The banker loving, baby-eating Tory party thread (regenerated)

[sidcow]

2 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

Who’ve you seen arguing for more lorries?

If we don't build more railway lines, we don't create the extra freight paths so more lorries are on the road.  No one was arguing specially FOR it but but arguing against it the net result is inevitably more buses and more cars and more lorries.

In fact I am a big believer this should go all the way to Edinburgh and help take internal flights away as well.

[chrisp65]

3 minutes ago, sidcow said:

If we don't build more railway lines, we don't create the extra freight paths so more lorries are on the road.  No one was arguing specially FOR it but but arguing against it the net result is inevitably more buses and more cars and more lorries.

In fact I am a big believer this should go all the way to Edinburgh and help take internal flights away as well.

But if we spend the money getting to London all the time how does that get freight off the road to Holyhead?

If we actually had electrified the track to Swansea as was promised, that would reduce the clamour for widening the motorway.

I don’t know the detail, but I’d suspect the same is true for Ipswich and Sheppey and Bristol and Middlesborough.

London London London London. Surely they must need another airport as well? Hey, I bet they need more water too, due to all the extra business. We could build a big pipe from somewhere with water. It’s an abject lack of vision and planning and strategy that I’m objecting to.

[bickster]

2 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

But if we spend the money getting to London all the time how does that get freight off the road to Holyhead?

Because separating Fast services from the semi-fast and slow services increases rail capacity. The bottleneck isn't on the line from Holyhead to say Crewe, the bottleneck is on the WCML it doesn't have the capacity for freight to use much of it because of the Fast / Express passenger trains. The Fast Services require huge gaps between the trains for safety. Slow services and freight do not need the huge gaps and more of the line can be filled with trains safely

[chrisp65]

I’m not ducking out! This is genuinely interesting, but I’m out for a couple of hours, I’m not sulking, honest!

Perhaps it needs to be somewhere other than babyeating? Perhaps we actually need a UK Plan thread?

Back in a bit…

[sidcow]

16 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

But if we spend the money getting to London all the time how does that get freight off the road to Holyhead?

If we actually had electrified the track to Swansea as was promised, that would reduce the clamour for widening the motorway.

I don’t know the detail, but I’d suspect the same is true for Ipswich and Sheppey and Bristol and Middlesborough.

London London London London. Surely they must need another airport as well? Hey, I bet they need more water too, due to all the extra business. We could build a big pipe from somewhere with water. It’s an abject lack of vision and planning and strategy that I’m objecting to.

As I said, it's the busiest most overcrowded line.

And Birmingham is the second city so the more commuter routes you can open up the more sense it makes.

More bang for your very, very expensive buck.

The Birmingham area is a very busy rail interchange,  The WCML stretch between Crewe and Milton Keynes intersects many other railway lines.  You could for example create more pathways to North Wales.  Freight trains will run on short stretches of it before changing lines.  

I'm no railway expert, not by a long shot, I am sure a real expert could run through all the new possibilities this opens up.

Lets face it, Government doesn't spend anything on anything without a more than rock solid business case.  I'm sure this jumped through no end of hoops.

And what pisses me off is this.  OK, it may be £77bn,  It may be £100bn, but this will still be paying for itself 200 years from now, trains will be running through this route in 200-300 year time.  How much did the original WCML cost to build 150 years ago?  Is anyone bitching about the cost today?   This is ultra long term investment in the UK.

Edited March 9, 2023 by sidcow

[Wainy316]

Everything else aside HS2 can be nothing but great for Brum can it?

[DCJonah]

2 hours ago, bickster said:

Improving Public transport is a good thing No?

Lots of people don't understand what the aim of HS2 is? They just see it as another railway line that enables you to get to that London quicker. It really isn't that, the aim has been badly explained from the off. I've posted this before but a railway engineer explains why HS2 is really important to public railways and the advantages it will bring across huge parts of the rail network. The getting to London so many minutes faster is just the by-product of building a new modern railway. That isn't it's purpose

 

Thanks for sharing that. I wasn't fully aware. 

I just still struggle with the amount of £70 plus billion. That seems an incredible amount of money. 

I hope the project eventually is worth it. 

[bickster]

1 minute ago, DCJonah said:

I just still struggle with the amount of £70 plus billion. That seems an incredible amount of money. 

Test and Trace - £37bil and it ran from an excel spreadsheet.

[bobzy]

1 hour ago, sidcow said:

And what pisses me off is this.  OK, it may be £77bn,  It may be £100bn, but this will still be paying for itself 200 years from now, trains will be running through this route in 200-300 year time.  How much did the original WCML cost to build 150 years ago?  Is anyone bitching about the cost today?   This is ultra long term investment in the UK.

Of the line itself, no.

But trains are **** extortionate.  They should sort that out before just chucking down more track.

[Nicho]

3 hours ago, Rodders said:

How is Linekers comments newsworthy? Bbc such a **** bent news organisation

Its also very funny how the Tories like to tear down the BBC as anti government and left wing when they have so obviously been corrupted by it towards them not against. 

[Genie]

13 minutes ago, bickster said:

Test and Trace - £37bil and it ran from an excel spreadsheet.

