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serious gaylord posted:Would you like to hear about the £330,000 beach huts at Mudeford Quay in Christchurch? Or the £100k ones at Sandbanks with a 12 year waiting list? There are still some places with council-owned beach huts. The ones near where my Mum lives now in Gosport/Lee-on-Solent are all council ones. I guess the 2024 Conservative government will liberate them with right to buy scheme, where they're sold to current renters for £4000 and immediately become worth £100,000 and only Persimmon will be allowed to build new Luxury Executive Beach Huts from then on...
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May 2, 2021 12:30
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Mebh posted:So wait... Beach huts have no heating, no insulation, no hot water, can't be slept in legally. Do they have toilets? The point in them is that they're just a garden shed on the beach where you can store your deckchairs/buckets/spades/surf boards/fishing rods/other beach gear, somewhere private and sheltered to get changed, something to get out of the weather (wind, rain, sun) and to house a camping stove or a small barbecue for picnics. They're supposed to be something you spend the day in, and you have an actual house somewhere nearby. Whether that house is your actual home, a holiday home or a place you've rented for a period that comes with access to a hut as part of the package. They're a glorified gazebo or a permanent version of those pop-up tents people take to the beach, but for people who spend enough time on or near the beach for a hut to be worthwhile. They're not supposed to be lived in and most have byelaws or terms to use attached to them that prohibit staying overnight. That they're worth six-figure sums is just 'Because British Property Market'.
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May 2, 2021 15:10
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Borrovan posted:Am I missing something or are most of those things actually good? This is the insidious thing about this sort of populist/kinda-One Nation Toryism. When summarised in this sort of way it looks very good. Especially in comparison to virtually any other government legislative programme over the past 30-ish years and especially especially when compared to the past 10 years. When laid out in headline snippety form it seems progressive, even left-wing in ways. But the implementation and the ends are going to be lovely. More homes = good. More homes by letting developers rip through the green belt after they influence/lobby/bribe the local council to declare all the greenfield as development land = Bad. Framework for nimble state aid to firms = good. Legalised £billions bungs to big businesses owned by Tory donors so they can fail upwards = Bad. Encouraging manufacturing jobs in areas where these are badly lacking = good. Doing so with free ports so multinationals can operate without paying tax = Bad. Letting small businesses bid for parts of large government contracts and a 'buy British' clause = good. An additional way to syphon public money to your mates in the Rotary club = Bad. Centralising the running of the NHS and rolling back the internal market system = good. Putting all the main functions of the NHS under the control of the DoH&SC so it can be more easily privatised = Bad. Animal welfare bill = Good. Animal welfare bill that goes after Halal etc. slaughter in a prominent and lovely way to get some praise from the tabloids = Bad (I'm just guessing on this one). Borrovan posted:this looks a lot better than anything Starmer's offering Yes, this is better than literally nothing. It's one of the most frustrating aspects of British politics at the moment - there is a huge appetite for progressively-flavoured economic and spending policies and neoliberalism has left the country and society so hollow that the notion of a government doing the tiniest thing aimed at making life better - even for duplicitous and shady reasons - is welcomed and praised to the rafters. So long as it comes from the Tories of course, because when they do it it's Backing Global Britain and Levelling Up but when Labour
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May 2, 2021 17:01
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Regarde Aduck posted:guys i think this country has some problems https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/01/exclusive-britannia-rule-waves-new-royal-yacht-named-prince/ https://news.sky.com/story/new-royal-yacht-named-after-prince-philip-to-be-commissioned-within-weeks-costing-as-much-as-200m-12292880 Sky News posted:The Daily Telegraph reports that the new yacht will be announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson "within weeks". gently caress me. As I've said before, I don't have a massive problem with this sort of thing in principle, but this really should end once and for all any narratives about magic money trees or national credit cards. It's not a case of spending 'a sum' of money on a royal yacht instead of school meals or...any number of infinitely more worthy causes, but it shows a) how actually the government can spend however much money it wants on whatever it drat chooses and therefore b)how utterly ideological these sorts of decisions are. I expect Labour to either propose a bigger, more expensive yacht with eight masts, each carrying a 15x30m Union Jack or condemn the whole thing out of principle and criticise the wallpaper being used and so be accused of being joyless miseries who are just Doing Britain Down and don't want to bring jobs to the Wirral. Either way alienates yet more of one side of the electorate and means they get no political capital out of it all.
