Anderson as leader would likely leak significantly to the Tories. However even against Burnham Labour Farage's Reform are still relatively resilient, only squeezed a little and still only a point or two behind
I presume you have some evidence for the first part of this or is it just some hopecasting from the Conservative side?
Since Reform is made up of both ex-Conservative and ex-Labour voters (as well as those who had previously not voted), it seems reasonable to suppose were their vote to fragment, it would go several ways including to Labour, Restore and Will Not Vote rather than going en bloc to the Conservatives.
The Reform vote was less than half what it is now before Farage returned to leave it. I highly doubt many Reform voters would to be that enthusiastic about a non white leader given and Anderson isn’t anywhere near as articulate and charismatic as Farage.
Of course a post Farage Reform vote would fragment but those Reform voters who voted Conservative in 2019 would likely mostly return to the Tories
That last paragraph is why you are going to lose the next election.
Yes, many of those who voted Reform in 2024 and indeed since were Conservative voters in 2019 (and quite likely LEAVE voters in 2016) but you can't assume a loyalty based on one vote at one election. Why should they return to the Conservatives - why not Labour or Restore?
Farage will likely lead Reform into the next general election, a post Farage Reform likely won’t happen unless and until Reform lose that general election.
The clear majority of current Reform voters voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 and some of them even voted Conservative in 2014. Those voters aren’t going Labour, certainly not under leftwing Burnham and only the Reform diehard core white nationalist core vote, some of whom are ex UKIP and Brexit party would go Restore
I'm not sure that's true.
The 2017 election certainly had a high Labour vote share and in seats like Amber Valley Labour improved its VI taking a share of those who voted UKIP in 2015.
In 2019, Nigel Mills had a majority of nearly 17,000 but in 2024 his vote collapsed roughly 3: 1 in favour of Reform over Labour. The Labour share went up to the 2010 level (below 2017 but not far below) while the Conservative share crashed to its lowest level in a seat which is a good barometer. Had all the 2019 Conservative vote gone to Reform, Reform would have won the seat - about a quarter went to Labour and I imagine a smaller group abstained.
I think there's much more volatility out there and to lazily assume because people once or twice voted Conservative and then switched to Reform at both national and local elections they will automatically come back to the Conservatives might be valid in Brentwood & Ongar but I'm less convinced about Amber Valley.
If HY's complacency is common across the residual Conservative PArty then it truly is doomed.
Sharon Graham, left wing leader of Unite and strong advocate of workers rights now faces a challenge
Her crime. Criticising Ed Miliband and his net zero politics and undermining his bid to be Chancellor. As well as ‘not doing enough to beat Reform’ even though many of its members are supporters?
So she now faces a challenge due to her wrongthink.
She faces a challenge because it's an elected position, and a section of the membership don't like her. I don't see where "crime" comes in; it's just how the union system works.
It would have been simpler to say that she faces a challenge from the left.
And far less interesting. The article makes it clear the reasons for the challenge.
I felt it worth pointing out. There is a clear campaign to bolster Ed Miliband and his bid for the chancellorship. As we saw with Newsnight last night with Mazzucato out batting for him.
She faces a challenge due to her positioning and views.
She’s a strong advocate of members rights. She’s even been on picket lines up here.
I've just noticed Miliband down at 1.62 to be Chancellor.
I don't think it should be understated that Miliband is the same generation as Burnham. They were in government together at a similar time, and were in shadow government together too..
The Chancellor decision will be his first test. I'd be inclined to regard choosing Miliband as a fail.
Perhaps we should wait to see whatever the new chancellor does before deciding they are a failure?
Ed M is the obvious choice, alongside Yvette Cooper. He's got an economics background and Treasury experience.
I don't disagree on the point that we then have to judge him on what he does. It's only a first test.
But the choice itself is likely to significantly influence policy, and I am not at all convinced by Milliband's record at Energy, where his economic background doesn't seem to have led to any useful insights.
You might not like his policies at energy but he has been consistent in his goal of decarbonisation of the economy. Most of our govt have dithered.
He's overseen enormous increases in renewable capacity, removed harmful ban on onshore wind, pushed through large solar farms past pointless planning delays, championed British nuclear, funded Sizewell C and faced down the threats from American lobby, launched Great British energy etc.
Some of that stuff is fine, even beneficial (onshore wind; solar), but none of it really displays any of the economic savvy you look for in a Chancellor. For example, I pointed out yesterday the absolute mess of our electricity market; he's done nothing at all to address that while in office.
