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It's slightly more painful than that. The level of need and entitlement to pensions, health and social services grows with the number of old people, while tax tends to rise more in line with the number of working age people, and the number of old people is growing faster. Admittedly the number...

Even then it would have to fail quite dramatically upwards

The EU has been relatively effective at allocating refugees around, and has a more detailed formal plan going into place. If we'd still been in the EU there would have been far fewer issues sending people back to other EU countries. The Home Office and Border Force would also be able to spend...

The alternative of course being to raise taxes to a more sustainable level and stop trying to run the whole country on debt. I'm not personally especially bothered either way. Growth is somewhat environmentally destructive, and encouraging everybody into a mindset of never having enough...

The traditional Conservative way to communicate thoughts is of course on the side of a bus. I'd happily post one of these back to their freepost address but I fear it won't fit in a letterbox

I have the evidence of my back. I don't especially care about anybody else's tbh.

I mean that's what makes me unwilling to even consider first class on LNER. It's part of the same problem though - they seem to want to offer a hugely subsidized half-assed alternative to airlines, but the service isn't good enough to be competitive and they don't want to be cheap or pleasant...

Moulded plastic. Sounds fancy. They'll likely go with wooden boards, and a metal bar to lean back against for safety

I don't ever travel in standard on LNER or GWR - comfort or not I'm not willing to deal with days of back pain following the journey. That used to mean I'd upgrade to first, but now I largely fly instead. (GWR is generally part of a journey from further north) Lumo and Pendo seats are...

The Costa Outlets are largely run by the same company as the Upper Crusts, and quite commonly share staff. If there's a difference in how run down they are it's probably because the Costas will have been opened slightly more recently, and may have been given the better spots as an "upmarket brand".

I would have thought it would have been a police matter by now, but perhaps because it's Conservative party money rather than expenses they are able to let it ride.

As long as nobody lets the DfT see that I think we're probably fine.

Iirc everybody wanted to just get rid of it and turn it into carriage sidings, but getting rid of the route was too much trouble, so they just recreated the connection in the new signalling system. Whether anything could actually ever be routed round it is a different question

My typical journey is around 40 minutes, and I'd say overall that I find myself longing for something with a bit more give in it. Doesn't need much - almost any plane or coach seat seems to be better. I suspect they aren't as uncomfortable as the IET seats, although I've perhaps just never tried...

Interesting. So they really only messed up in the last round by not selecting Kings Cross

I suspect it's more to do with the large number of intermediate destinations which are off the line. The East Coast has Leeds which is roughly equivalent to Manchester in services, but then only has a few services to Hull, Lincoln and Sunderland, while the West Coast has to accomodate...

Possibly it wasn't all cross-London. Maybe just LNER or something like that. Either way I've not once successfully got through the gates at Victoria, London Bridge, St Pancras, or the eventual destination in South London. Entirely ordinary ticket with no railcard. Tbh between that, the...

I believe Southern and Thameslink always set the gates to reject all cross-London tickets. Certainly I've never had any success with LNER ones over the last 10 years or so. I believe somebody said in a previous thread that it was so that the tickets could be checked more thoroughly, but I've...

It's just rather standard British jargon. Most of the conversation you have when performing transactions in shops makes very little sense in any language. It's just a series of standard phrases describing parts of the transaction, or niceties which are completely standard in the society, most of...

The Metros in Edinburgh were closer to the superstore prices. A large proportion of the variation between stores comes down to whether they stock expensive brands or the cheaper own-brand stuff though, rather than any huge differences in prices. I've seen Expresses in less-rich areas which were...