[David9694]

No more lollipop ladies, close paddling pools and turning off streetlights: How budget cutting BCP Council proposes to save millions

This will be coming to your area in one shape or another.  A few items below, with more in the pipeline as they still have a £12m gap. 

No America trade deal. Still, I was reading, a possibility of an India deal next year, which will fix everything. 

Community Safety Accreditation Scheme (Save £270,000) – They aim to remove community safety officers from Poole Town Centre, Christchurch Town Centre and Boscombe.

Monitoring CCTV (Save £49,000) – Reduce live monitoring of the cameras by 15-30 per cent and to seek support from partner agencies to fund the service. This could mean cameras will no longer be watched by staff at off-peak times.
.
Switching off street lighting (Save £68,000) – Turn off streetlights after midnight to 6am on quieter residential roads within the Poole area.

School Crossing Patrol (Save £12,000) – Remove school crossing patrols from locations that have existing crossing facilities and remove school crossing patrols from locations that, following a survey, do not meet the threshold for a patrol.

https://www.dorset.live/news/dorset-news/bcp-council-savings-budget-cuts-8924988

Topic

[chrisonabike]

Never visited, but a quick

Never visited, but a quick Streetview safari (2024) shows that – on a couple of the main roads – they have cycle paths and bus stop bypasses.  Even the odd cycle hangar.  That’s great – for the UK!

… then you realise how skinny these paths are. (Again not been but it seems not conducive to riding side by side like normal people travel when in their cars, or walking, or on the bus or train).  And the massive space taken up for motor traffic.  And as you follow them the cycle paths quickly become just bike lanes, then disappear.  And at junctions there’s at best our not-so-great friend the ASL (“bike box”) at junctions.

Yes, they have build cycle paths – which travel a few hundred metres in a few places and even that is rare for the UK.  Especially in what appears to be firmly a “car town” (almost all parts of all UK towns and cities are “car town”…)  But it looks very much like the familiar “where we can” – which is usually far from where they’re most needed.  And the junctions are nothing like the gold standard (in fact don’t reach the podium).

Still – nice for a bit of recreation (drive to the bike path?) which is not nothing.  But … perhaps it’s come on leaps and bounds since then?

[biking59boomer]

I was in Brighton & Hove a

I was in Brighton & Hove a few weeks ago and saw the excellent cycle route along the sea front and in other parts of the area.

[David9694]

Ah the long awaited India

Ah the long awaited India deal has finally come – just another what is it 19 years to wait for any Brexit benefits. 

UK-India: ‘Real and immediate opportunities’ in Hampshire

Our economic troubles are over, folks, read all about it in, er, the Southern Echo (no room on Sky or BBC tonight for this momentous announcement). 

https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/25338443.uk-india-real-immediate-opportunities-hampshire/

[hawkinspeter]

chrisonabike wrote:

chrisonabike wrote:

hawkinspeter wrote:

Isn’t it racism and copying Trump?

I’m not sure that’s in their policies (but somehow they do keep attracting people who make racist statements or do racist things). Copying Trump (or at least following his lead or crediting him) appears to be universal. (I’m daily expecting statements from Cycling Uk saying “Thanks to President Trump we’ve been able to get 0.2 miles of cycle lanes installed in Hove…”). Even the Russians want to be *seen* to be nodding along. In fact now the entire world is doing the same – trying to get US sanctions (tariffs) lifted and a new trade deal…

There’s plenty of people/places that recognise that Trumpian “policies” are just a disaster in waiting. Just look at the Canadian Conservative Party for an example of the electorate very firmly telling them “no”.

[chrisonabike]

hawkinspeter wrote:

hawkinspeter wrote:

David9694 wrote:

Reform seem to be staying in a B&B while they decide what (if anything) they stand for. 

Isn’t it racism and copying Trump?

I’m not sure that’s in their policies (but somehow they do keep attracting people who make racist statements or do racist things).

Copying Trump (or at least following his lead or crediting him) appears to be universal. (I’m daily expecting statements from Cycling Uk saying “Thanks to President Trump we’ve been able to get 0.2 miles of cycle lanes installed in Hove…”).

Even the Russians want to be *seen* to be nodding along. In fact now the entire world is doing the same – trying to get US sanctions (tariffs) lifted and a new trade deal…

[hawkinspeter]

David9694 wrote:

Reform seem to be staying in a B&B while they decide what (if anything) they stand for. 

Isn’t it racism and copying Trump?

[David9694]

Looking at the Sky News feed

Looking at the Sky News feed today, it does feel like the political parties are on some kind of Channel 5 house swap show. Labour seem to have moved into the Conservatives’ old house, thinking it was near Reform, no-one quite knows where the Conservatives have gone. The Lib Dem’s are house hunting and Reform seem to be staying in a B&B while they decide what (if anything) they stand for. 

