Damp Beer

Male The World Great Again. Ambition for all nations.

[Damp Beer @dampbeer]

@Bartosz19437521 @ukhpinfo Judging by the graph it's been a pretty decent inflation hedge.

[Damp Beer @dampbeer]

@memoirs20s @CricketDad23 Yes. And your own food. £115 is bloody expensive, but you can save on the food and drink. Also these are late availability tickets, cheaper ones were on sale earlier in the year.

[Gabriel Pogrund @Gabriel_Pogrund]

A glorious day for opponents of transparency in public life.

MPs have removed the names of their parliamentary staff from a decades-old public register - meaning we do not know who these people are and are left to accept the word of their employer when they say (as in the case of the prime minister, here) that said staff do not have any outside earnings or private interests.

"All staff have confirmed they have no registrable interests": oh, well that's that then.

No way of determining if true; no way of finding out if MPs employing family members; no way for anyone other than MPs themselves to uphold standards or examine who is operating in the Palace of Westminster on their behalf.

The decision was driven by ... you guessed it ... MPs themselves, following behind-closed-door consultations with staff trade union representatives - not media or anti-corruption organisations.

Echoes of the time that decided among themselves - with nil meaningful debate - to exempt themselves from the centuries-old system by which those arrested would be named before the Commons.

Parliament being sovereign it is always free to take such steps without consultation or engagement with the public - the hope is they decide not to abuse their positions and proactively seek criticism or counter-views.

In this instance, sadly, MPs have demonstrated they cannot be trusted to do so - they have put us out of step with comparable democracies without anything approaching scrutiny:

[David 'Bumble' Lloyd @BumbleCricket]

John Player … every Sunday, 2pm . 40 overs , 15 yd run ups …

[Rory Sutherland @rorysutherland]

@danhind Minor niggles are not minor when everyone is confronted by hundreds of them: they compound.

And 20 million people clicking on cookie pop-ups 15 times a day is not really minor. It's 9.5 years per day of lost time.

[Lucy Connolly @LucyTCWife]

Apparently the government can’t interfere in individual cases such as PC Harper killers.

Well let me tell you, Andy. There was plenty of government interference whilst I was banged up.

Maybe ask your mate Yvette Cooper about her meeting with the prison governor at HMP Peterborough on the 24th July last year?
That according to her didn’t happen!!
She was happy to interfere in my case.

Maybe you could ask your pals why my childcare ROTL application was blocked from the off.
Could you also ask why I didn’t get a ROTL of any way shape or form, even though rapists and murderers get resettlement ROTL.

It seems the government pick and choose what they involve themselves in.

@andyburnham

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

This is smallpox

You've never had it or even seen it

Because of vaccines

[Damp Beer @dampbeer]

@ArchRose90 A long journey from the Monday Club.

[Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid]

Thank you Britain 🇬🇧 for heroically sacrificing your economy to save the planet 💪
_

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

The crass logic of net zero in the UK in one chart.

[Historic Cricket Pictures @PictureSporting]

An outground I always enjoyed ... Sussex take on Surrey at Horsham in June 1939. Surrey won a high-scoring match by nine wickets after chasing down 221. First used in 1908, the venue hosted a week from 1912 to 1956 when it was mothballed. County cricket returned in 1983 until it was again axed after the 2015 game

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

Police investigated journalist who tried to expose the fantasist Cambridge professor.

Scotland Yard investigated a journalist who tried to expose a plagiarism row and told him to stop asking Professor Jason Arday questions.

Times Higher Education (THE) journalist Jack Grove was accused of harassment after emailing Professor Arday a series of legitimate questions about his academic record.

Arday instructed the law firm Carter-Ruck, which suggested in a letter to THE that its “apparent attack” on him “may be… racially motivated”.

Arday has claimed that he did not speak before his 12th birthday, could not read or write until he was 18, completed 30 marathons in 30 days, and appeared on a TV show that aired 20 years before he was born.

The Met Police spent four months investigating the harassment allegation against Mr Grove. Mr Grove was never interviewed and only discovered the investigation after officers informed him they would be taking no further action. It is also reported that the Met passed a complaint to another police force about an academic who was also looking into Professor Arday’s record, but that force declined to investigate.

The Free Speech Union is well aware of the Met’s penchant for wasting time on investigations into non-crimes while claiming it lacks the resources to tackle real crime.

Mr Grove told The Telegraph: “I was told a complaint had been made against me and investigated, but the force was not taking it forward. The officer told me that I shouldn’t contact Professor Arday again because his mental health had been affected by my actions.