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May 2, 2021 18:04
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Gonzo McFee posted:The Telegraph has always been stuffy old racists who are hilariously behind the times. The kind of people who think £30,000 is a starting salary and say racial slurs so old and obscure nobody is really sure who they're referring to. The Telegraph has always been both conservative and Conservative but its definitely taken a weird turn in recent years. My Dad has always 'taken' the Telegraph and when I flip through it when visiting and compare it to how it was when I read it in the early 2000s it's significantly more unhinged. It used to be a paper for merchant bankers, country landowners, doctors and retired Colonels living in the Cotswolds and managed to generally be accurate in its reporting, rational in its editorials and occasionally brilliantly investigative. Now it reads like a Boomer's facebook wall - just barely-coherent screeds stringing together all the hot right-wing buzzwords. I would guess that it's partly to do with the paper's huge decline in readership (it lost readers at a way higher rate than even the indsutry average before it withdrew itself from the circulation reports) and the general lunacy embracing the modern Conservative party. I get the impression that Brexit really broke the Torygraph's last link with normalcy when it was faced with the choice between its professional/business/financial/civil service/London-based readership who generally didn't want Brexit and its lead-brained retired rural-suburban Boomer readership who were willing to burn down the world to get Brexit and it went hard in with the latter.
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May 3, 2021 17:23
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The Perfect Element posted:Is anyone able to advise on a decent bike for me to buy via my works cycle to work scheme? I don't want anything fancy at all, just something I can go to the shops on, with maybe the occasional longer distance country ride. Comfy and reliable is what I'm after. I got one of these from my work's cycle scheme: https://www.halfords.com/bikes/hybrid-bikes/apollo-belmont-mens-hybrid-bike---18in-21in-frames-566619.html I'm sure serious cyclists would be aghast at getting a mass-produced bike from Halfords, but it was their second-cheapest road-biased hybrid bike and it was great. My actual commute was only about 10 minutes cycling each way but it was easy and comfy, I had panniers on it for going to the shops and I did some longer jaunts around town or out into the country on it. Disclaimer: I'd been getting about on a tiny-wheeled folding-frame bike with no suspension before that, so almost anything would be more comfortable and convenient by comparison.
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May 4, 2021 09:50
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TACD posted:Hope somebody has saved the audio of this for memeworthy remixes of Friday’s inevitable complete abdication of responsibility Setting himself up for a redo of Gordon Brown's "I take full responsibility for what happened, which is why the people responsible left immediately..." moment, perhaps?
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May 4, 2021 10:59
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Mebh posted:I want a left wing government, not a poo poo neoliberal excuse for a party that will do nothing useful and fall on its arse making the next election after they win go even more rightward. That comment saying "Labour should just do social democracy to win elections" really misses the point that social democracy was exactly what Labour were offering in 2019. I know it's all part of the trend of words not meaning anything anymore (and a massively right-slanted Overton window) but 2015-19 Labour weren't proposing actual socialism. What the libs/centrists/commenteriat mean by 'social democracy' is 'neoliberalism but with a sad face and some disused factories turned into modern art galleries.' I know no one ITT needs that explaining to them, but it's so frustrating seeing this sort of thing. But nothing like as wearying as people going "Labour need to show they're in back in touch with the country with policies like..." followed by a long list of policies which were actually in the loving manifesto. Did anyone actually read the 2019 manifesto, or is it just an article of faith now that it just said "All toilets to be gender neutral and free broadband" on every page? Beefeater1980 posted:I was catching up with the Milhist thread and someone mentioned in passing that the BBC took a strategic decision in 1942 to change from censored reporting to reporting the war news factually including Allied defeats, because it was believed that the war was overall going the right way so it was safe, and this would build credibility in an ocean of propaganda. That someone was me. And it wasn't even the 1960s - it was in the 1980s that the Beeb moved to close down its Italian service (set up originally to broadcast to fascist and occupied Italy in the 1940s, then serving as Italy's effective national radio broadcaster in the aftermath of the war) and was surprised to find out that it still had a regular audience in the hundreds of thousands.
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May 4, 2021 12:30
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I was really struggling to care about voting...in the end I was so motivated to exercise my essential rights and partake in our great nation's democracy that I went and voted because I was out doing something else and was driving right past the polling station. Such a depressing contrast to the last few times I'd been there. I spoiled my ballot for Police & Crime Commissioner because there were literally no good options. I voted Green in the council - a quick google/twitter search in the car before going in showed that the Labour candidate isn't an obvious shithead but it wasn't conclusive and I really didn't want to give the impression of endorsing Starmer. I voted Lab then Lib for our mayoral election because there were only three candidates and I felt I should at least try and help make it not a total walkover for the Conservatives.
