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 ?
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.
Bear in mind too that given Muslims are a small share of the overall population they are more likely than average to be a victim of a terrorist attack.
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.
I agree. There's also a body clock aspect of being out of natural daylight.
However, my limited experience on high-speed train lines is that they travel so fast that you can't really follow the changing landscape in the way that you can from a train doing no more than 125mph.
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.
Bear in mind too that given Muslims are a small share of the overall population they are more likely than average to be a victim of a terrorist attack.
SKS doesnt care unless he can badge it as Antisemitic
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 ?
Also who’s going to build them ?
Will the govt buy a struggling house holder ?
Doesnt matter if they buy one or not. The national supply chain and worker feed needs about 3 years to rebuild to cope with a higher capacity.You cant just add 50% to capacity overnight.
What makes or breaks infrastructure megaprojects is the effect they have above the ground.
Crossrail was very popular because, aside from lorry movements and deliveries and potential vibration (which did worry/upset some residents) it had very strong support, because it was underground and brownfield and directly relieving congestion for them.
HS2 was very unpopular because it was by and large all above ground, crossing greenfield areas and far too many constituencies, and not necessarily benefiting them either. Only in the big cities.
People hate noise, disruption, construction, ruining their views and extra traffic. Particularly when they don't personally benefit from it.
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.
Join a party because you are interested in political debate, but discover that you end up being an unpaid postie.
What makes or breaks infrastructure megaprojects is the effect they have above the ground.
Crossrail was very popular because, aside from lorry movements and deliveries and potential vibration (which did worry/upset some residents) it had very strong support, because it was underground and brownfield and directly relieving congestion for them.
HS2 was very unpopular because it was by and large all above ground, crossing greenfield areas and far too many constituencies, and not necessarily benefiting them either. Only in the big cities.
People hate noise, disruption, construction, ruining their views and extra traffic. Particularly when they don't personally benefit from it.
This drives 90%+ of all opposition.
It should have been entirely underground. As I posted a few months back there is a large, long tunnel currently being dug under the North York Moors with minimal local or national hostility. We can learn from that.
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.
Join a party because you are interested in political debate, but discover that you end up being an unpaid postie.
To an extent, that was my choice. I didn't just deliver - I ran surveys, produced my own leaflets, picked up a little knowledge of lithographs and offset printing.
It seemed to me being a talking shop was all well and good but in order to get the policies enacted, you needed to be in a position of power which meant winning votes and seats.
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.
It's interesting to compare to Ireland in terms of political uncertainty.
People make a lot of the low corporation tax rate in Ireland when explaining Ireland's economic success. That's obviously a factor (though I've talked about how there are other factors that are ignored) but a key ingredient is that the commitment to a low corporation tax rate has been a consensus between the two Irish parties of government - Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. That creates certainty and business confidence for the long-term to support decisions to invest, which necessarily have to consider a timeframe that extends over multiple political cycles.
In terms of public infrastructure, Ireland did a lot better in the period when this was part-financed by the EU, and so the EU had a role in ensuring that the projects happened, and there was a commitment to the projects that went beyond party politics. Now that ireland no longer receives EU development funding, or the oversight that went with that, progress on public infrastructure projects is much slower, involves much more political uncertainty, and costs escalate.
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.
Along with the response to any criticism of the NHS, ...but the US....should be banned along with "lessons will be learned"....
No sane person would select the US system, same as basically no country copies the NHS model (and the ones like Canada who do, don't have much good to say about it).
I think there is a wider problem in the West, our comfort blanket is always well we aren't as bad as US at this or we are as good as France at that. Then you go to Asia, and they see Europe as a twee place at has nice old building but massive out of date when it comes to so many things where tech can be used.
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.
It's probably some childhood shit about not getting enough attention and hating following rules.
Yes but all three Conservative female leaders were ousted by their own party. A female Prime Minister has never lost an election.
May maybe didn't lose 2017, but she didn't win a majority either.
Cameron didn't win a majority in 2010 either of course though he did win a small overall majority in 2015.
The truth is none of Thatcher, May and Truss were defeated by the electorate - only two actually contested an election and all three were removed by the Conservative Parliamentary Party.
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 problem for the UK is not that things are so disastrous, or even that they are so mediocre, it's that people won't accept that improving them in the long term needs sacrifices in the short term, and that improving them in the very short term can actually damage them over the long term.
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.
I think one of the things that annoys people most is that when things go wrong there is very little interest in fixing them.
It's tinkering. Probably a good thing that he didn't find an extra 10bn per annum, as they'd likely waste it.
I shouldn’t be surprised after 40 years reporting defence - but it’s amazing to see how easily the commentariat & Westminster can be diverted into talking about drones when the real Q is whether the nation is ready to accept the peace dividend is over, & scale of spend needed now https://x.com/MarkUrban01/status/2071893573369245970
Even if the country were ready, which it isn't, I wouldn't want a here today gone tomorrow (almost literally) PM and SecDef setting out how we're going to spend the extra £billions.
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.
I think one of the things that annoys people most is that when things go wrong there is very little interest in fixing 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".
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.
If the purpose of the NHS is to treat patients cheaply, irrespective of outcomes, then you are right. But in terms of medical outcomes the NHS comes last out of the 11 countries regularly compared. At times we are even worse than the US when it comes to medical outcomes.
Personally I would suggest that medical outcomes is the overwhemingly important measure when comparing medical systems. Others may have different ideas.
It's tinkering. Probably a good thing that he didn't find an extra 10bn per annum, as they'd likely waste it.
I shouldn’t be surprised after 40 years reporting defence - but it’s amazing to see how easily the commentariat & Westminster can be diverted into talking about drones when the real Q is whether the nation is ready to accept the peace dividend is over, & scale of spend needed now https://x.com/MarkUrban01/status/2071893573369245970
Even if the country were ready, which it isn't, I wouldn't want a here today gone tomorrow (almost literally) PM and SecDef setting out how we're going to spend the extra £billions.
The country isn't ready, and it wasn't in 1936 either, but I increasingly don't buy the argument that the MoD just pisses everything up the wall.
I think they're chronically underfunded for what we're asking them to do and, in many areas, this is new and novel technology and we have to accept that carries some financial risk.
"Therefore, some capital projects, for example on roads and energy, which are important but not immediately vital, will no longer go ahead as planned."
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.
If the purpose of the NHS is to treat patients cheaply, irrespective of outcomes, then you are right. But in terms of medical outcomes the NHS comes last out of the 11 countries regularly compared. At times we are even worse than the US when it comes to medical outcomes.
Personally I would suggest that medical outcomes is the overwhemingly important measure when comparing medical systems. Others may have different ideas.
