“You don’t seem to dispute the most important point- that Virgin (like all but one of the other private train companies) makes a net benefit from subsidies- they pay a franchise fee, then get more back as a result. I wish I had to pay a fee like that. “Here’s your £200 rent- now where’s my £300 “living in the house” subsidy?””

But this overlooks the painfully obvious fact that having a franchise isn’t a guarantee of making a profit – as the franchises that went bust found out. It’s not a “fee for a guaranteed profit” when they have to:

– take the financial risks associated with operating the service (staff, customer risks)
– raise and finance the capital required to operate the service e.g. the hundreds of millions required for rolling stock
– stimulate the demand / passenger numbers for the service

…Get any of these wrong and it’s a loss or bankruptcy.

The country is all the richer for these people continuing to live here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/9335689/Judges-who-allow-foreign-criminals-to-stay-in-Britain.html

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/jamaican-man-who-murdered-british-teenager-cannot-by-deported-because-he-is-gay-judge-rules-9265105.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2646634/Mum-killed-baby-deported-human-right-family-life.html

http://www.lbc.co.uk/the-foreign-rioter-we-cant-deport-due-to-human-rights-74574

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/489750/Jamaican-killer-cannot-be-deported-because-of-human-rights

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2519621/Vicious-rapist-deport–right-family-life.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10824715/Immigration-judges-block-foreign-killers-deportation-on-human-rights-grounds.html

Northwind – Member
Virgin Trains profit from public subsidy while delivering falling standards and increasing prices, I think it’s pretty reasonable for people to be down on that.

This is a great example of a great headline not being supported by the facts of the matter.

Firstly, rail fares are regulated. The inflation busting formula was defined under the last government and linked to RPI rather than CPI – the agreement is subject to legislation that means the formula can’t be touched until 2015 at the earliest. Operators are required to raise additional revenue under the formula and that revenue is then disbursed to national rail for infrastructure and to staff via the negotiated increases for the unionised element of the workforce.

The increased prices are therefore very little to do with Virgin as they don’t have control over them – the profit generated based on the working capital employed, and the need to pay a franchise fee of c£1Bn every few years means that despite the public perception of fat cat train operators because of the fare rises it’s not a brilliant investment and they can go bust – as happened to National Express and one other franchisee.

As for the falling standards, there are a record number of passengers travelling, and a record number arriving on time – both in absolute and percentage terms. Some of the rolling stock is showing its age but why would an operator make a decision to invest with a 20-30 year payback period when they can lose the franchise and their capital investment after only 8 years?

What we probably shouldn’t lose sight of is that despite our rail fares being high, the overall cost of the train journeys (fare paid + taxpayer subsidy) is a lot lower per passenger mile than other countries. So we have a choice – given there’s limited extra capacity on the train network do we:

1. Raise tax and subsidise existing passengers more – so everyone pays more even those who don’t travel?
2. Increase capacity by investing in infrastructure or other forms of travel – creating competition that almost inevitably drives down prices as has been seen in things like Telecoms and Energy, both of which are cheaper in the UK than many other European countries?
3. Nationalise the whole lot and borrow the £80B or so to do that and then hope it will be better run under public ownership – bearing in mind that the train networks with the worst safety record in Europe are now those that are publicly owned / run?

I personally think the virgin service is ok but not great. The fare increases are largely out of their hands and amongst other things go on giving the train drivers ridiculous wage rises every year that mean my mate who works as a driver now gets total remuneration approaching £90K a year with overtime – significantly more than most pilots who have to pass an incredibly demanding training course – and works 35ish hours a week and getting 6-8 weeks leave a year.

People who do not fulfil their responsibilities in society should not be able to claim so-called “qualified rights” in their defence in a court of law

seems pretty straight forward to me – “People who commit serious crimes in the UK, and in doing so infringe upon the basic rights of others, should lose their right to claim the right to stay here under the right to family life. So for example, a foreign criminal, guilty of causing death by dangerous driving and so taking away the rights of another citizen, would not be able to claim family rights to stay in the UK.“

There are plenty of well publicised heart wrenching stories of families who have seen loved ones die at the hands of people who shouldn’t have been living in the country yet we are powerless to remove them.

not sure I buy that jambalaya on several counts:

1. The HMRC receipts after the 50% tax rate was introduced show that revenue was down in both of the following years – discounting the short term effect of deferring bonus payments etc and showing a longer term trend.

