The BBC have already moved on to the likes of Guido Fawkes and bringing in 'thinkthanks' with undeclared financial interests.
Westminster Politics
- Thread starter altodevil
- Start date
Yeah whenever I stumble onto something like The Papers on the BBC or Sky News Press Preview it just feel completely bizarre, a group of people I wouldn't want to know talking about newspapers I wouldn't want to read.Still I think these types of shows will be around for a while as 1)It feels empty air time 2)There's actual people who make a living out of appear on these shows.
Although we can take comfort in the fact no one is watching.
this explains why they don't like the NHS
I watch the press preview now and then. It can be interesting on days big news break.
Lovely stuff.
As if old people donate their estates to the tidies just to continue fecking the young once they’ve gone, wtf?
The Tories have decided they are already full of massive cnuts and have denied Arron Banks membership. Who'd have thunk it?
These rail fare rises are a step too far. Why don’t commuters rise up?
Railways signal the state of a nation. Fast, clean, cheap, punctual trains make a country look well run: Mussolini and Hitler knew the potency of “making the trains run on time”. Any prime minister who puts Chris Grayling in charge, an ideological obsessive who destroys all he touches, is tone deaf to the national pulse.
This week’s train fare rise announcement was political folly on a grand scale, after June’s train timetable fiasco left tens of thousands of trains cancelled. Fares have risen at twice the pace of wages, up 42%, pay up just 18% since 2008, with driver shortages, short trains and customers short-changed by the some of the most expensive fares in the world. A Peterborough to Kings Cross season ticket costs £6,540 a year while in Germany a BahnCard 100buys a year’s travel anywhere for £3,840. Meanwhile, fuel tax has been frozen for seven years.
To make the point, one protester bought a car, taxed it, filled it with petrol and travelled from Bristol to Crouch End for less than the £218 full train fare, with £11 left over for lunch. People are spending one-fifth and more of their disposable incomes on season tickets, so these fare rises up-end super-fine calculations on the lower cost of a mortgage balanced against rising train fares with every mile travelled from centres of work. The missing ingredient is a reminder to business, forever whingeing about taxes, that unless the state carries their staff to work, low pay doesn’t cover fares. Dishonestly, the government uses the higher retail prices index to raise regulated fares and student loans, an index the Treasury and Bank of England declare “flawed” and “useless”, yet conveniently choose the lower consumer price index to keep pension and benefit rises low.
Two-thirds of voters want the railways to be renationalised, as Labour proposes, with only 19% opposed. The nonsense of rail privatisation is well-understood: the taxpayer pumps in £3.5bn subsidy, the many companies take out millions in profit; each has their own well-oiled board and chief executive, these rolling stock companies rolling in profits. Whatever happened to that pledge to parliament made by transport secretary John MacGregor in 1993: “I see no reason why fares should increase faster under the new system than they do under the present nationalised industry structure. In many cases, they will be more flexible and will be reduced.”
Companies can spend £60m a year just to bid for franchises. That’s an administrative madness that far outstrips the old rightwing complaint against British Rail that it was a bureaucratic monolith synonymous with state-owned, shabby, producer-captured sluggishness. John Major may be a revered anti-Brexit hero now, but it was his personal ideological fixation that dreamed up dashing liveries for different companies, which he imagined steaming away in hot competition embodying the free market. But there’s precious little competition – instead passengers are stuck with empty choices.
When profits are less than hoped, companies simply bail out, the east coast franchise has collapsed three times and been rescued by the state. Under public ownership, satisfaction rose to 91% and it yielded £225m a year profit to the state. That’s the embarrassment that had George Osborne dashing to reprivatise it in 2015, only for it to collapse again.
Meanwhile Network Rail scavenges for cash with a £1.5bn sell-off of railway arches harbouring 4,455 age-old businesses alongside new start-ups, going against every ethos of a state-owned company.
Is nationalisation a magic bullet train? There are risks: will the Treasury invest enough or, as before, keep cutting back on capital? Will the unions hold more sway than passengers? The same basic dilemmas will remain – how much should the state spend on a minority mode of transport, when cars and buses take most people to work? Council funding for buses has halved since 2010, and 3,000 vital services have been cut. Three-quarters of goods travel by road, not rail.
