dsr-burnley

They've had 20mph in Lancashire since 2013, and it isn't controversial at all. The point is that main trunk roads, even through towns, are still 30 mph. Side streets and residential streets that aren't (or shouldn't be) used as through routes, are 20 mph. It's a crucial difference from the Wales and Scotland mess-ups.

And when you've taxed it, what do you do with it? If there is some way to take all Musk's assets off him without devaluing his companies, you will have $38 per head to share round the world. How do we change the people's lives? Put it this way. The average spending on healthcare in the USA, by individuals and governments, directly and indirectly, is $4.5 trillion. If Musk's entire assets were taken off him and converted into cash, there wouldn't be enough to pay for a month's healthcare. Billionaires may indeed have obscene amounts of money, but the only reason for taxing them to destruction is because of spite or jealousy, not because of the good it would do.

OK, got you. I didn't get the hidden subtext that you weren't talking about local weather.

No snow in Burnley. Have you had a lot in Leicester? Or were you referring to a story from a different part of the world that I missed?

Because "atrocious conditions" like this happen for about half of winter and if we didn't leave the house because a gale is blowing, we wouldn't be able to go to work?

That's an extremely narrow view of capitalism. You can of course argue that a pure capitalist wants no state intervention, and by the same rationale that a pure socialist wants no private ownership of so much as a teddy bear. But you'd find that most of us (in fact all of us) are somewhere in between.

A tub? Are you getting the spreading kind? That's more expensive. Half a pound of butter is (I think) £1.35 in Farmfoods and two litres of milk is about £1.45. (Which, strangely enough, is even more than it was in the 1970's when I remember it went above 30p per pint.)

There are two ways to get consistency on head injuries. One is to give each player a whistle so they can stop play whenever they want. The other is for the players to stop cheating by faking injury.

It also boggles the mind that anyone could vote for Biden. What other walk of life would the choice between a nutcase and a person with dementia be a good choice? Would you let them operate on you? Or drive your taxi? Or teach your children? Trump may well win because there are significant numbers of people who think he's the best choice, and very significant numbers who don't want either but have to toss a coin. When is it going to occur to the Democrats that if they can't find a candidate that can comfortably beat Trump, then there must be something seriously wrong with their party?

"Conspiracy" and "Shadowy conspiracy" are not synonyms. Numerous members of the Democratic Party are going after Trump, including those in the legal system who are nothing like as politically independent as our legal civil servants. The problem with the basic principle of asking for votes that don't exist to be found is that that is just what the Democrats did after Gore lost to Bush jnr. They counted the Florida votes again and again in hopes of finding a different result. There are certainly differences in degree as to how Trump did it and how Gore did it, but there is no specific principle that asking for a recount is unconstitutional. There may be a fine line that must not be crossed, and it may be that Trump crossed it and Gore didn't, but it's not an absolute. The problem with the NY fraud case is that Trump may or may not have lied about his loan application, but the transaction didn't involve government money, it was a loan between a person who wanted to borrow it and a company that wanted to lend it, both parties were happy with the transaction and still are, and the loan was paid in full and on schedule. There is no reason other than a witch hunt to pursue this through the courts. There must be thousands of mortgage applications from way back when, in this country as well as over there, that contain lies and/or mistakes, but I don't see a team of prosecutors trawling through them to see if they can prosecute anyone. It's certainly reasonable to see his actions as inciting riots, but if he hasn't been prosecuted then he shouldn't be found guilty.

The problem is that Trump hasn't been convicted of insurrection. True, a Colorado district judge has named him as being involved, but I don't think he based it on a fair trial - it was just an opinion. If they want to ban him on the grounds of insurrection, then they need to try him first. We do need to be very, very careful about trying to stop fascism by instituting rules that the public can only vote for approved candidates. It's decidedly controversial to try to increase public freedom by restricting the vote to only those candidates approved of by the current government.