2. In two periods (70s and 2000s) the experience in the UK has been that when tax rates go higher than 50% the net receipts go down and people who are able to move abroad – with 1% of the population paying 30% of all tax it takes tens of thousands of “normal” tax payers to make up the gap caused by one “rich” person moving abroad for tax purposes.

3. The socialist experiment in France (much lauded by Ed Miliband when it was announced in 2012) significantly raised taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses and by all accounts has completely wrecked their economy in the following two years. Well paid jobs and professionals have been move abroad – London’s francophile population would make it France’s 4th biggest city of french speakers. Capital has also been moved abroad (17Bn euro to Belgium so far) , even the left wingers in France are now using language such as “we’ve only got 3 months left to reverse the policy and save France from disaster”.

4. The experience of some people I know (mix of friends and neighbours working in the public and private sectors) is that as tax has gone up they’ve simply bought more holiday / worked less.

Whilst appearing not to have lost sight of money not being everything and their need to pay towards the things that make the UK country great (healthcare, education, benefits for people who need them), my acquaintances use language along the lines of “when you see a net salary of 38% of your gross pay above a certain threshold you basically land up thinking “what’s the point” and choose to work less. Their change in behaviour doesn’t create jobs or help the economy – it just reduces direct tax receipts (and indirect taxes such as VAT on spending) and also means that some “key” professional roles like Hospital Consultants are now seeing fewer patients at a time when there are waiting lists.

“Global influences don’t require the chancellor to protect the interests of millionaire pensioners by making the working-poor poorer.”

Most pensioners aren’t millionaires and even those that are will be paying up to 60% effective tax depending on their annual income. The majority of pensioners are on modest incomes – they have been protected. The “working poor” are now paying significantly less tax – the annual allowance is now nearly £10K a year which means something like 2.5m of the lowest paid are now paying little or no tax.

These threads are so predictable:

1. Headline grabbing title about nasty Tories
2. Photo of the Dave or George (or both) laughing
3. References to the privileged or millionaire mates

What never seems to flow the other way is that Ed Milliband is more of a toff than David Cameron, having had a a completely private education, an extremely privileged life made possible through family connections, never having worked in a normal job and currently living in a £2.5m house – not exactly a man of the people.

Fortunately for Ed Miliband, the public would rather engage in trading stupid photos of politicians / name calling than actually examining whether the claims of the Labour party are anything more than wishful thinking, as Radio 4 perfectly illustrates by unpicking Labour’s two latest promises on the deficit and secondly to “save the NHS. The latter actually turns out to be a commitment to increase spending less in real terms than Margaret Thatcher did during a period in which Labour say the NHS was ruined by underinvestment:

Paying down the deficit: 13 mins 30 secs http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04hywws

NHS – 16 minutes in:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04hywws

The facts are irrelevant though – which is why we’ll almost certainly have Ed Miliband as the UK’s most ineffective Prime Minister since Gordon Brown. And look how well that turned out..

“No it was a world wide financial crisis, surprised you didn’t notice it.”

So what’s the excuse for the 5 years of increasing deficit before that happened – given that other major economies were not increasing their borrowing?

This is one example of “Privatisation” – very few people step back and think about what was happening before the change which was 15+ years of constant changes / pay offs to the Senior Management Team who by all accounts failed to turn round the trust or deliver good healthcare to the local population:

2012 – A financial and clinical basket case
2012 – step change in performance in a matter of months
2014 – delivers best care in the country

If a new team can take the same staff, same buildings, same level of spend and very quickly improve outcomes and patient experience, is this really such a bad thing?