Comments
I'd point to the early-2010s taking off the restraints leading to all these weird investment programmes, whilst at the same time gutting the funding base so there was no capacity to manage them properly. But that has been characteristic of both parties when in Government.
A contrast was Victorian "strong northern cities", but we need one for the 21st century.
On the barriers point, there is also that "putting in a barrier to stop motorcycle ASBO" (or now scooter ASBO) is a nice, cheap, visible win for a local councillor with the people who have votes in the ward, against a target group who nobody talks to (I've started doing so, however). The claim is complete bollocks heavily exaggerated (being polite on a polite day), because they don't stop them (I have multiple videos), and normally there was little problem anyway, but that does not stop the political benefit, and then once it is in the locals start to believe that it *has* stopped a problem that does not exist now. So getting rid becomes like pulling teeth from a crocodile.
I think "Margot Leadbetter is dead" is a fairly good statement of where the Conservative Party now sits, tbh.
https://bsky.app/profile/joxley.jmoxley.co.uk/post/3mpgjx4ttuk2q
Audrey fforbes-Hamilton is the LibDem county councillor for her division.
https://bsky.app/profile/iainbhx.bsky.social/post/3mpgoclanw227
The alternative would have been a long viaduct over much of the route, sadly that doesn’t curry favour with the locals although would give great views to the passengers.
The whole thing could have been built for £100bn had the scope been stabilised and calibrated properly and Phase 2A to Crewe, in particular, is an affordable one.
It's not the fact that Brits can't do it and the Spanish and Chinese can. The Chinese do it because they don't give a shit about planning, land rights, the environment, or health and safety (saves a lot of momey) and Spain has a largely empty interior.
What is true here is that we gold plate process, very densely populated island, with expensive land, and have an adversarial planning system.
I think the issue came down to continual tinkering - we really should be deciding on a route and then issuing primary legislation that allows it to be built without court interference.
Equally it's one of a number of projects (electrification is another) where we just need a team of people employed for x decades who move from project to project to complete things.
That fits - maybe ! Given that Margo Leadbetter aka Penelope Keith is now 86, and dead, as you say.
As per the Conservative Party, it's time for a Telegraph brand-renewal.
Of course a post Farage Reform vote would fragment but those Reform voters who voted Conservative in 2019 would likely mostly return to the Tories
It would be a massive waste of both money and human capital, if these skills end up lost again because there’s not sufficient work in the pipeline as the project concludes. Government and industry need to ensure that the pipeline continues, and people can seamlessly move from one project to the next.
We need seriously to tweak 'acceptable' practice. Certainly no one of my acquaintance regards how we do infrastructure stuff as anywhere near to socially or culturally ideal.
That was even a problem on the canals. Shelmore Great Bank on the Shropshire Union Canal between Gnosall and Nantwich which took eight years and cost literally hundreds of thousands to build, was only built because they had to divert around one landowner's pheasant shoot.
We might avoid some of this if just a few more politicians had something even close to an engineering background.
Now the works going over the M45 re Birmingham.... I've passed those in what should be peak working time, couple of pieces of plant on the go with most sitting idle...
They can build infrastructure better, faster and cheaper.
The issue is more, I think, to do with a culture of every pissant being given an ant hill to piss from. Domain knowledge is actively despised.
Yes, many of those who voted Reform in 2024 and indeed since were Conservative voters in 2019 (and quite likely LEAVE voters in 2016) but you can't assume a loyalty based on one vote at one election. Why should they return to the Conservatives - why not Labour or Restore?
Existing production allowed, tiebacks to existing facilities allowed, the ban is on new licenses for new fields.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/north-sea-future-plan-for-fair-managed-and-prosperous-transition
All-in-all, one of Rishi's worse decisions.
A Tory vote is a wasted vote.
Metrolink was being expended from about 2008 for half a dozen years (phase 3 as it was known).
The skills built up during that time led to teams rolling from one project onto another and then straight onto the Trafford Centre line, all of which was delivered under budget and on time.
Having a rolling program of such works (see railway electrification as an obvious examplee) lead to the skills and supply chain being non existent so we take ages, do it badly and end up importing everything as there is no reliable ongoing investment to support UK based companies.
As for my nephew he's still working mainly on safety reports - but he's 24/7 into railways, his weekend fun is track work on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway.
I will respect you more when that day comes, not less.
It takes a brave man to admit they got it wrong.
