2024 Election thread
Comments
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I've pretty much lost the thread of what you were arguing now, TBH.
It started off with low turnout helping Labour. Then you said we need to look at voter switching for which data is only available between 2019 and 2024 as far as I can tell - one election. And now we're seemingly agreeing that lots of other factors obscure the purported advantage to Labour. This seems to boil down to "when everything is going your way..."
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
It's perfectly simple. Labour wins when there is a low turn out, as proven by 1997 among others. 1997 seems to have been around the time when voter turnout started to drop, so it's lower than previous years but higher than later. Obviously this would mean Labour winning every year since 1997 if it were solely linked to voter turn out, so there are other factors that can be chosen at will to prove Rick's theory.
I think I got that right but got lazy and only skim read.
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I think you could argue that there is a long term downward trend in voter turnout. I think you could also argue that there is some inverse correlation between the number of Labour MPs and voter turn out over the last 35 years, but not before.
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Just so I’m clear. When the Tories are popular they win and when they’re not they lose 🤔
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The key question is whether anyone knows how to paste GIFs into here using an android phone?
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Looks like just pasting in the full web address.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Feels a bit like joining three points on a curve and claiming it is almost a straight line.
Surely a more obvious way to gauge national views would be the regular Social Attitudes surveys.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Which of the two statements are you contesting?
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The second one, not contesting as such, just commenting that a correlation over 3 changes of government -'97, '10 and '24 - in 35 years is quite a small data set.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
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Only if fewer people turn up to vote for them.
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I think there might be a correlation between % of votes cast for each party and electoral outcome. There has to be a graph about that.
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That's fair enough. I did say "some" inverse correlation, but it is a limited dataset. I was trying to help Rick articulate his point.
Maybe I have a future at the FT.
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Sounds ace. Bring it on.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
I mean you joke but the odds are that large parts of the Pennines and Peak district etc will now be subject to multiple overlapping applications, each of which will be submitted multiple times for the next decade or so. You know I sympathise with visitors and residents, on account of we've got a vast coastline, much of which is adjacent a very shallow sea that would make a perfect spot for a few wind farms without ruining anyone's home.
From what I've read, several are proposed within 50km of that seizmic testing array in Cumbria, where they cannot be built without the UK breaching it's duties under the international nuclear non proliferation treaty.
Doesn't stop several new applications coming in each year. The Scottish government even approves some of them and sticks them in a queue for when technology enables them to be built. Presumably they are hoping to uninvent nuclear bombs.
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I'm very much not joking. From what I have seen of Octopus they are practical problem solving people. They brought in experts to develop their own ASHP and lobbied hard for a government grant to be set at a level that makes an ASHP competitive with a gas boiler. I don't see them wasting time with sites that are never going to be viable. Over 90% of the UK land area is undeveloped - i.e. nobody lives there. I think we can make room.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
No one lives there except those who do. Not many of them, but those that are affected are often profoundly affected.
Anyhoo, that aside the company in question appears to be sensible. It's possible an issue in Scotland is the shockingly unfair land ownership, meaning many private rural dwellings are completely within vast estates owned by people who don't live there and who will earn millions from such developments.
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If people live there it's developed, not undeveloped. They're in the 9%. The 9% is not so dispersed as to render all of the 91% within 100m of a dwelling.
We'll also need lots more pylons 😈 because underground cables are massively expensive.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition1 -
Generously pay off those who are profoundly affected. The figures will be piddling compared with the long term costs of doing nothing.
An organisation I worked with some while back was grinding to a halt with organisational paralysis, a shrinking number of volunteers, and those left feeling frustrated. One of my partners in crime runs a big business, so is no stranger to running an efficient meeting, and after one of our meetings he told me how many times the word "can't" was used by the chair. It was a good way to illustrate why we were paralysed and demotivated.
It's now turned round with a new chair, and the new direction is "How can we do xxx?" The Tory regime had just said "can't" to wind turbines, and that's not an option.
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There's something a bit fishy about it. I read some quotes in Reuters and he seems to be pushing for zonal procing - a Tory idea that was very unpopular.
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The threshold for being badly affected doesn't reach not being able to sleep with the windows open or needing to close the curtains during the day. And I have never heard of a compulsory purchase order or indeed any form of compensation even for people living a few hundred metres away from even the largest 150+ ones.
The community kick backs usually amount to tiny grant schemes. I'm aware OVO have more thoughtful suggestions, but they will have to somehow severely limit the number of people offered cheap electricity to make it viable.
