"Only 6 per cent of people say they would volunteer to fight if Britain faced the threat of an invasion, a poll has found.
Asked whether they would be willing to defend the country in the face of an “imminent invasion”, 52 per cent of people claimed that they would be ineligible to fight because of age or disability.
While 14 per cent said that they would agree to serve if called up, 17 per cent claimed they would refuse any order to defend their homeland."
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
We're also fortunate in the UK that wind inversely correlates with sun. I have a basic model based on NESO data from 2024 that found that the challenge will be having enough storage in the autumn rather than the windy winter months.
It also found that there is rapidly diminishing marginal returns to battery investment - getting the UK to about 95% (350 days) renewables/battery coverage is relatively easy - but you'd need 4x as much to get to 99%, and 8x as much to get to 100%. It's complex though, depending on the exact mix of wind, solar and CCGT and gas storage you have - the main lesson is that after setting the appropropriate parameters, we should let the market make that efficient allocation.
At the moment industry/government instinct is the opposite (rent-seeking behaviour + regulatory capture, imo), so I think there's a good chance we throw this opportunity away. 77% of the potential energy produced by Seagreen last year was curtailed - that's 2.7 TWh of power that the people of Dundee and Angus should have had for free, about 5x as much as they actually used.
And which is why Net Zero is silly. You can get Net 90% for very little. So let's get there, and then we can worry about the next 10% later.
It's what's maddening and weird about the flip in the politics.
Go back about ten years, and Net Zero was seen as achievable, necessary, but difficult and expensive. There was basically consensus.
The science and engineering is way more favourable now than then. From here to Net Five Percent or so is stuff we probably want to do anyway. But the political opposition is greater.
The day to day physical evidence of climate change and its impact on the world is also much more obvious than even a decade ago. Yet the denial is getting stronger. It’s odd.
MAGA is part of the problem of course, We’ve been importing the climate equivalent of Southern creationism via social media.
"Only 6 per cent of people say they would volunteer to fight if Britain faced the threat of an invasion, a poll has found.
Asked whether they would be willing to defend the country in the face of an “imminent invasion”, 52 per cent of people claimed that they would be ineligible to fight because of age or disability.
While 14 per cent said that they would agree to serve if called up, 17 per cent claimed they would refuse any order to defend their homeland."
If we’re ever invaded it’ll be on the back of a blitz of thermonuclear weapons from ICBMs, and the country will already be a smouldering barbecue. Not sure what those 4 million volunteers would be doing.
"Only 6 per cent of people say they would volunteer to fight if Britain faced the threat of an invasion, a poll has found.
Asked whether they would be willing to defend the country in the face of an “imminent invasion”, 52 per cent of people claimed that they would be ineligible to fight because of age or disability.
While 14 per cent said that they would agree to serve if called up, 17 per cent claimed they would refuse any order to defend their homeland."
Even allowing for a fighting age of 20-35, that still gives 700k, and halving that again for physical capability gives a potential active armed force number of 350k.
Our problems would be economic and industrial rather than manpower.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
We're also fortunate in the UK that wind inversely correlates with sun. I have a basic model based on NESO data from 2024 that found that the challenge will be having enough storage in the autumn rather than the windy winter months.
It also found that there is rapidly diminishing marginal returns to battery investment - getting the UK to about 95% (350 days) renewables/battery coverage is relatively easy - but you'd need 4x as much to get to 99%, and 8x as much to get to 100%. It's complex though, depending on the exact mix of wind, solar and CCGT and gas storage you have - the main lesson is that after setting the appropropriate parameters, we should let the market make that efficient allocation.
At the moment industry/government instinct is the opposite (rent-seeking behaviour + regulatory capture, imo), so I think there's a good chance we throw this opportunity away. 77% of the potential energy produced by Seagreen last year was curtailed - that's 2.7 TWh of power that the people of Dundee and Angus should have had for free, about 5x as much as they actually used.
And which is why Net Zero is silly. You can get Net 90% for very little. So let's get there, and then we can worry about the next 10% later.
Net Zero isn't just the leccy, it is everything. Domestic heating is the elephant in the room. Convert the gas network to hydrogen, or shut it off and force us all to install shitty air source heat pumps. No government has been prepared to make the decision, and I can't see the new regime being in a rush to take it.
Just to add, CCS on EfW plants makes them net negative, so can offset emissions from other sectors, such as aviation.
"Only 6 per cent of people say they would volunteer to fight if Britain faced the threat of an invasion, a poll has found.
Asked whether they would be willing to defend the country in the face of an “imminent invasion”, 52 per cent of people claimed that they would be ineligible to fight because of age or disability.
While 14 per cent said that they would agree to serve if called up, 17 per cent claimed they would refuse any order to defend their homeland."
There are basically three costs: build, maintainance, fuel.
Gas: low, low, high Coal: medium, medium, medium Nuclear: high, high, low Wind: high, low, none Solar: high, very low, none
You missed the subsidy elements. For CCGT, and especially OCGT and engine sets, you make your money from availability payments. If you own an OCGT, the last thing you want is to have to run the thing to generate power at low efficiency from expensive natural gas, while also being hit with ETS costs.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
I agree with this, although I believe new gas turbines have got a lot more expensive, as have other electric generation technologies, so building new gas power stations "just in case" is looking relatively less cost effective, compared with going straight to batteries.
