Stop voting for fucking Tories

[inactionman]

Handcock's lawyer on GB News.

Feck me

Was that a typo or deliberate?

Either way, I approve of the inference.

[tabascoboy]

What is it that makes the right wing want to target groups of people rather than the wider issues I wonder...?

[JM2K6]

Does anyone see a path forward for this country in the next five years that would result in major positive changes? I keep calling this place a moribund country and I genuinely believe that. Too much of it has been left to rot and the rest has been looted. Some of the laws brought in over the last few decades are insane and we need a complete overhaul. I worry we're essentially turning ourselves into one of the shittier American states, only without the federal money to spend.

Where are the positives? What is there to hope for, to hang your hat on for the future of the UK? I'm not seeing it anywhere.

[fishfoodie]

Does anyone see a path forward for this country in the next five years that would result in major positive changes? I keep calling this place a moribund country and I genuinely believe that. Too much of it has been left to rot and the rest has been looted. Some of the laws brought in over the last few decades are insane and we need a complete overhaul. I worry we're essentially turning ourselves into one of the shittier American states, only without the federal money to spend.

Where are the positives? What is there to hope for, to hang your hat on for the future of the UK? I'm not seeing it anywhere.

Not really.

To get growth the UK needs to unfuck it's Education system, & then wait for those kids to become adults with the skills that Society needs.

The Tories succeeded in making the UK a hostile environment for EU Nationals, who contributed more than they took from the UK, & now businesses are being held back by the lack of suitable staff. The Tories can throw all the tax cuts they like at businesses, but that won't fix the growth problem.

In the last few months I've seen two Indian co-workers leave, because they are now moving from India to the UK, I wonder if this the trend that the rest of the UK will follow ? If it is, then it will drive down wages in Tech, & it makes STEM less attractive to UK students, & in ten years time the UK will be just as fucked.

[Biffer]

Does anyone see a path forward for this country in the next five years that would result in major positive changes? I keep calling this place a moribund country and I genuinely believe that. Too much of it has been left to rot and the rest has been looted. Some of the laws brought in over the last few decades are insane and we need a complete overhaul. I worry we're essentially turning ourselves into one of the shittier American states, only without the federal money to spend.

Where are the positives? What is there to hope for, to hang your hat on for the future of the UK? I'm not seeing it anywhere.

As a country we have not come to terms with the collapse of Empire. There's a tendency in media, in power and in a huge segment of the public to hark back to it, and not let go (all the WW2 bullshit and such is a big part of this as well). The European project was an avenue for us to find a place in the world for a modern Britain, and move on from it with a group that included countries in a similar position. But the longing for the past was too strong and we fucked it.

The UK has to deal with its attitude to the past before it can move forward.

How do we do that? I don't know. My preference is to break up the Union, I'm pretty sure that'd do it. That doesn't seem like it's going to happen in the immediate future though.

[tabascoboy]

Fear not, we have the awesome talents of Therese Coffey to sort out this department now

[Paddington Bear]

Does anyone see a path forward for this country in the next five years that would result in major positive changes? I keep calling this place a moribund country and I genuinely believe that. Too much of it has been left to rot and the rest has been looted. Some of the laws brought in over the last few decades are insane and we need a complete overhaul. I worry we're essentially turning ourselves into one of the shittier American states, only without the federal money to spend.

Where are the positives? What is there to hope for, to hang your hat on for the future of the UK? I'm not seeing it anywhere.

It is possible to wildly overstate how hard it would be to unentangle ourselves from the current predicament. The way I see it there are three burning issues:
1) Cost of living
2) Economic growth
3) Provision of public services

Obviously pretty major areas!
BUT there are relatively straightforward answers to the first two, that will then make the third a hell of a lot easier.
Cost of living
Two facets - short and long term. Short term energy bills are killing people. Not unique to Britain.
Longer term the issue is housing. To which there is a reasonably straightforward solution - build more!
The blockage to this is political. It isn't an iron law of the universe that building new housing requires round after round of consultation and bat surveys. The problem starts and ends with telling NIMBYs to piss off and lump it. Everyone calms down once the houses are built. My suggestion for how to manage the political impact, as you can't wish away politics, is to massively densify London. Near me Wembley has changed through my lifetime from rows of semis to increasingly large tower blocks. They don't look lovely but Wembley never did. Do the same in Harrow, Action, Ealing, Mitcham, Peckham, Bermondsey, Stratford etc. You lose nothing of architectural merit, you build housing where people want to live (in London), and where the transport infrastructure is.
Tl:dr - any government could drastically change people's housing costs within a 5-10 year period, if they had the political will.

Economic growth
Basically the same as above. The whole thing is political will. See this thread:


You can love or hate road building as his example, but the point is again; there is no iron rule of the universe that forces us to develop through this process. We should swallow our pride and learn from countries like Spain who keep building decent infrastructure at a reasonable cost within a fair time frame. No need to wildly overspec everything, Madrid has a metro now and Leeds doesn't for this reason.

Also, and grounds for optimism, is the demand for lab space around Oxford and Cambridge. So we need to provide it. The current demand is something like 10 times the available space - think of the jobs this creates, high paying ones too, think of the wider effect having these jobs has etc. Again, the government need to grasp the nettle and tell people being able to look at a flat and damp field near Cambridge is not a valid reason to deny the nation hundreds of high quality well paid jobs.

Love or hate the man but see Clarkson's attempts to diversify his farm. It isn't a fact of life that a council needs to be that obstructive. They saw 50 jobs and decided no, they shouldn't have the power to do so. This could be changed overnight, if a government wished to do so.

Provision of public services
People spending less on housing and energy = people have more disposable income = people spend the majority of that within the country = economic growth. If a London renter has an extra £250 a month they likely spend that in pubs/restaurants in London or save/invest it. All net gains for the economy that don't even require structural change.
More high paid jobs in an Oxbridge arc does this on steroids and leads to sustained FDI coming in and radically changes the vibe around Britain as a place to invest.
Both = higher tax revenues which = more money for public services and investment. It's a virtuous cycle.

We also try to provide public services with one hand tied behind our back. We lack doctors and have to bring in thousands from overseas, increasingly people with limited language skills and training we have no control over. This is because the BMA asked the government to artificially limit the number of medical school places offered in Britain. Anecdotally I know loads of bright people who got either 3 As or AAB at A level who were desperate to become doctors and couldn't get a place. They'd all have now qualified or be on the cusp of it. It is utter madness, we could double the number of places offered and fill them with decent people and sort a number of these issues within a decade, again.

Final thing I'd say is be careful of trusting too much in the vibes. Germany was the sick man of Europe for much of the 2000s and is now considered a paragon of virtue by too many. Their economy and political system has serious issues ahead. France under Hollande was considered a basket case with large scale emigration to London among certain classes. All forgotten now a decade or so on. Italy just keeps on trucking well enough. Basically the economic version of 'England shouldn't rationalise the Prem into four provinces because Ireland are number 1 in the world'. These things come and go and we are pretty exceptional as a nation in how willing we are to declare our country a basketcase.

Tl:dr - Our entire issue is one of political will. The current political settlement is designed around the interests of pensioners, that isn't something that needs to be settled forever and a government with ambition could rectify much of this in 5-10 years.

[Biffer]

Does anyone see a path forward for this country in the next five years that would result in major positive changes? I keep calling this place a moribund country and I genuinely believe that. Too much of it has been left to rot and the rest has been looted. Some of the laws brought in over the last few decades are insane and we need a complete overhaul. I worry we're essentially turning ourselves into one of the shittier American states, only without the federal money to spend.

