Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

And they don't even think Starmer's that boring. I'm amazed at 40% saying they find any political speech interesting, but as many people did Starmer as Johnson.

No doubt we'll just hear loads of moaning about how "Keith" isn't up to the job instead

[Richard Hakluyt]

The new cyber warfare centre will be built near Preston https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/04/national_cyber_force_hq_samlesbury/

There is a BAE plant there; needless to say the local universities, colleges and BAE are tremendously excited about the opportunities this presents.

I'm not sure whether this can be understood as a levelling-up move (the government claims that it is) or simple pragmatism...there are presumably synergies with BAE's work.

[Sheilbh]

I believe MI5 has an operations centre in Bury as well. Certainly better connected options than Cheltenham.

[The Brain]

The new cyber warfare centre will be built near Preston https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/04/national_cyber_force_hq_samlesbury/

There is a BAE plant there; needless to say the local universities, colleges and BAE are tremendously excited about the opportunities this presents.

I'm not sure whether this can be understood as a levelling-up move (the government claims that it is) or simple pragmatism...there are presumably synergies with BAE's work.

Is there a FAM plant as well?

[Syt]

[Tamas]

Filling station stock levels recover after hitting just 15% in panic
UK petrol station stocks were already lower than normal before last month's panic buying left many forecourts dry, new government figures show.

Fuel stock and sales data from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy show that average stock levels had dropped to 33% for several days up to Wednesday 22nd September.

That's down from around 40% in July, or 45% in late January 2020 before the pandemic hit the UK (which is a normal level).

Stocks dipped to 32% on Thursday 23rd, the day when reports that BP was preparing to ration fuel deliveries due to driver shortages hit the media.

On Friday, when queues began, stock levels shrank to 20%, and slumped again to just 15% on Saturday 25th September as panic buying gripped the UK (14% for petrol, and 17% for diesel).



The figures also show that levels recovered slowly last week, after an increase in deliveries.



They reached 25% by Sunday 3rd October, just before the military began helping to restock.

But there was a clear regional difference. Last Sunday, stock levels in Scotland had recovered to 35%, with north east England at 33%, while London was still at 18%, and the south east of England just 16%.

How is 33% being the highest and it being 16-18% where most of the population live is "stock levels recover"? Clearly the press have been told to rally behind Queen and country and quell the panic.

[garbon]

I liked seeing the meme/tweet about the ballet dancer who just finished cyber training, now off to re-tool for HGV.

[Sheilbh]

How is 33% being the highest and it being 16-18% where most of the population live is "stock levels recover"? Clearly the press have been told to rally behind Queen and country and quell the panic.

Only 1/3 of the country lives in London and the South-East not most and Scotland exists

Also doesn't it depend what's "normal"? In this case it looks like fuel also operates on a just-in-time basis so normaly is somewhere around 40-50%.

Feels like this is going to happen if we basically have even a marginally colder than normal winter

Winter blackout risk in Great Britain rises after cable fire
Blaze affecting vital subsea cable hits backup energy supply cushion, adding to industry troubles
Rob Davies
@ByRobDavies
Thu 7 Oct 2021 09.00 BST

The risk of winter blackouts has increased after a fire affecting a key subsea cable further eroded Great Britain's backup electricity supply cushion, already diminished by the shutdown of gas plants and nuclear reactors.

The National Grid's electricity system operator, ESO, said the "de-rated margin" – the amount of excess capacity that could be called upon if needed – was expected to be 6.6% or 3.9 gigawatts (GW).

That would be higher than the margins seen in 2015-16 and the following year. But the ESO said a worst-case scenario, such as multiple power plant outages, low wind speeds, and a bitterly cold winter, could cause the margin plunge to just 4.2%, or 2.5GW.

That would be well below the 5.1% it forecast in 2015, before a notoriously difficult winter when National Grid was forced to ask businesses to reduce their electricity usage to keep the lights on.