The NHS is a national religion. Cannot be criticised.
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...
The Railway College at Doncaster Lakeside has been empty pretty much since it was built. It doesn't look terribly expensive as these things go but I do wonder what the original point of it was.
Bart is right though. Getting to London faster is not what we actually need. Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester are all barely 30 miles apart with just about the worst transport network anywhere.
It's tinkering. Probably a good thing that he didn't find an extra 10bn per annum, as they'd likely waste it.
I shouldn’t be surprised after 40 years reporting defence - but it’s amazing to see how easily the commentariat & Westminster can be diverted into talking about drones when the real Q is whether the nation is ready to accept the peace dividend is over, & scale of spend needed now https://x.com/MarkUrban01/status/2071893573369245970
Even if the country were ready, which it isn't, I wouldn't want a here today gone tomorrow (almost literally) PM and SecDef setting out how we're going to spend the extra £billions.
The country isn't ready, and it wasn't in 1936 either, but I increasingly don't buy the argument that the MoD just pisses everything up the wall.
I think they're chronically underfunded for what we're asking them to do and, in many areas, this is new and novel technology and we have to accept that carries some financial risk.
I also think that people are criticising past mistakes - such as with Ajax - but to an extent the MoD is already adapting to a more urgent reality and operating differently.
For example, Britain gave all its existing AS90 self-propelled artillery to Ukraine and simply bought Archer from Sweden to replace the capability, rather than kicking off a multi-decade project to design a replacement. There are a lot of urgent procurement projects that have kicked off to create new capability for Ukraine (and also Britain) which seem to be progressing well.
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.
If the purpose of the NHS is to treat patients cheaply, irrespective of outcomes, then you are right. But in terms of medical outcomes the NHS comes last out of the 11 countries regularly compared. At times we are even worse than the US when it comes to medical outcomes.
Personally I would suggest that medical outcomes is the overwhemingly important measure when comparing medical systems. Others may have different ideas.
The NHS is a national religion. Cannot be criticised.
It's tinkering. Probably a good thing that he didn't find an extra 10bn per annum, as they'd likely waste it.
I shouldn’t be surprised after 40 years reporting defence - but it’s amazing to see how easily the commentariat & Westminster can be diverted into talking about drones when the real Q is whether the nation is ready to accept the peace dividend is over, & scale of spend needed now https://x.com/MarkUrban01/status/2071893573369245970
Even if the country were ready, which it isn't, I wouldn't want a here today gone tomorrow (almost literally) PM and SecDef setting out how we're going to spend the extra £billions.
The country isn't ready, and it wasn't in 1936 either, but I increasingly don't buy the argument that the MoD just pisses everything up the wall.
I think they're chronically underfunded for what we're asking them to do and, in many areas, this is new and novel technology and we have to accept that carries some financial risk.
I also think that people are criticising past mistakes - such as with Ajax - but to an extent the MoD is already adapting to a more urgent reality and operating differently.
For example, Britain gave all its existing AS90 self-propelled artillery to Ukraine and simply bought Archer from Sweden to replace the capability, rather than kicking off a multi-decade project to design a replacement. There are a lot of urgent procurement projects that have kicked off to create new capability for Ukraine (and also Britain) which seem to be progressing well.
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.
Are they afraid to investigate the reason because it might be connected with ...? (Foreign media people are amazed by the silence in the UK.)
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.
If the purpose of the NHS is to treat patients cheaply, irrespective of outcomes, then you are right. But in terms of medical outcomes the NHS comes last out of the 11 countries regularly compared. At times we are even worse than the US when it comes to medical outcomes.
Personally I would suggest that medical outcomes is the overwhemingly important measure when comparing medical systems. Others may have different ideas.
With the notable exception of the US, medical outcomes are correlated with spend. If you want better medical outcomes, spend more on the NHS. Put in those terms, voters often seem to decide that the NHS is good enough.
That suggests that medical outcomes per spend is an important metric. The UK does pretty well on that.
It's tinkering. Probably a good thing that he didn't find an extra 10bn per annum, as they'd likely waste it.
I shouldn’t be surprised after 40 years reporting defence - but it’s amazing to see how easily the commentariat & Westminster can be diverted into talking about drones when the real Q is whether the nation is ready to accept the peace dividend is over, & scale of spend needed now https://x.com/MarkUrban01/status/2071893573369245970
Even if the country were ready, which it isn't, I wouldn't want a here today gone tomorrow (almost literally) PM and SecDef setting out how we're going to spend the extra £billions.
The country isn't ready, and it wasn't in 1936 either, but I increasingly don't buy the argument that the MoD just pisses everything up the wall.
I think they're chronically underfunded for what we're asking them to do and, in many areas, this is new and novel technology and we have to accept that carries some financial risk.
I'm genuinely curious.
There's a strong Conservative trait (which is perfectly reasonable) which is to regard throwing money at problems to be basically the wrong thing to do. Many would argue the way defence is "done" from the way the MoD operates via defence procurement to even what the strategic requirements for a viable defence in the mid 21st century need to be fundamentally reassessed and if necessary overhauled.
Yet you seem happy to throw billions at the existing structure and processes whereasif I were to suggest throwing billions at the NHS or local Government I suspect you'd be first out the gate in disagreement.
I'm in the camp of those who accept we must do more in terms if defence but that doesn't mean the current machinery is working or fit for purpose. We need to rethink not only what kind of defence we need but how we provide it.
"Therefore, some capital projects, for example on roads and energy, which are important but not immediately vital, will no longer go ahead as planned."
Oh dear. Almost all other government spending (except cycle lanes, trams, and public health) should come before those two investments.
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.
If the purpose of the NHS is to treat patients cheaply, irrespective of outcomes, then you are right. But in terms of medical outcomes the NHS comes last out of the 11 countries regularly compared. At times we are even worse than the US when it comes to medical outcomes.
Personally I would suggest that medical outcomes is the overwhemingly important measure when comparing medical systems. Others may have different ideas.
The NHS is a national religion. Cannot be criticised.
No. What's a national religion is going around claiming that the NHS is a national religion and cannot be criticised.
In health policy circles, we spend all day criticising the NHS and make international comparisons. That's true both in academic, where I am, and within the DHSC and NHS itself. There is no lack of NHS criticism within the NHS and government.
"We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40"
So they scrimped and saved and retired at 40.
Fine.
But ALL the examples are couples or singles WITH NO KIDS. FFS. Nowhere is this point mentioned in the story.
We were £40,000 better off over 10 years from just that one lunch habit.
So £2k per person per year.
Alan had worked as a landscape gardener before launching a training and life-coaching business, while Katie was an actuary, or risk assessor, for a financial firm.
