the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

This was a short take on how a prison is run badly:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/09/11/eleanor-fellowes/how-did-birmingham-prison-get-so-bad/

How did Birmingham get so bad? The reasons include privatisation, low staffing levels, new drugs, and government spending cuts. Privatisation alone isn’t straightforwardly to blame. Some private prisons are better run than their public counterparts, and there are prisons in public hands that would recognise themselves in Birmingham’s inspection. But privatisation has contributed to problems across the prison system, as the public sector has to be run for as little as possible to stay ‘competitive’. That’s the big picture; the inspectorate is more concerned with the detail.

how could the prison service have known that privatisation would be a net negative given there are no examples of it ever going wrong before

Lmao @ only comment

I know..

I'm in agreement with the majority of his proposals (that I know of), and mostly balk at the EU/NATO/

Should Corbyn ever become PM its a safe bet he won't be leading us out of the EU and NATO. The Tories are doing that with the former atm, and as for NATO Trump is giving it a good bashing the 'hard left' could only dream of. Should you ever be British you'd be left with the Lib Dems or The Greens.

There seems to be a massive crisis in confidence about the general competence of anyone to run anything properly. The stigma attached to state-run services still remains fairly strong in a lot of areas but daily experience shows that private providers are constantly trying to redefine quite how bad they can get away with being. Renationalisation looks to be driven more by umbridge that people are profiting from doing a bad job, more than the idea that, idk, trains could actually be good. It’s not massively different from the argument in the Guardian today that univerisites aren’t particularly great and there are no jobs anyway, so you shouldn’t charge fees.

For all the optimism around the Corbyn message, there is a huge amount still to be done to convince people that stuff can actually be done well.

I think re-nationalising trains/energy/water is very popular with the electorate right now, and the Tories know it and listening to Chris Grayling coming out with the old "BR were shit, so therefore.." argument this morning shows they haven't really haven't got a plausible Private Sector better dialogue sorted and are out of ideas.

As soon as someone opens their mouth to utter, "I'm old enough to remember what British Rail was like..." they should be taken out and shot.

xp "Bus companies" could mean different things to different people: there are local service buses, inter-city buses like National Express or megabus, then actual private bus hire firms - that might explain why the figure is low. There are degrees of privatisation here - FWIW London's buses are privately-run by a bunch of different companies, but the network is centrally managed and regulated so it doesn't feel like it to the user.

london is unusual in being able to centrally manage its bus services. I think there are one or two other smaller cities that do it but the 1985 transport act holds over most of the country and has been I think by most measures a total disaster

umbridge: it's like the archers with 85% more fragmented class rage

sorry SV

it's generally taken rather than given.

um-bridge
To bridge one's phrases with the syllable "um".
He was such a halting speaker that everyone took umbrage at his um-bridge.

good old urban dict!

Typing on a mobile during a fire drill is the excuse i am going to use here.

london is unusual in being able to centrally manage its bus services. I think there are one or two other smaller cities that do it but the 1985 transport act holds over most of the country and has been I think by most measures a total disaster

― ogmor, Thursday, 20 September 2018 11:09

Quite right on all counts, I was just saying that you don't necessarily need state ownership of bus companies to run a functioning bus service. Though I'd probably still favour a wholly state-owned model.

Since prisons were brought up I'll just mention again that another privatized sector is immigration removal centres, often operated by the likes of G4S. Since the UK's the only state in Europe that allows indefinite detention it's quite a nice business.

xp I favour proper regulation and pushing brian souter into the pit

I'm sure most regular train users could accept a generally shit standard of service, late trains, cancellations etc.. if the cost of tickets was back down to peak BR rates.

pushing brian souter into the pit

u & k

Ann Gloag into the pit as well, obvs.

MORE GLOAG FOR THE GLOAG GOD

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http://perils.ipsos.com/index.html

the gloag archipelago, come on ppl

I took the quiz and apparently I am Spain. Result!

John Redwood looking distinctly uneasy and getting very shouty when a haulier takes him to task on customs checks post Brexit. https://t.co/LyxwUSd1tv

— Otto English (@Otto_English) September 20, 2018

From the Guardian live blog:

Q: You said it was your deal or a no deal. The EU is saying your plan is unacceptable. Isn’t it all falling apart?

May says she always said this would be tough.

She wants to have a Brexit that avoids a hard border in Ireland.

If there are concerns from the EU, “let’s hear what those concerns are,” she says.

(That is an odd thing to say. The EU has been spelling out its concerns all summer.)

christ how is she still so fucking bad at this

Oof. She's being butchered left and right.

lol, all the papers are running with Tusk calling Chequers ‘dead’ and Macron saying it won’t work, apart from The Times - which leads with one leader saying there is greater momentum for a fair compromise.

Viktor Orban.

Brutal.

Peston, Newton Dunn, etc calling it ‘an almost unprecedented humiliation’.

it sounds like she was genuinely shocked at Chequers getting pumped even though it was practically 1/1000 that it would be!

lots of Tories blaming Olly Robbins on twitter!

‘an almost unprecedented humiliation’.

that's really saying something considering may's unbroken string of faceplants, each worse than the last, since the referendum

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DnjaWl5WsAk8WFA.jpg

omg

whatever his yearly salary is, it isn't enough

i want that to be in textbooks

A David Low for our time

May says Chequers is the only option which maintains an open border in Ireland. Not true: there is Barnier's long-preferred single market + customs union model (also backed by the Irish). Many in Brussels are absolutely sure the UK will blink in this game of chicken

— Tom McTague (@TomMcTague) September 20, 2018

Feel like it might be time for a 'how does Brexit end?' poll.

May's house of cards will fall like a row of dominoes... checkmate

Those seem like unusually dark trousers in Matt's otherwise homogenitalous physiognomic greytopia.

rolling UK politics sept 2018: matt sticks the boot in

Thought you meant DC for a minute there :-O

Nailed it again

really enjoying the BBC’s the mighty redcar which feels like a necessary corrective to things like john harris’ brexit series in the guardian

Really brutal set of front pages today for the PM. With the Mail apparently defanged there's only the Sun there to cry ambush and betrayal.

whatever his yearly salary is, it isn't enough

― imago, Thursday, September 20, 2018 7:20 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Was she cross yesterday? She was steaming. Literally. The head wobbled with fury. Her eyes darted and bulged and practically boiled in their own juices. The old banger's temperature gauge was needling deep into the danger zone.

Oops. Did I just call our Prime Minster an old banger? It was meant in the metaphorical sense. Let's just say that in Star Trek at this point, Scottie would have been shaking his head and saying he couldna hold her much longer, Cap'n.

They had apportioned a tiny room near Mozart University for the May press conference. It was a veritable sweat box. The Salzburg smoker. As hot and nasty as a prop forward's jockstrap.

Quentin Letts' salary is definitely too high. I remember him doing *this type of thing* on her famous conference speech, he really shouldn't be encouraged!

Good that the Guardian is continuing to pay attention to this sort of thing.

https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/21/children-as-young-as-10-denied-uk-citizenship-for-failing-good-character-test?__twitter_impression=true

I thought you meant it in a sarcastic sense before I clicked, it is good - because no other paper seems interested rn.