UK politics general discussion

[Tom]

The Tories are pursuing their only desperate hope now: Trying to eek out enough of the pensioner vote to scrape through and hang on. Expect more on the war on woke, and pension promises to come.

 

[GaryH]

Why should private landlords foot the bills for insulation when the tenants can just pay more on their bills?

Rishi Sunak scraps home energy efficiency taskforce

The group set up to drive home insulation and boiler upgrades is a casualty of the PM's green rethink.

www.bbc.co.uk

Well that is bloody stupid. The one thing that is doable and is affordable and could actually reduce our dependency on electricity and gas use quite easily, while reducing energy bills almost overnight by insulating homes properly even if it’s a thicker loft insulation. Delaying the ban on ICE cars is one thing but this just
makes no sense…. Well except to keep landlords from fulfilling their obligations.

@rob666 - your earlier point about the top 20. Look I hear what you’re saying about emissions and yes we produce some and we should do something about it (which I’m not disagreeing with but stating what we do should be affordable and doable for the masses)….. but earlier you were saying we are one of the richest nations in terms of GBP so let’s compare ourselves to other comparable countries. While there may be 190+ countries in the list, I don’t think we can compare ourselves to countries like Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Bermuda, Dominican Republic, Tonga etc. in terms of our emissions compared to other rich countries, ours still remain extremely small compared to them.

And as for the point Tom made, again, it’s not about doing nothing, but it’s about realistic in what we can do and afford in the timescale, and my view is that the countries who pollute the most should take the lead on this.

 

[Matt.GC]

I'm going for a prediction here.

Wednesday's announcement of softening net zero laws and pretending to cancel things that never existed that he just made up is a clear sign of how they're going to fight the next election, and therefore is a starting gun.

By making this stuff up, it's clear he's trying to fight a Boris Johnson style culture war, a trap for Labour to denounce it all so that they can be characterised as "the tofu eating wokeratti" and "eco zealot's" who don't care about lowering costs for the public.

Over the next few months, they'll celebrate the lowering of our eye watering inflation figures and pretend they're doing a bang up job. The bank of England may keep interest rates the same so they'll claim another false victory there. The small boat numbers will lower due to the fact it'll be winter. Rumours have it that the Rwanda policy will actually go ahead, NHS waiting lists will be a different shade of shit to how they were last year and growth figures may come out a little less worse than expected.

All this will be propping up Sunaks "5 priorities" distraction nonsense where he set himself pathetically unambitious targets in order to celebrate success when he achieves them. The foreseeable future of the country, whoever wins the next election, is remarkably grim with some tough choices to be made. This will challenge Labour to put out their own positive message, which is hard to do unless you deny the reality of the situation. If they draw some stuff out of Starmer, the stuff they like will be nicked, the stuff they don't will be slated as "talking Britain down". He's trying to draw Labour out.

It's quite clear that the Tories are toast. But I think he's trying to do a John Major in '92 where Norman Lamont came out with a last minute bribe of a tax cut that was contrary to Kinnocks plans and snatch a last minute victory from the jaws of defeat. He'll be desperate to avoid a '97 scenario where Major could have limited the damage had he gone earlier.

So I think he'll go for a May election. Go later than that and he runs the risk of things getting worse (both for the Tories and the SNP, who he needs to keep Labour seats in Scotland at bay) before the election, and Labour consolidating. I don't think he sees Labour as being ready quite yet and I don't think there's a realistic prospect of anyone feeling that country is on the right track by this time next year. I think his chances are better if he whips up a quick culture war and leans heavily on boasting about achieving his own unchallenging targets in the Spring.

My money is on May. I think it's the best chance he's got.

 

[Matt N]

I could have sworn there was a thread about HS2, but I couldn’t find it, so I figured that this would be as good of a place as any to talk about this news.

Sources are now indicating that the government is preparing to scrap the entire Birmingham to Manchester leg of HS2, as well as the plan for it to stop at London Euston, with the only part of the originally planned network being built being Birmingham to Old Oak Common (a new station in the West London suburbs): https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...rthern-hs2-rail-line-ahead-of-tory-conference

This follows on from an originally planned eastern leg to Sheffield Meadowhall and Leeds being scrapped earlier this year.

The plan is apparently to announce this as early as next week so that the news is out before the Conservative conference goes to Manchester and Sunak doesn’t have to announce it there.

According to a Transport for London study, the journey between central London and Birmingham will actually take 1 minute longer than the existing journey between central London and Birmingham in a best case scenario if these plans go ahead, with passengers being forced to change onto the Elizabeth line or similar at Old Oak Common to get into central London.

Correct me if I’m missing something, but my thought here is; if the journey to central London actually takes longer with HS2 built than it does without, then surely it just becomes a huge waste of money that’s not really improving things? If a project intended to produce shorter journeys to London is actually making journeys longer, surely that makes it not really worth pursuing at all?