Does it make sense to incentivise a team to do drive a rapid improvement but levy penalties if they fail, rather than continue to use a changing cast of NHS senior managers who effectively get paid off whether they succeed or fail – with one off “early retirement” pension contributions well into the £million+ range…

And what’s best for the patient? Sticking to the “public” model that at Hitchingbrooke exposed them to a significant risk of serious untoward incidents / mistakes in routine care or recognising that the most important thing to patients is good care and making a rapid change to turn things round?

If Hitchingbrooke was our local hospital, would we rather that our families and loved ones get treated by a hospital that has caused avoidable injury and suffering for many years, or go to a hospital that costs the same to run but now offers excellent clinical outcomes and first rate patient care? Is the principle of “managed by the state” more important than the impact on real people?

your’re right wwaswas – the spend on healthcare isn’t as high as some other countries but several bits of data are missing so it’s not as clear cut as the graph suggests:

1. We now spend 50.5% of GDP on the public sector compared to c45% in 1997.
2. We spend more on the NHS than everything else in the public sector put together i.e. we’re spending more and the NHS is taking a bigger share of the increased spend but the trend clearly isn’t sustainable
3. The spend on the NHS is net of parallel spend on social care – which in some of the examples above are included
4. The total healthcare costs for other countries e.g. USA, Netherlands, Germany include the cost of retirement benefits. The NHS annual budget does not include this and will rise to c30% of the total budget over the next 15 years – making the NHS much more expensive than most other health systems and about the same cost as the USA.

Have to admit I’m always bemused by statements such as “The Tories are privatising the NHS” as many people who say things like that mostly seem to work on the principle that saying it enough times actually makes it so.

If we take a step back and look at what’s really going on, there are several forces at play

1.The move from secondary to primary care (enabled partly by technology and advances in medicines that mean fewer things are treated in hospital, and of those that are, less time spent in hospital for recovery)
2.A rapidly ageing AND rising population who are putting a lot more pressure on Primary Care
3.The urgent need for a step change in Leadership, Culture and Patient Outcomes in the NHS so that the experience isn’t a complete lottery depending where you are in the country and things like the Mid Staffs don’t get covered up / no-one being held accountable
4.The move to more GPs working part time / retiring early following their massive increase in pay 10 years ago and end of night-time responsibilities
5.The urgent need to improve the patient experience by joining up Health & Social Care.

Both of the first two forces really require a change in prioritisation of funding from Secondary Care to Primary Care. Pretty much every analysis done over the last 15 years shows that fewer beds are needed in Secondary Care than we currently have, and that clinical outcomes typically approve fastest when specialties treat a higher volume of patients i.e. you get better results when the Hospital Consultant treating you spends most of his / her time treating patients with that condition rather than doing it a few times a year.

Most of the NHS Secondary Care budget after staff is tied up in buildings and estates – so in order to make more money available to Primary Care where the demand is greatest there needs to be a commensurate reduction in the size and number of hospitals to meet the current level of demand. Many of the 150+ hospitals we have now are too old and cost too much to run now that patient volumes have fallen not to mention are pretty depressing places to work for staff.

As we’ve seen many times recently, very few politicians are willing to be honest about the shift that’s required so they generally support efforts by the public and staff to resist the necessary changes with the consequence that the NHS is stuck in limbo with GPs effectively under siege and hospital utilisation continuing to fall, wards mothballed and patients with treatable illnesses getting very hit and miss care.

As for the public / private point, Primary Care has always mostly been private even if Labour and the Trade Unions would have you believe otherwise. Where “Privatisation” has actually taken place it’s actually pretty limited in scale if you set aside the wave of very poor PFI deals completed under the last government. From memory around 5% of the total NHS budget is now allocated for external provision but importantly, the providers aren’t all “private” – they include the likes of MacMillan and other charities for cancer care and Bupa for some diagnostics / imaging.

The level of private activity hasn’t changed much year to year under the current government so despite the amount of noise that vested interests make, the facts don’t really support the argument that the Tories are trying to destroy the NHS, not least as they have protected it from spending cuts, something that Alistair Darling refused to commit to in his forward look just before the last election.

If we also look at what type of private activity has taken place the facts are pretty interesting:

– Independent Sector Treatment Centres – were set up under the Labour Government to create a “challenge” to NHS Trusts and force greater competition and reduce waiting lists. They were very successful in that regard.
– Alternative Providers for Primary Care Services – were set up by the last Labour Government and overseen by Tony Blair’s healthcare advisor and staunch “Blairite” Simon Stevens. He’s recently started as the new NHS CEO so hardly a sign that the current government are taking a different approach to Labour.
– Tendering for things like Pathology Services also started under the last Government.
– Takeovers of failing Trusts by “private” management teams (like the arrangement at Hitchingbrooke) was enabled by regulations laid down under the last parliament.
– Transfer of GP night time responsibilities to companies was completed under the last Government and contributed to many of the current problems with continuity of care

It’s always interesting to hear Andy Burnham re-writing history when he’s interviewed as the timing of many of the “privatisation” activities go firmly back to his door when he was Secretary of State for Health, not that he would ever admit this. Interestingly in his speech this week he made a case for Hospitals to drive the integration with social care but many would say that this will only make the current problem worse as what’s really required is smaller Secondary Care, and more investment in seamless Primary Care / Social Care.

Finally, to the original point, if the Tories were really trying to privatise the NHS they would probably have done a lot more than just maintain a similar scale of private sector activity to the last Labour Government – if they were as evil as people claim wouldn’t they have by now copied the approach taken by Labour when NuLab effectively dismantled NHS Dental care and moved it to a service that most people now expect to pay for?

“Bang on frosty! The increasingly disproportionate amount of national income taken by those at the top is incredibly bad for the economy. They don’t spend it, they squirrel it out of the country into tax havens. Or they invest it by buying property portfolios in London, driving prices through the roof, and yet further increasing inequality.”

The data on income tax quite clearly shows the rich are paying significantly more under the current government than under the last one.

Statements like this also obfuscate a rather relevant fact which is that the “super rich” i.e. oligarchs and such like aren’t British but are just residing here – so if they move the wealth gap suddenly closes again.

When the wealth gap” increases it’s largely just because a few more billionaires have chosen to domicile themselves here here rather than proving something more fundamental is at play – the upside of these people moving here is that they tend to waste enormous amounts of their money on goods and VATable services in the UK which generates jobs – by way of example a neighbour of ours is managing a £36m refurb for an oligarch in Hampstead that has several hundred tradesmen working on it, another example is the ridiculous number of Jags and Range Rovers in the congestion charge zone – which support jobs and pour in millions through VAT on sales.

Now the UK has a reasonably competitive rate of Corporation Tax these same Oligarchs also quite often headquarter their businesses here as well – as can be seen by the number of mining and raw material companies now listed in London. These firms pay corporation tax on their significant global profits despite the misconception that all companies avoid tax.

“I’m obviously out of touch, but 27k doesn’t sound too bad…”

Particularly when you factor in the annual leave and the value of the employer’s pension contribution, which as a defined benefit scheme is around 30% of salary.

This is one of the biggest challenges in any conversations about wages – despite the fact the public sector had few redundancies and even fewer wage cuts over the last 5 years, on average still earn more, retire earlier, get more paid time off, take more time off sick and get pension contributions about 6 x more than the average in the private sector, many people still feel “hard up” – and I kind of understand that against years of minimal wage rises but am also mindful of whether it would have been better to cut wages 10-15% across the board (as was the case in Ireland) and then use higher pay rises over the years that followed.

Perhaps it’s time to level the playing field, end the defined benefit / final salary schemes in the public sector, pay staff more and then let them choose how much to put into their pensions?

the majority of the cost of fags is already tax. Adding more tax will actually be counterproductive as it just encourages smuggling and counterfeits – both of which have the potential to expose consumers to even more dangerous cigarettes as per the fakes from China that routinely have very high levels of heavy metals in – the health costs of dealing with that via the NHS far outweigh any additional tax raised.

Back in August I decided there was no reason I couldn’t break out of my sloth-like existence and get to the point where I could do a 100 mile ride.