Where are the positives? What is there to hope for, to hang your hat on for the future of the UK? I'm not seeing it anywhere.

It is possible to wildly overstate how hard it would be to unentangle ourselves from the current predicament. The way I see it there are three burning issues:
1) Cost of living
2) Economic growth
3) Provision of public services

Obviously pretty major areas!
BUT there are relatively straightforward answers to the first two, that will then make the third a hell of a lot easier.
Cost of living
Two facets - short and long term. Short term energy bills are killing people. Not unique to Britain.
Longer term the issue is housing. To which there is a reasonably straightforward solution - build more!
The blockage to this is political. It isn't an iron law of the universe that building new housing requires round after round of consultation and bat surveys. The problem starts and ends with telling NIMBYs to piss off and lump it. Everyone calms down once the houses are built. My suggestion for how to manage the political impact, as you can't wish away politics, is to massively densify London. Near me Wembley has changed through my lifetime from rows of semis to increasingly large tower blocks. They don't look lovely but Wembley never did. Do the same in Harrow, Action, Ealing, Mitcham, Peckham, Bermondsey, Stratford etc. You lose nothing of architectural merit, you build housing where people want to live (in London), and where the transport infrastructure is.
Tl:dr - any government could drastically change people's housing costs within a 5-10 year period, if they had the political will.

Economic growth
Basically the same as above. The whole thing is political will. See this thread:


You can love or hate road building as his example, but the point is again; there is no iron rule of the universe that forces us to develop through this process. We should swallow our pride and learn from countries like Spain who keep building decent infrastructure at a reasonable cost within a fair time frame. No need to wildly overspec everything, Madrid has a metro now and Leeds doesn't for this reason.

Also, and grounds for optimism, is the demand for lab space around Oxford and Cambridge. So we need to provide it. The current demand is something like 10 times the available space - think of the jobs this creates, high paying ones too, think of the wider effect having these jobs has etc. Again, the government need to grasp the nettle and tell people being able to look at a flat and damp field near Cambridge is not a valid reason to deny the nation hundreds of high quality well paid jobs.

Love or hate the man but see Clarkson's attempts to diversify his farm. It isn't a fact of life that a council needs to be that obstructive. They saw 50 jobs and decided no, they shouldn't have the power to do so. This could be changed overnight, if a government wished to do so.

Provision of public services
People spending less on housing and energy = people have more disposable income = people spend the majority of that within the country = economic growth. If a London renter has an extra £250 a month they likely spend that in pubs/restaurants in London or save/invest it. All net gains for the economy that don't even require structural change.
More high paid jobs in an Oxbridge arc does this on steroids and leads to sustained FDI coming in and radically changes the vibe around Britain as a place to invest.
Both = higher tax revenues which = more money for public services and investment. It's a virtuous cycle.

We also try to provide public services with one hand tied behind our back. We lack doctors and have to bring in thousands from overseas, increasingly people with limited language skills and training we have no control over. This is because the BMA asked the government to artificially limit the number of medical school places offered in Britain. Anecdotally I know loads of bright people who got either 3 As or AAB at A level who were desperate to become doctors and couldn't get a place. They'd all have now qualified or be on the cusp of it. It is utter madness, we could double the number of places offered and fill them with decent people and sort a number of these issues within a decade, again.

Final thing I'd say is be careful of trusting too much in the vibes. Germany was the sick man of Europe for much of the 2000s and is now considered a paragon of virtue by too many. Their economy and political system has serious issues ahead. France under Hollande was considered a basket case with large scale emigration to London among certain classes. All forgotten now a decade or so on. Italy just keeps on trucking well enough. Basically the economic version of 'England shouldn't rationalise the Prem into four provinces because Ireland are number 1 in the world'. These things come and go and we are pretty exceptional as a nation in how willing we are to declare our country a basketcase.

Tl:dr - Our entire issue is one of political will. The current political settlement is designed around the interests of pensioners, that isn't something that needs to be settled forever and a government with ambition could rectify much of this in 5-10 years.

It's not just in Oxford and Cambridge that there's a shortage of lab space. There's companies crying out for it in Scotland too (and in other areas).

People don't seem to realise that cutting certain types of government spending cuts GDP.

Also, there's this screaming that the right wing press/politicians do about tax burden as a percentage of GDP being at a record high in the UK - it's still lower than most advanced democracies.

[JM2K6]

Does anyone see a path forward for this country in the next five years that would result in major positive changes? I keep calling this place a moribund country and I genuinely believe that. Too much of it has been left to rot and the rest has been looted. Some of the laws brought in over the last few decades are insane and we need a complete overhaul. I worry we're essentially turning ourselves into one of the shittier American states, only without the federal money to spend.

Where are the positives? What is there to hope for, to hang your hat on for the future of the UK? I'm not seeing it anywhere.

It is possible to wildly overstate how hard it would be to unentangle ourselves from the current predicament. The way I see it there are three burning issues:
1) Cost of living
2) Economic growth
3) Provision of public services

Obviously pretty major areas!
BUT there are relatively straightforward answers to the first two, that will then make the third a hell of a lot easier.
Cost of living
Two facets - short and long term. Short term energy bills are killing people. Not unique to Britain.
Longer term the issue is housing. To which there is a reasonably straightforward solution - build more!
The blockage to this is political. It isn't an iron law of the universe that building new housing requires round after round of consultation and bat surveys. The problem starts and ends with telling NIMBYs to piss off and lump it. Everyone calms down once the houses are built. My suggestion for how to manage the political impact, as you can't wish away politics, is to massively densify London. Near me Wembley has changed through my lifetime from rows of semis to increasingly large tower blocks. They don't look lovely but Wembley never did. Do the same in Harrow, Action, Ealing, Mitcham, Peckham, Bermondsey, Stratford etc. You lose nothing of architectural merit, you build housing where people want to live (in London), and where the transport infrastructure is.
Tl:dr - any government could drastically change people's housing costs within a 5-10 year period, if they had the political will.

Economic growth
Basically the same as above. The whole thing is political will. See this thread:


You can love or hate road building as his example, but the point is again; there is no iron rule of the universe that forces us to develop through this process. We should swallow our pride and learn from countries like Spain who keep building decent infrastructure at a reasonable cost within a fair time frame. No need to wildly overspec everything, Madrid has a metro now and Leeds doesn't for this reason.

Also, and grounds for optimism, is the demand for lab space around Oxford and Cambridge. So we need to provide it. The current demand is something like 10 times the available space - think of the jobs this creates, high paying ones too, think of the wider effect having these jobs has etc. Again, the government need to grasp the nettle and tell people being able to look at a flat and damp field near Cambridge is not a valid reason to deny the nation hundreds of high quality well paid jobs.

Love or hate the man but see Clarkson's attempts to diversify his farm. It isn't a fact of life that a council needs to be that obstructive. They saw 50 jobs and decided no, they shouldn't have the power to do so. This could be changed overnight, if a government wished to do so.

Provision of public services
People spending less on housing and energy = people have more disposable income = people spend the majority of that within the country = economic growth. If a London renter has an extra £250 a month they likely spend that in pubs/restaurants in London or save/invest it. All net gains for the economy that don't even require structural change.
More high paid jobs in an Oxbridge arc does this on steroids and leads to sustained FDI coming in and radically changes the vibe around Britain as a place to invest.
Both = higher tax revenues which = more money for public services and investment. It's a virtuous cycle.