Add: batteries were majorly responsible for preventing a blackout in June along with some deft placing of interconnector supplies. At the moment in conjunction with gas generation, but batteries are already a critical part of the mix
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
I agree with this, although I believe new gas turbines have got a lot more expensive, as have other electric generation technologies, so building new gas power stations "just in case" is looking relatively less cost effective, compared with going straight to batteries.
Add: batteries were majorly responsible for preventing a blackout in June along with some deft placing of interconnector supplies. At the moment in conjunction with gas generation, but batteries are already a critical part of the mix
Why do we need to build more gas plants? The amount of Electricity from gas is getting less and less as we build more renewables and batteries.
Because we usually have a week in the winter with freezing temperatures and no wind. Those glorious still days in the Cairngorms, with only 6 hours of sunlight. As I set out above, it means we only need to build about 1/8th of the battery capacity while still retaining 95% coverage.
The key thing is to have a strategic gas reserve that we buy on the cheap during the summer and deplete during that cold snap.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
I agree with this, although I believe new gas turbines have got a lot more expensive, as have other electric generation technologies, so building new gas power stations "just in case" is looking relatively less cost effective, compared with going straight to batteries.
Add: batteries were majorly responsible for preventing a blackout in June along with some deft placing of interconnector supplies. At the moment in conjunction with gas generation, but batteries are already a critical part of the mix
There are basically three costs: build, maintainance, fuel.
Gas: low, low, high Coal: medium, medium, medium Nuclear: high, high, low Wind: high, low, none Solar: high, very low, none
You missed the subsidy elements. For CCGT, and especially OCGT and engine sets, you make your money from availability payments. If you own an OCGT, the last thing you want is to have to run the thing to generate power at low efficiency from expensive natural gas, while also being hit with ETS costs.
I am merely looking at high level costs by type of powergen. I'm not looking at income or subsidies or anything like that.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
I agree with this, although I believe new gas turbines have got a lot more expensive, as have other electric generation technologies, so building new gas power stations "just in case" is looking relatively less cost effective, compared with going straight to batteries.
Add: batteries were majorly responsible for preventing a blackout in June along with some deft placing of interconnector supplies. At the moment in conjunction with gas generation, but batteries are already a critical part of the mix
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
I agree with this, although I believe new gas turbines have got a lot more expensive, as have other electric generation technologies, so building new gas power stations "just in case" is looking relatively less cost effective, compared with going straight to batteries.
Add: batteries were majorly responsible for preventing a blackout in June along with some deft placing of interconnector supplies. At the moment in conjunction with gas generation, but batteries are already a critical part of the mix
Why do we need to build more gas plants? The amount of Electricity from gas is getting less and less as we build more renewables and batteries.
Because we usually have a week in the winter with freezing temperatures and no wind. Those glorious still days in the Cairngorms, with only 6 hours of sunlight. As I set out above, it means we only need to build about 1/8th of the battery capacity while still retaining 95% coverage.
The key thing is to have a strategic gas reserve that we buy on the cheap during the summer and deplete during that cold snap.
With the way that our weather seems to be changing - often getting stuck in a rut - that one week of still days might turn into one month.
You could never hit 99.99% certainty with a battery backup [without massive over-sizing].
20 million. Extraordinary if true. (Referring to last night's discussion).
It is, but don't forget that if you're using a gross number you're including lots of people who come and go. If you have half a million students coming every year and then half a million students leaving every year, then over the course of 20 years you'll have 10 million students but no increase in net immigrants.
(Yeah, yeah, i know that's not what happened, but it is the danger of using gross numbers without context.)
If there's a problem with building prisons quickly, why not get low-risk prisoners to help build them? It would be better for them than sitting around in their cells most of the day.
Yes. Unlike the NatCon or PopCon conferences, which occasionally produce something interesting (which is not the same as "something I like"), the GB-CPAC is just Brits pretending they understand Americans and failing. Truss syndrome, if you will.
If there's a problem with building prisons quickly, why not get low-risk prisoners to help build them? It would be better for them than sitting around in their cells most of the day.
Is that the rate-limiting step? Suspect that getting planning permission and overcoming the local opposition (probably inevitable wherever you try to put a new prison) are much more relevant.
I suppose some prisoners would be happy to help with ensuring that the public don't oppose such plans. If you know what I mean.
20 million. Extraordinary if true. (Referring to last night's discussion).
It is, but don't forget that if you're using a gross number you're including lots of people who come and go. If you have half a million students coming every year and then half a million students leaving every year, then over the course of 20 years you'll have 10 million students but no increase in net immigrants.
(Yeah, yeah, i know that's not what happened, but it is the danger of using gross numbers without context.)
The worst kind of statistic- as in the most harmful to the public converstation- is the one that is both accurate and misleading.
The Southport killer Axel Rudakubana has been moved from prison to a psychiatric hospital after clinical assessment, the Guardian can disclose.
He was transferred to Broadmoor high-security hospital from the category A prison Belmarsh this week after it was concluded that he could not be managed safely in a prison environment, sources confirmed.
Presumably he's being given drugs to knock him out most of the day.
They could have saved a lot of time and money by accepting PB's nutty as a fruitcake diagnosis before the trial.
"Only 6 per cent of people say they would volunteer to fight if Britain faced the threat of an invasion, a poll has found.
