2024 UK politics - now with Labour in charge
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Fashion for architects still a black polo neck and grey trousers, is it?
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Busted.
Jeans are dark blue today. Need to sort those jowls out, too.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition1 -
😄
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3 months now since they won. What have they done? Stopped a few stupid things and annoyed all the old people.
There's no sense of urgency about anything, it drives me crazy.
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Sounds like reeves has bottled changing pension contribution tax relief, so the wealth gap will continue to increase. She's scared of upsetting the higher rate tax payers in the public sector apparently.
With a 180+ seat majority, upsetting a few people in pursuit of their 'agenda of change' really shouldn't bother them, but they need to grow some balls.
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VAT on school fees is also reported to be under review.
Also, continuing the dithering over nuclear power is just odd given the overall push to move away from gas.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Yeah, they should have got on with all the things that the Stevos of this world dislike, instead of which they are being too cautious and then flinching at the obvious press stuff that's just trying to derail anything, even if it's stuff the Tories started.
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It surely makes sense for VAT on school fees to start at the start of the school year if they are going to bring it in.
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Is the dithering about nuclear not about the small modular reactors?
If you are concerned about mille is of waste, those are worse than a few large ones. If you are concerned about global wars, and targeted infrastructure, small modular is the way to go.
See, it's an easy decision.
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If they are going to want to get rid of gas and also have more electric vehicles and loads of data centres doing AI shit, then just do something. And get rid of the need to spend 10 years writing 10,000,000 pages justifying everything about it before starting.
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Isn't the story along the lines of a leading member of the government that campaigned on being "better" than the Tories in terms of standards trousering a freebie for her clothes whilst still having plenty of her own cash to buy her boyf some nice "threads"? In an alternative universe, she doesn't take the freebie, buys her own clothes, doesn't look like a hypocrite, with her "no name" boyf left wearing last year's fashions un-noticed. The lack of judgement involved is really quite concerning, even if there's only low-level "corruption" and low-level "favours" involved.
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I would have a couple more large nuclear power stations in add ition to Hinkley, personally. And risk Putin targeting them.
Thing is, they are so expensive and slow to build, it's possible they won't be needed by the time they are online. Therefore perfectly sensible to consider renewables plus energy storage as an alternative for the UK.
The problem is that the dithering, as you put it, has already happened. Labour are now thinking about it, which is arguably not dithering. I accept that they could have thought about it while in opposition, mind you.
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Do it all.
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Why not modify existing gas power stations with CCS technology and get to the same place with far far less money and without a few hundred thousand years' radioactive waste?
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Good chin shot RJS - looks like one of those 'guess the athlete' pics they used to have in 'Question of Sport' 😊
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
I can't disagree. Seems to show a certain level of expectation for the perks of the job.
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The review is about the timeline to implementation rather than a u turn. The issue is that the schools can't register for VAT until the legislation is passed and the process of registration takes time. This makes people think it will all be totally impossible. In reality, this is something that happens to new companies regularly and can easily be managed.
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There is a big pot of money available for this and it needs to happen.
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The more general point (affecting all infrastructure in the UK) is that a large part of the slowness and cost is unnecessary.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
That's why I mentioned it. CCS is, as I understand it, not quite ready. But it is not rocket science.
As an interim solution islt makes a lot of sense. As a means to exonerate ourselves for burning fossil fuels for longer, it doesn't, because I can't help thinking that enough will go wrong frequently enough for there to be environmental costs, e.g. ocean acidification.
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They did stomp out some rather nasty riots and dished out the punishment pretty quickly.
Part of those 3 months was summer recess as well, so a month out there.
But yes not hitting the ground running as Blair did.
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This is the classic view of decarbonisation ("and and and"), but I can't see the point of new nuclear. It's staggeringly expensive, takes ages to build and doesn't fit well with intermittent stuff. France has struggled lately.
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A friend of mine works in the energy industry and his observation is that nuclear stations built in the UK are very expensive and take a long time to get up and running, whereas elsewhere, particularly in Korea, the construction costs and lead time are less onerous. The UK is apparently compromised by hoops that have to be jumped through in the planning process and a tendency to over-engineer the designs to address risks that other countries with proven "safe" nuclear programmes don't bother with.
I guess HS2 is a useful comparison, where the cost and time overruns have grown out of a desire to protect pretty much every last Great Crested Newt (or equivalent) on the route and a desire to build much of it underground., which aren't features of other countries' high speed rail, on the whole.
Caveat - We were well into a second bottle of a rather nice Malbec (after a few warm up "Landlords" earlier) at this point of our discussions on how to save the world, so his explanations and my recollection of them may not be all they could be!
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Sounds about right.
Incidentally, the great crested newt habitat issue seems far more common than the great crested newt, or it wouldn't be endangered.
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Korea was phasing out nuclear. Now it's not phasing it out as much, and hopes to export some. Note it had a bit of a fake part scandal 10 years ago.
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Shall I wheel out the Lower Thames Crossing again? Cost for just the planning application is multiples of the cost of actually building a much longer tunnel in that famously low-wage economy Norway. Ww are world leading at spending obscene amounts of money on planning to do things.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition1 -
Per recent Googling, Korea is now committed to maintain nuclear at circa 30% of its electricity requirements. (Since change of government.) I assume the 2017 plan to phase it out completely was politically motivated.
But I don't think political or even rational strategic decisions re energy mix change the fact that Korea can build reliable nuclear power stations faster and more cheaply than the UK appears able to manage.
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On a wider point, surely no single source of electricity generation would be ideal on its own. The main approaches all have their pros and cons, and a coherently thought-through diversified approach is surely likely to be the best, albeit with a different optimum mix for each country. (e.g. a sizeable hydro component makes sense for France, given the number of suitable lakes it has, whereas in the UK, there's a much less compelling argument for hydro.)
The UK's current strategy of being intentionally unable to meet peak demand without imports from the continent, with a heavy reliance on LNG imported great distances (two carbon "hits" here - the liquification process and the transportation process) whilst "local" oil is left in the ground is surely not one that other countries will be following in a hurry! Though Germany ditching its nuclear plants because of Earthquake risk post-Fukashima, when Germany is notoriously low risk for earthquakes, certainly raises an eyebrow.
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The German direction seems to be one of those 'on principle' ones (atomic = bad) in reaction (sorry) to a specific Green phobia rather than a hard-headed pragmatic one specific to their situation.
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Honestly, the case for nuclear is getting weaker. I used to be strongly in favour, on the grounds we needed to have decarbonised by now. But we haven't and renewables technology has moved forwards. In the UK we have abundant marine renewables capacity (wind, wave, tidal stream) and the drawbacks of intermittent supply can be overcome by overcapacity and energy storage. The options for energy storage are coming along quickly, as well. I question whether in 10-15 years time whether the energy from new nuclear would still be needed.
Those advocating for limping along with gas power and CCS, which seems to include Ed Milliband, may turn out to be correct if it is an interim solution.
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