We also try to provide public services with one hand tied behind our back. We lack doctors and have to bring in thousands from overseas, increasingly people with limited language skills and training we have no control over. This is because the BMA asked the government to artificially limit the number of medical school places offered in Britain. Anecdotally I know loads of bright people who got either 3 As or AAB at A level who were desperate to become doctors and couldn't get a place. They'd all have now qualified or be on the cusp of it. It is utter madness, we could double the number of places offered and fill them with decent people and sort a number of these issues within a decade, again.

Final thing I'd say is be careful of trusting too much in the vibes. Germany was the sick man of Europe for much of the 2000s and is now considered a paragon of virtue by too many. Their economy and political system has serious issues ahead. France under Hollande was considered a basket case with large scale emigration to London among certain classes. All forgotten now a decade or so on. Italy just keeps on trucking well enough. Basically the economic version of 'England shouldn't rationalise the Prem into four provinces because Ireland are number 1 in the world'. These things come and go and we are pretty exceptional as a nation in how willing we are to declare our country a basketcase.

Tl:dr - Our entire issue is one of political will. The current political settlement is designed around the interests of pensioners, that isn't something that needs to be settled forever and a government with ambition could rectify much of this in 5-10 years.

This is a very thoughtful and positive response. I have a quibble with one aspect, which is that I don't believe it's simply a case of supply and demand when it comes to the housing crisis, nor that the price of buying a house is intrinsically linked to availability. I think it's more complicated than that.

I agree that the current cost of living crisis is a short term event and it wasn't on my mind when I made my post.

However, for all the ways in which things could improve, I have two questions:

1) Where is the money to pay for all of this going to come from? By the time Labour get into power, the coffers are going to be basically empty
2) Where is the evidence that there is political will on either side to do anything like this?

On top of that, I will add the following:

- This country is built on crumbling infrastructure - public services, transport, national health, etc - which is ruinously expensive to fix
- There are huge parts of the country that urgently need investment, that have barely changed since the 70s. There are a lot of Gloucesters out there.
- Our laws are becoming ever more restrictive, illiberal, and anti-consumer
- Our media is in an almost farcical state compared to even a decade ago
- Inequality is a real problem
- We have no industries of our own that we can use to fuel our own growth and have instead cut off most of them at the knees
- Our environmental commitments are a sick joke, and (among other things) the climate crisis is itself treated as a joke that can't possibly affect us

On the point about doctors:

We also try to provide public services with one hand tied behind our back. We lack doctors and have to bring in thousands from overseas, increasingly people with limited language skills and training we have no control over. This is because the BMA asked the government to artificially limit the number of medical school places offered in Britain. Anecdotally I know loads of bright people who got either 3 As or AAB at A level who were desperate to become doctors and couldn't get a place. They'd all have now qualified or be on the cusp of it. It is utter madness, we could double the number of places offered and fill them with decent people and sort a number of these issues within a decade, again.

My understanding is that it's really not that simple. The BMA did vote back in 2008 to limit numbers for (IMO) dubious reasons, but successive governments have been happy to keep numbers limited because of how heavily subsidised the cost of training new doctors is. The BMA have been arguing in favour of increasing numbers (e.g. https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-suppo ... a-analysis ) for a while now. Again, it comes down to money.

And I don't know where that money is supposed to come from. We've backed ourselves into a position where major decisions have been made that have left us significantly worse off, followed by what can only be described as organised funnelling of public funds into the pockets of a small number of corporations and people with close links to the ruling party during Covid, which itself was obviously hugely expensive.

Of course things can be made better. But I do not see a realistic path that takes us there.

[_Os_]

To win planning permission, Norfolk Boreas wind farm's developers produced a 13,275 page environmental impact assessment.

That’s 144 pages longer than the complete works of Tolstoy plus Proust’s seven volume opus In Search of Lost Time.

My experience is this is all getting considerably worse. So far this year I've spent easily 2 weeks on unnecessary paperwork. Not just a single annoying form, but copious amounts of bullshit encompassing entire binders of evidence. It's fucking madness.

Just one example, EPCs used to be annoying but straightforward, the amount of evidence that needs to be supplied now in addition to an onsite inspection (which lasts 2+ hours, I've had one that lasted 5 hours!) is madness (100s of photos of essentially the same thing, receipts, certificates to get the EPC which itself is a certificate). The rules also increasingly don't make sense as more rules are added, but that's another topic. The plan is for EPCs to a certain standard (C rating) to become a mandatory requirement for buying and selling a house, for example it's proposed by 2030 a C rating will be mandatory to get a mortgage. Most houses in the UK are below C rated, upgrading to a C can sometimes cost £10k+ (which can be pointless if it's not documented). An increasingly complex compliance regime could end up being put between buyers and sellers in the housing market, there's potential for people being trapped in homes they don't want.

I've come to the conclusion it's just a cultural trait of the English. It's the same urge behind all the sports they've invented, and all the quiz shows on TV. They just love making rules, and once there's a rule they love making more rules on top of that until it's a mountain of rules, which is probably in contradiction with itself and open to interpretation. And the rules never go away, because they are loved. Maybe it's more just an Anglo thing, Australia has a reputation among South Africans for having far too many rules. Could also just be a UK thing, lots of people from a South Asian immigrant background also fucking love rules, a mountain of rules to do anything is one of the reasons India has failed to meet its economic potential.

Whatever it is, I'm increasingly finding ordinary processes need binders of accompanying evidence and in person meetings. I do sometimes wonder if a law degree would be valuable just to navigate ordinary UK life.

[inactionman]

To win planning permission, Norfolk Boreas wind farm's developers produced a 13,275 page environmental impact assessment.

That’s 144 pages longer than the complete works of Tolstoy plus Proust’s seven volume opus In Search of Lost Time.

My experience is this is all getting considerably worse. So far this year I've spent easily 2 weeks on unnecessary paperwork. Not just a single annoying form, but copious amounts of bullshit encompassing entire binders of evidence. It's fucking madness.

Just one example, EPCs used to be annoying but straightforward, the amount of evidence that needs to be supplied now in addition to an onsite inspection (which lasts 2+ hours, I've had one that lasted 5 hours!) is madness (100s of photos of essentially the same thing, receipts, certificates to get the EPC which itself is a certificate). The rules also increasingly don't make sense as more rules are added, but that's another topic. The plan is for EPCs to a certain standard (C rating) to become a mandatory requirement for buying and selling a house, for example it's proposed by 2030 a C rating will be mandatory to get a mortgage. Most houses in the UK are not C rated, upgrading to a C can sometimes cost £10k+ (which can be pointless if it's not documented). An increasingly complex compliance regime could end up being put between buyers and sellers in the housing market, there's potential for people being trapped in homes they don't want.

I've come to the conclusion it's just a cultural trait of the English. It's the same urge behind all the sports they've invented, and all the quiz shows on TV. They just love making rules, and once there's a rule they love making more rules on top of that until it's a mountain of rules, which is probably in contradiction with itself and open to interpretation. And the rules never go away, because they are loved. Maybe it's more just an Anglo thing, Australia has a reputation among South Africans for having far too many rules. Could also just be a UK thing, lots of people from a South Asian immigrant background also fucking love rules, a mountain of rules to do anything is one of the reasons India has failed to meet its economic potential.

Whatever it is, I'm increasingly finding ordinary processes need binders of accompanying evidence and in person meetings. I do sometimes wonder if a law degree would be valuable just to navigate ordinary UK life.

We've a family friend who works as a town planner, and he's of the opinion that much of the regulations are there as unscrupulous builders would circumvent laws and regulations to keep builds as cheap as possible, and that additional regs were added as part of an arms race to try to keep some form of control - noting that many developers will resort to litigation from which the only real protection is cast-iron policy and standard (woe betide the poor assessor who is up in court on a matter of interpretation).

