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Guavanaut posted:
Yes they did they broke into Big Ben and stuffed it up their kilts and ran back across the border cackling their big beardy heads off  
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Oct 26, 2019 20:27
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Coohoolin posted:how... what? can someone read the article and explain for me please. Probably that those who work in the far north and get up early, ie farmworkers are those who argue for the clocks changing. Did daylight saving time not originate in ww2, surely the gammon brigade would be big fans
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Oct 26, 2019 20:32
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crispix posted:Just go robbing imo What a spiteful, evil poo poo, holy christ.
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Oct 26, 2019 20:38
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Alan G posted:Probably that those who work in the far north and get up early, ie farmworkers are those who argue for the clocks changing. Did daylight saving time not originate in ww2, surely the gammon brigade would be big fans
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Oct 26, 2019 20:38
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Yeah the 'farmers' argument has never made sense to me. If you're governed by available light,y ou're governed by available light. it doesn't particularly matter if it's 6am or 7am for everyone else, it matters if it's... light. The 'children walking to school in the dark' argument is a much better one, but even then, they're gonna be walking in the dark one way or the other.
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Oct 26, 2019 20:51
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Alan G posted:Probably that those who work in the far north and get up early, ie farmworkers are those who argue for the clocks changing. Did daylight saving time not originate in ww2, surely the gammon brigade would be big fans They had double summertime in WW2. Not sure what they had in winter. Single summertime or GMT
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Oct 26, 2019 20:53
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thespaceinvader posted:Yeah the 'farmers' argument has never made sense to me. If you're governed by available light,y ou're governed by available light. it doesn't particularly matter if it's 6am or 7am for everyone else, it matters if it's... light.
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Oct 26, 2019 20:54
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thespaceinvader posted:Yeah the 'farmers' argument has never made sense to me. If you're governed by available light,y ou're governed by available light. it doesn't particularly matter if it's 6am or 7am for everyone else, it matters if it's... light. Even then, moving the start of the school day forward (that is to say, forward in time, i.e. later) and hour for 6 months of the year would make more sense, then everyone else can stay put. Or just move the school day anyway, since research shows that young people don't function well first thing in the morning.
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Oct 26, 2019 20:56
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Alan G posted:Probably that those who work in the far north and get up early, ie farmworkers are those who argue for the clocks changing. Did daylight saving time not originate in ww2, surely the gammon brigade would be big fans North of about Hull you're going to and from work in darkness no matter which way the hours go, so it doesn't make the slightest odds. Bojo blaming the scots somehow is bendy bananas grade bait.
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Oct 26, 2019 20:56
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Bobstar posted:Even then, moving the start of the school day forward (that is to say, forward in time, i.e. later) and hour for 6 months of the year would make more sense, then everyone else can stay put. IN MY DAY
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Oct 26, 2019 21:19
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I thought it was about fuel and power use - in the summer there's some three hours of daylight before people tend to wake up that almost no one is using, while people tend to have the lights on until 11pm or so. Might as well take some of that morning light and use it. Obviously this would have to have come in in an era where "people need to buy more power" wouldn't have been seen as all upside to the politics of the day.
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Oct 26, 2019 21:20
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The question though is why don't we just leave it that time all year round?
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Oct 26, 2019 21:23
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https://twitter.com/kidd__kong78/status/1188102940919320581
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Oct 26, 2019 21:23
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Tenebrais posted:I thought it was about fuel and power use - in the summer there's some three hours of daylight before people tend to wake up that almost no one is using, while people tend to have the lights on until 11pm or so. Might as well take some of that morning light and use it.
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Oct 26, 2019 21:24
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This lady just repeating 'love' while waving an EU flag while Joker-but-England-facepaint dances awkwardly next to her is the best flashpoint of our times, none us are better than her I'm stanning this singer.
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Oct 26, 2019 21:25
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feedmegin posted:Can we have some from jBrereton and radmonger? I’d be interested if someone could dig mine up,; I don’t have archive access.
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Oct 26, 2019 21:26
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:They had double summertime in WW2. Not sure what they had in winter. Single summertime or GMT they had the former crazy days
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Oct 26, 2019 21:34
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How many posts until someone brings up her holocaust memorial picture again?
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Oct 26, 2019 21:34
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The actual wsy you can tell a true Scotsman is by whether or not he has mugged you for an hour of your life.
