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The sell-off of the railways and council housing were both mainly driven by political ideology, and indeed petty-minded ideology. The method of privatization was chosen in order to make nationalisation as hard as possible, not to make the service better while council housing was devastated to...

True driverless cars in UK towns are decades away; the current systems from Tesla etc are basically shams that barely cope with US-style gridiron towns. 125mph on a motorway is probably doable, but it would be horribly expensive on rubber tyres wide enough to safely corner at that sort of speed...

Power supply, I'll grant you, will be a major issue in some areas. The rest is commodity stuff by now. No one's handcrafting each signal or writing computer code from scratch for each crossing. Telecoms, even with redundancy, is a solved problem in the real world. Compared to a Tesla car, for...

133 person-years cost for a bit of track covering two lanes' worth of road and some flimsy barriers and a couple of motion sensors? I need to get into providing railway infrastructure; it rivals the price of printer ink. Who vets these costs? Or does the government just pay "market rates" no...

Yes - promising a fare freeze when the governor of the Bank of England is promising at least 2% inflation (because he has a big pension, so why should he care?) is a hiding to nothing.

While I have been persuaded on this site that HS2 is not as bad as it seems, it is still the case that some of its supporters seem to want a blank cheque and feel that any amount of money - and we are talking about a HUGE amount of money here, and rising - should be rubber stamped and that any...

Beeching was no innocent bystander. He was a trained and experienced physicist who knew that a "survey of traffic" that took place over two days out of season was a sham, but he lent his name to Marples' plan. If he had had any interest in saving the railways he would have insisted on a proper...

I'm starting to wonder if we should just abolish Parliament. The PM has been blocked from implementing or even negotiating the democratic decision of the people, parliament additionally prevents him going back to the people for a mandate (because the speaker thinks he'd get one, I don't know if...

Which every child over the age of 6 knows they can't do if no-deal is off the table. You can't negotiate if the opponent knows you have no choice but to take whatever they offer. Why do remainers persist in thinking everyone else doesn't see understand this patently obvious lie? Try asking your...

https://theulsterfry.com/politics/rest-of-uk-adopts-northern-irelands-no-government-policy/ https://theulsterfry.com/politics/rest-of-uk-adopts-northern-irelands-no-government-policy/

The issue with the backstop for the DUP (and others) is the lack of a end-by date. The EU want it to be essentially permanent. The Hard Border™ is a strange little-green-men thing that people keep talking about but seems to have little actual existence. In the 40 years or so I lived in NI and...

I'm saying that civil unrest is the risk no matter what happens now because no one has seriously tried to create a consensus or compromise. It seems clear that there's trouble brewing in Scotland and NI if we leave; I thought I mentioned that - oh, yes, I did. Well they've bollocked that up...

I know. I was wondering that too but I've not lived in many places in England other than Newcastle (where I didn't travel by train much aside from the Metro) and Woking where I did commute for a few years and I know that I did ride in the van at least a dozen times - it wasn't some weird...

Well,unless they rode with their bikes. The 125 van used to be a popular option on some routes (SWT? It was a good while ago); I didn't have a bike and I enjoyed riding in the van in hot weather with the window open.

Ultimately, might makes right. Anyone can do whatever they like if they have enough force. That might be the government with the army (or the monarch, if it came to that), or the public with civil unrest. Once you get into conversations about obeying the constitution then you're only a few steps...

Well, that's how I feel about the EU. Unfortunately the anti-democratic movement that supports it has done a good job of blocking anything and everything that would threaten its status quo and all we can really hope for at this point is for its financial mismanagement to cause it crash and burn...

I remember the miners' strike and it would take some fancy bit of talking to persuade me that there was no intent to kill. Miners' strikes are always like that, regardless of rights and wrongs: So divvent gan near the Seghill mine Across the way they stretch a line To catch the throat and break...

I helped a friend move once and we took a 6' tall set of bookshelves (fully assembled with a back on them) on the Circle Line.

Why would they if the train wasn't standing room-only (I don't know if it was or not)? The train's getting them where they want to go and the passengers are probably all capable of remembering not to walk out an open door at 80mph. It puts the thread about taking a train out of service for a...

A satirical one.