I mention this only to raise one reason why the regulatory world is so overly complex.

Grenfell, putting aside its utterly horrific outcome, is an interesting study in why this complexity is dangerous - byzantine regs that allow each chain of the process to slope their shoulders and absolve themselves of responsibility, the lack of actual oversight and assurance over these complex regs (both as they're too complex for lay people - the end clients - to interpret, and those who are employed to interpret are contracted by the builders and therefore have vested interests in not actually doing their primary job lest they upset applecarts)



On the subject on mandatory EPC - this is going to cause carnage*, in some cases it's probably more feasible to knock down a Victorian detached house and build a Barrett home in its place. Our house in Edinburgh has bedrooms in the eaves, there's no real way to get into the spaces to fully insulate without pulling out the entire of upstairs.


* by 'carnage' I mean cottage industry and payday for whoever corners the market in energy efficiency remediation

[fishfoodie]

To win planning permission, Norfolk Boreas wind farm's developers produced a 13,275 page environmental impact assessment.

That’s 144 pages longer than the complete works of Tolstoy plus Proust’s seven volume opus In Search of Lost Time.

My experience is this is all getting considerably worse. So far this year I've spent easily 2 weeks on unnecessary paperwork. Not just a single annoying form, but copious amounts of bullshit encompassing entire binders of evidence. It's fucking madness.

Just one example, EPCs used to be annoying but straightforward, the amount of evidence that needs to be supplied now in addition to an onsite inspection (which lasts 2+ hours, I've had one that lasted 5 hours!) is madness (100s of photos of essentially the same thing, receipts, certificates to get the EPC which itself is a certificate). The rules also increasingly don't make sense as more rules are added, but that's another topic. The plan is for EPCs to a certain standard (C rating) to become a mandatory requirement for buying and selling a house, for example it's proposed by 2030 a C rating will be mandatory to get a mortgage. Most houses in the UK are below C rated, upgrading to a C can sometimes cost £10k+ (which can be pointless if it's not documented). An increasingly complex compliance regime could end up being put between buyers and sellers in the housing market, there's potential for people being trapped in homes they don't want.

I've come to the conclusion it's just a cultural trait of the English. It's the same urge behind all the sports they've invented, and all the quiz shows on TV. They just love making rules, and once there's a rule they love making more rules on top of that until it's a mountain of rules, which is probably in contradiction with itself and open to interpretation. And the rules never go away, because they are loved. Maybe it's more just an Anglo thing, Australia has a reputation among South Africans for having far too many rules. Could also just be a UK thing, lots of people from a South Asian immigrant background also fucking love rules, a mountain of rules to do anything is one of the reasons India has failed to meet its economic potential.

Whatever it is, I'm increasingly finding ordinary processes need binders of accompanying evidence and in person meetings. I do sometimes wonder if a law degree would be valuable just to navigate ordinary UK life.

Stupid Rules also breed corruption ! (Which is why their often very popular )

A couple of Irish Politicians are under pressure the last few weeks, because they told some lies in their planning applications. The rules are a mess, & if you went thru all planning applications, it'd be a fucking miracle if you found one that didn't contain inaccurate statements, designed to get the thing passed.

One friend told me that he knew his planning application had passed, when he got an email, not from the council planning dept, but from a local councillor to let him know it had been passed, so he potentially got some credit for it being passed. In reality he'd done nothing, & hadn't been approached, but politicians have involved themselves in the process, when it should be purely technical.

[Paddington Bear]

Does anyone see a path forward for this country in the next five years that would result in major positive changes? I keep calling this place a moribund country and I genuinely believe that. Too much of it has been left to rot and the rest has been looted. Some of the laws brought in over the last few decades are insane and we need a complete overhaul. I worry we're essentially turning ourselves into one of the shittier American states, only without the federal money to spend.

Where are the positives? What is there to hope for, to hang your hat on for the future of the UK? I'm not seeing it anywhere.

It is possible to wildly overstate how hard it would be to unentangle ourselves from the current predicament. The way I see it there are three burning issues:
1) Cost of living
2) Economic growth
3) Provision of public services

Obviously pretty major areas!
BUT there are relatively straightforward answers to the first two, that will then make the third a hell of a lot easier.
Cost of living
Two facets - short and long term. Short term energy bills are killing people. Not unique to Britain.
Longer term the issue is housing. To which there is a reasonably straightforward solution - build more!
The blockage to this is political. It isn't an iron law of the universe that building new housing requires round after round of consultation and bat surveys. The problem starts and ends with telling NIMBYs to piss off and lump it. Everyone calms down once the houses are built. My suggestion for how to manage the political impact, as you can't wish away politics, is to massively densify London. Near me Wembley has changed through my lifetime from rows of semis to increasingly large tower blocks. They don't look lovely but Wembley never did. Do the same in Harrow, Action, Ealing, Mitcham, Peckham, Bermondsey, Stratford etc. You lose nothing of architectural merit, you build housing where people want to live (in London), and where the transport infrastructure is.
Tl:dr - any government could drastically change people's housing costs within a 5-10 year period, if they had the political will.

Economic growth
Basically the same as above. The whole thing is political will. See this thread:


You can love or hate road building as his example, but the point is again; there is no iron rule of the universe that forces us to develop through this process. We should swallow our pride and learn from countries like Spain who keep building decent infrastructure at a reasonable cost within a fair time frame. No need to wildly overspec everything, Madrid has a metro now and Leeds doesn't for this reason.

Also, and grounds for optimism, is the demand for lab space around Oxford and Cambridge. So we need to provide it. The current demand is something like 10 times the available space - think of the jobs this creates, high paying ones too, think of the wider effect having these jobs has etc. Again, the government need to grasp the nettle and tell people being able to look at a flat and damp field near Cambridge is not a valid reason to deny the nation hundreds of high quality well paid jobs.

Love or hate the man but see Clarkson's attempts to diversify his farm. It isn't a fact of life that a council needs to be that obstructive. They saw 50 jobs and decided no, they shouldn't have the power to do so. This could be changed overnight, if a government wished to do so.

Provision of public services
People spending less on housing and energy = people have more disposable income = people spend the majority of that within the country = economic growth. If a London renter has an extra £250 a month they likely spend that in pubs/restaurants in London or save/invest it. All net gains for the economy that don't even require structural change.
More high paid jobs in an Oxbridge arc does this on steroids and leads to sustained FDI coming in and radically changes the vibe around Britain as a place to invest.
Both = higher tax revenues which = more money for public services and investment. It's a virtuous cycle.

We also try to provide public services with one hand tied behind our back. We lack doctors and have to bring in thousands from overseas, increasingly people with limited language skills and training we have no control over. This is because the BMA asked the government to artificially limit the number of medical school places offered in Britain. Anecdotally I know loads of bright people who got either 3 As or AAB at A level who were desperate to become doctors and couldn't get a place. They'd all have now qualified or be on the cusp of it. It is utter madness, we could double the number of places offered and fill them with decent people and sort a number of these issues within a decade, again.

Final thing I'd say is be careful of trusting too much in the vibes. Germany was the sick man of Europe for much of the 2000s and is now considered a paragon of virtue by too many. Their economy and political system has serious issues ahead. France under Hollande was considered a basket case with large scale emigration to London among certain classes. All forgotten now a decade or so on. Italy just keeps on trucking well enough. Basically the economic version of 'England shouldn't rationalise the Prem into four provinces because Ireland are number 1 in the world'. These things come and go and we are pretty exceptional as a nation in how willing we are to declare our country a basketcase.