The clear majority of current Reform voters voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 and some of them even voted Conservative in 2014. Those voters aren’t going Labour, certainly not under leftwing Burnham and only the Reform diehard core white nationalist core vote, some of whom are ex UKIP and Brexit party would go Restore
So for a cost of £100bn, the country could have ended up with 1 million new council houses, transforming the lives of people across this country with the countless long term benefits that brings for social cohesion as well as huge long term savings for the government through housing benefit, avoiding childrens social care bills etc.
Instead we've wasted £100bn on a railway that achieves next to nothing and will be an uneconomic millstone even when operational. I write as someone from the West Midlands for whom HS2 will not cut the journey time to London because it will probably be quicker and certainly less stressful and convenient to continue use the WCML because of its better connectivity. And no doubt cheaper too.
1 million council homes v a useless railway. What an epic cock up.
This stuff takes decades of workforce and capital investment. You’d be mad to base that investment on the whims of the UK government. The only area they are reasonably reliable is building submarines - and therefore the cost is (relatively) cheap, considering how astonishingly complicated and sophisticated they are.
That’s why I think the planning and legislative requirements for cancellation should be at least as long as commissioning something.
If Burnham wants economic development away from London then the way to achieve that is by building roads.
Within a few yards of every home, every place of work, every business, industrial, retail location, every educational, medical and recreational facility is a road.
Very few people accepted that the (completely unnecessary) top speed would cost a lot more.
A common attitude was the reducing the headline figure was penny pinching.
A better informed debate might have avoided some if the years of delay.
Hasn't he noticed that Starmer's housing targets have already been a complete failure ?
If that means a Tory win then I can live with that even though their position on the EU and ECHR would be a bitter pill to swallow .
And it had the other advantages of being a dictatorship until the end of the 80s, and not having much in the way of legacy Victorian infrastructure, so they didn't have many decades to forget how to do stuff.
They do need to show that the costs are under control though, they can’t be allowed to run away as happened to the Southern section.
There was lots more money to be made for lawyers and consultants from a high speed railway than an ordinary railway.
Put them together and the mentality of "if we're building a new railway it might as well be high speed".
Now consider how you would view a business which wanted a new car and said "if we're buying a new car it might as well be a Ferrari".
But like passing a law declaring Rwanda to be a safe country.
Once that was done, the engineers ran the projects.
As every devolved authority concentrates on what benefits itself rather than what Whitehall thinks benefits the country as a whole and/or London in particular.
It is perhaps a demonstration on the overwhelmingly maleness of this site that today we are discussing trains and there has been no mention of the, to me, extraordinary report on maternity services.
What `I would like to know, apropos of that report, is whether maternity services have declined somewhat over the past however many years or whether there have always been the problems outlined and no-one has done anything about them.
That’s before you’ve got the land and planning permission, and before the builder covers their infrastructure and marketing costs.
https://x.com/rollinghedge/status/2071820027804692525
There needs to be a significant rollback of building codes and a serious look at alternative construction methods, if there’s to be millions of new houses built.
In fact it would be simpler as the terminal projects would be clearly local ones so we wouldn’t have the mess of HS2 having to include both the Euston platforms and the replacement underground station. It would be 3 projects
Track to Euston - national
Station improvements at Euston - local
Tfl improvements - local
And this is something I’ve highlighted before we end up with multiple projects all under the same banner due to our inability to separate things out
Now it is all management and US soap doctors who are just money grubbers first and job a distant second , patients are an inconvenience nowadays.
The UK terror attacks you don’t hear about – and how they go under the radar
Terror attacks against Muslims in the UK are going unnoticed by members of the public because it is taking authorities as long as nine months to identify them as terrorism, The i Paper can reveal.
A quarter of the terror attacks in Britain over the past decade have targeted Muslims, but delays in confirming the offenders’ motivations mean the public may not be aware of the scale of the threat, the UK’s former head of Counter Terrorism Policing has said.
A European Central Bank paper entitled "The Immigration Impact on Population, Labor Productivity, Investments and TFP in OECD Countries"
OECD countries, and particularly Europe's leading economies, have experienced a
significant decline in native population growth alongside large increases in net
immigration. We compile a new and comprehensive dataset of net immigration rates
from all origins to OECD countries and document the characteristics of these flows,
establishing that most of the net immigration increase was from non-OECD countries
and was significantly high-skilled, over the period 1990–2024. We show that the
substantial cross-country heterogeneity in immigration dynamics is difficult to explain
by push factors or network effects, while immigration policy – as captured by
summary indices – account for only a small share of the observed variation.
