A long-overdue redesign and tinkering
The site’s geeky workings have been neglected for a little too long. So now, behold a new design and an upgraded forum. It should make contributing to the site more user-friendly.
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The site’s geeky workings have been neglected for a little too long. So now, behold a new design and an upgraded forum. It should make contributing to the site more user-friendly.
Very bright and cheerful! Well done. Though my natural inclination is to become nostalgic about the old place, which had a quaint charm.
Anyway,
Europe – let’s face it, nowadays they need us more than we need them.
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Why am I unable to sign on to the Forum?
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Johnson’s record: The axing of the WEZ fully honoured a manifesto pledge to consult about it and act on the outcome. Its effects cannot yet be precisely calculated, but it is hard to see the move as anything other than at odds with Boris’s promise to tackle congestion and it has cost Transport for London an estimated £55 million a year in revenue – a sum tellingly similar to the extra £60 million Londoners are expected to pay in bus fares this year.
His other adjustments to London’s congestion charging scheme too demonstrate that Boris’s commitment to unclogging the road network is limited by a desire to please rather than penalise motorists.
It’s as many of us thought: he’s rather too spineless and afraid to make enemies, which has lead to wish-washy policies.
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Tom – what’s your username?
Feel free to use the contact form if you don’t want to publicise it here!
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Simon, your photograph shows you looking very happy. I must say, I find the picture next to my comment disappointing. It looks like a skinhead in a kagoule, on a foggy day. How can I change this? I am too proud to ask my children.
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Ed – go to http://www.gravatar.com and get your own Gravatar. Then it should automatically update here.
See? Instant coolness, and I won’t tell a soul.
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Simon, this is very impressive.
Maybe you can help me with something else. I am a lifelong Tory voter, yet I live in a part of the country which always returns candidates with unpleasant and nauseous policies. And I’m certainly not going to approve the AV system, which is, frankly, tiresome.
I don’t wish to move from my agreeable home, or from my friends and relations. What should I do?
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Mr Johnson said: “My cycling revolution continues and I am determined to help more residents of outer London to take to two wheels.
Unfortunately, it was the previous mayor who caused the revolution by introducing the Congestion Charge, in the process being brave enough to make enemies.
The current mayor has proved too spineless and ambiguous to keep up the pace of change.
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Stephen Hester of RBS owns a chalet in Verbier, Switzerland.
Why does Boris Johnson keep speaking up for bankers’ bonuses?
Meanwhile, the horrid Stephen Hester of RBS gets 2 million bonus of taxpayers money.
Hester enjoys tennis, running, shooting and skiing, which for the latter he owns a chalet in Verbier, Switzerland. Hester also enjoys horse riding, as his wife is a master of fox hounds in Warwickshire: “it’s very important to keep our marriage together that I do the same as she does.”
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How does Boris Johnson feel about fellow Eton boy Zac Goldsmith asking for a Privacy Law?
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He can’t help going to Eton.
He chose, however, to join the Bullingdon Dining Club and to mix pretty much exclusively with other public schoolboys while at Oxford.
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I am too proud to ask my children.Ed
I don’t wish to move from my agreeable home, or from my friends and relations. What should I do?Ed
Ed, you use your pride upside down – stay where you are proudly, and advocate vote for Tories !!
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Consultant, the course of action you suggest is honourable, and under normal circumstances, the right thing to do. In fact, this is what I have done. For some decades. After a while, King Canute also realised that he was wasting his time and energy.
And a week ago, we awoke to the confirmation of an elected government who have, amongst other revolting actions, set free a convicted mass-murdering terrorist; railed against sectarianism, whilst perpetuating a state-sponsored sectarian education system; and lately, enabled compensation payments of £500 to convicted rapists who had to use chemical toilets in prison.
The most disturbing thing though, is that I am pretty sure that the rest of Great Britain, in a referendum, would rather happily support independence from Scotland. And this, I am sorry to report, is a result of the failure of the Scottish political class, and in particular, the Scottish Tories, to successfully argue a case to the electorate for anything other than than an economy dependent on a public sector. Even the Cubans have realised that a strong public sector is predicated upon a stronger commercial sector.
But ambiguous delusion is what the nationalists do best – the SNP want to throw off the shackles of Westminster, so they too can join the, uh, European Union.
So, coming soon from the nation who gave you Adam Smith: a vote for oblivion.
