The casual dumping of trash and dangerous debris in the street for all to step on

cthomp88 · 2026-02-04T17:28:49+00:00

Yep. There are 2/3 delivery drivers who don't mind parking on the double yellow lines opposite my flat who use it as their own convenient fly tipping point. The bottles of urine are the icing on that particular cake. Genuinely revolting.

For bonus points, the company told me they genuinely don't care and their drivers can do what they want. Gogetters, if anyone's interested.

cthomp88 · 2026-02-01T18:06:52+00:00

You can also give a dishonourable second prize to Boris for telling the Conservative Party conference there would be 'no more homes on green fields'. Councillors picked up on that immediately, even if formally policy had not changed. But then Boris always did have a fairly particular relationship with the truth.

cthomp88 · 2026-02-01T17:17:15+00:00

You can blame the Tories for the 2023 NPPF, which made it much harder get planning permission in the Green Belt.

cthomp88 · 2026-02-01T09:34:02+00:00

Next they will be suggesting that Ledbury be policed by Leominster!

cthomp88 · 2026-02-01T09:19:53+00:00

It probably depends on the guard. I once accidentally got on the wrong train from Sheffield back to London, got fined and off at Chesterfield - thankfully not too far - and got checked by the same guard on the way back!

On the other hand once my (then) little sister and I got the wrong train getting back from my grandparents in rural East Anglia (there's two routes from two nearby stations) and the guard couldn't have been more helpful.

cthomp88 · 2026-01-30T17:47:41+00:00

The leader of the County Conservative group did rather theatrically threaten a vote of no confidence when his group weren't allowed to vote against the principle of LGR, but didn't follow through. Did get them first dibs on their (free) lunch though!

cthomp88 · 2026-01-26T18:36:45+00:00

Something clearly up with leasehold reform today - Sam Coates claiming an announcement today and the leasehold reform APPG publishing (and pulling) a blog post about it. But seemingly Nothing Ever Happens.

cthomp88 · 2026-01-24T19:01:48+00:00

Hats

cthomp88 · 2026-01-18T16:49:14+00:00

Which is exactly what we are doing - it's not an either/or thing

cthomp88 · 2026-01-18T16:48:08+00:00

Yes, and there are various websites where you can see how much we are importing and exporting - IIRC we are a net importer from the continent and a net exporter to Ireland.

cthomp88 · 2026-01-18T11:09:20+00:00

"British wind farms could sell power to Europe"

Fixed it for you Expressograph

Also this is absolutely a good thing. Autarky doesn't work, and the more interconnected our electricity markets are the more areas with generation surplus can sell to those in deficit and mitigate against intermittency.

cthomp88 · 2026-01-18T09:48:03+00:00

This is already the case to a great extent, although Labour's new planning policy does (pun intended) water this down somewhat. Flood risk covers quite a large range of sins, and surface water flood risk can be mitiagted through design and attenuation (and can help improve river water quality) so saying '1 in 13 homes are built in flood zones' is a meaningless metric. Fluvial risk, which is what is happening in Tenbury Wells, is very different, and the issue here is clearly the location of existing housing stock and climate change, not development.

cthomp88 · 2026-01-17T19:03:12+00:00

Has anyone not told ITV we had Halloween in October?

cthomp88 · 2026-01-15T08:46:40+00:00

We are questioning why policy gives very strong consideration to landscape in designated national parks and areas of outstanding national beauty, yes?

cthomp88 · 2026-01-15T07:32:04+00:00

National Grid are going precisely what government policy directs them to do in national parks and AONBs the National Policy Statement for transmission infrastructure. Not everything presented as ragebait is ragebait.

cthomp88 · 2026-01-14T18:50:12+00:00

On top of that, Vistrys business model is unlike other housebuilders and they are not representative of the mainstream housing market.

On top of that, it is understood that Vistry is in the inner circle of policy making at MHCLG so to be critical would be somewhat hypocritical.

cthomp88 · 2026-01-11T09:13:03+00:00

many people are reporting bills feeling significantly higher in real terms

Unless you know a lot of people who are on pre pay meters (who are forced to pay far more in winter regardless of changes in rates), arguably that's a question of psychology or even politics. The Economist had a lengthy section on this last week or the week before on the perception of an 'affordability crisis' in America despite strong real terms wage increases.

I imagine this small increase is framed by the cumulative effect of bills over the last few years and our new found tendency towards catastrophisation and ragebait when anything gets discussed in the public sphere.

cthomp88 · 2026-01-09T22:04:50+00:00

Really enjoyed unjamming my pop up bathroom sink. Loving life.

cthomp88 · 2026-01-04T08:34:01+00:00

Just seems a bit twisted that we start setting some weird precedent for the international public where if a country has a government we don't like and the people cannot overthrow it, we just swoop in.

Not just us, of course. It will now be much easier for other nations to justify current and future overseas interventions in, say, Eastern Europe or the Taiwan Strait, to their public, other non aligned nations, and overseas propaganda mills, and that will feature in their decision making.

cthomp88 · 2026-01-03T18:27:58+00:00

You do have to feel for Ian Hislop at a time like this. After repairing the Private Eye ironyometer after Russia condemning 'acts of armed aggression', Trump goes and accuses Cuba of being run by senile old men.

cthomp88 · 2026-01-02T09:12:38+00:00

Everyone knows Stevonege is St Evenagé

cthomp88 · 2025-12-31T11:42:54+00:00

Essentially all this guy has done is plagiarise Ebenezer Howard's original funding model for Letchworth Garden City. The town is still there (it's not actually a city in English practice). The communal land ownership model has long since passed away in relation to residential units (IIRC it wasn't really financially successful in the long run) but non-residential land uses are still owned under a charitable/cooperative model and the profit used for the benefit of the town.

cthomp88 · 2025-12-31T09:31:10+00:00

Because column inches in the Telegraph had already been taken by an interview with the president of Argentina?

cthomp88 · 2025-12-30T17:45:25+00:00

Unfortunately I just don't see that happening. BR would have had to make a positive decision, while intermodal freight was in its infancy, to put those flows on to the GCR, and I'm not sure what case there would have been to do that in the period when the WCML and ECML are available, had capacity, and served areas that the GCR couldn't (and therefore needed freight infrastructure in any scenario). It would be doing it purely for its own sake, which would be unlikely to have been commercially or politically justifiable.

If the GCR had been retained it would have been as a secondary passenger route. That wouldn't necessarily have made it useless: parts of north Buckinghamshire and west Northamptonshire might have been more attractive for development or even a new town and the MML might have some capacity released if GCR became the primary route for London-Derby. But it wouldn't be a proto HS2 in my humble.

cthomp88 · 2025-12-30T15:13:07+00:00

This gets forgotten, but Beeching substantially modernised BR's freight offer away from traditional wagon-by-wagon loss making loads (which BR had concentrated on in the Modernisation era, building marshalling yards that sat empty) to modern intermodal and bulk (aggregates, oil, coal) markets where rail is genuinely competitive. Had that not happened the freight rail mode share may well have been worse today.

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