Can Labour for the first time offer a genuinely integrated transport system where at last everything links up? Imagining joined-up trains, buses, trams and bike-routes has been beyond all transport secretaries. Right now, no one is in charge, and that goes for virtually every department in Theresa May’s paralysed, swinging-in-the-wind regime.
Trains do signify the fitness of a government. If an incoming Labour government concentrates hard on making trains run on time at fair fares, that would be a potent signal of all-round efficiency worth investing in heavily. But what perplexes me is the passivity of train-travelling commuters, among the most well-heeled, empowered of citizens. Yet apart from a minor kicking down of a gate in St Albans during the worst of the timetabling disaster, they fail to rebel. Along Southern’s lines, passing through nothing but top Tory MPs’ constituencies, passengers tolerate years of strikes and disruption, with more to come. Why aren’t they taking direct action, voting out their MPs and super-gluing ticket barriers? Ah, I forgot. The private companies get paid regardless of ticket income: only the state loses if people refuse to pay, another brilliant bit of contracting in these failed franchises.
• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...fares-rise-privatisation-commuters-passengers
Railways signal the state of a nation. Fast, clean, cheap, punctual trains make a country look well run: Mussolini and Hitler knew the potency of “making the trains run on time”. Any prime minister who puts Chris Grayling in charge, an ideological obsessive who destroys all he touches, is tone deaf to the national pulse.
This week’s train fare rise announcement was political folly on a grand scale, after June’s train timetable fiasco left tens of thousands of trains cancelled. Fares have risen at twice the pace of wages, up 42%, pay up just 18% since 2008, with driver shortages, short trains and customers short-changed by the some of the most expensive fares in the world. A Peterborough to Kings Cross season ticket costs £6,540 a year while in Germany a BahnCard 100buys a year’s travel anywhere for £3,840. Meanwhile, fuel tax has been frozen for seven years.
To make the point, one protester bought a car, taxed it, filled it with petrol and travelled from Bristol to Crouch End for less than the £218 full train fare, with £11 left over for lunch. People are spending one-fifth and more of their disposable incomes on season tickets, so these fare rises up-end super-fine calculations on the lower cost of a mortgage balanced against rising train fares with every mile travelled from centres of work. The missing ingredient is a reminder to business, forever whingeing about taxes, that unless the state carries their staff to work, low pay doesn’t cover fares. Dishonestly, the government uses the higher retail prices index to raise regulated fares and student loans, an index the Treasury and Bank of England declare “flawed” and “useless”, yet conveniently choose the lower consumer price index to keep pension and benefit rises low.
Two-thirds of voters want the railways to be renationalised, as Labour proposes, with only 19% opposed. The nonsense of rail privatisation is well-understood: the taxpayer pumps in £3.5bn subsidy, the many companies take out millions in profit; each has their own well-oiled board and chief executive, these rolling stock companies rolling in profits. Whatever happened to that pledge to parliament made by transport secretary John MacGregor in 1993: “I see no reason why fares should increase faster under the new system than they do under the present nationalised industry structure. In many cases, they will be more flexible and will be reduced.”
Companies can spend £60m a year just to bid for franchises. That’s an administrative madness that far outstrips the old rightwing complaint against British Rail that it was a bureaucratic monolith synonymous with state-owned, shabby, producer-captured sluggishness. John Major may be a revered anti-Brexit hero now, but it was his personal ideological fixation that dreamed up dashing liveries for different companies, which he imagined steaming away in hot competition embodying the free market. But there’s precious little competition – instead passengers are stuck with empty choices.
When profits are less than hoped, companies simply bail out, the east coast franchise has collapsed three times and been rescued by the state. Under public ownership, satisfaction rose to 91% and it yielded £225m a year profit to the state. That’s the embarrassment that had George Osborne dashing to reprivatise it in 2015, only for it to collapse again.
Meanwhile Network Rail scavenges for cash with a £1.5bn sell-off of railway arches harbouring 4,455 age-old businesses alongside new start-ups, going against every ethos of a state-owned company.