It's hardly gullible to think there's a conspiracy against Trump, because there clearly is. Not all conspiracies are secret.

Is the suggestion that the Indian government caused his leukaemia, or is it that the hospital is lying and/or got the diagnosis wrong?

Mary's Meals. It costs £20 per child to give children in the poorest parts of the world a school dinner for a year. The idea is that the children not only get fed, but they also get educated. Double bonus. (Very little admin costs as well. About 2%.)

The problem with being a principled individual is that some of his principles are to say the least iffy.

Surely the whole point of government-supported immigration, right back to Windrush, was to bring in cheap labour to do the jobs that the current UK workforce was not willing to do at that price? Rather than pay enough to get the UK workforce to do it, they imported workers who would accept less pay. And just because it isn't government policy any more (though it is government practice), doesn't mean it won't have the same effect today. As for housing, it seems intuitive that if you increase the population at a greater rate than you increase the housing supply, prices will rise. Supply and demand. No?

Fiscally for the country as a whole, possibly - though I have my doubts. But it surely drives down wages and drives up house prices, neither of them a good thing for the lower paid. I don't think the Tories are capable of tackling anything, especially anything that involves Home Office co-operation. The Home Office isn't capable even of deporting ex-convicts on their release from jail, or of signing a document that would allow a Ukrainian refugee into this country (at least, it took them 2 months), so they aren't going to tackle a million per year immigrants. And like you say, the Tories haven't the strength of purpose. It will be interesting to see if Labour ever come up with any policies on this issue.

More often in the Daily Telegraph it is a reference to the million+ people arriving each year. There are suggestions that introducing a million new people with their associated housing needs and education and healthcare and the rest, that the country's infrastructure can't cope and the current state of the country's finances also makes it difficult. I haven't seen any clear attempt to lump the other 10 million or so first generation immigrants in with the current year's million, though I don't necessarily read the same media as you.

One thing to possibly bear in mind is potential future changes in government policy. Specifically, depending what you mean by a modest pension pot, whether the extra amount you could receive in pension would be matched by a reduction in benefits/pension credits, or even means tested state pensions if they ever dare introduce it. You might get little benefit from the extra income.

A lot of it is timing. In the year to about October 2022 my pension pot went up by over 10%. This year, nothing.

What the manufacturers don't realise is that we already had "touch technology", because we learned where all the buttons were and could switch things on and off without taking our eyes off the road. With a touch screen, you have to take your eyes off the road to see where you're supposed to be touching. Given a choice between "modern and trendy" and "safe", they appear to have chosen the former.

Perhaps in those circumstances it might be possible through negotiation to have the restrictions eased. For example, if Burnley removed from its constitution the desire to kill every resident of Blackburn, and in practice stopped spending a third of its budget on arms and stopped sending massed raids into Blackburn to kill all the Blackburn babies we could find, Blackburn might then be more tolerant. Of course, Burnley isn't a Nazi dictatorship so we wouldn't be in that position.

Genuine question - what is the difference between a Two State solution, and what has been happening in the area since Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005? Hasn't that been a Two State Solution, more or less - or Three State, if Gaza is to be counted separately from the rest of Palestine?

Why doesn't Hamas surrender to the UN and ask for a UN peacekeeping force to keep Israel out? Humanitarian aid to feed and shelter the people? As it stands, they have been spending about a third of the national income for the past 20 years or so on weaponry against a force that they can't hop[e to defeat, and they know that they can only lose this war be it slowly or quickly, and they know that the longer they fight the more of their civilians will die (especially the ones they use as human shields) - so why not surrender to the UN which will automatically clear the Israelis out? Do they want their own people to die?

If Israel wanted to kill all Palestinians, they could. Hamas, on the other hand, really does want to kill all Jews, and they do their best to do it. Israel is a democracy, Gaza isn't. Are you going to post evidence of the Palestinians taken hostage and kept on Israeli military sites as human shields?