My personal view is that the project at very least needs to go all the way to London Euston to be worthwhile, and I also think that building the Northern leg is vital to give the North better public transport connections. I don’t really agree with them having previously cancelled the leg to Leeds, either. I get the need to save money in a period like the current one, but from where I’m standing, HS2 is one of those projects where you can’t cut back on it and still get the intended economic benefit from it.

 

[rob666]

Half of the main commuters who would have benefited are now (pretending) to be working from home.
The hard demand is gone.
The cost has spiralled.
The railways are staffed by ravaging communists looking for revolution.
HS2...Death of another good idea by a thousand tory cuts.
It comes as no surprise to me, especially after last weeks green policy turncoating.

 

[WillPS]

Railways are still desperately short of capacity, the MML is worse now than pre-covid thanks to post-Covid cuts.

London - Birmingham is an absolute waste of time as that route is not short of capacity as it is - it has peak bottlenecks which are better now than pre-Covid but there is loads of off peak capacity. All the advantages came from the legs to the North and East Midlands. In true Tory fashion, they have delivered an incredibly expensive solution which will now solve very few problems. Genius.

As a fan of agile project management, HS2/"Northern Powerhouse ( ) Rail" always struck me as a project which was way too big in scope and as such bound to go badly wrong. It'd have been far better to have delivered a number of restored rail links - things like the collegiate rail link, Matlock - Buxton (which would restore a much needed South East to North West corridor), the Staffordshire line that ran past Alton Towers, extend the Welsh coastal railways north of Fishguard etc. Build overall network demand and then see about adding greater capacity to/alongside the existing mainlines.

 

[Tom]

Getting rid of HS2 entirely will be popular and do the Tories net benefit. It carves up many of their constituencies like a roast.

This could be a test of the water to see the reaction, ahead of a promise to scrap entirely during the election campaign.

 

[Matt N]

It is interesting how much HS2 has seemingly been scaled back over the years.

When it was announced, there were all kinds of other legs talked about that were cut, including:

• A link to London Heathrow so that international air travellers could easily reach the North.
• A direct link to HS1 so that direct trains to mainland Europe could run from the North.
• A link to Liverpool from the Manchester station.
• An Eastern leg going to an East Midlands station and stretching to Leeds.
• A further extension up into Scotland with a stop in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the way up.
• Some sort of high speed leg heading to Cardiff/Bristol and possibly extending far into South Wales.

From what I can tell, an original eventual plan was to have an X-shaped high speed rail network stretching all across the United Kingdom with Birmingham at its centre, and I personally think that that would have been a good idea. It would have put your big intercity services, like your 9-car Edinburgh Waverley to Penzance CrossCountry services, on the high speed lines and freed up additional capacity for more local services, which would have lessened the strain on the rail network and possibly even lowered ticket prices.

If the Northern leg to Manchester is still built and the London Euston terminus is still built, then it could still provide those benefits, but if they only build it to Birmingham and don’t bother with the London Euston terminus and terminate all the services at Old Oak Common, then I fear that it could be a bit of a white elephant that doesn’t do an awful lot to solve the problems that HS2 was originally intended to solve. As I say, I get the need to be fiscally responsible in a time like this, but HS2 strikes me as the sort of scheme where you need all of it to be built to reap the intended benefits from it. Indeed, from having read news articles, people who originally strategised the scheme, like David Cameron and Philip Hammond, have said that both Manchester and Euston had to be built to reap the benefits of the scheme and make the cost-benefit analysis work. And as the government have already sunk billions into the scheme and started notable construction in a number of areas between London and Birmingham, I don’t think full cancellation is really an option.

 

[Slugjc]

HS2 was always going to a huge waste of money. Not exactly cutting journey times down. 20mins quicker from Leeds to london. Wow. Billions well spent.

Living in Leeds. London is not exactly hard to get to. However getting to most northern cities in the north is a nightmare. Slow, unreliable and poor rolling stock.

For me HS2 should have been a high speed line between Hull and Liverpool. Calling at York, Leeds and Manchester. With branch lines going to Newcastle and Sheffield. Leave space for better faster services to the local area. Gives some tweaks on the east and west coast lines to enable a better service.

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

Freight. Everyone always forgets about freight capacity when discussing HS2. Shaving a few minutes off my journey is neither here nor there. Being able to send a shit tonne of extra stuff up and down the country, without relying on the roads, would prove invaluable. One freight train can take the capacity of 70 lorries off the road.

 

[rob666]

Using freight on railways was sacked off in the sixties and seventies, following the Beeching cuts, when 90% of transport operators and factory management decided roads were easier and cheaper in the long run.
Hence the traffic shitstorm we have now.

 

[jon81uk]

Correct me if I’m missing something, but my thought here is; if the journey to central London actually takes longer with HS2 built than it does without, then surely it just becomes a huge waste of money that’s not really improving things? If a project intended to produce shorter journeys to London is actually making journeys longer, surely that makes it not really worth pursuing at all?

In theory the time saving isn’t the important part, it’s the extra capacity, then you can run more stopping services or freight services on the old tracks as the fast intercity trains are on the new tracks. Because of the name everyone talks about HS2 and the speed, but that isn’t why we need it, we need extra railway capacity across the country and moving intercity trains onto dedicated tracks is the best way to do it.