As usual, pretty modest trade deals with faraway countries are being held up as major breakthroughs, ten years on from the Brexit ballot.

And we’re going to stop care homes recruiting from overseas because somehow all our lives will be better if we do this.  If their adverts for were being answered by local recruits, they wouldn’t be doing the overseas stuff. 

Political appeal is about distinctiveness: the lurch towards Reform is mainly driven by a “get tough” style and that catch-all, ‘common-sense’.  In gracelessly trying to ape Reform in policy terms (is that really what the tea leaves are saying?) Labour is condemning itself to a single term. God knows what follows. 

 

 

 

[Rich_cb]

It was always going to take
It was always going to take time to realise the benefits but while Remain didn’t go quite as far as your first paragraph they weren’t too far off on their predictions of imminent disaster.

In reality, almost a decade after the vote and GDP continues to grow at a similar rate to our European peers whilst we slowly but surely diverge from the EU in terms of trade policy and even domestic policy, VAT on school fees would be illegal under EU law from my understanding.

[chrisonabike]

Rich_cb wrote:

Rich_cb wrote:

Growth is happening. At roughly the same rate as our peers within the EU. Prices are supposed to go up, the BoE targets a 2% inflation rate. Even if that target had been met perfectly a £100 shop in 2015 would be a £120 shop today. You may have noticed a certain war raging in Eastern Europe, that has had a small effect on inflation too. Only 10%+, nothing too major…

Isn’t the point that while we are not suffering a rain of blood from the sky and famine stalking the land, I don’t recall other side saying “vote for Brexit – you probably won’t notice us doing much worse if you do…”?

Of course … like any changes I guess it’s all in “how long do you wait before you sample”.  And of course for large-scale changes it probably takes more time for all the results to emerge, by which time “events” have occured.

Presumably if we really flexed our Brexit muscles we could be a bit more like the US, declare it wasn’t our war and we have a beautiful ocean between us and there (the Channel), refuse to pay towards the war and presumbly continue getting the benefits of trading with Russia?

[Rich_cb]

Growth is happening. At
Growth is happening. At roughly the same rate as our peers within the EU.

Prices are supposed to go up, the BoE targets a 2% inflation rate. Even if that target had been met perfectly a £100 shop in 2015 would be a £120 shop today.

You may have noticed a certain war raging in Eastern Europe, that has had a small effect on inflation too. Only 10%+, nothing too major…

[David9694]

Add to which, our weekly

Add to which, our weekly supermarket bill never used to top £99, now it’s regularly nudging £150 p.w. Wasnt food going to be cheaper?  

Newts, toads, woodlands in the wrong place, conservation groups and their judicial reviews might all rank as annoyances to the “growth will fix it” agenda, but they aren’t the real reason growth ain’t happening. 

 

[Rich_cb]

I suppose the pertinent
I suppose the pertinent question is ‘what line of work are you in?’

Some sectors will be more badly affected than others, as a consequence of recent trade deals, some will now be doing much better than if we’d remained in the EU.

Overall our GDP growth remains entirely unremarkable compared to similar countries within the EU, obviously picking out the effects of COVID, Ukraine etc isn’t easy but we certainly aren’t an outlier compared to our peers.

[Rich_cb]

I would agree that rejoining
I would agree that rejoining gets much more difficult with every trade deal.

My impression is that both India and US trade deal are essentially beta releases. It’s the stuff that could be agreed now. Good old Peter Mandelson said as much about the US deal in an interview I read this morning and there are some hints that the same applies to the India deal.

Starmer was always on thin ice as his majority and his vote share were only tangentially related. A small drop in his vote share will cause his majority to dissappear.

[chrisonabike]

mdavidford wrote:

chrisonabike wrote:

I personally favour smaller states as part of a larger union – but presumably those who didn’t felt that we were already in more of a “United States” arrangement or were heading that way because of “ever closer union”?

Quite a few people bizarrely advanced the argument that ‘you can’t imagine the US sacrificing sovereignty in this kind of way!’. To which the answer is, er, the clue is in the name…

Indeed – didn’t they have some kind of mild disagreement when some of the states wanted to do some things a bit differently?

[mdavidford]

chrisonabike wrote:

chrisonabike wrote:

I personally favour smaller states as part of a larger union – but presumably those who didn’t felt that we were already in more of a “United States” arrangement or were heading that way because of “ever closer union”?

Quite a few people bizarrely advanced the argument that ‘you can’t imagine the US sacrificing sovereignty in this kind of way!’. To which the answer is, er, the clue is in the name…

[Author]

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