[bluebellnutter]

I can't make my mind up about HS2. Half of me thinks that it's a vanity project which is just for business users and could well be a white elephant as Skype and the like will reduce the need for business travelling.

The other half thinks it will relieve congestion on the West Coast main line which is near capacity.

It should also be factored in that high speed rail travel has a long and established history of bringing down the need for internal flights (the TGV basically killed the Paris to Brussels air corridor), which is good for the carbon emissions. Plus gets lorries off the road as the freight capacity increases.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Yep. And additional passenger capacity on existing mainlines (4 of them), which lose lots of their fastest trains to HS2. With the extra train capacity, you can do things like stick in extra stations to pick up more passengers, particularly on the edge of towns and cities- see eg Cambridge, where one extra station has opened (Cambridge North) and another is being planned (Cambridge South, logically enough). Not everywhere is booming like Cambridge, but you get the point.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Sounds like the accusation is she was on the housing list as overcrowded and moved somewhere else while she worked her way up the list.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Lugubrious Len is now super-forecasting that casting Corbyn adrift will cost Labour the next election.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54742096

Is he stupid, or what?

[crabcakes_windermere]

You know what would be good? If after this nonsense with Corbyn the figures continued to go up...

[youngian]

You know what would be good? If after this nonsense with Corbyn the figures continued to go up...

The goalposts constantly move; Keith Haircut can’t even improve on Ed Miliband against the worst Tory government ever.
Labour’s polling pulls ahead of Ed’s best; Polls are all wrong (mention Brexit and Trump) especially YouGov which is controlled by Tories. And of course the media will be to blame; Starmer gets an easy rise as he’s a neoliberal.

[crabcakes_windermere]

The goalposts constantly move; Keith Haircut can’t even improve on Ed Miliband against the worst Tory government ever.
Labour’s polling pulls ahead of Ed’s best; Polls are all wrong (mention Brexit and Trump) especially YouGov which is controlled by Tories. And of course the media will be to blame; Starmer gets an easy rise as he’s a neoliberal.

Oh there'll be no end to it. Corbyn himself was never done complaining even with first-term landslide Blair and they'll never stop complaining while we all persist in not thinking exactly the same way as they do.

[youngian]

Well that’s a relief, Len’s going to pull Labour back from oblivion.

[Boiler]

I think my loathing of Owen Jones has just multiplied.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Lavery, the MP for Wansbeck in Northumberland, said Labour’s decision to suspend Corbyn could be challenged because it had broken a key recommendation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report, which found the party responsible for three legal breaches over antisemitism.

“The EHRC recommendations, all of which I support, said quite clearly that there shouldn’t be any intervention from the leader’s office in disciplinary matters. Jeremy was suspended on Keir’s say-so,” he said..

Prove it, Ian. I reckon you'll struggle to get the former DPP on procedure.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Utter bollocks.
Lavery is as thick as pigshit. Allegedly.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Had never seen this before. "The real issues" etc.. Under the heading "Media Bias".

The Ian Lavery ‘scandal’ deliberately misses the point of trade unions
The media coverage says nothing about the good work Lavery for mineworkers as NUM president, writes SOLOMON HUGHES

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article ... ade-unions

they don’t want to talk about how Lavery was paid for helping win tens — possibly even hundreds — of millions of pounds for ex-miners.

The “scandal” involves adding up all that Lavery received from the NUM over the years, including housing and redundancy money, and saying it’s “a bob or two in anyone’s money” (Newsnight)

This is bullshit.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41688280

The regulator found that that the Northumberland Provident and Benevolent fund had lent Mr Lavery £72,500 to buy a house in 1994. 13 years on, the union Mr Lavery was then running forgave the loan to Mr Lavery. So he was £72,500 the richer.

But there's more. He'd been paying into an endowment fund to pay back the capital cost of the house. It had underperformed, but it still paid out £18,000. The regulator found Mr Lavery kept that too.

And that's not all.

The regulator found that in 2005, Mr Lavery sold a 15% stake in his house to the Union for £36,000. In 2013 the house was worth less, so he bought it back from the union for £27,500 - a notional profit of £8,500.

And then there's Mr Lavery's "termination payments", totalling £89,887.83. However, that total is a matter of some dispute between him and the union.

The regulator says that neither Mr Lavery nor the union could provide documentary evidence of the process or the decision by which Mr Lavery was made redundant - or why, given he was leaving for a job as an MP, he needed any redundancy payments at all.

That's nothing like "all the payments" made to him, and that would indeed be a silly thing to do. It makes no issue of salary or bonuses. Nearly all of it is a highly questionable redundancy and a loan being written off (which looks like what you might to do pay someone more without calling it salary). Solomon Hughes doesn't seem to fancy explaining either.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Old fashioned deep-in-the-trough trade union leader.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I don't know what his regular pay was. But whatever it was, you don't (as it seems) fake a redundancy when you're about to start another well-paid job.

In other news, Steve Howell thinks Starmer ought to have called Corbyn to tell him about his suspension. Because that wouldn't at all have been "evidence that Starmer was in on the suspension, so broke the rules".

[Tubby Isaacs]