Asked whether they would be willing to defend the country in the face of an “imminent invasion”, 52 per cent of people claimed that they would be ineligible to fight because of age or disability.
While 14 per cent said that they would agree to serve if called up, 17 per cent claimed they would refuse any order to defend their homeland."
Only 10 percent of the population were serving in the Armed Forces during peak mobilisation in WW2. 30% of the working age male population served but I don't know whether this poll is filtered like that. If not then 14% seems about right.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
👀 According to Downing Street read out of meeting between FM and new PM, Andy Burnham told John Swinney a second Indy ref was “off limits” because it would take focus from cost of living.
On Trump seemingly adding new conditions to the US Saudi nuclear deal, including Saudi Israel normalization, a Saudi source says: “It was signed. So nothing to renegotiate.”
Ratified agreements can be cancelled, this has not even been ratified yet.
It's Trump, he might put a missile through it.
Yes, the realpolitik is that the agreement is whatever America says it is, but its unreliable and capricious President must be doing immense harm to the United States by driving custom to its geopolitical rivals. Rory on TRiP was making a similar point about AI in light of America blocking the export of Mythos. China should not be the good guys and yet...
Thanks everyone for the supportive and encouraging words about my header. The link out to the YouGov analysis didn’t work on my iPhone from the header - that is the analysis when green were polling their highest, Labour had lost 4 voters to Greens for every 1 that went Lab to Reform - without analysis this might not have been our impression of what was going on? https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54811-labours-voter-coalition-broke-more-to-left-than-right-at-2026-local-elections That Labours overall poor showing in May was underwritten by voters switching Green, and their way back to 30% can come from squeezing the green vote. How far can Lab squeeze it - can the Green vote actually be lower next GE from tying themselves to populist leader who becomes the face of unpopularity, even disgrace, what drags them down? And to what extent is Burnham’s ideological battle actually with Reform? Would it be a harmful mistake to think it was, when it wasn’t?
I read the whole thread. Although nice things were said about the header, so many comments left me feeling several key “pennies actually hadn’t dropped”. Firstly - tactical voting isn’t about positivity and reasons to vote for you, you simply get that TV that made huge difference last time out, by being in the two most likely to win the seat, and you are the least hated or least feared for that constituency electorate. Picking up tactical vote is not a positive endorsement of you or your policy, it’s strong dislike for the other option in with a chance. TV is an anti vote - an attack vote against the other party or candidate. Maybe turnout shouldn’t go by the term Popular Vote anymore? Which brings us secondly to many mini discussions in thread about how the Conservatives are up against it because what policy platform gains positive votes to them from three distinct places they lost votes to, Ref, LibDem and Lab. what reasons to vote Conservative pulls them out this parliamentary hole? But the main thrust of my argument is that, in the first place the Conservatives didn’t lose these votes on policy or ideology, but on the perception they’re incompetent. 63.2% of seats to Lab from just 33.7% votes, 18.6% of seats for Con from 23.7% - you don’t have to be oozing an impression of confidence and have great policies next time, to make big difference in that tactical votes harshness and gain a huge haul of seats - it’s simply how you will measure against your opponents on competence - such as memories how incompetent you were, yes, but now it’s versus much fresher memories what absolute shower your opponents have been.
Too much doom as Mr Meeks and others claimed, because we do have a strong example of just such a quick turnaround, quick switch of those required voters who matter, and it fully supports my argument of old memories v much fresher memories of incompetence - it is the last US presidential election - is it not?
In London though the Conservatives were still second on May so there can squeeze Reform to beat Labour. In Tory held seats some Labour and LD voters will vote Tory to beat Reform
In London, the Tories have a very efficient vote in the seats that they won - but all you are talking about there is the Tories retaining the seats they have - it's not giving them any extra seats...
City of London and Westminster, Kensington, Chelsea and Fulham, Hendon, Uxbridge etc. Plenty of Conservative target seats in London
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
It's not at pretty low costs.
Pretty much every data center that I'm involved in right now is putting solar panels on their roofs, because the economics are absolutely incredible.
These panels are going up with zero government subsidy or involvement. (And exactly none of the electricity generated is going anywhere near the grid.)
I'm pretty sure the guys involved aren't doing it for fun.
If there's a problem with building prisons quickly, why not get low-risk prisoners to help build them? It would be better for them than sitting around in their cells most of the day.
There's unskilled labour to be done, sure, but I would have to guess that directing a bunch of untrained prisoners at the task, only some of whom will have experience on a building site, would probably be more trouble than it is worth.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
We're also fortunate in the UK that wind inversely correlates with sun. I have a basic model based on NESO data from 2024 that found that the challenge will be having enough storage in the autumn rather than the windy winter months.
It also found that there is rapidly diminishing marginal returns to battery investment - getting the UK to about 95% (350 days) renewables/battery coverage is relatively easy - but you'd need 4x as much to get to 99%, and 8x as much to get to 100%. It's complex though, depending on the exact mix of wind, solar and CCGT and gas storage you have - the main lesson is that after setting the appropropriate parameters, we should let the market make that efficient allocation.
At the moment industry/government instinct is the opposite (rent-seeking behaviour + regulatory capture, imo), so I think there's a good chance we throw this opportunity away. 77% of the potential energy produced by Seagreen last year was curtailed - that's 2.7 TWh of power that the people of Dundee and Angus should have had for free, about 5x as much as they actually used.