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Oct 26, 2019 21:35
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thespaceinvader posted:The 'children walking to school in the dark' argument is a much better one, but even then, they're gonna be walking in the dark one way or the other. The roads in the morning aren't 'used' like they would during the day. So better to be dark in the evening going home instead of risking icy roads in the morning. Less potential accidents.
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Oct 26, 2019 21:36
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Azza Bamboo posted:How many posts until someone brings up her holocaust memorial picture again? It was ten Tesseraction posted:the centrists dads gofunded her to desecrate a Holocaust memorial
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Oct 26, 2019 21:36
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Does the thread think it'd be valuable to start like, a collaborative google doc or something which contains links to articles/images/tweets which are good to use as arguments/refutations etc. to common fascist/Tory/Lib Dem (but I repeat myself) talking points? For example I keep having to find the image of the facebook post where the guy explains who's in charge of the BBC's political programming now (a bunch of right-wing chuds, ex tory staffers etc. after Cameron did a Copy/Replace on their political team). I quite like being a hashtag "Corbyn Outrider" on twitter and I think if it's easier to counter the bullshit you see (and it's often the exact same bullshit repeated again and again in endless Guardian columns) with these kinds of resources. If enough of us do it (not necessarily just from these forums), it may lead to an actual public shift of opinion.
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Oct 26, 2019 21:39
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Don't watch the show, is this bad or something? Something to do with WW1?
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Oct 26, 2019 21:40
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OwlFancier posted:The question though is why don't we just leave it [on Daylight Time] all year round?
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Oct 26, 2019 21:42
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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OwlFancier posted:The question though is why don't we just leave it that time all year round? The EU are planning to do exactly that, shame you won't be joining us
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Oct 26, 2019 21:43
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Oh, politics is happening apparently. https://twitter.com/michaelsavage/status/1188191178388398080?s=20
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Oct 26, 2019 21:45
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GMT all year would be better than hour wrong all year round. If that makes other things more inconvenient then change the times those things happen.JeremoudCorbynejad posted:It was ten happyhippy posted:Don't watch the show, is this bad or something? But also it's fiction.
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Oct 26, 2019 21:49
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OwlFancier posted:The question though is why don't we just leave it that time all year round? Will brexit mean we retain daylight savings while Europe doesn't from 2021? Is this the true meaning of taking back control?
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Oct 26, 2019 21:51
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https://twitter.com/LukewSavage/status/1188196806330585088?s=19 Fuckin amazing.
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Oct 26, 2019 21:57
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WhatEvil posted:Oh, politics is happening apparently. This actually sounds pretty reasonable. Dissolves Parliament next Monday so no time to slam through the WAB, calls it off if there's only a short extension offered (though quite how that would work is to be decided), election when there's students about. Would be interesting to see how Labour react.
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Oct 26, 2019 21:58
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Let's just rip the bandage off and have a other hung parliament where the Tory pm refuses to negotiate with Corbyn on a soft brexit and nothing changes
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Oct 26, 2019 22:04
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EvilHawk posted:This actually sounds pretty reasonable. Dissolves Parliament next Monday so no time to slam through the WAB, calls it off if there's only a short extension offered (though quite how that would work is to be decided), election when there's students about. Monday election? Fuckers, I'd have to be in work on Wednesday instead of having a three day weekend to recover. I think Labour will support it, though, as long as the date is locked and the extension guaranteed by the EU.
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Oct 26, 2019 22:05
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I loving KNEW it.