Tl:dr - Our entire issue is one of political will. The current political settlement is designed around the interests of pensioners, that isn't something that needs to be settled forever and a government with ambition could rectify much of this in 5-10 years.

This is a very thoughtful and positive response. I have a quibble with one aspect, which is that I don't believe it's simply a case of supply and demand when it comes to the housing crisis, nor that the price of buying a house is intrinsically linked to availability. I think it's more complicated than that.

I agree that the current cost of living crisis is a short term event and it wasn't on my mind when I made my post.

However, for all the ways in which things could improve, I have two questions:

1) Where is the money to pay for all of this going to come from? By the time Labour get into power, the coffers are going to be basically empty
2) Where is the evidence that there is political will on either side to do anything like this?

On top of that, I will add the following:

- This country is built on crumbling infrastructure - public services, transport, national health, etc - which is ruinously expensive to fix
- There are huge parts of the country that urgently need investment, that have barely changed since the 70s. There are a lot of Gloucesters out there.
- Our laws are becoming ever more restrictive, illiberal, and anti-consumer
- Our media is in an almost farcical state compared to even a decade ago
- Inequality is a real problem
- We have no industries of our own that we can use to fuel our own growth and have instead cut off most of them at the knees
- Our environmental commitments are a sick joke, and (among other things) the climate crisis is itself treated as a joke that can't possibly affect us

On the point about doctors:

We also try to provide public services with one hand tied behind our back. We lack doctors and have to bring in thousands from overseas, increasingly people with limited language skills and training we have no control over. This is because the BMA asked the government to artificially limit the number of medical school places offered in Britain. Anecdotally I know loads of bright people who got either 3 As or AAB at A level who were desperate to become doctors and couldn't get a place. They'd all have now qualified or be on the cusp of it. It is utter madness, we could double the number of places offered and fill them with decent people and sort a number of these issues within a decade, again.

My understanding is that it's really not that simple. The BMA did vote back in 2008 to limit numbers for (IMO) dubious reasons, but successive governments have been happy to keep numbers limited because of how heavily subsidised the cost of training new doctors is. The BMA have been arguing in favour of increasing numbers (e.g. https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-suppo ... a-analysis ) for a while now. Again, it comes down to money.

And I don't know where that money is supposed to come from. We've backed ourselves into a position where major decisions have been made that have left us significantly worse off, followed by what can only be described as organised funnelling of public funds into the pockets of a small number of corporations and people with close links to the ruling party during Covid, which itself was obviously hugely expensive.

Of course things can be made better. But I do not see a realistic path that takes us there.

My answers would be:
1) Most of what I'm suggesting is privately funded. If it is relatively straightforward to build a new housing development/railway/lab then firms will do most of it. A lot of the landbanking etc that Barratt et al do is a hedge against planning delays, a lot of the larger investment funds are plumbing for buy to lets as they offer a guaranteed return, the risk just isn't worth it to invest in development despite the feasibly higher returns. A huge amount of what's holding this back is planning intransigence rather than cash.
On the government side, I'd look at creating development corporations. I.e. there should be a London Development Corporation whose job it is to identify sites for development, create the infrastructure that makes the development possible and then most likely contract out the actual building and agree terms for the sale/lease of the land. These corporations can borrow at government rates with somewhat guaranteed returns.
2) This is the hard part. I think there's some chance that Starmer will find he needs to do a lot of this to fund the promises he will make come election time, and sticking it to the Tory voting pension bloc is to an extent risk free for him. I can see Sunak if he gets a second term realising London is currently lost to him and liberalising planning within urban areas etc to protect his voter bloc. More likely this happens to an extent after all other options have been exhausted.

Fair point on doctors, however as so often with the British state it loves a false economy. In the end it is more productive to train our own doctors. I wouldn't be totally opposed to allowing more of an open market for additional medical school places. I.e. there are another 8,000 say a year available for a fee. People are more than willing to pay for accountancy/legal/financial qualifications, why not throw it open a bit for medicine as well (with greater regulatory oversight).

I've come to the conclusion it's just a cultural trait of the English. It's the same urge behind all the sports they've invented, and all the quiz shows on TV. They just love making rules, and once there's a rule they love making more rules on top of that until it's a mountain of rules, which is probably in contradiction with itself and open to interpretation. And the rules never go away, because they are loved. Maybe it's more just an Anglo thing, Australia has a reputation among South Africans for having far too many rules. Could also just be a UK thing, lots of people from a South Asian immigrant background also fucking love rules, a mountain of rules to do anything is one of the reasons India has failed to meet its economic potential.

Whatever it is, I'm increasingly finding ordinary processes need binders of accompanying evidence and in person meetings. I do sometimes wonder if a law degree would be valuable just to navigate ordinary UK life.

Brits are much less rule focussed than other comparable systems. Try opening a hairdressers without a licence in the US, doing just about anything in Germany, getting round structure in France etc. So I don't think it is a national trait, if anything we have/had a tradition of being a bit more flexible. My take would be that there's been a massive increase in process in this country as the quality of politician has declined (I mean that both in terms of MPs, which you've alluded to before, but also in local government. The ambition and scale of what men like Chamberlain were trying to achieve in Birmingham 100 years ago compared to what Boris/Khan/Burnham have done more recently is tragic to read). Process ensures fewer fuck ups but is designed to throttle progress, which is where we get to the second key point. Process has met politics. The primary driver of local politics in Britain is being anti-development. I used to live in West Hampstead and walk to work in central London unless it was pissing it down, and I'd get at least a leaflet a month about 'saving our village'.

What we're left with is a perfect storm. Local politicians get grief for any development. Development requires adherence to process. If process isn't adhered to = no development, therefore the process gets longer and longer as more and more precision and detail is needed. Net result? Nothing gets built. This is a modern invention and is the exception to the national story rather than the rule.

[petej]

Lab space and testing capability is constant issue regardless of where it is located. UK businesses need a rethink they are basically stuck in a short term mentality of relentlessly cost cutting losing of capability and capacity which then they get caught out by. Everything can be outsourced and sub-contracted. Been around some bits of Hinckley C and it is like how are you going to build technical decision making and understanding if the required lab work you outsource it to a lab and they do a shite job of it and you have no internal capacity to do it and no alternatives to outsource it to with labs. They will outsource to consultants who then outsource back to the lab who did a bad job of it originally. I shouldn't laugh but I find stuff like this quite funny.

[Line6 HXFX]

Wow. What's this?

The tories don't have the best interests of the UK at heart?

That they just want to sell off everything we own and have invested in, for litterally generations, out of the backseats of their cars, to their mates..whilst escaping to the airport, and have done since the 1950s?


I mean honestly... what more is there to understand?

[Biffer]

Does anyone see a path forward for this country in the next five years that would result in major positive changes? I keep calling this place a moribund country and I genuinely believe that. Too much of it has been left to rot and the rest has been looted. Some of the laws brought in over the last few decades are insane and we need a complete overhaul. I worry we're essentially turning ourselves into one of the shittier American states, only without the federal money to spend.

Where are the positives? What is there to hope for, to hang your hat on for the future of the UK? I'm not seeing it anywhere.