And which is why Net Zero is silly. You can get Net 90% for very little. So let's get there, and then we can worry about the next 10% later.
It's what's maddening and weird about the flip in the politics.
Go back about ten years, and Net Zero was seen as achievable, necessary, but difficult and expensive. There was basically consensus.
The science and engineering is way more favourable now than then. From here to Net Five Percent or so is stuff we probably want to do anyway. But the political opposition is greater.
The day to day physical evidence of climate change and its impact on the world is also much more obvious than even a decade ago. Yet the denial is getting stronger. It’s odd.
MAGA is part of the problem of course, We’ve been importing the climate equivalent of Southern creationism via social media.
Sometimes as the evidence gets stronger it means those who were inclined to denialism feel the need double down even harder.
Just look at how many people now deny very clear evidence about vaccines generally, and the covid-vaccine more recently, even if at the point of 'how can we possibly know?'. even though we can and did see the effect from not using it to using it.
I wish Burnham would bring in the Australian AV system, because then we wouldn't have to bother with tactical voting. And it preserves the one member constituencies.
👀 According to Downing Street read out of meeting between FM and new PM, Andy Burnham told John Swinney a second Indy ref was “off limits” because it would take focus from cost of living.
Who cares, the UK government is sovereign. Swinney should focus on Scottish domestic policy
There's nothing wrong with having better relations between UK gov and devolved administrations, but there's obviously no point discussing this particular issue as the former see no need (at the moment) for any concessions, and the latter due to its make up have to raise it continually regardless.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
It's not at pretty low costs.
Pretty much every data center that I'm involved in right now is putting solar panels on their roofs, because the economics are absolutely incredible.
These panels are going up with zero government subsidy or involvement. (And exactly none of the electricity generated is going anywhere near the grid.)
I'm pretty sure the guys involved aren't doing it for fun.
That's not relevant. In the UK the strike price of solar has risen. Solar power is expensive by contract. How cheap it is to set up doesn't benefit the consumer, it benefits the industry.
I wish Burnham would bring in the Australian AV system, because then we wouldn't have to bother with tactical voting. And it preserves the one member constituencies.
I wish Burnham would bring in the Australian AV system, because then we wouldn't have to bother with tactical voting. And it preserves the one member constituencies.
I wish Burnham would bring in the Australian AV system, because then we wouldn't have to bother with tactical voting. And it preserves the one member constituencies.
I realise it's just words at this point, but with Reeves we didn't even have wise words.
We have a vicious cycle in politics, with government switching between laissez faire soft left Tory Governments, and actively malign 'progressive' ones. The result is Britain being sold off on the cheap.
If we replace those two poles with patriotic free-market low tax governments, alternating with patriotic 'buy British', sensible interventionist, Healey-esque governments, that's a virtuous cycle. I am a free-marketeer - I believe in the first type of economic policy, but if there must be an opposite, this is OK.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
I agree with this, although I believe new gas turbines have got a lot more expensive, as have other electric generation technologies, so building new gas power stations "just in case" is looking relatively less cost effective, compared with going straight to batteries.
Add: batteries were majorly responsible for preventing a blackout in June along with some deft placing of interconnector supplies. At the moment in conjunction with gas generation, but batteries are already a critical part of the mix
Not sure if it's covered in the video (just about to go to bed) - but afair the Impossible Project people were offered all the secret sauces and refused as they wanted to re-make it all from scratch. Which hasn't gone terribly well :-(
I wish Burnham would bring in the Australian AV system, because then we wouldn't have to bother with tactical voting. And it preserves the one member constituencies.
Yet that was rejected in the 2011 referendum
I never understand why that is seen as some catchall rebuttal to the suggestion. It has been 15 years, an awful lot has changed, we've changed our minds on what government we want several times for a start, is there some reason a referendum cannot be revisited after all that time?
People born after it may be able to vote at the next GE (in fact if voting age is lowered they definitely will), and I'm supposed to believe it has been definitively 'rejected' by voters for all time? Don't be silly.
And whilst they did it for less 'important' elections, the Tories had no issue changing voting rules despite it not being in their manifesto (only that they would continue to support FPTP), so if a party had a manifesto commitment and won it, any complaint about it would be doubly stupid.
I wish Burnham would bring in the Australian AV system, because then we wouldn't have to bother with tactical voting. And it preserves the one member constituencies.
2011 referendum:
No 2 AV = 68% Yes 2 AV = 32%
That's beginning to be a while ago now.
No kidding.
I don't actually think it would pass if put to the vote again, and I don't think the government is going to do it before or after the next GE either, but thing get revisited all the time.
I wish Burnham would bring in the Australian AV system, because then we wouldn't have to bother with tactical voting. And it preserves the one member constituencies.
Yet that was rejected in the 2011 referendum
I never understand why that is seen as some catchall rebuttal to the suggestion. It has been 15 years, an awful lot has changed, we've changed our minds on what government we want several times for a start, is there some reason a referendum cannot be revisited after all that time?
People born after it may be able to vote at the next GE (in fact if voting age is lowered they definitely will), and I'm supposed to believe it has been definitively 'rejected' by voters for all time? Don't be silly.
