#438

They’ve just been given an extension of the west coast one. Mental!

#439

Was just about to mention this…

Amazing isn’t it!

#440

As is often said, the profits have been privatised, while the risks are entirely on the taxpayer…

#441

That contract surely has to be illegally awarded, either corruptly or negligently

#442

I’m not sure how it works, but since it’s just an extension of the current contract and isn’t unusual in terms of DfT franchising, it’s certainly not unlawful. Negligent, almost definitely.

#443

And that was because they botched the most recent franchise award for that one (FirstGroup got it originally, then it all got reversed)

#444

It’s amazing how poorly equiped for awarding franchises the DfT are given it’s been one of their main functions for over 20 years now.

#445

There’s not actually much left of the DfT these days - most of it is outsourced to private consultants so there’s no continuity and it’s junior members of staff doing the work.

1 Like
#446

That would explain it.

#447

It’s the same across most departments now, too. Commissioning consultants to write reports is nothing new (New Labour were big fans of it, if it meant that they could make unpopular decisions without copping the blame), but huge numbers of the baby-boomer civil servants who oversaw the in-house translation of reports into policies have been pensioned off since 2010, resulting in reduced oversight from experienced people.

There have been so, so many badly written laws and policies brought in since 2010. It’s no wonder that many of them have been successfully challenged in court subsequently.

#449
#450

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1 Like
#451

OUR FUTURE! OUR CLUTTER!

#452

guaranteed solid gold cunt

#453

This is peak ineffectual centrism here.

#454
#455

Not a knock on your post, but it’s really frustrating that this keeps needing to be repeated because of the #FBPE crowd

#456

I find it staggering how incapable the so-called ‘sensible’ people are at actually thinking through what they’re claiming, and the consequences of the policy decisions they’re demanding.

Like, you can’t claim to be the rational technocrats and then utterly fail to even attempt to make sense of the situation.

2 Likes
#458

Think the belief that switching to economic issues will persuade more Tories over is extremely simplistic (and optimistic), but this is otherwise good.

#459

i kinda agree that it’s economic policy and not brexit that’s mainly dividing people at the moment

we’re back to two party politics, ukip, lib dem and green are all pointless now - at least in the minds of a LOT of people

things are pretty equal between the tories and labour and have been for months and months

the graph below looks to me like there wasn’t actually THAT much of a drop off in the tory vote share last year, in the election they actually got slightly above the average of the polls over the previous 2 years

mean while, lib dem ukip and green all collapsed and labour shot up by a fucking mile - and haven’t really fallen off since

what it will be that causes someone to open a remotely significantly lead… i have no fucking idea but i suspect that either brexit will fuck everything and everyone will vote for jez’s utopia or they’ll all vote for boris’ world war 3

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