Anyway, I followed how many people opposed them in southern Scotland - albeit it's the most densely turbined part of the planet - and the population density is a fraction of anywhere in England.
But I'd be surprised if they developed an ANOB or National Park so I'm fine.
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Speculative NIABYism 👌
- Genesis Croix de Fer
- Dolan Tuono1 -
Sure, identifying why it's problematic is part of the solution, but once it's decided "This is going to happen", then the conversation needs to move onto 'how'. OK, I'm not going to say I'd love to have added noise from a new construction near my house, though hundreds of hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of people can hear motorways with their windows open. That didn't stop them building motorways, such as the M32, but people still live there.
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There are wind farms in the Brecon Beacons and I believe in the Peak District. The roughly half a million people living under the Heathrow flight path might want a word about what is intolerable. Similarly the 6.5million living in fuel poverty might have a view on how badly affected they were by not being able to heat their homes.
But sure, let's pay double so a few thousand people don't have to look at them.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Thing is, the road noise drops at night. Whereas, for a turbine, the gearing drops but the carry on turning wherever possible.
Fwiw I also sympathise with people affected by roads. There are studies to show it is detrimental to child development, adult blood pressure and so on, just because of low level noise stress. I read that article (you?) posted about the westway and it was pretty shocking.
I'm highly noise sensitive, I know that. Like Spike Milligan level sensitivity. It's a curse, being a light sleeper.
But someone always loses out with development, and it can be completely devastating for them. They are hidden amongst the actual nimbys who just like walking their dog somewhere in particular, but completely dismissed and ignored - even insulted - as a consequence. Particularly where there is green washing. You know, if you are against your home being profoundly and irrevocably changed for the worse, you are against the planet, that sort of thing.
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Lack of building is also bad.
The people who need homes and the millions who have to pay inordinate amounts to put a roof over their head have been losing out since the 80s.
Let alone the pollution from fossil fuel power plans etc etc
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Sure. But there are viable alternatives to industrialising the fragments of wild land we have left in the UK. The particular issue with turbines is they move, are white and are quite loud in quite quiet places.
We have a superb offshore capability. That's our national USP. Slightly more expensive, but longer term where we should be getting energy is at sea. From the air, the tides, possibly waves. We are a very, very crowded island, so let's use the sea.
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Too sensible. You know the low hanging fruit is picked first.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
It's also a bit short sighted. Bad renewables creates opposition to good renewables and holds the whole sector back, in my view.
And there is a lot of bad.
Of particular concern is the threshold for bypassing local planning. It means flagrantly inappropriately scaled developments will be proposed to meet that threshold and game the system.
Take this for example - it breaches every bit of guidance.imaginable, from rare bird flight paths, co2 release from peat, extremely high visual impact from all of Midlothian, most of Edinburghs regional park, most of its hills and Fife
Extremely close proximity to about a dozen houses,.l cumulative impact from other developments. It is low altitude and even in a wind shadow.
Shouldn't make it past a preliminary scoping opinion, but is now in the hands of one bloke to decide because they made the numbers big enough.
https://www.energyconsents.scot/ApplicationDetails.aspx?cr=ECU00004661
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Dartmoor (for instance) was an industrial hub in the 19th century, FWIW. And Dartmoor Prison was a private enterprise which was predicated on making the farmland around the railways and quarries more productive. Dartmoor now is pretty much a 20th-century human creation of an imagined wilderness. It's highly managed to keep it, erm, 'wild'.
IIRC, North Pennines are a similarly human creation out of what was once a network of railways and mines, and, probably, like Dartmoor, before that, a forest, until humans cut down all the trees.
I don't see offshore/onshore as an either/or. In the longer term, in any case, if a better technology comes along, turbines have a tiny footprint, and can be dismantled as quickly as they went up, leaving little trace. Certainly a smaller trace than if we put things off because too many people say "can't".
It's not making light of your noise sensitivity, but for those who are hypersensitive to noise, it's not like there won't still be plenty of truly quiet places to live in the UK. I suspect a lot of those truly quiet places are actually in towns: my parents' house in suburban Bristol was much quieter than when I lived in farmland overlooking Dartmoor... stock grazing (you'd not believe how noisy cows are when they graze in the dead of night), tractors spreading dung or ploughing, RAF doing low-level flying exercises using my house on the top of a hill as a landmark, etc...
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