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May 6, 2021 20:03
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peanut- posted:Reading about that Teeside mayor, it seems like he nationalised an airport and got about £300m out of the government for local infrastructure development. This is the most galling thing - the Corbyn era really brought back into the realm of political discussion and possibilities the radical idea that "the government can do things to make things better". That's essentially what led to the surge of Lab support after the 2017 manifest dropped. Then the Conservatives under Johnson embraced that, their chums in the media praised them to the rafters for it while decrying Labour's policies and smearing Corbyn in all the ways. And of course half the Labour party doing the same thing from inside. So now large swathes of the country are seeing an interventionist on-their-side government for the first time in decades but it's Blue. And Labour now don't even have a leadership that wants to commit to that sort of thing on their own terms. Basically the attitude that the poster earlier summed up as: "telling people you'll do things to make their lives better is cheating. You have to promise them that nothing can change because that's what grown-ups do."
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May 7, 2021 17:27
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My ward went from Labour to Conservative, largely courtesy of a solid Lab->Green swing rather than any real increase in the Conservative vote. Which is nice in as much as it delivers a kick to Starmer et al. The ward over was actually a Labour gain, because the Conservative candidate was revealed to previously be an undercover policeman for the Met with a string of allegations and upheld complains about grooming/sexually abusing female activists which - fortunately, given how things sometimes shake out in 2020s British politics - the voters were not a fan of.
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May 7, 2021 18:45
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Grondoth posted:Since I'm American and my understanding of everything is thus binary, did Brexit blowing up a bunch of industries and people's livelihoods matter much at all? I know it was a social issue that cut deep across all party lines, but it seems like there was a pretty solid "I told you so" moment about it but the party that pushed it seems to have been rewarded. The absolute worst pearl-clutching doom-mongering predictions of those who were anti-Brexit (and which dominated most mass- and social-media coverage of Brexit on both sides of the issue before and after the referendum) haven't happened. Aircraft aren't falling from the skies, the entire southeast of England isn't literally gridlocked with lorries, the supermarkets still have food on the shelves, the lights are still on. That sort of thing. The major snags were sorted out or are (seen to be) being renegotiated. So it's easy for a lot of people to see Brexit as having been a success. The government and the media will happily blame any fallout on the dastardly Europeans 'punishing' plucky Britain, so to an extent even the problems that are acknowledged give the Tories a boost from their voter base, which loving loves jingoism and sabre-rattling at foreigners - see how turgidly aroused large parts of the media and conservative twitter became yesterday when two tiny Royal Navy ships with a couple of machine guns on them went and lurked off the French coast to observe a fishing rights dispute that was actually almost nothing to do with the UK. The much-publicised "told you so" moments, while they seem dramatic, are all part of a slow-burning process. In reality Brexit was never going to cause the entire economy to implode overnight, but it's going to be a continual burden making things a little bit more difficult and expensive for everyone. A large part of the electorate that voted for Brexit (and is now voting for the Tories) are retired or otherwise on fixed incomes. Even if Brexit went badly, they'd be immune from the actual, material effects so all they get out of it is the satisfaction of 'being out of the EU'. The cultural and social effects. And all this is happening against the background of the pandemic, which has massively disrupted normal life and frozen large parts of the economy. So many Brexit effects are null and void, and any that do register can easily be dismissed as part of the pandemic. We've already had empty shelves, people losing their jobs, businesses collapsing and so on. Had Brexit impacted against normal life the effects would have been more noticeable and harder to dismiss but in the situation we're in now it has made precious little actual difference.
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May 7, 2021 20:01
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We're now in a world where the Conservatives have won the Tees Valley mayor contest with over 70% of the vote and lost control of Tunbridge Wells, the Isle of Wight, Canterbury, eight seats in West Sussex and 14 seats in Surrey. Interesting thread on 'London outflow' (which sounds like it would normally be some sort of sewerage system that twisto would post about): https://twitter.com/ACJSissons/status/1391041816053567497 It's the other side of the "all the young people are leaving the ex-industrial north, leaving only angry business-owning Boomer landlords" coin. Urban property prices, the increase in remote working and the growth in student numbers even in the smaller regional universities are pushing young white-collar graduates out of safe Labour city consituencies into the hard blue suburbs and semi-rural fringes of the southeast.
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May 8, 2021 16:50
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I was going to say 'so Starmer's first move in his plan to change the party to appeal to the traditional base is to sack the state-educated northern woman who used to be a social worker' but he seems to managed an even more alienating way of doing that:Apraxin posted:Oh my god, why would you phrase it like that?