So 2-3hr/week more work probably would have got them same result. Or better job / harder negiotating for a pay rise.
It's tinkering. Probably a good thing that he didn't find an extra 10bn per annum, as they'd likely waste it.
I shouldn’t be surprised after 40 years reporting defence - but it’s amazing to see how easily the commentariat & Westminster can be diverted into talking about drones when the real Q is whether the nation is ready to accept the peace dividend is over, & scale of spend needed now https://x.com/MarkUrban01/status/2071893573369245970
Even if the country were ready, which it isn't, I wouldn't want a here today gone tomorrow (almost literally) PM and SecDef setting out how we're going to spend the extra £billions.
The country isn't ready, and it wasn't in 1936 either, but I increasingly don't buy the argument that the MoD just pisses everything up the wall.
I think they're chronically underfunded for what we're asking them to do and, in many areas, this is new and novel technology and we have to accept that carries some financial risk.
That's a bit of a straw man, since it is largely the MoD, along with the PM, who defines what it is that they do. (For example, I'm certainly not asking them to field any Challenger 3 regiments, as I regard an MBT as irrelevant to UK defence needs. And I doubt the UK public is, either.)
I don't think they piss everything against the wall, but I do believe that successive governments have avoided the hard choices, and have instead decided to fund a significant number of essentially Potemkin capabilities, few of which could sustain a confiict of more than a week.
There's been no real public debate about what we should do, what we might choose to do and what we might abandon. Instead we get successive behind-closed-doors defence reviews, all of which are delivered late, and none of which are then adequately funded.
The drones thing announced today gets my half hearted approval, since although it's not going to be game changing given its small size, it does at least start developing stuff to see how it might work (and some of it almost certainly won't).
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.
I agree. There's also a body clock aspect of being out of natural daylight.
However, my limited experience on high-speed train lines is that they travel so fast that you can't really follow the changing landscape in the way that you can from a train doing no more than 125mph.
Perhaps one of the most exhilarating ways to watch the landscape from a train is through the windscreen of a German ICE 3 high speed train on the Cologne to Frankfurt route. These trains have underfloor engines, and you are free to wander up to the front of the train and peer over the shoulder of the driver as it flies along the purpose-built line at 190 mph.
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.
If the purpose of the NHS is to treat patients cheaply, irrespective of outcomes, then you are right. But in terms of medical outcomes the NHS comes last out of the 11 countries regularly compared. At times we are even worse than the US when it comes to medical outcomes.
Personally I would suggest that medical outcomes is the overwhemingly important measure when comparing medical systems. Others may have different ideas.
With the notable exception of the US, medical outcomes are correlated with spend. If you want better medical outcomes, spend more on the NHS. Put in those terms, voters often seem to decide that the NHS is good enough.
That suggests that medical outcomes per spend is an important metric. The UK does pretty well on that.
What matters is medical outcomes per capita. Telling people we let more of them die but we do it very efficiently is hardly a great sell.
These whiners are the sort of simpletons who are happy for these people to dumped elsewhere. Like Gateshead and Rochdale. They need to learn to love this.
‘ The MP for The Wrekin, Mark Pritchard, spoke during Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) this week to raise concerns about the plans to house up to 121 asylum seekers in the small village of Stoke Heath, near Market Drayton,’
The data is pretty clear that Scotland's economy has outperformed since devolution, even against a tough sectoral backdrop of oil & gas decline. I'm careful to caveat any claim it's because of devolution heavily, but the data exists and is pretty clear. https://x.com/thomasforth/status/2071894688169111998
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.
If the purpose of the NHS is to treat patients cheaply, irrespective of outcomes, then you are right. But in terms of medical outcomes the NHS comes last out of the 11 countries regularly compared. At times we are even worse than the US when it comes to medical outcomes.
Personally I would suggest that medical outcomes is the overwhemingly important measure when comparing medical systems. Others may have different ideas.
With the notable exception of the US, medical outcomes are correlated with spend. If you want better medical outcomes, spend more on the NHS. Put in those terms, voters often seem to decide that the NHS is good enough.
That suggests that medical outcomes per spend is an important metric. The UK does pretty well on that.
What matters is medical outcomes per capita. Telling people we let more of them die but we do it very efficiently is hardly a great sell.
You say that, and yet voters have often voted for parties that have underfunded the NHS
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.
If the purpose of the NHS is to treat patients cheaply, irrespective of outcomes, then you are right. But in terms of medical outcomes the NHS comes last out of the 11 countries regularly compared. At times we are even worse than the US when it comes to medical outcomes.
Personally I would suggest that medical outcomes is the overwhemingly important measure when comparing medical systems. Others may have different ideas.
I agree. The NHS is genuinely world leading at keeping millions of ill people just about going, and is great value for money in that narrow sense.
That’s to be applauded, but the bigger picture is pretty grim. We are not a healthy population.
"We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40"
So they scrimped and saved and retired at 40.
Fine.
But ALL the examples are couples or singles WITH NO KIDS. FFS. Nowhere is this point mentioned in the story.
We were £40,000 better off over 10 years from just that one lunch habit.
So £2k per person per year.
Alan had worked as a landscape gardener before launching a training and life-coaching business, while Katie was an actuary, or risk assessor, for a financial firm.
So 2-3hr/week more work probably would have got them same result. Or better job / harder negiotating for a pay rise.
Some diehard FIRE loons even use the dishwasher to cook meat, sous vide.
"We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40"
So they scrimped and saved and retired at 40.
Fine.
But ALL the examples are couples or singles WITH NO KIDS. FFS. Nowhere is this point mentioned in the story.
Indeed. Consider Alan and Katie
"...Alan had worked as a landscape gardener before launching a training and life-coaching business, while Katie was an actuary, or risk assessor, for a financial firm..."
So two salaries in (at least) the upper-middle-class bracket. Leaving aside the fact that he's obviously leeching off her (life-coaching business my arse), the stories boil down to "two wealthy people with no kids retire early".
Plus when their parents die (if they haven't already) the inheritance will keep them going for a long while.
"We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40"
So they scrimped and saved and retired at 40.
Fine.
But ALL the examples are couples or singles WITH NO KIDS. FFS. Nowhere is this point mentioned in the story.
The acronym used to be DINKY rather than FIRE...
We are similar (before it became a thing) but I am under no illusion that it would have been possible should we have had children.
It is also difficult to transition between not spending and spending when you get to the point where enough is enough.
There is an old Yorkshire dialect word "Thoil" which can be used to mean whether you can justify to yourself whether you should buy something (assuming affordability is not an issue) and I find myself using it a lot.