And whilst they did it for less 'important' elections, the Tories had no issue changing voting rules despite it not being in their manifesto (only that they would continue to support FPTP), so if a party had a manifesto commitment and won it, any complaint about it would be doubly stupid.
I don't actually think it will happen though.
If Burnham does electoral reform it will be full PR not AV
Politicians with huge majorities seem to be scared stiff of offending the public by changing the voting system without holding a referendum.
Utter nonsense I suspect.
Most people wouldn't even notice, because they're not interested in politics, except maybe who's prime minister - and there's a large segment of the population who aren't even bothered about that.
Parliament is sovereign as we all know, so get on with it, if you believe it's right and you have that majority.
Politicians with huge majorities seem to be scared stiff of offending the public by changing the voting system without holding a referendum.
Utter nonsense I suspect.
Most people wouldn't even notice, because they're not interested in politics, except maybe who's prime minister - and there's a large segment of the population who aren't even bothered about that.
Parliament is sovereign as we all know, so get on with it, if you believe it's right and you have that majority.
You would need it in the manifesto first and a majority won for that
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
It's not at pretty low costs.
Pretty much every data center that I'm involved in right now is putting solar panels on their roofs, because the economics are absolutely incredible.
These panels are going up with zero government subsidy or involvement. (And exactly none of the electricity generated is going anywhere near the grid.)
I'm pretty sure the guys involved aren't doing it for fun.
That's not relevant. In the UK the strike price of solar has risen. Solar power is expensive by contract. How cheap it is to set up doesn't benefit the consumer, it benefits the industry.
Every time someone puts a solar panel on a data center, rather than hooking up a gas turbine or connecting it to the grid, it is lowering your energy bill.
If you were building a data center -even in the UK- you would put panels on the roof, because you get power at almost exactly the time you need it most. It is peaking power for your data center. And it is dramatically cheaper than the alternatives.
Now, if the gas price were to drop two-thirds, then that would change. But having a variety of different power sources is a massive win for data center owners, because it smooths out the impact of fluctuating gas prices on their economics.
There are basically three costs: build, maintainance, fuel.
Gas: low, low, high Coal: medium, medium, medium Nuclear: high, high, low Wind: high, low, none Solar: high, very low, none
You've missed out transmission losses. If the powergen source is in the wrong place then there are costs there too. One argument is that generators are paid irrespective of where they access the grid nodes.
Politicians with huge majorities seem to be scared stiff of offending the public by changing the voting system without holding a referendum.
Utter nonsense I suspect.
Most people wouldn't even notice, because they're not interested in politics, except maybe who's prime minister - and there's a large segment of the population who aren't even bothered about that.
Parliament is sovereign as we all know, so get on with it, if you believe it's right and you have that majority.
You would need it in the manifesto first and a majority won for that
Hot on the heels of Louise Haigh not being trusted with the Public Fraud portfolio, look who turns up as a Housing Minister. Timms (a Blairite) is covering both the DWP and Housing.
Hot on the heels of Louise Haigh not being trusted with the Public Fraud portfolio, look who turns up as a Housing Minister. Timms (a Blairite) is covering both the DWP and Housing.
A Russian Su-57 fighter jet crashed on a training flight in Moscow oblast. The pilot survived. Some in Russia are claiming it was yet another example of friendly fire.
That’s the brand new “stealth” fighter plane that hasn’t even turned up in Ukraine yet. There’s only half a dozen prototypes in existence, and now one fewer of them!
There's a claim going round that Ukraine tricked the Moscow air defence system into firing on their own jet. No idea how credible a claim it is.
Well there now appears to be more details to the rumour. Absolutely hilarious if this is true.
I found out this week that IMAX can no longer make a 70mm projector. There’s 41 of them in the world, and they keep them alive by cannibalising older non-functional machines.
Most modern IMAX cinemas use very large digital projectors playing very large digital content.
There are basically three costs: build, maintainance, fuel.
Gas: low, low, high Coal: medium, medium, medium Nuclear: high, high, low Wind: high, low, none Solar: high, very low, none
You missed the subsidy elements. For CCGT, and especially OCGT and engine sets, you make your money from availability payments. If you own an OCGT, the last thing you want is to have to run the thing to generate power at low efficiency from expensive natural gas, while also being hit with ETS costs.
I am merely looking at high level costs by type of powergen. I'm not looking at income or subsidies or anything like that.
The whole reason for the high electricity prices, is the complex web of contracts and subsidies that represent significant government intervention into the markets.
Which is why we now see data centres not just put solar panels on the roof, but installing turbine generators and even talking about SMR nuclear on-site, as it’s cheaper to set up their own power generation from scratch than to use the expensive grid power.
On Trump seemingly adding new conditions to the US Saudi nuclear deal, including Saudi Israel normalization, a Saudi source says: “It was signed. So nothing to renegotiate.”
Ratified agreements can be cancelled, this has not even been ratified yet.
It's Trump, he might put a missile through it.
Yes, the realpolitik is that the agreement is whatever America says it is, but its unreliable and capricious President must be doing immense harm to the United States by driving custom to its geopolitical rivals. Rory on TRiP was making a similar point about AI in light of America blocking the export of Mythos. China should not be the good guys and yet...
And Trump just imposed another set of tariffs unilaterally on dozens of countries.
There no real rationale for his actions other than a desire to chuck his weight around.
There are basically three costs: build, maintainance, fuel.
