[-] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

I'd say this is less about reducing CO2 and more about making cities and towns nicer places to live and helping people live healthier lives.

I have no idea what the stats on this are, but I'd guess that the amount of emissions saved in people cycling more vs using a petrol car or electric car wouldn't actually be much compared to measures that reduce emissions from goods transport.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Bill Stickers is innocent!

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Full text archive link: https://archive.is/lhS3k

Some further thoughts from the FT politics newsletter:

Labour has an ambitious target to increase the UK’s employment rate to 80 per cent — for context, the OECD average is 70 per cent, and the UK is currently at 75 per cent. If it could achieve this, the UK would be part of a small group of countries: Iceland, the Netherlands and Switzerland are the only OECD countries with employment rates above 80 per cent

However, while the UK’s employment rate looks good next to its peers, it is also the only G7 country that has an employment rate lower than it was before the Covid-19 pandemic. So while it is an ambitious target, a) it is not an impossible one and b) the UK could almost certainly get closer to 80 per cent than it is now.

One lever that Labour wants to pull to turn that around is to reform what jobcentres do — Delphine Strauss’s story is here — getting them to focus more on providing career advice than policing the benefits system.

When government departments and agencies work well, they are obsessed with improving performance. When they are working badly, they are obsessed with improving performance indicators. When this happens in education it leads to grade inflation, because it is always in the interest of the government of the day to be able to point to better grades. (Some more thoughts on that here.)

Jobcentres have essentially always been the part of the government that is most geared towards producing improved performance indicators rather than improved performance. While it matters a great deal to the UK’s economic performance whether someone who comes into contact with a jobcentre leaves with a better job than the one they had lost or with a new qualification, in political debates all that really matters is whether or not you can say that the number of people claiming unemployment benefit has fallen.

One way Labour is trying to change that is, for the first time since the Thatcher government, by having two different ministers in charge of employment (Alison McGovern) and social security (Stephen Timms, who having been a very effective select committee chair and a former minister in the last Labour government, is perhaps the most Keir Starmer-y appointment it is possible to make) at the DWP.

But it’s a big, big, big cultural change the party is looking to bring about in jobcentres, and doing so is a big part of how it is going to try and meet what is its most ambitious target when it comes to social policy.

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Source: RedfieldWilton@twitter

Labour are more trusted than the Conservatives on EVERY policy issue prompted.

Which party do voters trust most on...?

(Lab | Con)

NHS (42% | 17%) Education (39% | 20%) Economy (38% | 23%) Immigration (33% | 21%) 🇺🇦 (31% | 24%)

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Very much agree with all these points. I also don't think it's that useful to be spamming this community with polls as they come out. But thought this was a helpful bit of information to see where things roughly stand at the beginning of campaign time.

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Westminster Voting Intention:

  • LAB: 45% (+1)
  • CON: 19% (-2)
  • RFM: 14% (+2)
  • LDM: 12% (=)
  • GRN: 5% (-1)

Via @techneUK , 22-23 May. Changes w/ 15-16 May.

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I've not listened to TRIP before but I know lots of people seem to be fans of their commentary.

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[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Weirdest set of things in the prize task for quite a while, I loved it.

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Full text archive link: https://archive.is/SDX09


Brewer will put £40mn annually into refurbishing its UK estate as pub groups regain confidence

Heineken is reopening 62 UK pubs it had closed in recent years and will put about £40mn annually into refurbishing its estate in the latest sign that pub groups are regaining confidence as cost of living pressures ease.

The move by the world’s second-largest brewer, which owns 2,400 pubs in the UK through its Star Pubs and Bars arm, will restore the number of operating outlets in its estate to pre-pandemic levels.

“Now is clearly a significant moment in terms of the resilience of pubs coming back and showing how they can still work very well for consumers up and down the country,” said Lawson Mountstevens, Star Pubs’ managing director.

Heineken, which leases out most of its pubs, has spent more than £200mn maintaining them over the past five years and plans to continue investing at a similar level.

This year it will put £39mn into the reopenings and makeovers across 94 outlets, mainly in suburban areas where more people work from home. The spending will include increasing kitchen space and improving gardens, as outdoor space has become more popular since the pandemic. A total of 612 pubs will benefit from investment.

“I would envision us investing at around those levels for the next four years or so,” Mountstevens said. Continued investment was Heineken’s “massive vote of confidence in the longevity of pubs in the UK”, he added.

Britain’s hostelries have been hard hit by the cost of living crisis; consumers are spending less money in pubs and bars than at any time since Covid lockdowns ended, according to recent research by Deloitte. Beer is one of the consumer goods they have particularly cut back on, FT research recently found.