These whiners are the sort of simpletons who are happy for these people to dumped elsewhere. Like Gateshead and Rochdale. They need to learn to love this.
‘ The MP for The Wrekin, Mark Pritchard, spoke during Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) this week to raise concerns about the plans to house up to 121 asylum seekers in the small village of Stoke Heath, near Market Drayton,’
I actually know Stoke Heath quite well from back in the day. There is (or at least was) an military barracks there where I believed they taught helicopter flying. But as a place to put Asylum seekers its really stupid, its the arse end of nowhere with very limited public transport and Market Drayton is basically a ghost town (everybody is a commuter to Telford or works at the massive Muller Factory). What are they going to do all day completely cut off, and if they need GP appointment or appointment with their lawyer going to be a nice big taxi bill?
"We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40"
So they scrimped and saved and retired at 40.
Fine.
But ALL the examples are couples or singles WITH NO KIDS. FFS. Nowhere is this point mentioned in the story.
We were £40,000 better off over 10 years from just that one lunch habit.
So £2k per person per year.
Alan had worked as a landscape gardener before launching a training and life-coaching business, while Katie was an actuary, or risk assessor, for a financial firm.
So 2-3hr/week more work probably would have got them same result. Or better job / harder negiotating for a pay rise.
And no kids folks. Thats the secret to retiring early.
"We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40"
So they scrimped and saved and retired at 40.
Fine.
But ALL the examples are couples or singles WITH NO KIDS. FFS. Nowhere is this point mentioned in the story.
We were £40,000 better off over 10 years from just that one lunch habit.
So £2k per person per year.
Alan had worked as a landscape gardener before launching a training and life-coaching business, while Katie was an actuary, or risk assessor, for a financial firm.
So 2-3hr/week more work probably would have got them same result. Or better job / harder negiotating for a pay rise.
And no kids folks. Thats the secret to retiring early.
I must be doing something wrong, no kids, aint retiring anytime soon....clearly spending too much on my lunch every day.
These whiners are the sort of simpletons who are happy for these people to dumped elsewhere. Like Gateshead and Rochdale. They need to learn to love this.
‘ The MP for The Wrekin, Mark Pritchard, spoke during Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) this week to raise concerns about the plans to house up to 121 asylum seekers in the small village of Stoke Heath, near Market Drayton,’
I actually know Stoke Heath quite well from back in the day. There is (or at least was) an military barracks there where I believed they taught helicopter flying. But as a place to put Asylum seekers its really stupid, its the arse end of nowhere with very limited public transport and Market Drayton is basically a ghost town (everybody is a commuter to Telford or works at the massive Muller Factory). What are they going to do all day completely cut off, and if they need GP appointment or appointment with their lawyer going to be a nice big taxi bill?
On the last point: what do they do all day wherever they are? The law says they can't work iirc. So young men just left hanging around.
These whiners are the sort of simpletons who are happy for these people to dumped elsewhere. Like Gateshead and Rochdale. They need to learn to love this.
‘ The MP for The Wrekin, Mark Pritchard, spoke during Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) this week to raise concerns about the plans to house up to 121 asylum seekers in the small village of Stoke Heath, near Market Drayton,’
I actually know Stoke Heath quite well from back in the day. There is (or at least was) an military barracks there where I believed they taught helicopter flying. But as a place to put Asylum seekers its really stupid, its the arse end of nowhere with very limited public transport and Market Drayton is basically a ghost town (everybody is a commuter to Telford or works at the massive Muller Factory). What are they going to do all day completely cut off, and if they need GP appointment or appointment with their lawyer going to be a nice big taxi bill?
On the last point: what do they do all day wherever they are? The law says they can't work iirc. So young men just left hanging around.
I note you are criticising Bridget Phillipson for her policies on private schools.
Can I ask how you square that with not suspending Mr Tony Costigan's membership of your party in light of this story which is moving into a new phase as of this week?
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.
Its a good point. Continuity in secretaries of state (the decent ones at least) can be so important.
Trump Was Indicted Under the Espionage Act. Why Can’t We Read the Report? https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/opinion/jack-smith-report-trump.html “It is incoherent to immunize the president from prosecution on the theory that he can be held accountable through the political process — and then to deny Congress and the public information that would help them do so.”
"We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40"
So they scrimped and saved and retired at 40.
Fine.
But ALL the examples are couples or singles WITH NO KIDS. FFS. Nowhere is this point mentioned in the story.
We were £40,000 better off over 10 years from just that one lunch habit.
So £2k per person per year.
Alan had worked as a landscape gardener before launching a training and life-coaching business, while Katie was an actuary, or risk assessor, for a financial firm.
So 2-3hr/week more work probably would have got them same result. Or better job / harder negiotating for a pay rise.
And no kids folks. Thats the secret to retiring early.
I must be doing something wrong, no kids, aint retiring anytime soon....clearly spending too much on my lunch every day.
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
"We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40"
So they scrimped and saved and retired at 40.
Fine.
But ALL the examples are couples or singles WITH NO KIDS. FFS. Nowhere is this point mentioned in the story.
We were £40,000 better off over 10 years from just that one lunch habit.
So £2k per person per year.
Alan had worked as a landscape gardener before launching a training and life-coaching business, while Katie was an actuary, or risk assessor, for a financial firm.
So 2-3hr/week more work probably would have got them same result. Or better job / harder negiotating for a pay rise.
And no kids folks. Thats the secret to retiring early.
I must be doing something wrong, no kids, aint retiring anytime soon....clearly spending too much on my lunch every day.
You eating at The Farmer's Dog every day?
Given how expensive the US, it certainly felt like it the past month.
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.
If the purpose of the NHS is to treat patients cheaply, irrespective of outcomes, then you are right. But in terms of medical outcomes the NHS comes last out of the 11 countries regularly compared. At times we are even worse than the US when it comes to medical outcomes.
Personally I would suggest that medical outcomes is the overwhemingly important measure when comparing medical systems. Others may have different ideas.
With the notable exception of the US, medical outcomes are correlated with spend. If you want better medical outcomes, spend more on the NHS. Put in those terms, voters often seem to decide that the NHS is good enough.
That suggests that medical outcomes per spend is an important metric. The UK does pretty well on that.
What matters is medical outcomes per capita. Telling people we let more of them die but we do it very efficiently is hardly a great sell.
You say that, and yet voters have often voted for parties that have underfunded the NHS
I'm intrigued. Which party have they voted for that hasn't underfunded the NHS?
(Before anyone says 'New Labour' can I just say 'PFI'?)
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Listen to the defence experts and Starmer's own defence review that required 28 billion investment
Read Healey and Carns resignation letters and understand Starmer is not making our country safe
Billions more needed to rearm for potential Russia war - and defence spending plan 'still well short'
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
It's an ill wind. One of my sons works for a company which makes and sells drones. My son works mainly on the Pacific Rim, but I gather the company's doing quite well.
