Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

Its quite amazing how the Conservatives who want to keep their grubby hands on power for the next five years have suddenly gone down the oppositions route of shredding their fiscal rules and having a binge on borrowing.

Jam today gruel tomorrow springs to mind Mr K..

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

Indeed Den, it'll be spending for a year after the election, then austerity for another 20 years to make up for it, targeted at the most vulnerable again, of course. More fool the public if they vote for it.

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

This is unlikely. What train was it?

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

In this case the distinction is irrelevant. The Prime Minister sought to carry out an action that he was constitutionally unable to do. The outcome: to have that action reversed. Illegal and unlawful are irrelevant to the point. I also at no point said they mean the same thing - I said I didn’t care for the distinction in this instance because it has no bearing on outcome.

I can judge someone ineffective for having no role other than being a passive observer to an unlawful act. Yes, I absolutely can.

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

It's a Pacer train in the North if England, and yes it maybe 1980's, but that makes it no better. Its a bus on a track, even the bloody windows leak ! Unlimited money for Crossrail in London though....

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

Those old Pacers did it go bumpety bump bump .:D:D as they were supposed to have gone the way of the dodo many years ago.

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

Now see, if you’d said “Merseyrail” you’d have had me. They genuinely are running a 1970s fleet, for a few more months anyway. :D

The Pacers are much maligned, and not very comfortable, but they are pretty reliable mechanically and cheap as chips to build and run. Arguably they saved a lot of less well used lines from closure in the 1980s when passenger numbers were in their trough and helped keep the network going. Those lines are busy now, but can only be busy now because of the lifeline your Pacer provided back then. There simply wasn’t the business case to provide anything more luxurious at the time, though I agree more could have been done before now.

It’s interesting, the Barnett Formula means that when a project like Crossrail is approved in London, an amount of money is allocated for spending in Scotland because money is being spent in England, and not because there is a specific project requiring funding. The formula was designed to prevent easier business cases in high population areas like London sucking up government investment, leaving Scotland with its small, dispersed population behind. Yet no such equivalent arrangement exists within England, meaning that each region’s capital projects are all competing for the same pot of money as London, where the business case is always going to be easier to make because of the high density, relatively wealthy population.

Anyway, give your Pacer a pat on the bodyshell this evening - it may be the reason you can catch a train to work at all. And in any case it’ll be finally gone into retirement within 12 months.

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

Mmm the pacers that were meant to be phased out by (iirc) 2020 but will now be about till 2023 ish. Because, reasons.....

They’re atrocious and I refuse to use them. If I need to get to London or Heathrow I’ll take the TPE to York and connect from there rather than going to Darlington via pacer

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

And it's all the fault of <fill party name here> and will be fixed by <fill party name here>.

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

Looking at the papers this morning it's seems that the message from senior labour party members is vote tory to avoid a national disaster.

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

Depends how you define senior I suppose.

The papers don’t appear to afford the same coverage to the Rt. Hon. Kenneth Clarke QC. A man who has held genuinely senior positions in Government saying he can’t bring himself to vote Tory.

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

There will be many who will have voted both Labour and Conservative in the past who will be considering exactly the same train of thought.

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

Ken Clarke did not say he “won’t vote for the Conservatives.” He did say that it was a possibility that he would not, but that it would depend on the campaign the Conservative party ran, and that he did not expect them to run a campaign which would cost them his vote.

https://fullfact.org/news/abbott-media-bias/

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn to face off in live BBC debate.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50347661

Re: Election 2019, Week 1
 

Austerity was not for nothing. Yes, it was painful, but it brought our deficit down to much more sustainable levels. Only now can we think of spending more, because we have room to maneouvre.

Sorry to hear about your delayed train. You should have been on the planet when the railways were a nationalised industry. Not only were they often late and overcrowded, but they were filthy too, and their curled up sandwiches were legendary. :sick: