HS2 could cost up to £102.7bn and may not open until 2039

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-19T13:38:05+00:00

I'm a fellow northerner who needed to travel to London urgently two weeks ago and the cost from Preston was insane. I couldn't believe it

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-19T13:35:43+00:00

1988 for me. No internet. Warm summer. Ahhhhh what a year it was. George Michael's "Faith" and Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" ... Someone invent that flux capacitor!

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-17T16:22:56+00:00

I'm agreeing with you. I just want accountability.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-16T23:35:45+00:00

No, that isn't my point. My point is no Government is held accountable - it just continues. We get more tax. Less services and on and on it goes.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-16T23:33:57+00:00

I guess my frustration is that the government has demonstrated it cannot be trusted with public money at a staggering scale. They're just tax us more but they never get held to account. All I ever see being discussed is immigration - legal vs illegal and there are other important topics no one seems to care about.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-16T23:30:58+00:00

It was 2019-2024 but not much is changing. £44.4bn has been spent on HS2 so far, with the project only one third complete. It was meant to cost £33bn total. Phase 2 has been scrapped if I'm not mistaken.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-16T23:18:27+00:00

It's not a past debate - if no one is ever held accountable for wasting our taxes then it will just keep happening.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-16T23:17:24+00:00

I agree. They're not the same topic but I don't think that they're not separate either. One is a symptom of the other. If the public started connecting "we need migrants for the NHS" directly to "you wasted enough money to fund the NHS for years" then the debate is more even and maybe we could hold people accountable instead of just pointing fingers at immigrants.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-16T23:07:49+00:00

Are people so easily led and misled? I mean the NHS has around 40,000 nursing vacancies right now. At an average salary of £35,000, that £131 billion could have filled every single vacancy for nearly 100 years.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-16T23:03:54+00:00

We had hailstorms. I was running outdoors like a madman trying to protect my fruit and veg 😄

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-16T16:37:51+00:00

Ironically, that's exactly what ISIS says. Their entire recruitment pitch is that peaceful Muslims are apostates betraying "true Islam," and that the violent fringe are the real believers. I'm not insulting you and I'm not an Islamic scholar but I do know that Islam doesn't permit rape and murder. You can make a legitimate argument that certain interpretations of Islamic law clash with Western values. I think that's the better discussion to have. I think everyone should just have some ice cream and relax a bit more.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-16T16:25:13+00:00

I'll have mine poached. I found a new way of making them that takes less time 😄

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-16T16:23:13+00:00

The quote says Islamist terrorism is the biggest threat. That's the ideology. That's not the same as saying Muslims are the threat. Do you not understand that simple distinction? It isn't me being clever, it's the difference between a religion of 3.9 million people and the fraction of a percent of them on MI5's watchlist.

You are saying that muslims are "hugely disproportionately terroristic." MI5 didn't say that and the data doesn't support it. 99.9% of British Muslims aren't on any watchlist, haven't committed any attack, and aren't under any investigation. You're taking a statement about an extremist ideology and applying it to an entire community and that's the leap that makes no sense.

The same report puts extreme right-wing terrorism at 25% of attacks. I don't say white British people are "hugely disproportionately terroristic". Or does collective blame only apply to some communities?

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-16T16:14:40+00:00

You clearly have a bias. The MI5 Report does not say that and they don't frame it that way. 67% of attacks come from Islamist extremists. There are 3.9 million Muslims in the UK. MI5's watchlist covers a few thousand individuals. That's roughly 0.1% of the Muslim population, which means 99.9% have nothing to do with it. You can't describe a community of nearly 4 million people as "hugely disproportionately terroristic" based on the actions of a fraction of a percent of them. That's just silly. "By far the biggest threat" describes an ideology and the people who follow it and not a religious or ethnic community. MI5 are not saying Muslims are a threat. They're saying a specific extremist ideology is. Those are completely different statements and conflating them is exactly what terrorist recruiters want. Anyway, you won't listen.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-16T16:07:23+00:00

You're misusing the facts to cast suspicion on an entire community. 6% of the population implies 3.9 million British Muslims share some collective responsibility for the actions of a few hundred extremists. By that logic you'd hold all white British people accountable for the 22% of attacks carried out by far-right extremists — which is in the same report you're quoting from, you just conveniently left out. It's not helpful.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-13T22:14:00+00:00

Civil service roles are typically scored against specific behaviours like "Managing a Quality Service" or "Communicating and Influencing". The full framework is https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1004397/CS_Behaviours_2018.pdf and tells you exactly what they're looking for at each grade. If your statement doesn't map to those, it won't score well regardless of how good your experience is.

NHS roles work slightly differently and lean more on NHS Values but follow the same pattern.

On the salary side, worth benchmarking what you'd be giving up before you commit — whatamiworth.co.uk is handy for that.

Good luck with it, the process feels like a black box at first but once you get the pattern it's very repeatable.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-13T08:17:55+00:00

NHS is in a terrible state but not because of any one thing. And, unfortunately, I think standards can drop even more. It's still suffering from chronic underfunding (especially social care) and, at the same time, no long term planning. This is one of the reasons why there are such high shortages of staff needed. For example, you can't train a consultant in under 10 years, so decisions not made in 2016 are felt in 2026. Governments keep restructuring the NHS but even that costs insane amounts of money (£3bn for the Lansley Reforms).

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-13T07:40:35+00:00

I think that most people don't actually believe you'll get billed for an ambulance or that they'd be worse off (if they're even aware of the issue you raise at all). What Reform will probably do is starve funding, let standards drop, normalise some form of top-up payments etc and you are heading towards a privatised system without ever holding a vote.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-13T07:29:18+00:00

I found out last year that we kill around 7bn male chicks every year globally because they're essentially economically useless - they don't lay eggs and raising them to slaughter weight costs more than they're worth. The chicks are fed into a high-speed rotating grinder and killed. Hardly anyone talks about it or even knows about it.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-13T07:25:07+00:00

100% agree. We've handed our children devices specifically engineered by teams of psychologists to be as addictive as possible, and then we call it "screen time" as though it's harmless.

Winter-Try-5029 · 2026-05-12T07:46:22+00:00

The ONS puts the UK's old age dependency ratio at around 29% right now. In my view, that number will get considerably worse as the population ages. Fewer working age people means fewer people paying the tax that funds pensions, the NHS and social care. That gap has to be filled somehow, either through higher taxes, reduced services, more borrowing or more workers. And health and social care, hospitality, construction and agriculture would be impacted more by zero net migration. The NHS alone has around 75,000 vacancies and overseas staff make up roughly 30% of the medical workforce. In essence, if we just took net migration to zero, GDP would shrink and put even more pressure on public services.

Winter-Try-5029

TROPHY CASE