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
It is not a case of new stuff in 10 to 15 years. We need stuff now. We need more personnel (many of the ships we have can't go to sea for lack of manpower). We need massive investment in the new technologies we are seeing dominate the wars around the world - drones and IT being two. We need to end our reliance on the US for much of what we do by providing it ourselves or with our other allies.
This is no longer about shiney new toys - although we do need a lot more ships for example. It is about buying stuff off the shelf which we can integrate and use straight away, not in decades.
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Listen to the defence experts and Starmer's own defence review that required 28 billion investment
Read Healey and Carns resignation letters and understand Starmer is not making our country safe
Billions more needed to rearm for potential Russia war - and defence spending plan 'still well short'
These whiners are the sort of simpletons who are happy for these people to dumped elsewhere. Like Gateshead and Rochdale. They need to learn to love this.
‘ The MP for The Wrekin, Mark Pritchard, spoke during Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) this week to raise concerns about the plans to house up to 121 asylum seekers in the small village of Stoke Heath, near Market Drayton,’
I actually know Stoke Heath quite well from back in the day. There is (or at least was) an military barracks there where I believed they taught helicopter flying. But as a place to put Asylum seekers its really stupid, its the arse end of nowhere with very limited public transport and Market Drayton is basically a ghost town (everybody is a commuter to Telford or works at the massive Muller Factory). What are they going to do all day completely cut off, and if they need GP appointment or appointment with their lawyer going to be a nice big taxi bill?
I used to work in Telford. Lucas had a factory that made plastic mouldings for the Cannock site.
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Or we could raise £15bn in taxes. You want something, you pay for it
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Listen to the defence experts and Starmer's own defence review that required 28 billion investment
Read Healey and Carns resignation letters and understand Starmer is not making our country safe
Billions more needed to rearm for potential Russia war - and defence spending plan 'still well short'
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Listen to the defence experts and Starmer's own defence review that required 28 billion investment
Read Healey and Carns resignation letters and understand Starmer is not making our country safe
Billions more needed to rearm for potential Russia war - and defence spending plan 'still well short'
"We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40"
So they scrimped and saved and retired at 40.
Fine.
But ALL the examples are couples or singles WITH NO KIDS. FFS. Nowhere is this point mentioned in the story.
We were £40,000 better off over 10 years from just that one lunch habit.
So £2k per person per year.
Alan had worked as a landscape gardener before launching a training and life-coaching business, while Katie was an actuary, or risk assessor, for a financial firm.
So 2-3hr/week more work probably would have got them same result. Or better job / harder negiotating for a pay rise.
In what way is making a packed lunch scrimping and saving? For a start, I got to eat what I wanted to eat, not what the local shops wanted to sell me. Better than working an extra 2-3 hours too.
I also made my own coffee in the office. Cafetiere, ground coffee, as good as paying £4 a cup, if you are not hung up on having espresso-based drinks all the time. And also saved the time going to the shop and getting it.
People do piss money up against the wall and claim it is some sort of necessity*. Or, it seems, humiliating to prepare your own food and beverages.
* In my case it is beer, so I am not immune. I am trying to find more social opportunities that don't involve drinking several pints
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Or we could raise £15bn in taxes. You want something, you pay for it
Simpler than that, voters can pledge what they'll personally give up so the MOD can hose it up the wall. Pension / NHS treatment/ their kids school
At no point in the last 80 years would the MOD not have claimed they need more money to spend on hardware because of the Russians.
Asylum seekers will be ordered to pay about £10,000 to cover their state-funded living costs or be denied settled status in the UK under a new law to be considered by MPs on Tuesday.
Once again, there's the headline with which the average Reform voter will read and agree and the context which is much less clear.
87% of those seeking refugee status were still not earning the national minimum wage five years later.
That in itself begs all sorts of difficult questions about the "underclass" in society - how many end up working in the black economy and how many end up effectively in indentured servitude and in truth do many people care?
I cannot imagine the trauma of rebuilding a life thousands of miles from a home to which I can never return but for many every migrant is simply another scrounger, another rapist, another child molester for whom deportation cannot come quickly enough.
We don’t have an open ended obligation to help everyone though.
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Listen to the defence experts and Starmer's own defence review that required 28 billion investment
Read Healey and Carns resignation letters and understand Starmer is not making our country safe
Billions more needed to rearm for potential Russia war - and defence spending plan 'still well short'
Given that Russia is currently struggling to hold its own against Ukraine and that we are one of a number of powerful allied European countries, forgive me if I don't quite see the urgency with regard to planning for a war with Russia. It seems to me that the risk to the UK from, for example, climate change is an order of magnitude greater than that from Russia.
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Listen to the defence experts and Starmer's own defence review that required 28 billion investment
Read Healey and Carns resignation letters and understand Starmer is not making our country safe
Billions more needed to rearm for potential Russia war - and defence spending plan 'still well short'
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Or we could raise £15bn in taxes. You want something, you pay for it
Simpler than that, voters can pledge what they'll personally give up so the MOD can hose it up the wall. Pension / NHS treatment/ their kids school
At no point in the last 80 years would the MOD not have claimed they need more money to spend on hardware because of the Russians.
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Or we could raise £15bn in taxes. You want something, you pay for it
Simpler than that, voters can pledge what they'll personally give up so the MOD can hose it up the wall. Pension / NHS treatment/ their kids school
At no point in the last 80 years would the MOD not have claimed they need more money to spend on hardware because of the Russians.
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Or we could raise £15bn in taxes. You want something, you pay for it
Simpler than that, voters can pledge what they'll personally give up so the MOD can hose it up the wall. Pension / NHS treatment/ their kids school
At no point in the last 80 years would the MOD not have claimed they need more money to spend on hardware because of the Russians.
There's £5 billion on asylum seekers that the vast majority would happily give up. Elements of the the third sector can pay - if they can raise the funds.
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Listen to the defence experts and Starmer's own defence review that required 28 billion investment
Read Healey and Carns resignation letters and understand Starmer is not making our country safe
Billions more needed to rearm for potential Russia war - and defence spending plan 'still well short'
Given that Russia is currently struggling to hold its own against Ukraine and that we are one of a number of powerful allied European countries, forgive me if I don't quite see the urgency with regard to planning for a war with Russia. It seems to me that the risk to the UK from, for example, climate change is an order of magnitude greater than that from Russia.
War has changed and the way they are fought has changed and we need urgent investment into the new warfare that we can already witness and we do not have the capabilities
The 40 odd year peace dividend is over, and all European countries face huge increases in their defence spending.