2 wrongs don’t make a right..

Also, the test part was reasonably successful, and to be fair to them they didn’t have the luxury of years to plan it. 

[blandy]

17 hours ago, foreveryoung said:

I've said I'm not a hater of Asylum seekers, I just don't like how they enter the country over the Channel

Sadly, they have no option. That's the problem. the government has made it impossible for genuine asylum seekers from most nations to apply for asylum from outside the UK, so they have to come here to apply, but there is no route for them to get here "legally.

[bickster]

2 minutes ago, Genie said:

2 wrongs don’t make a right..

Also, the test part was reasonably successful, and to be fair to them they didn’t have the luxury of years to plan it. 

The point wasn't about wrongs and rights. It was about the relative costs of stuff. People quote numbers in billions and think they are huge sums of money

HS2 (phase 1) started in 2017 and will complete in 2029, The cost is £44bil across 12 years that is less than £4bil per year. It isn't huge sums of money being spaffed up a wall

[KentVillan]

7 hours ago, blandy said:

There is. People entering the uk without authority are one such category.  It’s what this whole latest row is about. The baby eaters propose that this category of illegal immigrants will be barred from claiming asylum. 

The issue is that people who use the phase “illegal immigrants” in this debate usually make a distinction between illegal immigrants and “refugees” or “legitimate asylum seekers”, and yet the latter often enter the country via unauthorised routes - so would be “illegal immigrants” by your definition.

For that reason, the term “illegal immigrant” doesn’t really mean a great deal, as there are two separate things being elided, and people can be illegal/unauthorised in none, either or both categories.

One is unauthorised entry, and the other is living / working in the country illegally.

You can have unauthorised entrants who nonetheless have legitimate asylum claims, and you can have so-called “undocumented” people who initially entered the country via authorised routes but now live/work here illegally.

The Govt proposal is to completely merge the two categories, but this is unworkable because it’s not how any other country handles it, and it causes problems further upstream which will just lead to retaliation from France (etc). There’s no unilateral solution to this problem.

[foreveryoung]

7 minutes ago, bickster said:

The point wasn't about wrongs and rights. It was about the relative costs of stuff. People quote numbers in billions and think they are huge sums of money

HS2 (phase 1) started in 2017 and will complete in 2029, The cost is £44bil across 12 years that is less than £4bil per year. It isn't huge sums of money being spaffed up a wall

Hs2 has recently had it's belts tightened, before contractors were spaffing money away left right and centre, I know a couple of guys working on it, you can't get a new pair of boots now without written justification.

[desensitized43]

2 hours ago, sidcow said:

FFS. Its not about 10 minutes faster. It's about releasing massive extra capacity on existing overcrowded lines for more local services and a huge uplift in freight trains taking thousands of lorries off the road. 

All these things create employment and opportunities and increase the efficiency of the nation (we're a very inefficient nation compared to our peers and one of the big reasons for this is because transport in this country is piss poor).

Other nations have multiple high speed train lines. They are a good thing. Seems the general public are as short sighted as our government about investing in the UK's public infrastructure. 

My comment was a joke but oh well.

I’m more than familiar with how HS2 works since my brother works for them in the office at snow hill. Because of that I know all about how utterly wasteful and how ridiculously the whole thing has been managed. People on stupid wages, crazy contracts that have gone out to all kinds of companies, Compulsory purchases at massively over market rate. I could go on but I wouldn’t want to say things out of turn.

Bottom line is that it’s not the worst idea in the world but it’s been terribly executed. They should have started by connecting the northern cities that for too long haven’t had the kind of investment London has. Starting with the Birmingham-London stretch has meant that we’ll likely never see the Manchester and Leeds stretches. Utterly pointless.

I get what you’re saying about the added capacity but seriously without the bit that we were all interested in and the bit that could have added the most value to us as a country, it just hasn’t been worth it.

[blandy]

13 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

so would be “illegal immigrants” by your definition

It's not "my" definition. It's what the law says.

[blandy]

2 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

But if we spend the money getting to London all the time how does that get freight off the road to Holyhead?

If we actually had electrified the track to Swansea as was promised, that would reduce the clamour for widening the motorway.

I don’t know the detail, but I’d suspect the same is true for Ipswich and Sheppey and Bristol and Middlesborough.

London London London London. Surely they must need another airport as well? Hey, I bet they need more water too, due to all the extra business. We could build a big pipe from somewhere with water. It’s an abject lack of vision and planning and strategy that I’m objecting to.

I mean, yeah - but there's a bit in @bickster's video (I've time stamped it here) which explains some of it. I'm with you generally, though.

 

[KentVillan]

The problem with HS2 is that it is genuinely a shitstorm, but also most of its most vocal opponents are completely disingenuous NIMBYs.

The thing its proponents never seem to have been able to explain effectively is that more rail capacity has knock on positive effects on other lines, on roads, airports, etc. The more options you have to travel between two places, the easier it is to travel by any of those, and that’s why more capacity is a good thing…

[KentVillan]

8 minutes ago, blandy said:

It's not "my" definition. It's what the law says.

Which law is that? I don’t think there’s any “illegal immigrant” category in law, except perhaps in the new bill put forward by Braverman