Gas: low, low, high Coal: medium, medium, medium Nuclear: high, high, low Wind: high, low, none Solar: high, very low, none
You missed the subsidy elements. For CCGT, and especially OCGT and engine sets, you make your money from availability payments. If you own an OCGT, the last thing you want is to have to run the thing to generate power at low efficiency from expensive natural gas, while also being hit with ETS costs.
I am merely looking at high level costs by type of powergen. I'm not looking at income or subsidies or anything like that.
The whole reason for the high electricity prices, is the complex web of contracts and subsidies that represent significant government intervention into the markets.
Which is why we now see data centres not just put solar panels on the roof, but installing turbine generators and even talking about SMR nuclear on-site, as it’s cheaper to set up their own power generation from scratch than to use the expensive grid power.
Robert's point is that the inefficiencies and absurdities of the electricity market have no bearing at all on whether solar is a cheap and efficient generating technology.
There are basically three costs: build, maintainance, fuel.
Gas: low, low, high Coal: medium, medium, medium Nuclear: high, high, low Wind: high, low, none Solar: high, very low, none
You missed the subsidy elements. For CCGT, and especially OCGT and engine sets, you make your money from availability payments. If you own an OCGT, the last thing you want is to have to run the thing to generate power at low efficiency from expensive natural gas, while also being hit with ETS costs.
I am merely looking at high level costs by type of powergen. I'm not looking at income or subsidies or anything like that.
The whole reason for the high electricity prices, is the complex web of contracts and subsidies that represent significant government intervention into the markets.
Which is why we now see data centres not just put solar panels on the roof, but installing turbine generators and even talking about SMR nuclear on-site, as it’s cheaper to set up their own power generation from scratch than to use the expensive grid power.
Robert's point is that the inefficiencies and absurdities of the electricity market have no bearing at all on whether solar is a cheap and efficient generating technology.
Robert is, of course, quite correct.
And my point is that whether or not solar is a cheap way of generating electricity (it is hardly efficient for your generation to stop at night or due to a cloudy day) is irrelevant when it is costing the consumer more than energy generated by gas. All the cheapness does is increase the profit margin of suppliers.
There are basically three costs: build, maintainance, fuel.
Gas: low, low, high Coal: medium, medium, medium Nuclear: high, high, low Wind: high, low, none Solar: high, very low, none
Tidal: medium-high, low. none. (you have to factor in they have a life-span of 2-3 times that of nuclear/4-6 times that of wind/solar- but low abandonment costs vs ultra high for nuclear).
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
It's not at pretty low costs.
Pretty much every data center that I'm involved in right now is putting solar panels on their roofs, because the economics are absolutely incredible.
These panels are going up with zero government subsidy or involvement. (And exactly none of the electricity generated is going anywhere near the grid.)
I'm pretty sure the guys involved aren't doing it for fun.
That's not relevant. In the UK the strike price of solar has risen. Solar power is expensive by contract. How cheap it is to set up doesn't benefit the consumer, it benefits the industry.
Every time someone puts a solar panel on a data center, rather than hooking up a gas turbine or connecting it to the grid, it is lowering your energy bill.
If you were building a data center -even in the UK- you would put panels on the roof, because you get power at almost exactly the time you need it most. It is peaking power for your data center. And it is dramatically cheaper than the alternatives.
Now, if the gas price were to drop two-thirds, then that would change. But having a variety of different power sources is a massive win for data center owners, because it smooths out the impact of fluctuating gas prices on their economics.
I wish Burnham would bring in the Australian AV system, because then we wouldn't have to bother with tactical voting. And it preserves the one member constituencies.
👀 According to Downing Street read out of meeting between FM and new PM, Andy Burnham told John Swinney a second Indy ref was “off limits” because it would take focus from cost of living.
There are basically three costs: build, maintainance, fuel.
Gas: low, low, high Coal: medium, medium, medium Nuclear: high, high, low Wind: high, low, none Solar: high, very low, none
Tidal: medium-high, low. none. (you have to factor in they have a life-span of 2-3 times that of nuclear/4-6 times that of wind/solar- but low abandonment costs vs ultra high for nuclear).
Are the maintenance costs low? I thought the salt water was a nightmare and screwed everything up.
I wish Burnham would bring in the Australian AV system, because then we wouldn't have to bother with tactical voting. And it preserves the one member constituencies.
UK 'ready to defend' itself after Iran warns of 'consequences' for US access
The UK says it is ready to defend itself, after Iran warned of "consequences" for opening its bases to the US military.
A little earlier, Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it "strongly condemns the decision" to allow the US's "illegal military attacks"
"Any party that participates in any way in committing military aggression against Iran will be responsible for the consequences... of its decision," a spokesperson said.
The UK's Ministry of Defence gave a stark response to Iran's threat:
"Our Armed Forces are ready to keep the United Kingdom safe from any kind of attacks, whether it's on our soil or from abroad. The UK stands ready 24/7 to defend itself.
"This includes through operating a layered approach to air and missile defence, provided by Royal Navy, British Army and Royal Air Force assets equipped with a range of advanced capabilities, working closely with our NATO allies.
"The UK's approach to the conflict remains the same - we are committed to defending our people, our interests and our allies, acting in accordance with international law and not getting drawn into the wider conflict."
