The English are involved in a struggle to remain relevant on the world stage and that involves managing relationships with allies, partners and adversaries. There’s no logical reason to roll out the red carpet for trump other than we may need their military support and access to their market. Similarly, we need to trade with China and can’t stand on moral principles when they break our rules.
This is what peak trolling looks like guise. It has all the elements for a perfect recipe. Bloated and petulant narcissist target, check. Corpulent and obsequious hosts, check. Incredibly damaging and embarrassing open secret that nobody wants to publicly discuss but everyone is dying to find out what’s in the dossier, chef’s kiss.
That is at least encouraging news. I was in Oxford recently and there was a lot of cars and very little else. Oxford council wisely decided to drop the ‘15min city’ moniker due to the campaign that was waged against it. Compared to Dutch cities, we remain very much locked in to car culture. They were doing 15min before the concept existed. It’s rare to travel anywhere in Europe and find a more dominant car culture than the UK, more expensive trains or fewer sustainable travel options. Portugal is comparable, Slovakia not great. France, home of the biggest cycle race on earth, is having to do battle with the automotive lobby in Paris. Northern Europeans quietly but resolutely leading the way, as usual.
I’m thinking of the protests in Oxford. Milton Keynes has huge potential as a pedestrian and cyclist friendly city but it has never been fully utilised or inhabited.
Thankfully the pace of climate change has been slow so far because the ability of the English to change is comparable. On the other hand, if the trajectory of the temperature predictions are accurate, we may be in trouble and by we I mean my daughter’s generation. I’m still giving it large it in my SUV, what, what.
Note that the large majority of “lost government receipts”, shown in yellow in the figure below, are due to fuel duty evaporating as drivers shift to electric vehicles. As the OBR notes, the government could choose to recoup these losses via other types of motoring taxes.
I don’t understand how it’s possible to achieve net zero carbon emissions with personal car ownership continuing at the present levels. Cars require a vast amount of energy to produce, before you put anything in the tank or battery. We don’t have viable alternatives to our excellent road network and the English have rejected 15min cities.
Our housing stock is hopelessly inefficient and a huge energy sink. Anyone who frequents municipal waste facilities can get a sense of the vast amounts of waste that we create. While it should be fairly obvious to everyone that avoiding an ecological collapse is ‘cheaper’ (wtf does that even mean?) than blundering into one, it feels fairly inevitable that we will blow past 3C no problem. When people start dying like flies due to floods and famine is around the time we will see any meaningful change.
The British seem to be particularly bad at big infrastructure projects. The computerisation of the NHS was a debacle, for instance. HS2 has fallen massively short. The people in charge don’t understand technology and are not good at taking advice.
It’s unbelievable that this is even a question. Wherever we mix profit with public services the profit motive distorts the solution into something that doesn’t make sense unless one follows the money. Our leadership is populated by people who can barely operate a computer and they are somehow qualified to make these type of strategic technology decisions.
You need to find someone you trust. There’s no technology that can prevent someone disclosing data if it’s their job to work with that data.
If you treat people with respect and pay them well, you will be amazed at what they give back. Especially autistic people, they tend to have high personal integrity.
Behind that stony facade I think Putin has quite a good sense of humour.
It’s even more outrageous since the British would never engage in this sort skulduggery 🙄
This is news for chumps and delusional fanbois
Imagine a system where that isn’t true. Actually you don’t have to because it held sway for centuries when the monarchy was in charge. Only the very wealthy got healthcare which is not too far from the situation America currently finds itself in and the UK aspires to.
I got no pussy
The British were given the choice and voted against proportional representation. They deserve the duopoly and everything that flows from it e.g. terrible healthcare, the illegal war in Iraq, royals, pointless and expensive aircraft carriers. They chose to leave the only institution that is defending their basic freedoms. These bigoted Dunning Kruger morons cannot be told.
Excellent guide. Greens are emerging as the only sane choice.
Use the money to build cycle paths and trains that run on time.
Plot twist, Google was mollesting Brand all along, now he has Stockholm syndrome which he alleviates by making videos about wacky shit.
Just torrent that shit while the streaming platforms get their house in order. It’s not acceptable to be racist to Linux.