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May 8, 2021 19:47
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Josef bugman posted:Gods Bones. His galactic-scale incompetence would surely be a pretty good indicator that he was a British security services plant, I'd have thought. What's the deal with Andy Burnham? I mostly remember him as a second-tier New Labour suit, but a quick skim down his wiki page suggests that he's got at least some decent principles and then there's the whole King of the North thing last year. He seems to be a genuine soft-lefty (rather than a mild liberal calling themselves 'soft left'). He seems like he could be the sort of leader Starmer promised he'd be - palatable to a broad spectrum of the party and, while seemingly a bit of a weathervane, at least a weathervane with the sense to take onboard which way the wind's blowing. But I'm sure the thread will be able to explain in great detail why he's no better than any of the other high-ups left in the party.
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May 9, 2021 00:10
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namesake posted:Saudi Paul is partially responsible for the hospital closure though. A big reason Labour can't recover is that most of the big names that get media attention are just as pro-austerity and pro-privatisation as the Tories ever were and so without a very public split there's no way to convince large amounts of the public that the left will legislate in a left way. Exactly. A lot of the current problems (as seen by the mass shedding of votes from the heartlands during the New Labour era) are because these places enthusiastically voted for a Labour government after 18 years of Conservative rule and then effectively got diddly-squat in return. You saw it in the early Corbyn years, when TV interviewers and journalists would respond to new policies against - say - privatisation of the NHS - with "but it was Labour that ramped up the PFIs etc. etc.". And they're right. But policy-wise Labour in 2015-2019 were effectively an entirely different party from Labour in 1997-2010. Maybe some high-profile repudiations of specific New Labour policies and some purging of prominent Blairites in the early days would have got that message across. As it was Labour were faced with the uphill battle of being trusted to do any of the great stuff they talked about because all the evidence was that 'a Labour government' was no better than the Conservatives. And under Starmer of course they seemed a lot worse because they were trying to be sensible while the Tories give the money tree a good shaking and bring the local airport back into public ownership. Left-wing policies like nationalisation of infrastructure, higher wages, community regrowth and environmentalism may consistently poll well but only when they're not explicitly flagged as 'Labour policies'.
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May 9, 2021 13:07
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Rail services to come under unified state control As expected, the government is implementing the TfL/Overground system for the entire network - which has been de facto in place already since the pandemic hit. Network Rail will be no more, and infrastructure, tickets, prices and timetables will be the responsibility of a single state body with a uniform image and branding called....  Great British RailwaysSo no more franchising in the sense we all know and love, but there still needs to be a way to funnel public money into private pockets, so operators will be contracted to run 'certain' services - whether these will be the profitable ones (socialising losses, privatising profit) or the unprofitable ones (let the subsidy/investment cash from the DfT flow!) is yet to be seen. People on PistonHeads are comically furious about this, banging on about British Rail in the 70s and "Only the gas and water to go and bloody Corbyn's got his manifesto anyway  "
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May 20, 2021 10:10
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:I did read it. It does annoy me when people trot out that graph of passenger rail journeys which skyrockets as soon as privatisation happened, as if hundreds of thousands of people were refusing to use a state-owned rail network and then suddenly began using trains again in April 1994. The numbers don't lie - rail journeys increased massively after privatisation. But the turnaround in numbers began in the early 80s when BR was sectorised (organised by traffic type not geographical region) and the sectors were given more power to adjust their timetables, fares, service patterns, marketing and corporate identity than under the monolithic BR of the 60s and 70s 'managed decline' era. The surge in passenger numbers in many ways reflects groundwork done in the late 80s paying off as the economy bounced back after the early 90s recession. The graph also tracks with rising fuel prices, increased road congestion (reflecting the end of 'Roads for Prosperity' in the aftermath of the recession and the fallout from Twyford Down and Newbury) and the boom in property prices as more people commute from further away and do so by rail. And what the graph really pegs is inward investment in the rail network, which surged in the few years before privatisation and then private sector investment boomed in the mid 90s until the private operators realised that running a railway is both difficult and expensive and it's easier to make a profit this quarter (rather than in 20 years) by outsourcing some of the maintenance to a billion subcontractors and deferring all the rest. Then after Hatfield etc. the state subsidy picks up the slack. I imagine BR could have undergone a similar revival if it had had it's funding increased by a factor of four. OwlFancier posted:what the gently caress is the middle of the economy Presumably it's people like that chap on QT who refused to believe that he was a) rich and b) in the top 1% of earners because he made £100k/year and was outraged that Labour were going to put his taxes up because he was just an ordinary struggling tradesman. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 13:22 on May 20, 2021 |
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May 20, 2021 12:36
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Guavanaut posted:Far more interesting are Segel & Levy's takedown A Lie and A Libel and comics legend Will Eisner's The Plot, and the forward to that by Umberto Eco is probably the neatest summary I could find: This is just the early 20th century equivalent of "Well even if it didn't happen it's something they would do. Makes u think." response you get on facebook when it's pointed out that people are peddling falsehoods/lies/slander.