It is possible to wildly overstate how hard it would be to unentangle ourselves from the current predicament. The way I see it there are three burning issues:
1) Cost of living
2) Economic growth
3) Provision of public services

Obviously pretty major areas!
BUT there are relatively straightforward answers to the first two, that will then make the third a hell of a lot easier.
Cost of living
Two facets - short and long term. Short term energy bills are killing people. Not unique to Britain.
Longer term the issue is housing. To which there is a reasonably straightforward solution - build more!
The blockage to this is political. It isn't an iron law of the universe that building new housing requires round after round of consultation and bat surveys. The problem starts and ends with telling NIMBYs to piss off and lump it. Everyone calms down once the houses are built. My suggestion for how to manage the political impact, as you can't wish away politics, is to massively densify London. Near me Wembley has changed through my lifetime from rows of semis to increasingly large tower blocks. They don't look lovely but Wembley never did. Do the same in Harrow, Action, Ealing, Mitcham, Peckham, Bermondsey, Stratford etc. You lose nothing of architectural merit, you build housing where people want to live (in London), and where the transport infrastructure is.
Tl:dr - any government could drastically change people's housing costs within a 5-10 year period, if they had the political will.

Economic growth
Basically the same as above. The whole thing is political will. See this thread:


You can love or hate road building as his example, but the point is again; there is no iron rule of the universe that forces us to develop through this process. We should swallow our pride and learn from countries like Spain who keep building decent infrastructure at a reasonable cost within a fair time frame. No need to wildly overspec everything, Madrid has a metro now and Leeds doesn't for this reason.

Also, and grounds for optimism, is the demand for lab space around Oxford and Cambridge. So we need to provide it. The current demand is something like 10 times the available space - think of the jobs this creates, high paying ones too, think of the wider effect having these jobs has etc. Again, the government need to grasp the nettle and tell people being able to look at a flat and damp field near Cambridge is not a valid reason to deny the nation hundreds of high quality well paid jobs.

Love or hate the man but see Clarkson's attempts to diversify his farm. It isn't a fact of life that a council needs to be that obstructive. They saw 50 jobs and decided no, they shouldn't have the power to do so. This could be changed overnight, if a government wished to do so.

Provision of public services
People spending less on housing and energy = people have more disposable income = people spend the majority of that within the country = economic growth. If a London renter has an extra £250 a month they likely spend that in pubs/restaurants in London or save/invest it. All net gains for the economy that don't even require structural change.
More high paid jobs in an Oxbridge arc does this on steroids and leads to sustained FDI coming in and radically changes the vibe around Britain as a place to invest.
Both = higher tax revenues which = more money for public services and investment. It's a virtuous cycle.

We also try to provide public services with one hand tied behind our back. We lack doctors and have to bring in thousands from overseas, increasingly people with limited language skills and training we have no control over. This is because the BMA asked the government to artificially limit the number of medical school places offered in Britain. Anecdotally I know loads of bright people who got either 3 As or AAB at A level who were desperate to become doctors and couldn't get a place. They'd all have now qualified or be on the cusp of it. It is utter madness, we could double the number of places offered and fill them with decent people and sort a number of these issues within a decade, again.

Final thing I'd say is be careful of trusting too much in the vibes. Germany was the sick man of Europe for much of the 2000s and is now considered a paragon of virtue by too many. Their economy and political system has serious issues ahead. France under Hollande was considered a basket case with large scale emigration to London among certain classes. All forgotten now a decade or so on. Italy just keeps on trucking well enough. Basically the economic version of 'England shouldn't rationalise the Prem into four provinces because Ireland are number 1 in the world'. These things come and go and we are pretty exceptional as a nation in how willing we are to declare our country a basketcase.

Tl:dr - Our entire issue is one of political will. The current political settlement is designed around the interests of pensioners, that isn't something that needs to be settled forever and a government with ambition could rectify much of this in 5-10 years.

This is a very thoughtful and positive response. I have a quibble with one aspect, which is that I don't believe it's simply a case of supply and demand when it comes to the housing crisis, nor that the price of buying a house is intrinsically linked to availability. I think it's more complicated than that.

I agree that the current cost of living crisis is a short term event and it wasn't on my mind when I made my post.

However, for all the ways in which things could improve, I have two questions:

1) Where is the money to pay for all of this going to come from? By the time Labour get into power, the coffers are going to be basically empty
2) Where is the evidence that there is political will on either side to do anything like this?

On top of that, I will add the following:

- This country is built on crumbling infrastructure - public services, transport, national health, etc - which is ruinously expensive to fix
- There are huge parts of the country that urgently need investment, that have barely changed since the 70s. There are a lot of Gloucesters out there.
- Our laws are becoming ever more restrictive, illiberal, and anti-consumer
- Our media is in an almost farcical state compared to even a decade ago
- Inequality is a real problem
- We have no industries of our own that we can use to fuel our own growth and have instead cut off most of them at the knees
- Our environmental commitments are a sick joke, and (among other things) the climate crisis is itself treated as a joke that can't possibly affect us

On the point about doctors:

We also try to provide public services with one hand tied behind our back. We lack doctors and have to bring in thousands from overseas, increasingly people with limited language skills and training we have no control over. This is because the BMA asked the government to artificially limit the number of medical school places offered in Britain. Anecdotally I know loads of bright people who got either 3 As or AAB at A level who were desperate to become doctors and couldn't get a place. They'd all have now qualified or be on the cusp of it. It is utter madness, we could double the number of places offered and fill them with decent people and sort a number of these issues within a decade, again.

My understanding is that it's really not that simple. The BMA did vote back in 2008 to limit numbers for (IMO) dubious reasons, but successive governments have been happy to keep numbers limited because of how heavily subsidised the cost of training new doctors is. The BMA have been arguing in favour of increasing numbers (e.g. https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-suppo ... a-analysis ) for a while now. Again, it comes down to money.

And I don't know where that money is supposed to come from. We've backed ourselves into a position where major decisions have been made that have left us significantly worse off, followed by what can only be described as organised funnelling of public funds into the pockets of a small number of corporations and people with close links to the ruling party during Covid, which itself was obviously hugely expensive.

Of course things can be made better. But I do not see a realistic path that takes us there.

Wrt paying for it.

We have to decide if we are a high tax, high services country, like most of Europe, or a low tax, low services country, like the USA. For the last few decades we've been subsidising the tax take by, at various points, selling everything off that wasn't nailed down, oil revenue, borrowing and windfall taxes. That's led an entire generation to think they can have good public services for a lower rate of tax than it actually costs. We need to break that - and the Tories want to go one way (USA), but Labour won't admit they want to go the other because they'll get crucified in the press.

[sockwithaticket]

Wrt doctors, I was under the impression that one of the big limiting factors (that becomes more significant with every retirement, many resulting from the government's recent changes to pensions) is the number of staff available to conduct training in hospitals.

You can make as many places available as you want for students, but once they get beyond theory elements and need practical instruction there's an insurmountable bottleneck.

[Lobby]

Wrt doctors, I was under the impression that one of the big limiting factors (that becomes more significant with every retirement, many resulting from the government's recent changes to pensions) is the number of staff available to conduct training in hospitals.

You can make as many places available as you want for students, but once they get beyond theory elements and need practical instruction there's an insurmountable bottleneck.

Correct. The need to find hospital placements for the final years of training limits place numbers (or at the very least, means that any increase in numbers has to be managed carefully rather than simply allowing a free for all).

The other restriction on medical school places is that schools are only allowed 8% of overseas students. In other subjects overseas students paying high fees massively subsidise the HE system, but the restriction in medicine means that these costs have to be met by universities and the NHS. As an aside a friend of mine involved in medical education used to complain that it was mad for us to refuse to train overseas doctors, but then import loads of them to work in our hospitals.