Ask any European country if they think war with Russia can be dismissed then you will find a resounding no
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Listen to the defence experts and Starmer's own defence review that required 28 billion investment
Read Healey and Carns resignation letters and understand Starmer is not making our country safe
Billions more needed to rearm for potential Russia war - and defence spending plan 'still well short'
Given that Russia is currently struggling to hold its own against Ukraine and that we are one of a number of powerful allied European countries, forgive me if I don't quite see the urgency with regard to planning for a war with Russia. It seems to me that the risk to the UK from, for example, climate change is an order of magnitude greater than that from Russia.
It won't be tanks rolling across the central European plain, it will be little green men in Narva, sabotage of power plants, unattributable drones, encroaching on borders, that sort of thing, steadily ratcheted up. Of course we will fail to respond with the required force and the next we know there will be an attempt on the Suwalki Gap which can probably be done with a relatively limited force.
It's tinkering. Probably a good thing that he didn't find an extra 10bn per annum, as they'd likely waste it.
I shouldn’t be surprised after 40 years reporting defence - but it’s amazing to see how easily the commentariat & Westminster can be diverted into talking about drones when the real Q is whether the nation is ready to accept the peace dividend is over, & scale of spend needed now https://x.com/MarkUrban01/status/2071893573369245970
Even if the country were ready, which it isn't, I wouldn't want a here today gone tomorrow (almost literally) PM and SecDef setting out how we're going to spend the extra £billions.
The country isn't ready, and it wasn't in 1936 either, but I increasingly don't buy the argument that the MoD just pisses everything up the wall.
I think they're chronically underfunded for what we're asking them to do and, in many areas, this is new and novel technology and we have to accept that carries some financial risk.
I'm genuinely curious.
There's a strong Conservative trait (which is perfectly reasonable) which is to regard throwing money at problems to be basically the wrong thing to do. Many would argue the way defence is "done" from the way the MoD operates via defence procurement to even what the strategic requirements for a viable defence in the mid 21st century need to be fundamentally reassessed and if necessary overhauled.
Yet you seem happy to throw billions at the existing structure and processes whereasif I were to suggest throwing billions at the NHS or local Government I suspect you'd be first out the gate in disagreement.
I'm in the camp of those who accept we must do more in terms if defence but that doesn't mean the current machinery is working or fit for purpose. We need to rethink not only what kind of defence we need but how we provide it.
You may have a warped understanding of Conservatives then, and what we really value then.
It isn't money. It's the security and defence and, indeed, the ongoing viability of our country.
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Listen to the defence experts and Starmer's own defence review that required 28 billion investment
Read Healey and Carns resignation letters and understand Starmer is not making our country safe
Billions more needed to rearm for potential Russia war - and defence spending plan 'still well short'
Given that Russia is currently struggling to hold its own against Ukraine and that we are one of a number of powerful allied European countries, forgive me if I don't quite see the urgency with regard to planning for a war with Russia. It seems to me that the risk to the UK from, for example, climate change is an order of magnitude greater than that from Russia.
The big change we need re climate change is more spend on specific mitigation. Air conditioning fitted into hospitals should be a priority imo, particularly geriatric care.
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
Listen to the defence experts and Starmer's own defence review that required 28 billion investment
Read Healey and Carns resignation letters and understand Starmer is not making our country safe
Billions more needed to rearm for potential Russia war - and defence spending plan 'still well short'
Given that Russia is currently struggling to hold its own against Ukraine and that we are one of a number of powerful allied European countries, forgive me if I don't quite see the urgency with regard to planning for a war with Russia. It seems to me that the risk to the UK from, for example, climate change is an order of magnitude greater than that from Russia.
Russia has a much stronger military than Britain if it is able to hold its own against Ukraine. What is this idea that being held to a stalemate in Ukraine is a sign of Russian weakness?
I think you're naive about both Russia, and about the weaknesses of the British military.
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
It is not a case of new stuff in 10 to 15 years. We need stuff now. We need more personnel (many of the ships we have can't go to sea for lack of manpower). We need massive investment in the new technologies we are seeing dominate the wars around the world - drones and IT being two. We need to end our reliance on the US for much of what we do by providing it ourselves or with our other allies.
This is no longer about shiney new toys - although we do need a lot more ships for example. It is about buying stuff off the shelf which we can integrate and use straight away, not in decades.
I'm a low tax Conservative and I'd whack up income tax by 2p now to pay for it all. In full. Even though it'd personally hurt me and others.
That's how seriously I think we need to take Defence.
"We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40"
So they scrimped and saved and retired at 40.
Fine.
But ALL the examples are couples or singles WITH NO KIDS. FFS. Nowhere is this point mentioned in the story.
We were £40,000 better off over 10 years from just that one lunch habit.
So £2k per person per year.
Alan had worked as a landscape gardener before launching a training and life-coaching business, while Katie was an actuary, or risk assessor, for a financial firm.
So 2-3hr/week more work probably would have got them same result. Or better job / harder negiotating for a pay rise.
In what way is making a packed lunch scrimping and saving? For a start, I got to eat what I wanted to eat, not what the local shops wanted to sell me. Better than working an extra 2-3 hours too.
I also made my own coffee in the office. Cafetiere, ground coffee, as good as paying £4 a cup, if you are not hung up on having espresso-based drinks all the time. And also saved the time going to the shop and getting it.
People do piss money up against the wall and claim it is some sort of necessity*. Or, it seems, humiliating to prepare your own food and beverages.
* In my case it is beer, so I am not immune. I am trying to find more social opportunities that don't involve drinking several pints
A few years back, on one project, the team got pissed off with coffee shop coffee.
They bought an electric moka pot, and made coffee on the office instead.
Their guess was it paid for itself inside the first couple of weeks.
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.
You are going to run into finance issues.
Treasury funds the capital but councils get the rents? Treasury won’t like that. Treasury gets the rents but councils run the properties? How will they fund maintenance?
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
It is not a case of new stuff in 10 to 15 years. We need stuff now. We need more personnel (many of the ships we have can't go to sea for lack of manpower). We need massive investment in the new technologies we are seeing dominate the wars around the world - drones and IT being two. We need to end our reliance on the US for much of what we do by providing it ourselves or with our other allies.
This is no longer about shiney new toys - although we do need a lot more ships for example. It is about buying stuff off the shelf which we can integrate and use straight away, not in decades.
I'm a low tax Conservative and I'd whack up income tax by 2p now to pay for it all. In full. Even though it'd personally hurt me and others.
That's how seriously I think we need to take Defence.
"We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40"
So they scrimped and saved and retired at 40.
Fine.
