POLITICS CORNER

[Stanley]

Private Eye has quite a lot to say about how badly freeports have gone wrong in other countries. They seem to encourage marginal behaviour in terms of tax.

[Stanley]

Just one paragraph from Private Eye on levelling up and the North....

[chinatyke]

You've got to be joking? 800 million quid for one new platform? For how many passengers per year? Is it made of gold? The UK has gone bonkers!

[Stanley]

No joke China. 3 bridges for £1,000,000 looks like a bargain!

[plaques]

The new Piccadilly station is part of the High speed rail project plus an underground station for other high speed links. Manchester Council wants to do it once but do it correctly Station.

[chinatyke]

But 800million? That's more than the whole of Manchester is worth!

[Stanley]

China, you're in fantasy land.

[Whyperion]

has someone noted the general amount of females in that list , the caste / educational background of most of them, and the lack of Afro-Caribbean representation ?

I think it's a 'joke' and perhaps not to be taken too seriously.

Well you can crunch the numbers and do the actual working out (I just flew a rough though as it passed by) if you have time - and perhaps for balance add a few more important organisations and businesses. Might be worth digging into their educational backgrounds too, I suspect there may be something common accross a few at a guess.

[Stanley]

I see the Commons Accounts Committee is questioning the efficacy of test and trace and the sums spent on it. This offering from Private Eye could help them make their case. Later, the figure is reported to be £37.5billion as another 15 billion has been budgeted for next year.

[chinatyke]

That's only about 320 quid per person. Don't worry, Rishi will print some more money!

[plaques]

China, dare I say it but you are losing touch of prices (houses, commercial buildings etc) in the UK. There are even houses in Colne which are hitting the £M mark. Manchester will command even higher prices and I wouldn't like to guess at the central city area prices. Ordinary working people are now being prices out of the housing market. The local push is now on to provide affordable houses and flats usually one bedroom properties. The big outfits don't see any profit at these low cost properties they would much prefer to build on greenfield site at £500k a throw not to mention the 18% profit margin. Welcome to the real world.

[chinatyke]

Don't take me seriously! I say in jest things like the whole of Manchester being worth 50 quid!

I should have said "not worth fifty quid!"

[Stanley]

To get back to the spend on track and trace. Can't anyone see that it is a ludicrous amount of money and paid mostly to outside contractors who are reporting large profits. Time we left these matters to the civil service and stopped cutting staff numbers. It has the same effect as cutting doctors and nurses and then employing locums.
Ask Hancock about the cosy deals with the private hospitals who were in trouble until the NHS started hiring beds cut by previous governments and far more expensive than providing our own. When asked the reply was that the government is working on 40 extra hospitals. (No doubt built with the money we are saving by having left the EU)

[Tizer]

What a surprise!...£350 million a week for the NHS...Just like that, as Tommy Cooper would say!
`Magicians' tactics found in politics and marketing' LINK

[Stanley]

You got me quite excited there Peter, I thought they'd actually found the £350million down the back of the sofa....
30% pay rise for Cummings and 1% for nurses. There's a comment on values.... What exactly is Cummings employment position now?
Later. Jenrick announces that there is to be an enquiry into the matter of the Cumbrian deep coal mine. Sorry but this U-turn smacks of Cunning Wheeze to me. Start an enquiry and announce the project is to be allowed after the climate change conference we are hosting later this year is over.

[plaques]

Listened to a plausible explanation of why Boris Johnson only offered the nurses 1% pay rise. The cunning wheeze runs along these lines...
Two years ago Boris promised the nurses at least 2.1% , then comes the lie that labour voted against this increase this was corrected in Parliament but not by Boris, so Boris continues with his 1% gambit. After much huffing and puffing Boris may have to do a U-turn and offer 2% which is still below the AT LEAST 2.1%. Embarrassing, but he's such a nice guy after all that he found another 1%, who can argue with that. The two year old promise goes out of the window.

[Tizer]

Two bits of news from America that I heard during the latest Americast episode...

First, we knew that American Airlines had said they would have to make 13,000 workers redundant but in the middle of the programme Jon Sopel got a news flash saying that due to Biden's $1.9 trillion bail out the airline has just said this was stopped and the workers can be kept on. Not a single Republican was willing to vote for that bill.

Second, an announcement from somebody called Donald Trump saying that the Republican Party must not use his name or his image without his permission or he will sue them. Don't you just love that man?

[Stanley]

[Stanley]

See THIS for news of the alarming state of our tanks.
Then Ponder on the word 'could' as in the statement that the Cabinet Office could move 500 jobs to Glasgow by 2024.
Clever stuff eh!

[Stanley]

See THIS for the situation in Northern Mozambique three days ago. More news this morning that children as young as 11 years old are being beheaded by the insurgents. That's right children being beheaded.
We live in a very strange world.....

[Tizer]

It's not surprising there's talk about needing to beef up our military. The world is getting more dangerous, not less. I've just been reading about a race among Asia Pacific nations to build submarines. China will soon have more than the USA. India, Japan, Taiwan, Australia and others are building more subs or replacing old ones with new. The South China Sea is seen as the future battlefield. The US military believes China will attempt to take over Taiwan by 2027.

[chinatyke]

The US military believes China will attempt to take over Taiwan by 2027.

China has repeatedly stated Taiwan is part of China and it will NEVER give up Taiwan, so I guess one day it will happen.

[PanBiker]

It's a bit like the Falklands but a lot more commercially lucrative I reckon.

[Stanley]

My problem is I can always think of better things to spend money on than arms.

[plaques]

The UK to increase the number of nuclear warheads.

The UK is set to reverse plans to reduce its stockpile of nuclear weapons by the middle of the decade, as part of a foreign policy overhaul.
The overall cap on the number of warheads will now increase to 260, having been due to drop to 180 under previous plans from 2010.

Doesn't that give you a nice warm glowing feeling that we can now forget about global warming knowing that if China (not our OG China) gets a bit uppity then we can nuke them. Get global warming over with in a flash.
Of course there is always the possibility that since we will probably place the manufacturing order on America who in turn will outsource it to China who will make sure that they will explode on launch then its back to the drawing board on global warming. But we will have shown them who's boss.