I found the century training plan below and with the aid of a turbo trainer in the week and a long ride at the weekend am now comfortably doing 60-70 mile rides – I’m a bit ahead of the target for week 7.

Using a turbo requires a bit of mental discipline but it does seem to be really improving my fitness and there’s no excuse for not doing it – I can always find an hour either before or after work. Or when I come back from the pub 😉

http://www.marincyclists.com/page-131128

Edit – forgot to say that I’ve used the MyFitnessPal app to track what I’m eating and make sure I’m eating enough to offset the exercise calorie loss.

“Meanwhile the state owned, re-nationalised East Coast Mainline has been a complete failure in that it makes a profit which it returns to the treasury. “

This kind of misses the point that the East Coast Mainline isn’t paying a franchise fee of c£1Bn which was the thing that sunk the last franchise holder. The other key issue is that East Coast has effectively inherited rolling stock without having to finance it. If all of the franchises were renationalised the Treasury would then need to borrow £billions more for rolling stock, and take the operational risk.

A more interesting comparison, albeit one the Unions haven’t trotted out for a while now (for good reason) is that the rail systems that have the highest number of fatalities in Europe are those that are publically run, despite also having fewer miles per passenger.

BT will likely snap up most of the sites as they prepare to launch their 4G network – they are working on quite an interesting quad play strategy to compete with the other fixed and wireless operators that basically works as follows:

– all BT home hubs will get swapped out with 4G home hubs – that “share” the wifi via a hotspot but also use the 4G spectrum now own to create a small cell network
– BT Mobile customers will use the 4G hotspots at home, and outside of that will roam across onto EE’s 4G network
– BT will also use their 4G spectrum for wireless broadband per the model with “relish” in London who now offer unlimited home broadband via a 4G box.

“Seems a bit dodgy, especially in light of Royal Mail sell-off:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/09/01/ttip-eu-us-trade-deal_n_5747088.html

What are they up to this time?”

All I read is lots of “ifs” “buts” and “perhaps”. Where is the proof / where are the facts that back up the typically inflammatory HuffPost headline?

“The privatization is already gathering pace…

http://www.chichester.co.uk/news/local/a-e-services-under-new-threat-1-6291424″

The “privatisation” here is actually a services contract that’s been awarded to BUPA.

Bupa is a Not for Profit – it doesn’t have any shareholders and therefore doesn’t pay a dividend. In many respects it’s similar to the likes of MacMillan and other organisations who now provide specialized care on behalf of the NHS in areas where the quality or cost effectiveness of NHS provision is poor.

He’s withdrawn millions of pounds of benefits, food banks have increased, the NHS is being sold off and staff haven’t had pay rise beyond 1% since he came into power and that’s just for starters. Losing Scotland no one cares about.

Let me fix that for you…

He’s withdrawn millions of pounds of benefits reduced benefits slightly and still to a level that when adjusted for inflation is much higher than they were under Labour in 2002, food banks have increased at a lower rate than under the last government, the NHS is being sold off has received year on year budget increases despite Labour saying at the last election they wouldn’t commit to that and staff haven’t had pay rise beyond 1% since he came into power have received 1% plus their annual length of service awards over a period when other sectors experienced mandatory wage cuts and redundancies and that’s just for starters. Losing Scotland no one cares about.

“Plod have been doing this in my experience for the last 20 years.

Now they can excuse their laziness by saying ‘budget cuts’ and ‘austerity’ rather than ‘couldn’t be bothered’ and ‘asleep in a layby'”

+ 1000

This is certainly my experience of regularly reporting crime in the same area for 15+ years. The police have never investigated or responded to anything – even when I got the number plate of the van used to take away the bikes stolen from me, or CCTV footage of people who had vandalised the same row of properties every weekend for months. All you get a is a first class letter saying they have closed the investigation – they can’t even be bothered to save money sending non urgent items second-class.

The “resources” thing is absolutely nonsense too as in my area the number of front line officers is at a record high, yet you never see them and even when reporting things that eventually lead to crime a few weeks later you never hear anything.