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Oct 26, 2019 22:05
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Balfron megapost pt. 2 - part 1 is here It’s 1945. There are 3 million homeless people in London, with over a million homes destroyed or uninhabitable. Similar problems, if at a smaller scale, existed across the country. The natural thing to do is to just patch up the old terraces and get people back to their homes as quickly as possible, but Clement Attlee never did the easy thing. As with the welfare state and the NHS, he and the rest of the Labour Party saw an opportunity to completely reshape Britain. Of those million homes destroyed, most of them were tiny, draughty, heated by coal and lit by gas, and lacked indoor plumbing. They were also mostly in the hands of private landlords, who of course charged the maximum amount the tenants could pay. The vision was simple - give the people homes that they could live in, at a price they could afford. This process had been ongoing since the Victorian era, first from private charities like Peabody and Toynbee, then picking up pace after World War I and into the Depression, but ultimately it was always limited - by space, by money, and of course by the commercial interests of the landlords. World War II had - quite literally - swept aside those impediments, but how to actually get all of these houses built, particularly in a country bankrupted by war, with its industrial capacity crippled? The first housing built after the war was prefabricated - little boxes, just four walls and a roof really, made from factory-made panels (one of the factories making them was the A. V. Roe factory that had built Lancasters during the war, in an irony that nobody really wanted to talk about). These were thrown up on bombsites all over the country, solving the immediate need for housing. Despite their temporary nature, many survived well into the 1990s and were it not for the fact they were often made out of asbestos - a perfect material, cheap, lightweight, and fire- and water-proof, just with an unfortunate chance of killing the owner in a horrible way 30 years after they put a picture up - many more would probably still be in use today. Slightly more permanently, houses and even blocks were put together from pre-cast concrete slabs held together with steel joints. Known as Orlit houses after the architect who came up with the idea, some still stand to this day - for example this early-50s block on the Isle of Dogs:  What doomed most of these wasn’t asbestos, but the sea - the concrete, being made with sand and aggregate dredged from the Thames Estuary, was high in chlorine, which gradually rotted away the steel joints. Grant House, above, was made from panels made in Wales with aggregate and sand from up a mountain because the Thames concrete plants couldn’t keep up with demand. This was also the precursor for Large Panel System high-rises, which we’ll come to. These could only ever be a stopgap though, and the sheer scale of the problem - perhaps even more than the NHS and welfare state, which let’s not forget were also being set up at the same time in this country crippled by war, just in case anyone wants to get arsey about whether or not the country can afford something - was completely uncharted territory. The between-the-wars slum clearances had built around 250,000 homes in 20 years; Britain needed 10 times as many homes now. The Festival of Britain was to be the starting gun for this process, and the architectural exhibition was to be more than a wooden model in a glass case, but an entire small community, designed to show the New Elizabethans how good-quality, cheap housing could be provided to the masses.  Directly adjoining the plot of land this post is supposed to be about, the Lansbury Estate (named, of course, for our hero George) in Poplar genuinely astonished those who saw it when it opened in 1951. Simply by using two- and three-story buildings, this little estate clustered around the old Chrisp Street Market provided 50% more homes than the terraces it replaced, each of them with almost twice the floor space as their predecessors, with not just indoor plumbing but central heating and, with room for a pedestrianised market, along with a new library, new church, and two schools. Visiting it today it’s a little underwhelming, in the same way Seinfeld seems a little hackneyed to modern ears. It feels like almost every other pedestrianised town centre you might find around the country, but this was the first, the ur-example for every other. However it also hid a dark secret - as a template for a mass building programme it was a dead end. The problem was in the very walls themselves - or rather what those walls were made of. The Lansbury Estate had been built in brick because, well, that’s what you made permanent homes out of. Bricks themselves were shooting up in price though. Even without the massive demand for new construction and repair, they required huge amounts of coal to fire them - also required everywhere else in the economy. The price of bricks increased tenfold between the end of the war and the breaking of ground on the Lansbury, and this was before new construction had started in earnest. This could probably have been addressed with new brickworks and alternative fuels, but a single dwelling would take a skilled bricklayer a week (and that rarest of commodities, a week without rain) to construct, and that brickie required years of training and experience. You’d think this would be a golden time to be a bricklayer, but then of course good old fashioned racism hosed everything up. In a move that certainly has no parallels with any other point of this septic isle’s history, anti-Irish sentiment reared it’s head again. It had ebbed and flowed in the UK (but particularly London) with the prevailing economic winds, but reached a fever pitch in the immediate after-war years. In a move that should be a much larger black mark in it’s history Labour caved to this pressure and with the 1948 