Rising operating costs and financing challenges have also affected the sector. But the bullishness of Star Pubs is the latest sign that large players in the industry are shifting to the offensive. The pub sector expects improvements in trading and financing this year.

Greene King announced last week that it would invest £40mn in a new brewery in Bury St Edmunds, with plans for this to replace the existing brewery there in 2027. Punch Pubs announced last week that it had acquired 24 pubs from the Milton Three pub group, which fell into administration in November. The deal is believed to be worth about £15mn.

“Consumer confidence is beginning to return, which is reflected in the tentative signs of an uplift in pub sales,” said Emma McClarkin, chief executive of the British Beer and Pub Association, the industry body. “Investors are making big investments into the UK in our sector and confidence in the beer and pub sector for the long-term is strong.”

The UK has 45,300 pubs but 530 of them shut their doors last year, according to the BBPA. The number of closures was higher than even the height of the pandemic in both 2020 and 2021 when the government provided support.

Peel Hunt analyst Douglas Jack warned that borrowing costs still remained high for many private companies but added: “Confidence is improving as real disposable income is growing and interest rates are forecast to fall.”

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The UK is too centralised, but experiments with devolution are in their infancy and still have mixed results

Full text archive link: https://archive.is/iZ7RM

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[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not to say I fully agree with the author's viewpoint, but this article is a good, non-sensational, explanation of the current Thames Water situation. Worth a read if you're interested in what's actually going on.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

If they were dead set on doing a tax cut (unfortunately for the good of the country) at least they made it an NI cut rather than an income tax cut.

I can see a way forward for labour if they want to raise more money without straight up reversing these cuts by abolishing NI (or gradually reducing it to phase it out) and correspondingly increasing income and/or capital gains tax.

They can chalk it up as making the tax system fairer by removing the tax on which employees pay more than self employed or those with passive wealth-based income. Simultaneously they can say they are building on the one positive outcome of the previous budget.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Mr Robot, you missed an important sentence:

Abolishing the non-dom tax regime would raise an estimated £3.6bn a year.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Britons, for instance, think they live in a country where only 37 per cent of people would give 1 per cent of their income to the climate fight, but the study indicates the real figure is 48 per cent.

"48% Vs 52%” Oh god it's the cursed numbers again!

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I'm a big fan of middle class ideals. Just have a look on Google maps, there's more around than you might expect.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

See if you have a local pottery near you that could make a new lid to fit.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

They're really descending into the pits of weird fringe politics - like the sort of stuff you'd see from pre-Farage UKIP.

It also seems to be the opposite strategy to Johnson, who was essentially the bullshitting yes man that wanted great, wonderful, positive things for everyone but with no plan on how to achieve it. Instead of grand visions of new (unfeasable) infrastructure projects based on (non existent) future technology that the government will help develop, and impressive sounding targets (with no execution plan) to "make Britain world beating", we now have policies seeking to actively block and slow development of anything new. Johnson was popular because he was promising progress and great things to everyone. Sunak is now attempting to do the polar opposite of what Johnson used to achieve electoral success, presumably because he's aiming for the opposite of electoral success???

[-] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The two potential roads seem somewhat equivalent to me:

  1. Threads federation is blocked by the main Mastodon instances. A huge user base of non-techies starts using Threads and it dwarfs the rest of the fediverse acting as a singular centralised platform. The fediverse continues to be a techie/ideological anti-corporate community as it is now with a relatively small community in the grand scheme of things.
  2. Threads federates with some of the big Mastodon instances. Fediverse instances outside of Threads get a large amount of growth as people see the extra content available in this larger federated environment. Growth of Threads still outpaces all other fediverse instances combined. Meta then carries out some form of EEE tactics and some large chunk of the userbase of the non-Threads instances switch to Threads. The techie/anti-corporate community continues to use fediverse instances without any interaction with Threads.

Both scenarios end in a large centralised platform run by Meta and a small community that want to avoid a corporate platform.

I think it's also wise to separate the effect of large corporate instances in the fediverse between effects on Mastodon (where users follow users) vs Lemmy/Kbin (where users follow communities). In the case of Mastodon, the effects of EEE tactics will be strong due to a more powerful network effect because it's important that a particular person is on the same platform as you (i.e. this is a similar situation to XMPP and gchat). In contrast, you just need some people to participate in a Lemmy/Kbin community to make it worth joining, but it doesn't matter exactly who, meaning that membership can be small and sparse but the community still has a meaningful existence (i.e like niche forums).

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