Perpetual UK Politics Thread Part Two

[Hangfire]

https://www.ft.com/content/7a971bac-981d-447d-853e-d215f183594d

Planning reforms to threaten thousands of ecologists’ jobs, warns sector​

Dropping green requirements will pose risk of major job losses, warns industry body

Reforms to change how environmental concerns are addressed in the UK planning system have sparked job security fears among thousands of ecologists, according to senior industry figures.

The proposed measures will significantly reduce the number of protected species surveys required for development to be approved, as part of a government drive to speed up delivery of major infrastructure projects.

The planning and infrastructure bill, which faces its second reading in parliament on Monday, is intended to “get Britain building” and remove obstructive regulation.

But Jason Reeves, head of policy at Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, said the overhaul could lead to job losses and deter young people from entering the sector.

“We’ve had more members contact us about this than any other consultation we’ve had in probably 20 years I’ve been here, that’s how much of an issue this is for members,” he said.

Oh no, my heart fucking bleeds. Oh wait no fuck em all. About time those oxygen thieves get a decent fucking job the useless fucks.

I hope the entirety of those fucking parasitic fucking gnats are worried.

 

[Demento]

I get the root need for these things, but almost every single case seems to end up... Excessive. Endangered species need to be protected, but the guidelines allow them to define "endangered" in such a way that just being rare in that area (even if endemic elsewhere) is enough to stop anything cold.

 

[SnakePlisskenUK]

And to tie the last two subjects discussed in the thread together.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...ames-crossing-plan-essex-kent-approved-tunnel

Here London, have another £9bn public funding for transport.

 

[SnakePlisskenUK]

Well, Reeves spring statement has inevitably gone down like a bucket of cold sick with absolutely everybody.

Quite a lot of people going "this isn't what I voted for". Oh yes it is. Starmer, Reeves and their advisors have never hidden what they are and what they will do, and if you thought they were doing something else, then maybe you shouldn't have fought with the fury of a thousand suns against the people who were actually going to try to deliver that something else, rather than supporting George Osborne in a skirt.

 

[Ananke]

Reeves doing a remarkable job of doublethink (link)

And Reeves replied with a broad-brush answer defending her record.

NHS waiting lists down for five months, rolling out free breakfast clubs in primary schools, the national living wage going up by £1,400 pounds from next week, 2.5% of GDP spent on defence, including £2.2bn pounds invested next year, record housebuilding, the highest level of housebuilding for 40 years. That’s the change that we promised, that’s the change that we are delivering.

Picking on a few points:

• Housebuilding from July 2024 to Feb 2025 is the lowest seen since 2013. Not the kind of record about which one really wants to boast.
• Record high levels of housebuilding in future is a promise we've heard from every government in the last 20 years (1), while the overall trend has been downwards since the mid 1960s. I'll believe it when I see it.
• 2.5% of GDP on defence is a promise by 2027, hardly an accomplishment right now. If a future promise is considered an achievement, then that belongs to Hunt (who promised it by 2030, before Trump's wrecking ball was unleashed), and not Reeves.

(1) And that's just as long as I've been paying attention.

 

[SnakePlisskenUK]

I've been hugely successful and delivered on everything, as I plan to invest in a castle and a Ferrari by 2027...

 

[Numfuddle]

London City is tiny. It can only handle small planes - A318 size max. Its location means it has lots of restrictions and you need specially qualified pilots for the approach angle.
London Gatwick is nearly at capacity during normal operation and only has one runway. Luton and Stanstead also only have one runway and I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't far off capacity. The largest planes wouldn't be able to land at some of the other airports as the runways won't be long enough.

Also Stanstead is basically an hour away from city center and the rail and transit bus connection to London is an additional bottleneck.

 

[El Capitano]

Housebuilding from July 2024 to Feb 2025 is the lowest seen since 2013. Not the kind of record about which one really wants to boast.

In fairness, house starts crashed hard at the end of 2023. The numbers are coming back up, but they're still well below norm and any increases will still just be reverting to mean at this point. Housing completions are broadly static, but there has been a slow trend downwards since around the end of 2019. source

 

[Demento]

Well, Reeves spring statement has inevitably gone down like a bucket of cold sick with absolutely everybody.

Quite a lot of people going "this isn't what I voted for". Oh yes it is. Starmer, Reeves and their advisors have never hidden what they are and what they will do, and if you thought they were doing something else, then maybe you shouldn't have fought with the fury of a thousand suns against the people who were actually going to try to deliver that something else, rather than supporting George Osborne in a skirt.