With margins likely to be tighter than the Grid would like, it expects to issue a similar number of electricity market notices to last year, when it sent six of the official pleas to energy suppliers to increase the amount of electricity they make available.

The ESO took the unusual step this year of issuing an early version of its Winter Outlook, its annual assessment of Great Britain's electricity safety net.

It said at the time that the margin could fall to 5.3%, owing to the retirements of the Dungeness B and Hunterston B nuclear power stations and shutdowns at the Baglan Bay, Severn Power and Sutton Bridge gas power stations.

But its worst-case scenario has worsened since September, when a large fire affected the IFA high-voltage power cables importing electricity from France. Half of the 2GW cable is expected to be unavailable until March.

Despite the downgrade, National Grid said there was no risk of blackouts as a result of the tighter margin.

Fintan Slye, the executive directive of ESO, said: "The Winter Outlook confirms that we expect to have sufficient capacity and the tools needed to meet demand this winter. Margins are well within the reliability standard and therefore we are confident that there will be enough capacity available to keep Britain's lights on."

However, speaking at an event hosted by the Financial Times on Wednesday, the National Grid chief executive, John Pettigrew, said the gap between supply and demand could be smaller than in recent years.

Tighter margins can lead to higher bills as the Grid faces the excess cost of paying energy suppliers more for extra supplies to top up the backup margin.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Additional rechargeable LED lanterns given to my mother-in-law for her birthday 

I find myself quite energised by all this, it is like a rerun of the 1970s 

[Tamas]

16% even 33% is still way below 50% Sheilbh.

My fuel situation is sorted for now. I had to drive to Heathrow to drop off my Day 2 test. There was an Esso nearby where I could get my E5 premium petrol, but only £35 worth so I still had about 15 litres of tank left. Neighbouring Shell had only a minimal queue left when I was driving home (was queueing back to the road when I started), so I stopped to get those 15 litres, although they only had the cheap E10 my engine doesn't like, but I figured that much shan't cause trouble.

[Richard Hakluyt]

It was pretty much a non-event in the NW of England; went to Liverpool last weekend (in an electric car) but all the stations seemed to be operating as normal. Liverpool is right next to a major refinery which may account for it.

[Josquius]

We've noticed supermarkets are starting to get very good at hiding shortages. Instead of a half empty section where they'd have all their types of apple they'll instead just bring out extra stock of the two types they actually have.

Shame they won't just put up a "not here. Blame brexit" sign. Alas in the modern UK you know someone would die for that.

[Duque de Bragança]

It was pretty much a non-event in the NW of England; went to Liverpool last weekend (in an electric car) but all the stations seemed to be operating as normal. Liverpool is right next to a major refinery which may account for it.

A major city right next to a major refinery? Colour me surprised. 

[Sheilbh]

Amazing how they've stolen all my lines.
The thing is though, they're known liars.

Re. this - I thought this was interesting and I broadly agree. But I don't think the party is sold on some new interventionist model - I think they like Johnson and he's won so they tolerate it. But when his schtick gets old (and when the electorate tire of it I think the mood will turn very quickly) they'll get back to him and go to Sunak or someone a bit drier like him:

Boris Johnson's 'high wage' agenda is taking the wind out of Labour's sails
Larry Elliott
The PM thinks his interventionist approach to the economy is a winning formula. Without a coherent opposition, he could be right
Thu 7 Oct 2021 07.00 BST

There's nothing original about saying Britain needs a new economic model. Nor that poverty wages should be a thing of the past. Or even that business needs to stop relying on cheap imported labour and invest more in skills training instead.

The idea that Britain needs root-and-branch reform to make it a high-productivity economy has been around for decades. It is voiced every time there's a scandal involving gang masters or the squalid conditions in which migrant workers have been forced to live.

What's unusual is that the call for change is coming from Boris Johnson's government, which has spent the past few days telling UK companies that the days when they could ease labour shortages by whistling up low-wage workers from the EU are over. The prime minister said in his conference speech that it was time to tackle the "long-term structural weaknesses" of the UK economy, which takes some nerve given that the Conservatives have been in charge of this "broken model" for 11 years.