Unexpected immigration shocks and surges were relevant phenomena of these
years. We then examine the relationship between immigration and growth in
population and GDP per capita, focusing on labor productivity, capital investment,
and total factor productivity (TFP), using local projections and several sources of
identifying variation. We find that immigration from non-OECD countries has been a
significant driver of GDP per worker growth, primarily through higher investment.
High-skilled immigration, in particular, is associated with stronger human capital
accumulation, faster TFP growth, and greater capital deepening. Positive
immigration shocks and surges and more open immigration policies, are likewise
associated with improved economic performance. By contrast, native population
growth has either no effect or a weakly negative effect on GDP per capita and
productivity growth. The estimated coefficients on immigration, while positive, are
often imprecisely estimated. Still, their magnitude and direction are important and
consistent with a large and growing literature documenting the positive effects of
immigration – especially high-skilled immigration – on productivity, entrepreneurship,
and economic growth.
For now, everyone jogs along in relative amity.
The distinction isn't about how those who benefit make their local decisions but about how those who lose out get the right to say no.
And if those who lose out are unable to say no then that's not devolution.
He's overseen enormous increases in renewable capacity, removed harmful ban on onshore wind, pushed through large solar farms past pointless planning delays, championed British nuclear, funded Sizewell C and faced down the threats from American lobby, launched Great British energy etc.
Tom votes tactically but is Labour at heart. Barbara has recently gone Green.
The 2017 election certainly had a high Labour vote share and in seats like Amber Valley Labour improved its VI taking a share of those who voted UKIP in 2015.
In 2019, Nigel Mills had a majority of nearly 17,000 but in 2024 his vote collapsed roughly 3: 1 in favour of Reform over Labour. The Labour share went up to the 2010 level (below 2017 but not far below) while the Conservative share crashed to its lowest level in a seat which is a good barometer. Had all the 2019 Conservative vote gone to Reform, Reform would have won the seat - about a quarter went to Labour and I imagine a smaller group abstained.
I think there's much more volatility out there and to lazily assume because people once or twice voted Conservative and then switched to Reform at both national and local elections they will automatically come back to the Conservatives might be valid in Brentwood & Ongar but I'm less convinced about Amber Valley.
It's true to say the party didn't do personality differences well - I saw a couple of examples of local council groups fall apart because of internal bickering not based on policy but personality.
Then people wonder why every pressure group is absolutist.
There has been discussion, over multiple years, that domestic violence by women against men is counted as domestic violence by men against women. Apparently it’s too tricky to count them separately.
Probably, terrorism against Muslims is counted as UFO sightings. And there is a chain of memos about changing that…
The culture of 'NHS is best' is so ingrained in this country. And ultimately its dangerous - we need to look around the world and see where best practice is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamome_(train)
Lost to the Tories, you'd have thought, but is he Reform or Restore?
In the real world people have very little interaction with, or need for, 'world beating'.
What people need in their lives are things which are effective, efficient, reliable, good enough and good value for money.
The problem for the UK is not that things are so disastrous, it is that they are so mediocre.
The job is huge amounts of hard work if you do it properly (and also if you do it improperly, by being a control freak), but who said he has to do it properly?
Johnson wasn't exactly known for his diligence and hard work. Cameron was notorious for chillaxing as PM, though he at least was able to delegate most of the work to a Cabinet that had some sense of what it was trying to do.
Farage one hundred percent wants to be able to force the establishment to admit him as a member. It is his primary motivating force. Becoming PM would be the culmination of a lifelong crusade to exorcise the chip on his shoulder. He wants the job for the weekly chat with the Monarch alone.
If he walks away from Reform it will be because he believes defeat at the next general election is inevitable, and he doesn't want any part of it. As long as he thinks he can win, he will stick with it.
@DPJHodges
As I said, there are significant political challenges for Andy Burnham's regional devolution strategy. But the hysterical reaction by some to the idea the British Prime Minister might spend a day or two out of London shows just how hard even incremental change actually is.
https://x.com/DPJHodges/status/2071837593503666650
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNbMB4b00NE
I have a speculative punt on Pat McFadden.
For example, I pointed out yesterday the absolute mess of our electricity market; he's done nothing at all to address that while in office.
If she's not careful, it will start to define her.
Kemi Badenoch calls the women around Andy Burnham his "handmaidens" as she punches the bruise that Labour has never had a female leader.
https://x.com/kitty_donaldson/status/2071530242515034171