[Sandstorm]

Wrt doctors, I was under the impression that one of the big limiting factors (that becomes more significant with every retirement, many resulting from the government's recent changes to pensions) is the number of staff available to conduct training in hospitals.

You can make as many places available as you want for students, but once they get beyond theory elements and need practical instruction there's an insurmountable bottleneck.

Hospital building shortage, innit. Crumbling infrastructure again.....

[SaintK]

Wrt doctors, I was under the impression that one of the big limiting factors (that becomes more significant with every retirement, many resulting from the government's recent changes to pensions) is the number of staff available to conduct training in hospitals.

You can make as many places available as you want for students, but once they get beyond theory elements and need practical instruction there's an insurmountable bottleneck.

Hospital building shortage, innit. Crumbling infrastructure again.....

Ah, come on! I've been reliably informed that there are 40 new hospitals being built

[Sandstorm]

Wrt doctors, I was under the impression that one of the big limiting factors (that becomes more significant with every retirement, many resulting from the government's recent changes to pensions) is the number of staff available to conduct training in hospitals.

You can make as many places available as you want for students, but once they get beyond theory elements and need practical instruction there's an insurmountable bottleneck.

Hospital building shortage, innit. Crumbling infrastructure again.....

Ah, come on! I've been reliably informed that there are 40 new hospitals being built

Well we've got the £350 million a week from that bus in the bank..........

[fishfoodie]

Hospital building shortage, innit. Crumbling infrastructure again.....

Ah, come on! I've been reliably informed that there are 40 new hospitals being built

Well we've got the £350 million a week from that bus in the bank..........

I think that's being used at the mo to store PPE that doesn't protect, & feasibility studies for a bridge to NI, & a new Royal Yacht, & a new paint scheme for the Government jets, & flying back stray cats & dogs from Kabul

[tabascoboy]

Does anyone see a path forward for this country in the next five years that would result in major positive changes? I keep calling this place a moribund country and I genuinely believe that. Too much of it has been left to rot and the rest has been looted. Some of the laws brought in over the last few decades are insane and we need a complete overhaul. I worry we're essentially turning ourselves into one of the shittier American states, only without the federal money to spend.

Where are the positives? What is there to hope for, to hang your hat on for the future of the UK? I'm not seeing it anywhere.

Having read the replies here, I only wish it were that easy...

It's going to take a huge amount of putting aside self-interest for the "greater good" from all walks of life - not only politicians. So that's us basically fcuked then...

[TheNatalShark]

Sunak and Starmer are basically the same

Ignoring the detail, I find above very funny in isolation. It may even be funnier if the voter base has perfect sight of the detail.

KEKW

[_Os_]

We've a family friend who works as a town planner, and he's of the opinion that much of the regulations are there as unscrupulous builders would circumvent laws and regulations to keep builds as cheap as possible, and that additional regs were added as part of an arms race to try to keep some form of control - noting that many developers will resort to litigation from which the only real protection is cast-iron policy and standard (woe betide the poor assessor who is up in court on a matter of interpretation).

I mention this only to raise one reason why the regulatory world is so overly complex.

Grenfell, putting aside its utterly horrific outcome, is an interesting study in why this complexity is dangerous - byzantine regs that allow each chain of the process to slope their shoulders and absolve themselves of responsibility, the lack of actual oversight and assurance over these complex regs (both as they're too complex for lay people - the end clients - to interpret, and those who are employed to interpret are contracted by the builders and therefore have vested interests in not actually doing their primary job lest they upset applecarts)

I guess the question is once it's all in place how does it get rolled back without it undermining the point of it being there?

Tories like Rees-Mogg get it wrong when they try and rip up all the rules. Capitalism should be regulated, but where I think things have gone wrong in the UK is there's now an intent to regulate for perfect outcomes. Regulation should just be a minimum baseline nothing more. Instead there's a pride that the UK's regulations "are even better than the EU's", the meaning being that the UK often decided to go beyond EU minimum requirements. With input from all manner of people and concerns that have no stake in what's actually at hand. Meanwhile as you say it becomes so complex it ends up becoming self defeating. This process now covers multiple areas, planning/construction, immigration (which I've mentioned at length), tax (longest tax code in the world, whilst there's so many backdoors for anyone with real money to escape through ... 10 million words of tax code, an entire library shelf, but also massive offshore tax havens).

On the subject on mandatory EPC - this is going to cause carnage*, in some cases it's probably more feasible to knock down a Victorian detached house and build a Barrett home in its place. Our house in Edinburgh has bedrooms in the eaves, there's no real way to get into the spaces to fully insulate without pulling out the entire of upstairs.

* by 'carnage' I mean cottage industry and payday for whoever corners the market in energy efficiency remediation

- This country is built on crumbling infrastructure - public services, transport, national health, etc - which is ruinously expensive to fix
- Our environmental commitments are a sick joke, and (among other things) the climate crisis is itself treated as a joke that can't possibly affect us

This is connected to JM's point. The basic mechanism of the EPC is not about climate/environment issues really, it's instead about reducing energy bills, the measurements are in how much it costs to run a house. Its purpose is also changing by stealth, an E rating used to be acceptable for rented accommodation soon it will be a C (which is above the UK average of D/E). There's a lot going on there, the main one being what started as a minimum standard in the true sense, is now really a compliance ratchet which could potentially be moved to A/B and apply to every dwelling. The compliance costs aren't cheap either, new boiler, new windows, external cladding. Some of this has marginal benefit, as in thousands spent and very little energy bill savings per annum that would take over a decade to recoup. Solar becomes one of the cheaper and easier options to improve the rating (one day install, house doesn't need to be ripped apart, £5k). So the carrot (feed in tariff subsidy) has been cut and the stick (EPC) has arrived. But roof top solar is a poor option for the UK at scale (might be good for individual homes, large roof etc), there's not enough sunshine.

Climate issues can only be addressed by national governments, it's not really true individuals change what they do and it's all good (from memory weren't even lockdown conditions not enough to change direction sufficiently?). Utilities need a large scale infrastructure programme. Doesn't seem true that if government forces a potentially massive misallocation of capital towards dwelling improvements well beyond any reasonable minimum requirement, that it's really going to solve much. Meanwhile the utility companies don't seem to like being in the business of large scale infrastructure investment.

[geordie_6]

Suella de Vil admits in letter to MPs that this new Illegal Migration bill likely won't be compatible with European Convention on Human Rights but seems determined to go ahead anyway.

Hoping to get enough support from their pocket racists to justify them "taking back their borders"?

[tabascoboy]

Suella de Vil admits in letter to MPs that this new Illegal Migration bill likely won't be compatible with European Convention on Human Rights but seems determined to go ahead anyway.

Hoping to get enough support from their pocket racists to justify them "taking back their borders"?

No need to worry if it's not legal or ethical, just don't betray Britain!

[_Os_]

Brits are much less rule focussed than other comparable systems. Try opening a hairdressers without a licence in the US, doing just about anything in Germany, getting round structure in France etc. So I don't think it is a national trait, if anything we have/had a tradition of being a bit more flexible. My take would be that there's been a massive increase in process in this country as the quality of politician has declined (I mean that both in terms of MPs, which you've alluded to before, but also in local government. The ambition and scale of what men like Chamberlain were trying to achieve in Birmingham 100 years ago compared to what Boris/Khan/Burnham have done more recently is tragic to read). Process ensures fewer fuck ups but is designed to throttle progress, which is where we get to the second key point. Process has met politics. The primary driver of local politics in Britain is being anti-development. I used to live in West Hampstead and walk to work in central London unless it was pissing it down, and I'd get at least a leaflet a month about 'saving our village'.