But ALL the examples are couples or singles WITH NO KIDS. FFS. Nowhere is this point mentioned in the story.
We were £40,000 better off over 10 years from just that one lunch habit.
So £2k per person per year.
Alan had worked as a landscape gardener before launching a training and life-coaching business, while Katie was an actuary, or risk assessor, for a financial firm.
So 2-3hr/week more work probably would have got them same result. Or better job / harder negiotating for a pay rise.
In what way is making a packed lunch scrimping and saving? For a start, I got to eat what I wanted to eat, not what the local shops wanted to sell me. Better than working an extra 2-3 hours too.
I also made my own coffee in the office. Cafetiere, ground coffee, as good as paying £4 a cup, if you are not hung up on having espresso-based drinks all the time. And also saved the time going to the shop and getting it.
People do piss money up against the wall and claim it is some sort of necessity*. Or, it seems, humiliating to prepare your own food and beverages.
* In my case it is beer, so I am not immune. I am trying to find more social opportunities that don't involve drinking several pints
On your last point - I am part of a group of men who was in the same boat. We tried table tennis - but that was in a bar. Finally, we landed on padel. That's now my social opportunity, and I enjoy it more than sitting in a pub drinking. But unfortunately per hour it is probably at least as expensive as going to the pub, if not more so. Badminton is much better value for money, and just as much fun as far as I can see. But doesn't seem to catch on in the same way.
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.
You are going to run into finance issues.
Treasury funds the capital but councils get the rents? Treasury won’t like that. Treasury gets the rents but councils run the properties? How will they fund maintenance?
And don’t get me started on debt consolidation.
One thing that needs to be killed off yesterday is right to buy, or well keep it but right to buy must be at market value not with a huge discount.
Listening to Starmer praising how well the country is doing begs the question why has he had to resign
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
So what are you sacrificing for the MOD to hose another £15bn up the wall? What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
It is not a case of new stuff in 10 to 15 years. We need stuff now. We need more personnel (many of the ships we have can't go to sea for lack of manpower). We need massive investment in the new technologies we are seeing dominate the wars around the world - drones and IT being two. We need to end our reliance on the US for much of what we do by providing it ourselves or with our other allies.
This is no longer about shiney new toys - although we do need a lot more ships for example. It is about buying stuff off the shelf which we can integrate and use straight away, not in decades.
I'm a low tax Conservative and I'd whack up income tax by 2p now to pay for it all. In full. Even though it'd personally hurt me and others.
That's how seriously I think we need to take Defence.
It is just 3 billion a year more for 4 years
Take it from welfare - triple lock anyone ?
Removing the triple lock doesn’t save you £4bn next year - it saves money down the line
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 problem for the UK is not that things are so disastrous, or even that they are so mediocre, it's that people won't accept that improving them in the long term needs sacrifices in the short term, and that improving them in the very short term can actually damage them over the long term.
This goes for growth too. There are ways (left or right coded) that governments can create it quickly but it will be frothy and unsustainable.
Comments
Will the govt buy a struggling house holder ?
However, my limited experience on high-speed train lines is that they travel so fast that you can't really follow the changing landscape in the way that you can from a train doing no more than 125mph.
Down with the kids
Crossrail was very popular because, aside from lorry movements and deliveries and potential vibration (which did worry/upset some residents) it had very strong support, because it was underground and brownfield and directly relieving congestion for them.
HS2 was very unpopular because it was by and large all above ground, crossing greenfield areas and far too many constituencies, and not necessarily benefiting them either. Only in the big cities.
People hate noise, disruption, construction, ruining their views and extra traffic. Particularly when they don't personally benefit from it.
This drives 90%+ of all opposition.
Why?
He is toxic he is irrelevant
Get your stuff packed pal
It seemed to me being a talking shop was all well and good but in order to get the policies enacted, you needed to be in a position of power which meant winning votes and seats.
People make a lot of the low corporation tax rate in Ireland when explaining Ireland's economic success. That's obviously a factor (though I've talked about how there are other factors that are ignored) but a key ingredient is that the commitment to a low corporation tax rate has been a consensus between the two Irish parties of government - Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. That creates certainty and business confidence for the long-term to support decisions to invest, which necessarily have to consider a timeframe that extends over multiple political cycles.
In terms of public infrastructure, Ireland did a lot better in the period when this was part-financed by the EU, and so the EU had a role in ensuring that the projects happened, and there was a commitment to the projects that went beyond party politics. Now that ireland no longer receives EU development funding, or the oversight that went with that, progress on public infrastructure projects is much slower, involves much more political uncertainty, and costs escalate.
No sane person would select the US system, same as basically no country copies the NHS model (and the ones like Canada who do, don't have much good to say about it).
I think there is a wider problem in the West, our comfort blanket is always well we aren't as bad as US at this or we are as good as France at that. Then you go to Asia, and they see Europe as a twee place at has nice old building but massive out of date when it comes to so many things where tech can be used.
The truth is none of Thatcher, May and Truss were defeated by the electorate - only two actually contested an election and all three were removed by the Conservative Parliamentary Party.
Probably asking for interview tips.
So decisive he has spent months delaying it, lost 2 of the most respected steady eddie ministers over it, and until he is dead and buried as a PM.
Probably a good thing that he didn't find an extra 10bn per annum, as they'd likely waste it.
I shouldn’t be surprised after 40 years reporting defence - but it’s amazing to see how easily the commentariat & Westminster can be diverted into talking about drones when the real Q is whether the nation is ready to accept the peace dividend is over, & scale of spend needed now
https://x.com/MarkUrban01/status/2071893573369245970
Even if the country were ready, which it isn't, I wouldn't want a here today gone tomorrow (almost literally) PM and SecDef setting out how we're going to spend the extra £billions.
Personally I would suggest that medical outcomes is the overwhemingly important measure when comparing medical systems. Others may have different ideas.
I think they're chronically underfunded for what we're asking them to do and, in many areas, this is new and novel technology and we have to accept that carries some financial risk.
Though after a decade of sitting there unused it looks (in the past month or so) like they have found a purpose for the building and I have actually seen the doors open:
https://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/revealed-name-of-new-railway-training-centre-following-public-vote
Bart is right though. Getting to London faster is not what we actually need. Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester are all barely 30 miles apart with just about the worst transport network anywhere.
For example, Britain gave all its existing AS90 self-propelled artillery to Ukraine and simply bought Archer from Sweden to replace the capability, rather than kicking off a multi-decade project to design a replacement. There are a lot of urgent procurement projects that have kicked off to create new capability for Ukraine (and also Britain) which seem to be progressing well.
https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgdn3qqg7po
"We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40"
So they scrimped and saved and retired at 40.