My only 2 face to face interactions with the local plods in the last few years has been when they knocked on my front door to warn me the CCTV camera I’d put up in the side alley after a series of thefts at night might lead to a complaint being made against me unless I angled it so it couldn’t film anyone on the pavement… and about 18 months after when they knocked to see if the same CCTV had picked up any pictures of some travellers who had defrauded an elderly ne neighbour down the road. Unfortunately I’d followed their instruction to angle the CCTV camera so it didn’t film the road with the result they couldn’t identify the perps.

i’ve had to have varicoceles removed twice in my groin – veins that swell up (and stay swollen) to the size of a small finger in width.

Before I swapped to Specialized BG saddles I had pretty much given up cycling – even a short ride resulted in so much swelling and pain for literally months after that it was too much.

Post-the move to BG saddles (the Romin is the one that’s worked best for me) I still get a bit of groin pain and occasional swelling but managed a 50 mile ride yesterday with no lasting effects other than sore legs.

The terrible impact this will have had on the children is almost too hard to comprehend but personally, it doesn’t come as a great surprise.

The thing driving a good deal of these offenses is a mindset that’s far more established in the UK than many people think. As we’ve seen in Rotherham, Oldham, Bradford, Oxford and Bristol, one of the issues at play is that for many reasons, those in positions of responsibility do not feel able to publicly acknowledge the issue due to its inherent sensitivity – their reticence is reflected in the approach of MPs and to some extent the general public who don’t want to be labelled as “racist” by discussing something that actually has no relation to race but does have some relation to geography and the culture.

My own experience is that through a number of reasonably close Muslim friends, colleagues and acquaintances I’ve heard the mindset of parts of the wider community i.e. their parents, childhood friends etc. The broader thinking aside from seeing children of other faith as somehow inferior as we’ve seen in this case also extends to:

– children born to muslim fathers and white women being the work of the devil i.e. it’s not the father’s “fault”
– white non muslim women being seen as prostitutes or conveniently treated as “brides for the night” so that the men don’t bear any culpability for the relationship or even having to admit they were having a relationship with a non muslim (in some cases this is at considerable emotional cost to the men as they struggle to reconcile the expectations of parents and the community with the feelings they have for their partner)
– non muslim women basically being there to satisfy the sexual needs of muslim man on a temporary basis.
– non muslims being dirty and inferior – particularly those that are gay or jewish.

Clearly this thinking does not reflect all muslims but it does reflect the thinking of a significant number of those whose families originated from a handful of towns in Pakistan and to a lesser extent Bangladesh – I’ve not met any Muslims that have moved to the UK from other parts of Asia who seem to hold views that are as potentially damaging to UK society and in the main they seem to be as revolted as everyone else as are the many community leaders who have spoken out in Mosques on the specific subject of child grooming.

It’s also worth noting that the repugnant ideology laid out by ISIS in Syria and Iraq has at its core similar underlying principles with regard to non muslims and people in Europe / the west – and whilst we don’t have daily beheadings and stonings in Britain this is perhaps an appropriate time to recognise that the belief system held by these people must be directly challenged at every opportunity in order to protect women and children in Britain in order to avoid any more child grooming, FGM, slavery and an increasing number of women being oppressed by men.

OriginalStyle Tiles are pretty good for victorian tiles and seem to have tiles that are closest to the originals. Unless the OP is going for glazed ones don’t forget to put impregnator down on them before the tiles are grouted – lithofin seems to work well

By its own admission, one in 20 deaths in NHS hospitals are avoidable, and that is very likely to be a conservative estimate given the massive under reporting of adverse events.

What’s key is how quickly learning is applied to avoid mistakes being repeated and on that front the NHS scores very badly – it takes decades for best practice to be uniformly adopted by all Trusts – great if you’re a patient in one of the better trusts and risky if you’re in one of the Trusts that are improving slowly.

Up to 2/3 of NHS staff at some Trusts would recommend their own organisation to their families based on the quality of care and thats speaks volumes about the size of the problem and opportunity for a step change in quality and safety.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9901354/Doctors-dont-trust-their-own-hospitals.html

we weren’t there, the Jury were… and for me that’s the end of it – what gets reported in the press (especially the bbc which has an axe to grind) and what actually happened in court are quite often two separate things.