“I asked him what I had done, and he said there had been online posts about Professor Arday. I said I’d never posted anything about him and asked him if he realised he was speaking to a journalist investigating a story. He didn’t really respond but repeated his request that I not contact Professor Arday again, citing his mental health.

“I was just doing my job. Journalists should be free to ask questions of anyone, even star professors. It’s very rare for academics to refuse to speak to the press – that prompted me to look into this matter further, and I was astonished by what I found.”

It is astonishing that the police still cannot comprehend the importance of free speech and a free press. Scotland Yard investigating a journalist for asking legitimate questions in the public interest is deeply disturbing.

Read more below 👇

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Perhaps the most disturbing element in the fantasy world of (ex)-Professor Jason Arday is not his proclivity to embellish his achievements (or lack thereof) in absurd ways that were easily exposed or Cambridge University’s facile complicity in his whole scam but that a reporter at Times Higher Education, who was looking into anomalies in Mr Arday’s dodgy CV, was subjected to a four-month police investigation for allegedly harassing him. The police need to be held to account for this abuse of police power to thwart a journalist from doing his job.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

It has taken Gatwick Airport almost 10 years to move a runway that it already owns 12 metres.

It's part of a scheme to shift the existing standby northern strip 12 metres north so that 2 aircraft can use the airfield at once instead of 1. The land is Gatwick's. The tarmac is already down. The £2.2bn is private.

Almost 10 years.

On Tuesday the Court of Appeal threw out the last challenge. Lord Justice Holgate and Lord Justice Dove found the grounds unarguable, with no real prospect of success, which is judicial for get the eff-n-jeff out of my court. That failed appeal was itself the final stage of a process that began before the pandemic, before Brexit had been implemented, before 4 of the 7 prime ministers we have had in a decade had taken office.

The project has moved at the rate of a metre and a half a year. A tortoise does a metre and a half in an afternoon and does not usually require senior counsel to do so.

Heathrow Terminal 5 took 8 years to get planning permission. That delay was regarded as a national embarrassment so acute that Parliament built an entire new regime to prevent it happening again: the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects system, designed to produce a decision within 12 to 17 months.

As you'd expect from a department with a name that'd make a penguin cringe, it hasn't worked. Gatwick has just taken 8 years under the system created to stop projects taking 8 years. The machinery designed to fix the problem reproduced the problem exactly, to the year, and nobody in Whitehall appears to have noticed or minded.

58% of decisions under that regime are now judicially reviewed. The success rate of those reviews is 3.9% for ordinary developments and 10.2% for significant ones. They add 1.4 years to a project on average and up to £121 million in costs on a major road scheme.

Roughly 9 in 10 challenges fail, and they work anyway, because delay is the point and defeat costs the challenger almost nothing. An objection does not have to be right. It only has to be filed.

We built a legal system in which anybody can impose years of delay and 8-figure costs on a national asset, lose, and walk away whistling. A peculiarly contemporary form of looting.

Progress will end it inside the first year. Under our planning programme there is a binding statutory maximum of 12 months from acceptance of an application to the Secretary of State's decision on any nationally significant project, with no exceptions: 4 months for examination, 3 months for the minister, and deemed consent if the state misses its own deadline. Judicial review of planning decisions gets restricted to genuine points of law, with hard cost consequences for those who bring hopeless challenges and hard timetables for the courts that hear them.

On the other side of those 8 years: 100,000 additional flights a year. Passenger capacity rising from 43 million to 80 million. 14,000 jobs across Sussex and Surrey. Every penny of it privately financed, requiring nothing from the Treasury but permission.

All of it available in 2019.

A country that cannot move a runway 12 metres in less than 8 years is not going to build the reservoirs, the reactors, the labs or the houses. Everything else we argue about downstream of this is conditional on fixing it.

And we intend to fix it. If you would rather live in a country that can move 12 metres in under a decade, come and join us. It's time to get to work.

[Simon Clarke @SirSimonClarke]

Sometimes difficult to remember, but some things ARE going right. This is one of them.

The world doesn’t owe Britain a living and we need to choose economic growth at every opportunity. The alternative is unthinkable decline.

[Damp Beer @dampbeer]

@Gatwick_Airport Great. Now bring back daily flights to Hamburg.

[Damp Beer @dampbeer]

@andyburnham When you're explaining, you're losing.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Just heartbreaking to hear the news about Rod Liddle.
I don’t have the words to express how sad this is. For journalism, for his readers and most of all his friends and family. Had missed his column and hearing his voice on the radio. Thought he was on a break.
Rest in peace, Rod. You will be very much missed.

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

Britain is a poorer, quieter, duller place without Rod Liddle. The country has lost an ingenious and puckish spirit; I have lost a friend.