Really? I’m surprised it took her so long to stick her neck out.
To succeed in politics, especially in the Tory party, you need to have a psychotic degree of self confidence. It can never be your fault. You were always right. Other people ruined your plan.
If most people did a job as catastrophically bad as Liz Truss did as Prime Minister - to a degree that the country is still reeling from it - we’d struggle to show our faces in public again. Not Liz Truss. It was all everyone else’s fault. All those lefty ideologues at the IMF, OBR, Bank of England. The socialist radicals working in the City of London. They ruined ‘The Plan’.
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It’s OK folks, BBC is talking about Farage coming back and going for PM. Truth is truly stranger than fiction.
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Maybe they were talking about the Radio 4 evening news programme?
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Tory cabinet minister boasts she blocked gun crackdown after mass shooting
Story by Mikey Smith & Carl Eve •1h
A Tory cabinet minister boasted she’d blocked tighter restrictions on shotgun ownership in the aftermath of a mass shooting.
At a fringe meeting of game shooting enthusiasts at Conservative Party Conference, Environment Secretary Therese Coffey said: "Understandably, there’s been some serious incidents with shotguns in parts of the country and in Plymouth and other areas like that.
“So there was a potential reaction that would have made it much harder for you to have shotguns and I stopped it - I stopped that." She added: “It is about having a sensible partnership on this approach."
In August 2021, 22-year-old Jake Davison from Plymouth, shot and killed five people, including his mother, and injured two others before fatally shooting himself. The Government launched a consultation into tightening up gun licensing laws in the wake of the shooting.
But in June the Government announced changes would not go ahead because “the vast majority of licensed firearms holders are law abiding and cause no concern.” And Policing minister Chris Philp said "additional controls on shotguns are unnecessary and would have a negative impact on their legitimate use.”
The Plymouth Herald reported local MP Luke Pollard had demanded an apology from Ms Coffey, who made the remarks - first reported by the Guardian - at a conference lunch sponsored by the British Association of Shooting and Conservation (BASC).
He said: “I am stunned and disappointed that the former Deputy Prime Minister would boast about obstructing gun law reform after the Plymouth tragedy. We have long suspected that there were Conservative Ministers siding with the shooting lobby behind closed doors to prevent change. Now we know who. Therese Coffey must apologise to the victims’ families and to Plymouth, both for her remarks today and for her actions to sink reform."
Earlier this year, following an intense five-week inquest into the shootings, Plymouth’s senior coroner Ian Arrow laid down a series of recommendations in his Prevention of Future Deaths report. He warned that there was “a risk that future deaths could occur unless action is taken” adding that he had concerns - voiced by a number of witnesses at the inquest, including senior police officers - that the Firearms Act of 1968 “requires root and branch reform” to achieve this.
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Watching Partygate on channel 4,
Downing street looks a really fun place to work
“It’s not that we didn’t do it, but you’ve run out of time to bring your claims”
Jesus wept 
That genuinely seems to be their defence, according to the article at least.
Mind-boggling how it’s only a throwaway mention that the EHRC was getting politicised.
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So we’re scrapping HS2 to Manchester. Shame as saving 20 minutes on the journey was worth £110billion.
Sad we couldn’t have had this decision years ago.
For anyone else reading who’s not familiar with the topic, faster journeys was a side-effect, not the main goal of HS2.
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Never been a massive fan of dystopian novels, but I guess I don’t need to read one. Is this 1984 or Brave New World?
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… and the main goal could have been achieved far more cheaply if you didn’t have to engineer the line for 200mph.
Wouldn’t that have come at the cost of capacity?
In any case, unless I’m much mistaken, the ballooning cost doesn’t have that much to do with the engineering itself so much as the dithering and the constant changes imposed by political whim?
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It’s technically called " Accusation in a mirror".
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In other news, apparently Birmingham is bankrupt because it was so badly mismanaged because it’s Labour, but this is fine: Tory-run Hampshire council says it faces ‘financial meltdown’ | Local government | The Guardian
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No, capacity increases at a lower speed (unless there are no gaps in between which there would have to be here).
Edit: Agree on your second point, though.
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Interested to see more info on that. In my mind the cost per mile for the upgrade is not linear i.e. the initial cost far exceeds to extra over for the speed increase.
I’m also trying to think what the increase involves from a design perspective. Straighter lines, longer corners and so on.
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(from HS2: nine key numbers that illustrate the dilemma over rail project’s future | HS2 | The Guardian)
It’s more a matter of this country being shit at building railways I guess.
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