Traditionally, Labour would have much happier suggesting that Britain has lessons to learn from Germany's economic model, but Johnson thinks the people who provided him with his 80-seat majority in 2019 are turned off by free-market economics and will support a party that offers higher wages, better railways and more money for the NHS.

Johnson went out of his way to praise the private sector and the dynamism of capital, but that seemed like an attempt to mollify business after the savaging they have been getting in Manchester all week. It would once have been unthinkable for a Conservative cabinet minister to go on the radio and accuse business – as Dominic Raab did – of having an "addiction" to cheap imported labour.

This is not ground on which the Conservative party would traditionally choose to fight, not least because the seeds of Britain's low-wage, service-sector dominated model were sown by Margaret Thatcher when she decimated manufacturing, smashed the trade unions and strongly supported the creation of Europe's single market.

Predictably, the thinktanks that keep the flame of Thatcherism alive hated Johnson's speech. The Adam Smith Institute called it "economically illiterate", describing it as "an agenda for levelling down to a centrally planned, high tax, low productivity economy".

But Johnson's Tories appear to have no qualms about picking fights with the businesses that bankroll the party. What's more, they do so using the sort of political language normally only used by the left.

It goes without saying that all this represents a gamble. In the circumstances, the government's poll ratings are holding up well, but there's no guarantee that they will continue to do so if inflation surges and shortages intensify. Parties that preside over falling living standards don't tend to prosper.

There were times in his speech when Johnson appeared to be inhabiting a parallel universe where motorists did not have to queue for petrol, energy bills were not rocketing and supermarkets were not suffering from shortages. These were dismissed as stresses and strains, the sort of things that happen when the economy is coming out of lockdown.

Yet Johnson clearly thinks this is a gamble worth taking. His aim is to cement the reshaping of British politics that has been under way since the Brexit vote in 2016. The prime minister thinks he has hit on a winning formula with an interventionist, left-of-centre approach to the economy and a tough right-of-centre approach to law and order, immigration and culture wars. In the absence of a coherent alternative from Labour, he could well be proved right.

In theory, this should be happy times for the opposition. Johnson has as good as admitted that Labour has been right in its critique of Britain's economic failings all along. He has gone out of his way to antagonise business at the start of what looks like being a long, hard winter.

But the upbeat mood of the Tories in Manchester was noticeable by its absence when Labour met in Brighton last week. And one reason is that the Conservatives are united behind a plan for post-Brexit Britain they believe in, while Labour would rather not talk about Brexit at all.

This is not a good place to be – and something the relatively small number of Labour Brexiters feared would happen. They argued – as Johnson is now doing – that leaving the EU presented an opportunity to restructure the economy and warned that if a party of the left did not make a positive case for change, then the vacuum would be filled by the right.

Put simply, Labour has a choice. One option is to stick with its current approach – stay outside the EU, but negotiate a better Brexit deal – and hope that the government is hobbled by economic chaos over the coming months, which is entirely possible but not guaranteed.

Another is to argue that Brexit was a mistake and therefore the party will campaign at the next election to rejoin the EU. This appeals to many party members but after the wipeout of 2019, Keir Starmer and his team have no appetite for a strategy they think would result in a similar result next time.

Finally, Labour could say that it, too, wants to seize the opportunity afforded by Brexit and would make a better fist of renewal than the government. For that, though, two things are needed: a plan of its own, and some of Johnson's optimism.

    Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist

[Josquius]

I don't get the conclusion of this article.
So 3 options.
1: fix brexit
2: undo brexit
3: claim brexit is giving wonderful opportunities to do all this stuff that has fuck all to do with brexit, is actually made a fair bit harder by brexit, and if we'd had a decent government at some point in the last decade we would hopefully have been doing already

If excuses must be made for why this wasn't done before but is now then corona makes a much better arguing point that serves to unify people and not stand out as something easily avoidable that makes doing the things you say you want to do harder.