What we're left with is a perfect storm. Local politicians get grief for any development. Development requires adherence to process. If process isn't adhered to = no development, therefore the process gets longer and longer as more and more precision and detail is needed. Net result? Nothing gets built. This is a modern invention and is the exception to the national story rather than the rule.

This all makes sense. But the thing about culture is that it changes and doesn't remain static. My explanation for the poor quality of UK politicians is the mechanisms within the parties and the institutions (parliament etc) that they move through. They all used to work better than what they do now, but that was in a different culture that's now gone. The biggest change being that people gave up on politics and switched from viewing it as something they wanted to participate in because it's needed, to something they wanted to be free from (which is something that's impossible). Basically enough ordinary people used to be happy being party members and sitting through boring meetings, now not enough are and many who are bluntly put are quite mad. The people who became MPs were once happy to read and write vast amounts and now aren't, I've seen MPs over recent years proudly stating they hadn't read the GFA (and other documents) assuming it was "too long" when it's 35 pages. Politics has gone from necessary and boring, to a branch of the entertainment industry and/or something that looks good on the CV for their next job (I've seen this even down to very low levels, people stating "participated in Labour campaign in xyz as part of 123 team, as the lead coordinator" on LinkedIn/their CV).

Politics needs to become boring, serious, and necessary again. Not sure how it gets there without everything getting worse first.

[JM2K6]

erm

[Margin__Walker]

Guessing they don't employ Comms professionals in No. 10 any more.

[dpedin]

Sunak and Starmer are basically the same

Ignoring the detail, I find above very funny in isolation. It may even be funnier if the voter base has perfect sight of the detail.

KEKW

I thought this was a joke harking back to the dark days of covid and three word slogans (that the UK Gov ignored!) with pathetic rhetoric based nonsense. Then I saw it on the news ... FFS! They must be so feckin desperate now and worried sick about the Blonde Bumblecunt and Reform Party they have gone full on racist twats. Oh and the proposed bill doesnt have compatibility with the ECHR legislation - their own assessment suggests it has a more than 50% risk of not meeting the ECHR nor International Law, on which the GFA is based on. Last throw of the dice for a decrepit and failing shit house of a Gov.

[Hal Jordan]

Suella de Vil admits in letter to MPs that this new Illegal Migration bill likely won't be compatible with European Convention on Human Rights but seems determined to go ahead anyway.

Hoping to get enough support from their pocket racists to justify them "taking back their borders"?

No need to worry if it's not legal or ethical, just don't betray Britain!

She is a fucking appalling human being. Gleefully cruel, woefully stupid, blindly arrogant and so far beyond the Peter Principle she's crossed some sort of event horizon.

[tabascoboy]

Ignoring the detail, I find above very funny in isolation. It may even be funnier if the voter base has perfect sight of the detail.

KEKW

I thought this was a joke harking back to the dark days of covid and three word slogans (that the UK Gov ignored!) with pathetic rhetoric based nonsense. Then I saw it on the news ... FFS! They must be so feckin desperate now and worried sick about the Blonde Bumblecunt and Reform Party they have gone full on racist twats. Oh and the proposed bill doesnt have compatibility with the ECHR legislation - their own assessment suggests it has a more than 50% risk of not meeting the ECHR nor International Law, on which the GFA is based on. Last throw of the dice for a decrepit and failing shit house of a Gov.

They might just as well rename themselves the National Front now, stop pretending otherwise

[I like neeps]

Guessing they don't employ Comms professionals in No. 10 any more.

The comms professionals are employed for incendiary copy. Realistically, nobody in the UK actually knows how many boats come into the UK per day/week/month/year. The crisis is entirely manufactured by the press and right wing politicians. And the logical end point is the trap they've got caught in over an issue they've turned highly toxic and can't control.

[Margin__Walker]

Guessing they don't employ Comms professionals in No. 10 any more.

The comms professionals are employed for incendiary copy. Realistically, nobody in the UK actually knows how many boats come into the UK per day/week/month/year. The crisis is entirely manufactured by the press and right wing politicians. And the logical end point is the trap they've got caught in over an issue they've turned highly toxic and can't control.

Oh I know, but I'm talking about the actual copy on the graphic. It reads like only those not arriving in boats will be allowed to be slaves in the UK. Those coming over in the boats will be shit out of luck if they had aspirations of being a slave in Britain.

[Paddington Bear]

Guessing they don't employ Comms professionals in No. 10 any more.

The comms professionals are employed for incendiary copy. Realistically, nobody in the UK actually knows how many boats come into the UK per day/week/month/year. The crisis is entirely manufactured by the press and right wing politicians. And the logical end point is the trap they've got caught in over an issue they've turned highly toxic and can't control.

It's hard to say it is entirely manufactured - not being able to control a border and leaving vulnerable people at the mercy of predatory gangs operating overseas is a crisis in of itself

[I like neeps]

Guessing they don't employ Comms professionals in No. 10 any more.

The comms professionals are employed for incendiary copy. Realistically, nobody in the UK actually knows how many boats come into the UK per day/week/month/year. The crisis is entirely manufactured by the press and right wing politicians. And the logical end point is the trap they've got caught in over an issue they've turned highly toxic and can't control.

It's hard to say it is entirely manufactured - not being able to control a border and leaving vulnerable people at the mercy of predatory gangs operating overseas is a crisis in of itself

Yes true, but the crisis is not one faced by the Daily Mail reading, Stoke on Trent presiding, British electorate who the "solutions" have been created for.

[tabascoboy]

Guessing they don't employ Comms professionals in No. 10 any more.

The comms professionals are employed for incendiary copy. Realistically, nobody in the UK actually knows how many boats come into the UK per day/week/month/year. The crisis is entirely manufactured by the press and right wing politicians. And the logical end point is the trap they've got caught in over an issue they've turned highly toxic and can't control.

It's hard to say it is entirely manufactured - not being able to control a border and leaving vulnerable people at the mercy of predatory gangs operating overseas is a crisis in of itself

A consequence of not offering safe legal routes maybe? These issues need international co-operation and conciliation, but we have a government which now prefers confrontation with a sledgehammer as first option.

[Paddington Bear]

The comms professionals are employed for incendiary copy. Realistically, nobody in the UK actually knows how many boats come into the UK per day/week/month/year. The crisis is entirely manufactured by the press and right wing politicians. And the logical end point is the trap they've got caught in over an issue they've turned highly toxic and can't control.

It's hard to say it is entirely manufactured - not being able to control a border and leaving vulnerable people at the mercy of predatory gangs operating overseas is a crisis in of itself

A consequence of not offering safe legal routes maybe? These issues need international co-operation and conciliation, but we have a government which now prefers confrontation with a sledgehammer as first option.

Sure, this is part of the story. But whilst we allow people to stay who arrive on small boats without having genuine asylum/refugee grounds, there is likely to always be a market for people to cross. See the increasing number of Indians using it as a route into the country.

[Biffer]

It's hard to say it is entirely manufactured - not being able to control a border and leaving vulnerable people at the mercy of predatory gangs operating overseas is a crisis in of itself

A consequence of not offering safe legal routes maybe? These issues need international co-operation and conciliation, but we have a government which now prefers confrontation with a sledgehammer as first option.

Sure, this is part of the story. But whilst we allow people to stay who arrive on small boats without having genuine asylum/refugee grounds, there is likely to always be a market for people to cross. See the increasing number of Indians using it as a route into the country.

So we need to spend money on faster processing and effort on international treaties about returning people. Neither of which this government are willing to do.