By way of example remember the massive credit card paedophile scandal / “operation ore” in which the police announced they had identified thousands of suspects care of credit card billing data…? What didn’t happen next is quite telling but it’s a classic example of the police leaking evidence and trying to use the court of public opinion – the whole sorry shambles is documented rather well on wikipedia including some of the people who were named and shamed in public and have never had their reputations restored :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore

Still, I guess we should be grateful to the Chinese government for investing in UK infrastructure projects which our government refuses to invest in – railways and electricity are quite important so I don’t know how we would manage without Chinese help.

Network rail announces record investment

£38B of investment

Investment in the North[/url]

Crossrail 2[/url]

HS2

Despite the rhetoric from “I’ll say I’ll nationalise anything if it gets me votes Milliband” considerably more development of rail infrastructure will have taken place under the current government than the previous one.

It’s also worth saying that of recent new rail projects, most of the original project development also started under tory governments e.g.

Jubilee Line extension
Extension to London Overground
Crossrail
Channel Tunnel Rail Link

Under the last government despite their willingness to borrow and invest money pi55 money up the wall and leave a £650B debt , very few new rail projects were progressed – they managed to electrify only 10 miles of line in 13 years. The current government will have funded projects to electrify 2000 miles of track and the “beasty”, a specially developed overhead-line construction train from Windhoff is putting in the stanchions, overhead supports and cabling at the rate of 1 mile a night on the Great Western Line at the moment.

Currently connect via an airport extreme connected directly to the BT infinity modem- the settings are as follows:

Go into manual setup via the airport utility

On the ‘internet’ settings tab, make the following changes.

1 : ‘Connect Using’ select PPPoE
2 : ‘Account Name’ enter ‘bthomehub@btbroadband.com’
3 : ‘Password’ and ‘verify password’ enter a single space (as in press the space bar once). There is no password, but for some reason it will not accept no password at all, and won’t negotiate properly.

I don’t have a service name set, and ‘connection’ is set to always on’ with ‘disconnect if idle’ set to never.

I experienced something very similar on a flight to new york the week after 9-11.

It was one of the first flights from London and in between doing prayers on the floor space in front of his business class seat the guy spent the rest of the flight chanting quite loudly as he read from his holy book.

I think it’s fair to say that given the tragic events of the week before the passengers and crew around him were in tatters by the end of the flight and I rather suspect that he knew this and enjoyed seeing the effect his behaviour was having on others.

Thomas Piketty got his sums wrong

is that the same Andy Burnham who repeatedly refused to meet relatives of people who died at Mid Staffs, or acknowledge the concerns they were raising, and who refused 81 requests into a public enquiry, voted against it when it was proposed in parliament, and as Secretary of State oversaw the development of a strategy to shut hospitals that he has since opposed ever since finding himself in opposition?

Andy may well be a good guy and straight talking, but his unwillingness to meet or talk to members of the public undoubtedly meant the tragic events at Mid Staffs went on a lot longer than they should have, and there’s plenty of pointers now that he will say pretty much anything if it secures votes.

It’s quite sad to see what’s become of an MP who used to be known for his integrity.

It may have worked better than this lot, or it may not. A lot of people seem to think it would have worked. Impossible to tell unless we could run the experiment in a parallel universe.

Luckily France have been running an experiment for us – they have carried on spending, made minimal reductions to public sector budgets and imposed significant increases to tax on the wealthy.

Although their experiment is still running the results are pretty striking:

UK / France
Unemployment 6.6% / 10.4%
Unemployment trend: down / no change
youth unemployment: 18.5% / 23.4%
economy: growing / at risk of 3rd recession in 6 years

The answer to the question – do those that can move when income tax is raised?

It’s good news Binners.

72 people paying significant tax that gets used to run public services with more on the way. You could of course decide we don’t want them and put in place punitive tax arrangements but then have to accept you would need to pay more to make up the lost revenue – at present the majority of the population is being subsidised.