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May 20, 2021 18:38
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Around the North East woodlice are Slateybacks, and we have spelks for those annoying hair-thin bits of wood that catch on everything. If you tell a Geordie you have a splinter, you'd best have a small branch sticking out of your arm. When I was growing up in rural Hampshire in the 80s you could still occasionally hear farmers call woodlice 'flumps'. I heard one ancient wizened stockman use the word 'dumbledore' years before JKR put pen to paper. They used words like 'aftershear' (consequences), they would 'bait' rather than stoke/tend a fire, call a fussy person a 'quiddler', accuse a braggard or show-off of being 'janty' and call young geese 'gulls' rather than goslings.
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May 24, 2021 18:27
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Gonzo McFee posted:I think ive found the perfect distillation of the British mindset. Unsurprisingly the first-tier replies are mostly a trash fire (with some good takedowns in the second tier), but it's like a capsule of all the bad cultural/political takes in one place. It really brings out how the obsession with WW2 as a national myth amongst a certain part of the population (currently massively represented in media and discourse) is the maypole on which so many other lovely ideas are hung. This is a gem: https://twitter.com/twitdwood/status/1397074939128258561?s=19 "I can't watch telly without being reminded that other people face discrimination. This is the real injustice, not the people who actually have to face the discrimination in their real lives 24/7/365." On the regional words/language quirks thing: I worked with a guy from NW England and he used lend/borrow differently (I was going to say 'the wrong way round' but that sounds prick-ish). So it was: "Can you borrow me a pencil?" and "Do you mind if I lend that pencil?" Is that a regional thing (and where?) or an individual quirk? (Awaits the revelation that all the millions of people north of the Trent and west of the Pennines use the words that way and I've just never actually talked to a Mancunian before...)
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May 25, 2021 10:31
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:I've heard and even used "Can I have a lend of that pencil". I couldn't tell you where I picked that up from as I was born Oop North, then moved to the south coast (actually) when I was about 1, and then to Wales and then to Wiltshire and then to Germany and then began to diverge from the parents when I went to uni in London. I think the fellow in question said "can I have a lend of..." at least a few times. He was born in West Yorkshire, grew up in Cheshire and Greater Manchester and then studied and lived in Lancaster before moving to the East Midlands where I worked with him, so I don't know if it's a quirk of one of those places in particular. Guavanaut posted:Reminds me of the urban legend sounding story about the first automatic level crossings in Yorkshire. Where "do not cross while lights flash" takes on the inverse meaning. I have also heard this exact example, but also in an educational context. Apparently in Yorkshire 'while' can mean 'until' in certain contexts (to do with an old ambiguity in English between process and result). Apparently you can find 'until' used where we would use 'while' in the King James Bible. This is - supposedly - why the modern standard level crossing sign phrase is "Stop When Lights Show" Edit: Which one of you is this? https://twitter.com/McfeeFanny/status/1397127402204106753 BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 11:07 on May 25, 2021 |
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May 25, 2021 11:01
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Gort posted:Yeah, customs seems to be a completely random roll of the dice. Once in a while customs will randomly select your package to be the one they inspect, and you'll get a £10+ bill for the privilege. I mentioned ages ago that a car part I ordered from France in mid-December (with a 4-week delivery estimate) finally turned up in mid-March. Now the same car has been at a garage since April 12 having other parts ordered and fitted - one of them is coming from Germany and was supposed to take no more than two weeks to arrive. My car's been there with the front end all stripped down for six weeks now! Fortunately I have access to another car and WFH so it's not vital, and all this work is only because I'd quite like to have working a/c again so if it comes to it they can just put it back together and it'll be in the same state it was when I dropped it off. But this is the sort of thing that took a matter of days to arrive this time last year. I know the pandemic will be screwing with the supply chains too, but if this going to be the norm it seriously puts a cramp on owning older foreign cars. Maybe that's the point - to encourage us to buy home-made British cars like....a Morgan Three-Wheeler
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May 27, 2021 13:09
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