British Nationality Act stripped tens of thousands of Irish people living in the UK of their British citizenship unless they could prove they had a right (through blood or military service) to it. Many did (including my granddad, which is why this post is about London social housing and not… whatever the gently caress happens in Cork) but many (including, of course, Spike Milligan) saw this as the studied insult that it was, and chose to return “home” even if none of them had ever set foot there before. Among these sudden personae non gratia were the vast majority of jobbing bricklayers (and carpenters, roadworkers, and all the other hundreds of little jobs essential to keep a country running). It’s difficult to say just how big an effect this had on the situation, given there was absolutely no benchmark to measure against, but it sure as hell didn’t help. To be honest I only mention it because the aforementioned granddad was very bitter about it. Meanwhile the solution to all these problems - and the cause of a shitload more - was taking shape 600 miles to the south.  I know I promised/threatened words about Brutalism and why it is both good and bad, but that part of this post had already gone on longer than the entire rest of this post so I zapped it. If anyone’s interested I’ll chuck it up as an appendix to this post, because boy I loving love talking about Brutalism and how everyone else is wrong about it. Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation (not it’s actual name but I’m saving that for the architecture rant) provided the template for the mass house building programme that Britain needed. Reinforced concrete was considerably cheaper than bricks, and crucially required far less skilled workers. Interestingly just south of the Balfron site, in the old East India Docks, this had been proven definitively when unskilled dockers had been taught in a week how to properly pour concrete, when the docks were used as the construction site for components of the Mulberry harbours Social housing construction of the 1950s though failed to follow through on the grand plans of those heady post-war years. A Tory central government disinclined to spend huge amounts of money to house poor people met with the general malaise that afflicted Britain as it came to terms with no longer being a superpower (and both Labour and Tory governments shovelling huge amounts of cash and effort into multiple military-industrial furnaces attempting to stop this) to push house-building right down the agenda. Not that buildings weren’t going up. New Towns (which are different from new towns, for some reason) sprung up around cities like mushrooms after rain, but many of them were planned - and some started - before the war. However the Eden and MacMillan governments were disinclined to give money to the LCC and other big city authorities to allow them to go through with their ambitious plans to reshape themselves. Whether this was standard high-Tory tightfistedness or a premonition of Thatcher’s attempts to completely reshape Britain by putting everyone out in the suburbs is impossible to tell, though. When everyone threw away their cloth caps and put on miniskirts on 1st January 1960 though things changed. Suddenly even the normally hedgerow-obsessed Tories were excited by the brave new world being proposed. That they were often proposed by construction companies whose names happened to be the surnames of Cabinet members in one of those really weird coincidences that definitely are coincidences and don’t look into it any further than that. Whatever the reasons, suddenly there was money available, and lots of it, to continue the slum clearance work started before the war. Balfron Tower (hey, remember that?) was one of the very first new high-rises commissioned by the now flush LCC. Their choice of architect, Ernő Goldfinger, was a little surprising - his only notable buildings to that point being a couple of primary schools and the offices of The Daily Worker. The only housing he’d designed had been his own house, a small modernist terrace in London. It was those schools though that had bought him to the attention of the LCC - not that the schools themselves were particularly notable, but his use of reinforced concrete to allow them to be quickly and cheaply built in the immediate post-war years meshed perfectly with what the LCC had decided was the only way they could build housing on the scale they wanted. Goldfinger himself was… eccentric. Actually, he was a bit of an arsehole. He once sacked a junior at his firm for smiling at the wrong time, and was known to throw out clients who dared to question his vision. The Bond villain was named after him, after Ian Fleming met his cousin who described his relative’s irascible nature and unforgettable name. Goldfinger threatened to sue Fleming, who in return suggested that he could rename the character “Goldprick”. They settled out of court, with Fleming providing several signed copies of the book to Goldfinger, which suggests he may not have been quite as humourless as many have suggested. However, the man knew his stuff when it came to reinforced concrete - and as a devoted student of Le Corbusier, he had some good ideas about how to make housing. Balfron Tower (it’s named for a tiny village just outside Glasgow, as are the other buildings on the estate, for reasons nobody’s quite sure about) borrows many of Le Corbusier’s ideas, in particular having the dwellings in blocks of three floors, meaning each dwelling could have windows at both east and west elevations of the building, with access from an internal landing at a higher density than other designs, also granting ease of design for utility access. It also adds a number of Goldfinger’s own ideas, many of them based on his eccentricities. The most visually distinctive part of the design, the separate tower containing the lifts and staircase, is said to be there because Goldfinger had once had a hotel room next to a lift and the noise had annoyed him intensely. Whether or not