More delays for Euston's HS2 station

Incompetence in not figuring out the long term consequences of campaign-time actions. So you campaign with hatred against immigrants because it's cheap. You campaign about how they use the dimnishing services. You campaing on cutting benefits to pander to "fiscal conservatives" and business that would like lower costs. You open immigration to pander to business wanting cheaper workforce.

In isolation, with exception of first, none of them are much about malice and all can seem logical for the "goal of winning is the most important thing". Even the first is more malice from pandering to whatever emotion gets you direct results, without necessarily thinking anything about actually being malicious towards immigrants.

Taken as a whole, looking at the whole system, it's a clusterfuck.

Sure "war on drivers" may be the wrong phrase, but there is nothing being done to encourage those who are not privileged, or live in London where transport is excellent, to use alternative means.

ULEZ, high insurance, fuel, tax, neglect of infrastructure, unfair parking charges for old/non-electric vehicles, etc, for those who can't afford electric vehicles or for whom they're not practical, who have older vehicles because that's what their budget allows for, and who require them for their trade, or because they have to travel further to find work, those for whom it's cheaper to drive than pay exorbitant rail fairs, at the cost of their time due to greedy rail providers with poor services, I'm sure for them it can feel like a war against them.

It's easy for those who live in London, or are able to cycle or walk everywhere they want/need to say; I lived in London for ten years and never needed to own a car; but for those out in the rest of the country, who have a family, have a disability, work in different locations day to day, or a plethora other reasons, that's just not reality.

Its certainty more ready then any potential large scale project in the North only.

> We all know there's not much money left.

Not sure what that means.

> And politically speaking, Labour needs to give the north of england a fair deal on infrastructure spending

HS2 is the best thing that can happen to the North, far better then any other possible prject. I'm not sure why you are not seeing this.

Express trains to London are ruining all the local network on the traditional main lines, and thus all connected branch lines.

HS2 will put all the express trains onto HS2. Meaning all of a sudden all the other lines have massive amounts of utilization free that can finally be used for regular regional and local travel.

I wonder if you're doing this on purpose, or if you are genuienly unaware of ULEZ compliance conditions? ULEZ only requires your car to be Euro 4 compliant for petrol cars, and Euro 6 for diesels. Most(if not all) petrol cars that are younger than 20 years old are Euro 4 compliant, and any diesel made in the last 10 years should be Euro 6 compliant too. You are making it sound like you have to buy an EV to be ULEZ compliant, which is absolutely not true.

>>for those using polluting Diesels who we encouraged and subsidised to buy them a few short years ago

Well, you can't reverse decisions from the past - you can only improve on them. And ULEZ is one of the best decisions made anywhere in this country, its impact on pollution within London is undeniable, I wish every single city in the UK had a ULEZ zone.

>> and those who rely on them for their work or trade.

Funny, but this exact same argument was being used when leaded petrol was being phased out. And yet I can't imagine anyone would look back at that time and say it was a mistake to get rid of it.

>>skyrocketing insurance

That is one thing I 100% agree with you on - insurance industry is just a giant cartel right now, and they keep charging more and more despite skyrocketing profits. Their own numbers about increased cost of repairs doesn't line up with the increases in premiums across the board, it's all a scam.

>> high fuel prices

Fuel prices have been going down every year, even if the price of fuel has increased in absolute terms. Thank inflation for that one.

> Not sure what that means.

What it means is:

1. The UK national debt is high, about 7% of public spending is on interest payments. The debt-to-GDP ratio is the worst it's been in 60 years.

2. The current overall tax rate is the highest it's been since the 1960s. We might be able to get some extra money by going after tax cheats and suchlike, but it's probably not going to be easy; we don't have the money yet.

3. Previously we've tried cutting back on public services to get the debt down - "austerity" as it was called - and it was not regarded as a big success.

4. In fact, there have been loads of strikes and a long period of under-investment in public services. So we could probably spend quite a chunk of money just stopping the roofs falling down on the schools we've already got, to say nothing of building anything new.

5. Previous attempts to move public debt off the books, like PFI contracts, turned out to cost the taxpayer more in the long term.

6. Truss attempted to spur GDP growth to improve the debt-to-GDP ratio, and it went terribly.

7. Individuals aren't any better, with the high levels of mortgage debt and student loan debt, rising fuel bills and a cost-of-living crisis.

We're a hardy nation, we've dealt with worse and we'll get through this - but the reality is Starmer doesn't have a lot of cash to splash around.