 

[Slugjc]

In theory the time saving isn’t the important part, it’s the extra capacity, then you can run more stopping services or freight services on the old tracks as the fast intercity trains are on the new tracks. Because of the name everyone talks about HS2 and the speed, but that isn’t why we need it, we need extra railway capacity across the country and moving intercity trains onto dedicated tracks is the best way to do it.

Which is why it would be better to have higher speed railways between the northern cities.

I live close by to the proposed route into Leeds. Highly controversial from the get go. Housing estates only a year old being told to move out, without any compensation. Plus the amount of tree felling that's gone on. Huge estates loosing land at no where near market value. Listed building demolished. Sports clubs moved. Infrastructure moved. The whole thing has been a giant mess. Signs all over saying stop HS2 guess they will be happy.

 

[WillPS]

HS2 was always going to a huge waste of money. Not exactly cutting journey times down. 20mins quicker from Leeds to london. Wow. Billions well spent.

Living in Leeds. London is not exactly hard to get to. However getting to most northern cities in the north is a nightmare. Slow, unreliable and poor rolling stock.

For me HS2 should have been a high speed line between Hull and Liverpool. Calling at York, Leeds and Manchester. With branch lines going to Newcastle and Sheffield. Leave space for better faster services to the local area. Gives some tweaks on the east and west coast lines to enable a better service.

The investment is about capacity, not speed. If you are building new capacity, it makes sense to not build it to Victorian standards which largely dictated the maximum speeds our current mainlines adhere to (for all the tilting/straightening workarounds we add over the top).

LNER is desperately short of capacity, worse than pre-Covid.

 

[Slugjc]

The investment is about capacity, not speed. If you are building new capacity, it makes sense to not build it to Victorian standards which largely dictated the maximum speeds our current mainlines adhere to (for all the tilting/straightening workarounds we add over the top).

LNER is desperately short of capacity, worse than pre-Covid.

Fully aware of the capacity thing. The wife works for LNER.

The issue is once again the north is being abandoned (potentially, we don't actually know but it's looking that way) it's so hard to travel between the major cities around the north. Unreliable railways. The car parks that are the M62, M1 and A1. Money stripped away from the buses. 3 major rail companies have all been stripped of their franchises Northern, TPE and LNER. Tells alot about how bad it is.

No desire to level up. Keep everything in the south. Good Tory votes in the south.

 

[Thameslink Rail]

Round here we get some of the investment. The plus sides are the frequency to London, the 12 car trains (although the seats are awful) and the 24 hour service. The down sides are the high fares on weekdays (which will increase massively next year when travelcards are withdrawn) and the lack of step free access, this has been promised numerous times over the last decade but construction still hasn't started. Unfortunately we also lost our high speed services north of Kettering recently and we have virtually no east west connections, the quickest route to Stevenage ten miles away is into London and back(!)

 

[WillPS]

Fully aware of the capacity thing. The wife works for LNER.

The issue is once again the north is being abandoned (potentially, we don't actually know but it's looking that way) it's so hard to travel between the major cities around the north. Unreliable railways. The car parks that are the M62, M1 and A1. Money stripped away from the buses. 3 major rail companies have all been stripped of their franchises Northern, TPE and LNER. Tells alot about how bad it is.

No desire to level up. Keep everything in the south. Good Tory votes in the south.

Virgin Trains East Coast relinquished their franchise because they couldn't meet the financial commitments they had made. Their performance was entirely adequate and the same management persisted under the new LNER brand, as I'm sure you'll know from your wife.

Northern/TPE were (fully) nationalised off the back of performance issues largely the result of the DfT themselves, mostly Chris Grayling (although Arriva and First certainly weren't blameless either).

I don't think motorways being car parks is a northern thing as anyone who's attempted to use the M25 will tell you.

The horrible truth is that we have been behind the curve on infrastructure across the country since the 70s, thanks in no small part to the ridiculously restrictive planning regulations we have. Energy, transport, telecoms - we are playing catch up massively but are trying to do so without freeing ourselves of the bottlenecks that partially caused the problem in the first place!

 

[Jonathan]

So, in the latest on Cruella Braverman, she’s now allegedly said in an interview that some immigrants lie about their sexuality (i.e. they claim they’re gay when they’re apparently not) to gain refugee status in the UK. I genuinely question what on earth goes on inside her head for her to say disgusting and abhorrent things like that. She’s absolutely vile.

 

[Zeock]

So, in the latest on Cruella Braverman, she’s now allegedly said in an interview that some immigrants lie about their sexuality (i.e. they claim they’re gay when they’re apparently not) to gain refugee status in the UK. I genuinely question what on earth goes on inside her head for her to say disgusting and abhorrent things like that. She’s absolutely vile.

That is utterly disgusting.

 

[Jonathan]

That is utterly disgusting.

Well, that’s the polite version. If I were to say what I truly felt, then even though this is the Tavern, I’d probably get a temporary ban from the forum.