Recovery? What recovery? Oh… the one that the 5% at the top have benefitted from? Yeah… I’m sure they’re really enjoying it, and will vote accordingly

What about the 2.5m people on the lowest wages who have now been taken out of tax completely? That’s nearly 8% at the bottom who have significantly benefited…

And the 5% isn’t true in any event – it’s massively distorted by the top 0.1% who have done well but tend to be trans national and based in the UK for tax purposes.

The fact the wealth of the top 0.1 has increased simply tells us that the global economy is showing signs of a small improvement. It also distorts the overall “top 5%” because more of the crazy rich whose wealth is from global sources are choosing to reside in britain – there’s a record number of Sterling Billionaires here at the moment; 72 at the last count.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/10822726/More-than-100-billionaires-living-in-Britain.html

@robdixon – so red dots are bad yes ?

just to clarify, the red dots on the bottom row of maps indicate areas where only a 2G signal is found. Blue indicates 3G, greeny blue is fast 3G (up to 20 meg ish), and dark blue indicates 4g. So on the vodafone map the sea of red and no colour at all shows the geographic area that only has 2G or no service at all.

can’t believe that EE can be worse than Vodafone unless it’s just for voice calls… voda’s data network is shockingly bad as the latest rootmetrics maps show (they are based on independent tests of tens of thousands of calls, texts and data sessions all over the uk).

The last chart on the bottom left on this link is a see of red and blank spaces – showing the huge areas of the UK where there’s only a 2g data network or no coverage at all – scroll left to right to compare with data for the other networks…

https://jmcomms.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/rootmetrics-coverage-june2014.jpg

As we’ve seen over the years, the Tories only ever plough money into things for one reason – when they’re about to hand it over to their mates in the private sector.

That would rather seem to be undermined by the obvious fact that the peak of private sector involvement in the public sector was actually under the last Labour government via the hundreds of billions wasted on PFI and is considerably down in the number and value of transactions.

I don’t see how a dog can be teased, poked or hurt by a child in a public place if the owner is in control of his/her dog

Well a small child of around 5 years old walked up to my dog (on the lead) in the park 2 weeks ago – I said “not too close” as I always do and the little sod then threw a handful of mud and stones right into the dogs face. The parent didn’t even apologise and just walked off – but if the above comment is correct if my dog had reacted it would have been my fault not the brat or its fwit parent.

Children are by nature trusting and are brought up to assume that a dog is friendly and can be approached without fear of being bitten.

This is part of the problem.

Responsible parents would teach their kids to ask the owner first if it’s ok to go up to a dog and make a fuss of it in exactly the same way you’d ask a farmer if it was safe / ok to “pet” a farm animal. Dogs aren’t there for the entertainment of other people’s children and shouldn’t be seen as such.

If the dog nipped then it ultimately thought it was defending the pack or was being attacked – it’s hard to judge from the description in the original post.

What may be going on is that with the death of a previous owner and a new home it may not be clear to the dog that it’s not the pack leader and that’s the thing to focus on – dogs only get territorial when the owners don’t give it confidence they are in charge / control.

It sounds like a storm in a tea cup – Irish wolfhounds are pretty placid and the original poster tells us the dog has never been a problem before.

Some simple changes like gesture eating, ignoring the dog when the OP comes home etc will show the dog it doesn’t need to be on guard / protective and avoid the distress of a dog being re-homed with the unpredictable outcome that carries (including that some re-homed pets subsequently land up being used in organised dog fights).

There’s no reason to re-home the dog unless the OP isn’t up for getting some advice from a behaviourist and then making some simple changes that would cost nothing apart from effort and would normally be the sort of thing any reasonable person would do for a “best mate”.

There are far too many “problem” dogs sent for re-homing where the only problem is a lack of effort on the part of the owners in doing the very simple things that dogs need to see in order know their place.

He did his best to establish support and votes by making a strong statement making false promises that he knew at the time he was making them could never be afforded in order to cynically capture floating votes on tuition fees.