Fine.
But ALL the examples are couples or singles WITH NO KIDS. FFS. Nowhere is this point mentioned in the story.
That suggests that medical outcomes per spend is an important metric. The UK does pretty well on that.
There's a strong Conservative trait (which is perfectly reasonable) which is to regard throwing money at problems to be basically the wrong thing to do. Many would argue the way defence is "done" from the way the MoD operates via defence procurement to even what the strategic requirements for a viable defence in the mid 21st century need to be fundamentally reassessed and if necessary overhauled.
Yet you seem happy to throw billions at the existing structure and processes whereasif I were to suggest throwing billions at the NHS or local Government I suspect you'd be first out the gate in disagreement.
I'm in the camp of those who accept we must do more in terms if defence but that doesn't mean the current machinery is working or fit for purpose. We need to rethink not only what kind of defence we need but how we provide it.
He is providing half the investment needed into defence and Deborah Hayes, Sky's defence spokesperson, is very hard hitting on the lack of funding
And he wants to lead NATO - He simply has no self awareness
In health policy circles, we spend all day criticising the NHS and make international comparisons. That's true both in academic, where I am, and within the DHSC and NHS itself. There is no lack of NHS criticism within the NHS and government.
So £2k per person per year.
Alan had worked as a landscape gardener before launching a training and life-coaching business, while Katie was an actuary, or risk assessor, for a financial firm.
So 2-3hr/week more work probably would have got them same result. Or better job / harder negiotating for a pay rise.
(For example, I'm certainly not asking them to field any Challenger 3 regiments, as I regard an MBT as irrelevant to UK defence needs. And I doubt the UK public is, either.)
I don't think they piss everything against the wall, but I do believe that successive governments have avoided the hard choices, and have instead decided to fund a significant number of essentially Potemkin capabilities, few of which could sustain a confiict of more than a week.
There's been no real public debate about what we should do, what we might choose to do and what we might abandon. Instead we get successive behind-closed-doors defence reviews, all of which are delivered late, and none of which are then adequately funded.
The drones thing announced today gets my half hearted approval, since although it's not going to be game changing given its small size, it does at least start developing stuff to see how it might work (and some of it almost certainly won't).
These whiners are the sort of simpletons who are happy for these people to dumped elsewhere. Like Gateshead and Rochdale. They need to learn to love this.
‘ The MP for The Wrekin, Mark Pritchard, spoke during Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) this week to raise concerns about the plans to house up to 121 asylum seekers in the small village of Stoke Heath, near Market Drayton,’
https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/stoke-heath-asylum-seekers-home-office-mark-pritchard-shropshire-council-8747366
Reminds me of the Lib Dem MP here who was happy to put his name to all the welcome here guff yet is opposed to them being welcomed in his area.
https://www.gbnews.com/news/migrant-crisis-lib-dem-mp-frustrated-plans-house-asylum-seekers-bicester
https://x.com/thomasforth/status/2071894688169111998
That’s to be applauded, but the bigger picture is pretty grim. We are not a healthy population.
"...Alan had worked as a landscape gardener before launching a training and life-coaching business, while Katie was an actuary, or risk assessor, for a financial firm..."
So two salaries in (at least) the upper-middle-class bracket. Leaving aside the fact that he's obviously leeching off her (life-coaching business my arse), the stories boil down to "two wealthy people with no kids retire early".
Plus when their parents die (if they haven't already) the inheritance will keep them going for a long while.
We are similar (before it became a thing) but I am under no illusion that it would have been possible should we have had children.
It is also difficult to transition between not spending and spending when you get to the point where enough is enough.
There is an old Yorkshire dialect word "Thoil" which can be used to mean whether you can justify to yourself whether you should buy something (assuming affordability is not an issue) and I find myself using it a lot.
I note you are criticising Bridget Phillipson for her policies on private schools.
Can I ask how you square that with not suspending Mr Tony Costigan's membership of your party in light of this story which is moving into a new phase as of this week?
https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/abbotsholme-hotel-domain-name-exists-11026334
Thanks
Y Doethur.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/opinion/jack-smith-report-trump.html
“It is incoherent to immunize the president from prosecution on the theory that he can be held accountable through the political process — and then to deny Congress and the public information that would help them do so.”
What new weapon, ship, vehicle do we need 10-15years from now? Over budget, late and superseded on delivery?
Alternatively we could spend the money on the national grid upgrades.
(Before anyone says 'New Labour' can I just say 'PFI'?)
Read Healey and Carns resignation letters and understand Starmer is not making our country safe
Billions more needed to rearm for potential Russia war - and defence spending plan 'still well short'
https://news.sky.com/video/share-13559030
This is no longer about shiney new toys - although we do need a lot more ships for example. It is about buying stuff off the shelf which we can integrate and use straight away, not in decades.
The money can be better spent.
It was in Halefield.
Russia waging war in Ukraine and threatening Europe
The middle east in turmoil with regional wars
The change in how wars are fought and your 'toy guns' are no longer the issue but drone warfare is
The defence review addresses these issues and yet Labour only find 15 billion when 28 billion is needed
Shortfall is 13 billion over 4 years so just over 3 billion more needed pa
The welfare bill should be reduced accordingly
I also made my own coffee in the office. Cafetiere, ground coffee, as good as paying £4 a cup, if you are not hung up on having espresso-based drinks all the time. And also saved the time going to the shop and getting it.
People do piss money up against the wall and claim it is some sort of necessity*. Or, it seems, humiliating to prepare your own food and beverages.
* In my case it is beer, so I am not immune. I am trying to find more social opportunities that don't involve drinking several pints
Pension / NHS treatment/ their kids school
At no point in the last 80 years would the MOD not have claimed they need more money to spend on hardware because of the Russians.
"Sky Sports... I wish it was." - @BethRigby
https://x.com/SkyNews/status/2071905566159425682?s=20
The 40 odd year peace dividend is over, and all European countries face huge increases in their defence spending.
Ask any European country if they think war with Russia can be dismissed then you will find a resounding no
It isn't money. It's the security and defence and, indeed, the ongoing viability of our country.
Maybe schools too...
I think you're naive about both Russia, and about the weaknesses of the British military.
That's how seriously I think we need to take Defence.
They bought an electric moka pot, and made coffee on the office instead.
Their guess was it paid for itself inside the first couple of weeks.
Treasury funds the capital but councils get the rents? Treasury won’t like that. Treasury gets the rents but councils run the properties? How will they fund maintenance?
And don’t get me started on debt consolidation.
Take it from welfare - triple lock anyone ?
Badminton is much better value for money, and just as much fun as far as I can see. But doesn't seem to catch on in the same way.