If anyone is surprised by Reeves' actions, the only thing you can draw from that is that they haven't been paying attention for the past 10 years. She's somewhere to the right of Thatcher.

 

[SnakePlisskenUK]

No, no, no. She's Centre Left. Polly Toynbee and Rory Stewart and lots of other Very Sensible People said so.

An an aside, you are right that she has always been this way and openly so. What just occurred to me is that whenever she couldn't help herself and blurted out something like "workhouses are a good idea" then the media would react with "she shouldn't have said that out loud" and never "what the hell?"

 

[JimCampbell]

Polly Toynbee and Rory Stewart and lots of other Very Sensible People said so.

It is, in a very grim way, kind of amusing to watch Toynbee, et al, handwringing about how awful this all is having previously applauded the complete destruction of the Corbyn project and celebrating the 'adults being back in the room', without ever once acknowledging that their whole-hearted support of the latter led directly to the former. Who could possibly have seen this coming?

 

[derMarc]

You'll get a reform/con government in was it 2029? Or earlier. Another reason for the EU not to trust anything a current UK government does or proposes.

 

[bjn]

You'll get a reform/con government in was it 2029? Or earlier. Another reason for the EU not to trust anything a current UK government does or proposes.

It’s looking that way. Labour is making so many unforced errors so they can stay in their self imposed fiscal straight jacket. The UK has a huge range of structural problems, none of which Reeves’ actions will help fix. FFS, raising National Insurance is literally a tax on employment, which is not a way to boost employment. The charity my wife works for will likely have to let some people go because of it, while it will eat a huge amount of any extra spending on the NHS.

If the Germans have decided that their own fiscal masochism can be relaxed, we should too.

Also, tax the rich, especially all the damned speculators.

 

[derMarc]

If the Germans have decided that their own fiscal masochism can be relaxed, we should too.

Also, tax the rich, especially all the damned speculators.

The UK has completed the journey to a rentier economy. Everyone is extracting rent for something from somebody, worst of all with regards to housing. This isn't sustainable, obviously. You're paying enormous interest for your debt, unlike Germany. Simply taxing the rich isn't going to work. Housing will need to change, fat chance that's going to happen.

 

[bjn]

As I said, there are immense structural problems in the UK, and the rentier gouging is one of them. Apparently doing anything about it, like renationalising the effectively bankrupt water companies, is seen “anti-business”.

 

[ramases]

Re the Heathrow episode:

Apparently Heathrow does have feeds from two other substations, and it would have been able to draw power from them.

What it doesn't have is sufficient power transfer provisions to switch to its B or C feed in a shorter timeframe than what we saw.

Edit: Airport management says that improving on this might require an investment of up to 1 billion. The total regulatory (which includes also financial assets in all subcompanies and all financial instruments/investments) asset base of the Holding is like 20 billion. Smells a bit like a "but i don't wanna pay this" cost estimate tbh.

 

[SnakePlisskenUK]

Don't worry - a publicly funded bailout will do the necessary work for £1.5bn. Call it "securing essential national infrastructure". If you want to get really clever about it, you can cut it from the welfare budget by arguing that poor people don't fly out of Heathrow anyway.

 

[crazydee]

Re the Heathrow episode:

Apparently Heathrow does have feeds from two other substations, and it would have been able to draw power from them.

What it doesn't have is sufficient power transfer provisions to switch to its B or C feed in a shorter timeframe than what we saw.

Edit: Airport management says that improving on this might require an investment of up to 1 billion. The total regulatory (which includes also financial assets in all subcompanies and all financial instruments/investments) asset base of the Holding is like 20 billion. Smells a bit like a "but i don't wanna pay this" cost estimate tbh.

Long, long ago, I did financial services software and infrastructure for a living.

Anything failover needs to be used regularly or it will not work when you need it; for reasons like this. They probably got here by upgrading the three feeds, but not upgrading the switch gear, because that was out of scope.

The magic time period is about 2 weeks. Practise fail over less often than that and there will be issues most fail overs. Do it more often and you will have to fix the issues, or accept that there isn't a fail over process any more.

The real root cause here is probably that Heathrow Airport Holdings loses a bit of income but probably doesn't pay for the the impact of the outage. Other stakeholders take the majority of the hit.

That's what was different in financial services - the bank could be very clear about the costs of outage time, and the those costs were bourne by the bank. So there was a simple budgetary case for mitigation efforts.