true, it does avoid the awkward shapes lift and utility risers have to take in more conventional buildings, and is considerably safer in the event of fire than later designs. He also - possibly uniquely among the architects of the era - spent two years living in the building he’d designed, recognising that no matter how great the design was it was pointless if it wasn’t a good place to live. He picked up some valuable information from this (which he might have already known had he paid a bit more attention to Le Corbusier). Some of these problems - the lifts being slow and too small, the “honeycomb” structure making the flats quite drafty and damp, exacerbated by the walls being a very thin plaster skim on the reinforced concrete, also meaning you needed specialised tools just to put up a picture on certain walls - were fixed in his next building, the Trellick Tower on the other side of London, and also in Balfron’s Mini-Me, Glenkerry House, designed by Goldfinger’s studio and built just behind Balfron. . Some of them were unfixable though, and would dog almost all high-rise developments of the next few years. This is something for the other post about architecture, especially as I’ve passed 2,000 words and am also semi-suicidal after West Ham’s capitulation against Sheffield United - and I paid 500 loving quid for the privelige of watching this poo poo happen 19 times a loving year. So let’s accentuate the positive. The first residents of Balfron (at least the first ones not sharing a name with a Bond villain) were decanted there from terraces in Limehouse and Stepney that were about to be demolished and replaced. For many of them, Balfron seemed almost absurdly luxurious - some had never had hot running water before, let alone the generously-proportioned rooms and abundant built-in storage. That the council tried to keep extended families on the same floors, and even moved several sets of neighbours into adjoining flats, meant that Balfron had a far stronger sense of community than many of the post-war developments. This was assisted by Goldfinger providing plentiful communal space, including a youth and social club, doctor’s surgery, and even a small set of allotments on the roof of an adjoining parking structure. The sense of community remained over the following decades, even as the area changed massively with first the bust of the closure of the docks and the subsequent near-total collapse of the local economy (Tower Hamlets approached 50% unemployment in the early 80s) and the subsequent insane boom as Canary Wharf went from Harold Shand to Bruce Wayne. This isn’t to say that the place was perfect - that draftiness and damp never really was properly fixed, and high-rise malaise no doubt contributed to the fact that the inhabitants of Balfron lagged behind their neighbours on the Lansbury Estate in almost all social and economic measures. However those that were there mostly enjoyed the place and were happy to stay. If you know anything at all about melodrama his is, of course, the point where the villain appears. His name is Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. We all point the finger at Thatcher and Right to Buy as the thing that destroyed working-class communities up and down the country, but I would say that Blair’s huffing of the private sector’s farts had just as much to do with it, at least in areas like Poplar where things were mostly not broke and really didn’t need fixing. While admittedly it was Thatcher who bought in the legislation that allowed councils to sell off their housing stock to the private sector, it was Blair that made it almost impossible for them *not* to sell. By cutting off their access to central government funds for large-scale capital expenditure projects, long-term maintenance of a housing stock rapidly approaching half a century old became impossible. Enter Poplar Housing And Regeneration Community Association (HARCA), a name that is as Blairite as something can be without actually invading a Middle-Eastern nation. They are the true villains of the third and final act of this epic, but like all good villains they are not really the authors of their own destiny. I’m going to leave off here because frankly I’m disgusting even myself vomiting these many words into a dead comedy forum on a Saturday night. (Incidentally for those worried about my state of mind after West Ham loving me over, my conviction they would do so led me to bet on a draw in an accumulator that netted me slightly less than the cost of my season ticket, so maybe there is some balance in the universe)
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Oct 26, 2019 22:08
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goddamnedtwisto posted:I loving KNEW it. I thought we all knew this already
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Oct 26, 2019 22:08
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Snip effortpost Thanks, this is all really interesting
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Oct 26, 2019 22:11
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Insanely good post twisto, fascinating stuff, like an episode of 99% Invisible
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Oct 26, 2019 22:16
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https://twitter.com/TelePolitics/status/1188063071446675456?s=19
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Oct 26, 2019 22:17
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They've got a better chance of success than if they spent £34m on trying to teach empathy to the Tories.
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Oct 26, 2019 22:18
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| # ? May 24, 2024 12:35 |
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The last person to leave Change UK should change the party name to 'Chucka Ur Career Away Party' before switching the lights off.
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Oct 26, 2019 22:20
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