Absolutely mental decision to help with that illegal war
On Trump seemingly adding new conditions to the US Saudi nuclear deal, including Saudi Israel normalization, a Saudi source says: “It was signed. So nothing to renegotiate.”
Ratified agreements can be cancelled, this has not even been ratified yet.
It's Trump, he might put a missile through it.
Yes, the realpolitik is that the agreement is whatever America says it is, but its unreliable and capricious President must be doing immense harm to the United States by driving custom to its geopolitical rivals. Rory on TRiP was making a similar point about AI in light of America blocking the export of Mythos. China should not be the good guys and yet...
And Trump just imposed another set of tariffs unilaterally on dozens of countries.
There no real rationale for his actions other than a desire to chuck his weight around.
Given how obese he is you wouldn't have thought he needed to do much to chuck it around.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
It's not at pretty low costs.
Pretty much every data center that I'm involved in right now is putting solar panels on their roofs, because the economics are absolutely incredible.
These panels are going up with zero government subsidy or involvement. (And exactly none of the electricity generated is going anywhere near the grid.)
I'm pretty sure the guys involved aren't doing it for fun.
That's not relevant. In the UK the strike price of solar has risen. Solar power is expensive by contract. How cheap it is to set up doesn't benefit the consumer, it benefits the industry.
It certainly benefits the consumer if the panels are on your own roof!
The public are probably thinking: if we could do so much so quickly at the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, why can't we build some new prisons over the next 3 months?
The public have some idea of how long it takes to build a huge building. It’s longer than 3 months. Use some common sense.
does not have to be a Hilton hotel, easily stick up a warehouse with cells etc , they manage it easily elsewhere. Too many bleeding hearts.
On Trump seemingly adding new conditions to the US Saudi nuclear deal, including Saudi Israel normalization, a Saudi source says: “It was signed. So nothing to renegotiate.”
Ratified agreements can be cancelled, this has not even been ratified yet.
It's Trump, he might put a missile through it.
Yes, the realpolitik is that the agreement is whatever America says it is, but its unreliable and capricious President must be doing immense harm to the United States by driving custom to its geopolitical rivals. Rory on TRiP was making a similar point about AI in light of America blocking the export of Mythos. China should not be the good guys and yet...
And Trump just imposed another set of tariffs unilaterally on dozens of countries.
There no real rationale for his actions other than a desire to chuck his weight around.
Given how obese he is you wouldn't have thought he needed to do much to chuck it around.
Not nearly the liability of the worst Trade Secretary in history, Kemi is massively popular in Australia and New Zealand, their farmers never had it so good. Every Trade deal she signed was on worse terms than it's predecessor.
She can yell and scream and scream and scream but the violet Elizabet of British Politics has in her political carerr delivered the square root of absolutely fuck all!
Anyone know anything about this company planning to put mirrors in space to provide daylight at night?
They say that a 60 foot mirror will illuminated a disc three miles wide, but that's only going to get you enough sunlight for twilight (with the light from a small mirror sort over a large area), and it's not going to help you with solar farms or growing more food.
👀 According to Downing Street read out of meeting between FM and new PM, Andy Burnham told John Swinney a second Indy ref was “off limits” because it would take focus from cost of living.
Comments
Wonderful. Especially the trombones at about 4 minutes in...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEquvyaBCLI&list=RDJEquvyaBCLI&start_radio=1
MAGA is part of the problem of course, We’ve been importing the climate equivalent of Southern creationism via social media.
Even allowing for a fighting age of 20-35, that still gives 700k, and halving that again for physical capability gives a potential active armed force number of 350k.
Our problems would be economic and industrial rather than manpower.
Just to add, CCS on EfW plants makes them net negative, so can offset emissions from other sectors, such as aviation.
I could fly or fix small drones but I'd fail any fitness test - which the way things are set up, would currently make me ineligible.
The key thing is to have a strategic gas reserve that we buy on the cheap during the summer and deplete during that cold snap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-u-u0ERQbU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbYQYOM66MA
You could never hit 99.99% certainty with a battery backup [without massive over-sizing].
Minnesota - 2nd House Polling:
🔵 Little: 45%
🔴 Pratt: 40%
🔵 Klein: 43%
🔴 Pratt: 42%
🔵 Berg: 43%
🔴 Pratt: 43%
Harper Polling / June 21, 2026
https://x.com/USA_Polling/status/2079966329717608913
(Internal polling commissioned by a Pratt.)
(Yeah, yeah, i know that's not what happened, but it is the danger of using gross numbers without context.)
That's the first time I've seen Dominic Frisby since "17 million fuck-offs".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiUFPjulTW8
(I like the reuse of Widdecombe Fair in the tune.)
I'm also slightly surprised at IDS. There's also a bit of barrel-scraping.
I suppose some prisoners would be happy to help with ensuring that the public don't oppose such plans. If you know what I mean.
The link out to the YouGov analysis didn’t work on my iPhone from the header - that is the analysis when green were polling their highest, Labour had lost 4 voters to Greens for every 1 that went Lab to Reform - without analysis this might not have been our impression of what was going on?
https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54811-labours-voter-coalition-broke-more-to-left-than-right-at-2026-local-elections
That Labours overall poor showing in May was underwritten by voters switching Green, and their way back to 30% can come from squeezing the green vote. How far can Lab squeeze it - can the Green vote actually be lower next GE from tying themselves to populist leader who becomes the face of unpopularity, even disgrace, what drags them down? And to what extent is Burnham’s ideological battle actually with Reform? Would it be a harmful mistake to think it was, when it wasn’t?