 

[ramases]

The real root cause here is probably that Heathrow Airport Holdings loses a bit of income but probably doesn't pay for the the impact of the outage. Other stakeholders take the majority of the hit.

A very comfortable position, to be able to risk-shift like that.

I also find it kind of curious, to be honest, that BA doesn't multi-hub, and instead single-hubs out of LHR. Yes, it does fly a lot out of LGW, but here's the thing: LGW only has a very small fraction of the feeder network LHR has.

This is very different to the situation of KLM/AF with CDG/AMS, or Lufthansa with FRA/MUC; their route network gives them much more options, not only to reroute in case of problems but also in how they deal with the airports.

BA's reliance on LHR means it has has very little effective commercial leverage over the airport. Their "friends" at QA probably have more leverage than them, considering that they own 20% of the airport; pardon, this is of course incorrect. It is not Qatar Airways that holds the investment, it is the Qatar Investment Authorities, and there's certainly no sort of political connection whatsoever between the two. Especially not in a country like the State of Qatar.

 

[xoxox]

I also find it kind of curious, to be honest, that BA doesn't multi-hub, and instead single-hubs out of LHR. Yes, it does fly a lot out of LGW, but here's the thing: LGW only has a very small fraction of the feeder network LHR has.

This is very different to the situation of KLM/AF with CDG/AMS, or Lufthansa with FRA/MUC; their route network gives them much more options, not only to reroute in case of problems but also in how they deal with the airports.

IAG also own Iberia, so pretty much exactly the same situation as KLM/AF with LHR/MAD

 

[ramases]

IAG also own Iberia, so pretty much exactly the same situation as KLM/AF with LHR/MAD

Ah, Iberian, the king of the el cheapo South American routes. You too can have lower prices if you jam in a couple extra rows into the same hull ...

They have gotten a lot better in recent years ... but they had lot to of potential to improve.

If I had to long haul out of London, and would need to detour for another hub, I'd frankly be much more likely to go via KLM, AF, QA (for Asian routes), LH or Turkish (also Asian), before I would go with Iberian.

 

[Neill78]

Yeah, the thing about redundancy is that if you do it right it doesn't add more capacity it just means you can't lose the capacity you have quite as easily but it does increase cost.

So they don't like it, no sir.

 

[SnakePlisskenUK]

Wow. It turns out that if a Government invests in deprived areas and towns, then those places tend not to fall prey to easy populism of right-wing grifters? Who knew?

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...show-smaller-reform-uk-vote-share-study-finds

 

[Neill78]

Wow. It turns out that if a Government invests in deprived areas and towns, then those places tend not to fall prey to easy populism of right-wing grifters? Who knew?

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...show-smaller-reform-uk-vote-share-study-finds

Every sociology 101 student from 1982 on? But why listen to experts when leaded gasoline is so much more delicious.

/Depression

 

[Embattle]

A harm reduction role for Penny Mordant, I'm fairly sure that is not smoking in the first place or quitting asap:

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...ising-one-of-the-worlds-largest-tobacco-firms

 

[SnakePlisskenUK]

If I had any Photoshop talent, I'd find that photo of her with the Big Sword and put a ciggie in its place.

(Basically what I am saying is, if you know anyone, get them to do this.)

 

[nimro]

Parliament is being recalled (it's on Easter recess right now) for a rare Saturday sitting tomorrow to debate emergency legislation about the future of the British Steel plant in Scunthorpe.

Govt spokesperson: “Tomorrow, parliament will be recalled to debate the Steel Industry (Special Measures) bill. The bill provides the government with the power to direct steel companies in England, which we will use to protect the Scunthorpe site. It enables the UK government to preserve capability and ensure public safety. It also ensures all options remain viable for the future of the plant and the livelihoods it supports."

I was mildly amused by this quote in the article from an MP:

One MP said the move was “going down extremely badly” with colleagues who had been given no warning about the need to return to Westminster, when it had been known for weeks that British Steel was in trouble.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Heaven forfend MPs have to show up to their place of work!

And yeah, in the current global climate letting a capacity like steelmaking close entirely (as this is the only active virgin steel production in the country right now) would be very silly.

 

[bjn]

Allowing secure remote voting in some circumstances would be a very useful thing.

Most of the UK's political class have swallowed neo-liberal economics to the extent that they can't see a strategically important capability for all the market "efficencies" they are chasing. Hopefully they don't let this tank. The UK still has no iron ore mines to speak of any more, so the furnaces will be stuck at the end of a supply chain, likely starting in Australia.

 

[derMarc]

Sweden is much closer.