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I may have not been as clear about the Scottish government as I intended. The payment of £500 is not to all convicted rapists, but to each convicted rapist, who was made to use a chemical toilet in prison. The compassion of Scottish jurisprudence is a wonder.
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Excellent. A new design, and no content. This certainly encapsulates the zeitgeist, does it not? I look forward to the absence of policies from old Bozza. 97.85% of the previous ones were dire.
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Ed you did it again, up side down solution! I am more in favour of inclusion rather than separation (independance!) – what next? another separation! they are your neighbours, always! beside, the probablity of growth with larger Britain is higher!
I also indulge in all kind of pessimism about the world myself:
…..All sorts of wickedness goes on in our society, and we finance it through our taxes, elect leaders who allow it and fail to do much to change things. More immediately, almost anything we do can be an occasion, opportunity or means for someone else to do something wrong. To avoid all cooperation in evil would require that we abandon almost all arenas of human activity – such as family, workplace, government, health system, Church – and could well constitute a sin of omission.
Cooperation in evil: understanding the issues, Anthony Fisher OP in Helen Watt (ed), Cooperation, Complicity and Conscience: Moral Problems in…Science, Law and Public Policy (London: Linacre Centre, 2005), 27-64
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Consultant, I am grateful for your consultancy, though as I am a Scot I am sure you are not so naive as to expect me to pay a fee, for your introducing me to the concept of “independance”.
For many years I thought of Scottish Nationalists as being victims of a kind of eccentricity, not really dangerous, but hardly admirable; being a Scot Nat, I thought, was rather like confessing to buying pornography, or collecting miniature figurines of kilted soldiers. Harmless, but slightly disturbing.
So the times change. The country that was once admired for the works of David Hume, Adam Smith and Lord Kelvin is sadly now despoiled by the reputations of Fred Goodwin,Gordon Brown and Kenny MacAskill. We may yet live in the age of what you so accurately describe as “independance”.
For as the great Dorothy Parker observed, what else is a dance other than the vertical expression of a horizontal desire? The morning after the “independance” will be a very rude awakening.
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Well said! if you move there is one more loss for Scots!
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The Conservatives privatised the railways.
What Philip Hammond and Sir Roy McNulty are pussyfooting around is the fact that the current structure is the root cause of the high costs of our railways (Report, 19 May). When other European rail services are 30% to 40% less expensive, the most outstanding difference is the single national operator every other country has and our fragmented “system”, with nearly 20 different players, that has let the cost of replacing a rail on the UK system become 40% more than in France, the Netherlands or Germany.
If changing to a single operator is too akin to renationalisation for the current Tory government, then the private company structure from before the second world war would be far more efficient and cost-effective than the present institutionalised chaos. As for the spin that the railways are only used by the wealthier sections of society, that’s because the rest of us cannot afford the ticket prices, and limiting future price rises to RPI+3% will not change that when almost everyone except the immorally super-rich is experiencing a reduction in their income.
The suggestion that labour costs are too high does not seem to be backed up by comparisons with the labour costs of European rail systems, so this looks like a ruse to move responsibility for high ticket prices from the real cause, the inefficient structure, to the rail workers.
Just think what British Rail could have done with a £5.2bn annual subsidy, The present mess on the rails is enough to make you weep – and John Major should be weeping for what he did to British Rail!
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An interesting analysis of the previous government’s risk management paranoia:
…the experts who are being made increasingly accountable for what they do are now becoming more preoccupied with managing their own risks. (Michael Power 2004)
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I agree, Consultant. Risk-aversion is a dreadful curse of the modern world. And whilst I applaud many aspects of the new wbsite, and whilst I accept that Boris Johnson does make the occasional gaffe, and that his home-life is not always exemplary, and that he does sometimes stray from the Coalition line, I do think that it is taking things a bit far by abolishing Boris Johnson’s contributions from a website called ‘Boris Johnson’.
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Mayor of London Boris Johnson said: “I’ve always believed that West Londoners never wanted the extension of the congestion charge and had it foisted upon them.
“I am glad I gave the people a say and thrilled that the initial results suggest there has been no significant downside in removing the WEZ.”
Others say it was a slightly spineless, weather-cockish thing to do.
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What’s happened to the forum?
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Everyone should send a messge to Boris to comeback !!
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