Is nationalisation a magic bullet train? There are risks: will the Treasury invest enough or, as before, keep cutting back on capital? Will the unions hold more sway than passengers? The same basic dilemmas will remain – how much should the state spend on a minority mode of transport, when cars and buses take most people to work? Council funding for buses has halved since 2010, and 3,000 vital services have been cut. Three-quarters of goods travel by road, not rail.
Can Labour for the first time offer a genuinely integrated transport system where at last everything links up? Imagining joined-up trains, buses, trams and bike-routes has been beyond all transport secretaries. Right now, no one is in charge, and that goes for virtually every department in Theresa May’s paralysed, swinging-in-the-wind regime.
Trains do signify the fitness of a government. If an incoming Labour government concentrates hard on making trains run on time at fair fares, that would be a potent signal of all-round efficiency worth investing in heavily. But what perplexes me is the passivity of train-travelling commuters, among the most well-heeled, empowered of citizens. Yet apart from a minor kicking down of a gate in St Albans during the worst of the timetabling disaster, they fail to rebel. Along Southern’s lines, passing through nothing but top Tory MPs’ constituencies, passengers tolerate years of strikes and disruption, with more to come. Why aren’t they taking direct action, voting out their MPs and super-gluing ticket barriers? Ah, I forgot. The private companies get paid regardless of ticket income: only the state loses if people refuse to pay, another brilliant bit of contracting in these failed franchises.
• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...fares-rise-privatisation-commuters-passengers
If this is who the Foreign Secretary is taking advice from, there is well and truly no hope. Kissinger is a despicable war criminal.
You only need look at the state of Hunt’s tea to know what an awful human being he is.
This country needs fixing. It's dying on its feet. Frontline police have been cut by a third.
I mean, there's 650 MP's, and literally thousands of those other jobs. Not sure why they've been added to the bottom. The figures are horrifying enough.
But but but they put a brown person in charge
It's shocking. If wages had kept pace with RPI inflation newly qualified nurses would currently be on about £6,000 more a year. Being a police officer, nurse, teacher...these should be decent paying jobs. They should be decent car and two holidays a year where you don't have to stay in a hotel that has shit on the sheets, types of jobs. Absolute fecking shame of it.
After 3 years in these professions everyone should be guaranteed to at least be on the average wage, currently £27,271
Madness and The Specials did more than she could be bothered to.
Part of me wants him to so he can get absolutely smashed. But then anything is possible these days, so hopefully he doesn’t.
One of the biggest, if not the biggest, charlatans in British post-war politics. Has milked every gravy train going, while railing against “career politicians” for supposedly doing the same. The day he fecks off, society upgrades.
'Truth is, he just can't stand being out of the headlines for long.
What the feck. fair play for trying.Just came in to post this
You’ll get similar results in favour of the Tories if you only allowed 50+ Year olds to vote. Such is the chasm between the generations. The trouble is, the older folk always vote, whereas the young uns don’t.
But the numbers voting Labour at a young age have drastically increased % wise, which is a big problem for the Tories in the long-term. The average age at which someone switches from Labour to Tory went from something like 34 to 47 in the last election.
Would like to see a demographic analysis of the UK. There was research that said youth turn out in the last GE was very good. Maybe there are just more older people. The birth rate has been shrinking for a long time.
The following article gives a really good and interesting summary... the sample size is huge for a study of this type, so the figures are likely to be fairly accurate.
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/06/13/how-britain-voted-2017-general-election/
Thanks.
not enough is being said about UKIP moving up in the polls and that it's hurting the tories. Also the lib dems
The centrist surge!
Two Russian charged over Novichok attack, but UK cannot get them out of Russia
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...-russians-charged-conspiracy-murder-novichok/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...-russians-charged-conspiracy-murder-novichok/
Hard to argue that he doesn't have a point. Politics has become the exclusive playground of those who want to deregulate without consequence and those who genuinely seem to believe one of the most fundamental issues facing the British people is deciding whether or not the establishment of the state of Israel was a racist endeavour.
The guy is literally the leader of a centrist moderate party. Who hardly anyone is voting for.
It’s funny because it’s true.