I read the whole thread. Although nice things were said about the header, so many comments left me feeling several key “pennies actually hadn’t dropped”. Firstly - tactical voting isn’t about positivity and reasons to vote for you, you simply get that TV that made huge difference last time out, by being in the two most likely to win the seat, and you are the least hated or least feared for that constituency electorate. Picking up tactical vote is not a positive endorsement of you or your policy, it’s strong dislike for the other option in with a chance. TV is an anti vote - an attack vote against the other party or candidate.
Maybe turnout shouldn’t go by the term Popular Vote anymore?
Which brings us secondly to many mini discussions in thread about how the Conservatives are up against it because what policy platform gains positive votes to them from three distinct places they lost votes to, Ref, LibDem and Lab. what reasons to vote Conservative pulls them out this parliamentary hole? But the main thrust of my argument is that, in the first place the Conservatives didn’t lose these votes on policy or ideology, but on the perception they’re incompetent. 63.2% of seats to Lab from just 33.7% votes, 18.6% of seats for Con from 23.7% - you don’t have to be oozing an impression of confidence and have great policies next time, to make big difference in that tactical votes harshness and gain a huge haul of seats - it’s simply how you will measure against your opponents on competence - such as memories how incompetent you were, yes, but now it’s versus much fresher memories what absolute shower your opponents have been.
Too much doom as Mr Meeks and others claimed, because we do have a strong example of just such a quick turnaround, quick switch of those required voters who matter, and it fully supports my argument of old memories v much fresher memories of incompetence - it is the last US presidential election - is it not?
These panels are going up with zero government subsidy or involvement. (And exactly none of the electricity generated is going anywhere near the grid.)
I'm pretty sure the guys involved aren't doing it for fun.
Just look at how many people now deny very clear evidence about vaccines generally, and the covid-vaccine more recently, even if at the point of 'how can we possibly know?'. even though we can and did see the effect from not using it to using it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeqnhOYMIF8
No 2 AV = 68%
Yes 2 AV = 32%
https://youtu.be/BBQojZDZoVg?is=QUGlrnAqqHWzBgg1
I realise it's just words at this point, but with Reeves we didn't even have wise words.
We have a vicious cycle in politics, with government switching between laissez faire soft left Tory Governments, and actively malign 'progressive' ones. The result is Britain being sold off on the cheap.
If we replace those two poles with patriotic free-market low tax governments, alternating with patriotic 'buy British', sensible interventionist, Healey-esque governments, that's a virtuous cycle. I am a free-marketeer - I believe in the first type of economic policy, but if there must be an opposite, this is OK.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/07/23/badenoch-blocks-shapps-from-standing-for-tories/
She tells
@CathyNewman
that she thinks Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is "amazing" and a "truthful politician".
https://x.com/SkyNews/status/2080376449857462671?s=20
People born after it may be able to vote at the next GE (in fact if voting age is lowered they definitely will), and I'm supposed to believe it has been definitively 'rejected' by voters for all time? Don't be silly.
And whilst they did it for less 'important' elections, the Tories had no issue changing voting rules despite it not being in their manifesto (only that they would continue to support FPTP), so if a party had a manifesto commitment and won it, any complaint about it would be doubly stupid.
I don't actually think it will happen though.
I don't actually think it would pass if put to the vote again, and I don't think the government is going to do it before or after the next GE either, but thing get revisited all the time.
Utter nonsense I suspect.
Most people wouldn't even notice, because they're not interested in politics, except maybe who's prime minister - and there's a large segment of the population who aren't even bothered about that.
Parliament is sovereign as we all know, so get on with it, if you believe it's right and you have that majority.
If you were building a data center -even in the UK- you would put panels on the roof, because you get power at almost exactly the time you need it most. It is peaking power for your data center. And it is dramatically cheaper than the alternatives.
Now, if the gas price were to drop two-thirds, then that would change. But having a variety of different power sources is a massive win for data center owners, because it smooths out the impact of fluctuating gas prices on their economics.
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Labour-Party-manifesto-2024.pdf
Hot on the heels of Louise Haigh not being trusted with the Public Fraud portfolio, look who turns up as a Housing Minister. Timms (a Blairite) is covering both the DWP and Housing.
https://www.gov.uk/government/people/stephen-timms
And these daily mini-announcements. The Thick of It returns.
https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/2080326066409783376
https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/2080471937768153248
They’re really not good at this air defences thing, apart from shooting down their own planes.
Most modern IMAX cinemas use very large digital projectors playing very large digital content.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/andy-burnham-north-sea-oil-gas-gcrz7d007 (£££)
Which is why we now see data centres not just put solar panels on the roof, but installing turbine generators and even talking about SMR nuclear on-site, as it’s cheaper to set up their own power generation from scratch than to use the expensive grid power.
There no real rationale for his actions other than a desire to chuck his weight around.
I'm not sure how a website hacker, a liar about her University offer and the word truth can be utteredin the same sentence.
Robert is, of course, quite correct.
NEW THREAD
She can yell and scream and scream and scream but the violet Elizabet of British Politics has in her political carerr delivered the square root of absolutely fuck all!