cirrus-clouds
Joined 9 years ago
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Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
Thanks for the update. The Dusseldorf and Cologne route monthly price seems to have risen quite high.
Here are the 2022 prices for the UK. The Liverpool to Manchester route price has dropped:
- UK: Luton to London St. Pancras (35 miles) | Monthly ticket cost: £387 (2017) | £452.80 (2022)
- UK: Liverpool Lime Street to Manchester Piccadilly (32 miles) | Monthly season ticket cost: £292 (2017) | £234.70 (2022)
Comment · 4 years ago
I've posted this before: a monthly season ticket comparison from 2017 for UK and Continental Europe. The price differences between UK and other countries are stark:
- UK: Luton to London St. Pancras (35 miles) | Monthly season ticket cost: £387
- UK: Liverpool Lime Street to Manchester Piccadilly (32 miles) | Monthly season ticket cost: £292
- Germany: Dusseldorf to Cologne (28 miles) | Monthly season ticket cost: £85
- France: Mantes-la-Jolie to Paris (34 miles) | Monthly season ticket cost: £61
- Italy: Anzione to Rome (31 miles) | Monthly season ticket cost: £61
- Spain: Aranjuez to Madrid (31 miles) | Monthly season ticket cost: £75
Source is the TUC (2017): https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/uk-commuters-spend-6-times-much-...
> UK workers on average salaries will spend 14% of their income on a monthly season ticket from Luton to London (£387), or 11% from Liverpool to Manchester (£292).
> By contrast, similar commutes would cost passengers only 2% of their incomes in France, 3% in Germany and Italy, and 4% in Spain.
Comment · 4 years ago
This twitter thread is excellent. Here are selected tweets to highlight the crisis from hospital and ambulance waiting times.
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"England & Wales as the only part of Europe that has recorded sustained and rising excess mortality over the last few months with no obvious natural explanation."
"Patients who waited 8-12 hours had a 16% higher chance of dying in the subsequent 30 days than average."
"This was after adjusting for a huge range of possible confounders, i.e this was not due to those patients’ characteristics, conditions etc, but due to the length of the wait."
"You may have heard almost 30,000 people waited 12 hours in English A&Es in July, but that figure actually only refers to the wait after initial assessment"
"Thanks to @Rebeccasmt’s reporting, we know that if you include all time spent waiting, 100,000 people waited 12+ hours!!"
"Take ambulance delays, for example: for emergency situations including suspected strokes and heart attacks, the average wait for an ambulance to arrive on the scene is now one hour, and 40,000 people with these sorts of emergencies waited 2 hours last month."
"As before, the peaks in ambulance-related harms broadly coincide with peaks in England’s non-Covid excess mortality.
"It’s a grim picture, and an increasingly conclusive one."
Comment · 4 years ago
Imagine if French citizens were facing energy bills as high as the UK (£5,816, €6850). French citizens would never tolerate such levels.
From Reuters: "France has committed to capping an increase on regulated electricity costs at 4%. To help do this the government has ordered utility EDF (EDF.PA), which is 80% state owned, to sell more cheap nuclear power to rivals"
(Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europes-efforts-shie...)
Comment · 4 years ago
On top of that, we have a zombie goverment with no solutions or urgency to tackle the cost-of-living crisis.
Comment · 4 years ago
Summary of the FT article:
- Investment bank Citigroup forecasts UK inflation will hit 18.6 per cent in January 2023 — the highest peak in almost half a century — because of soaring wholesale gas prices.
- The bank predicted that the country’s retail energy price cap — which limits how much the average household pays for heating and electricity — would be raised to £4,567 in January and then £5,816 in April (approx $6880, €6850) compared with the current level of £1,971 a year. It added that the shifts would lead to inflation “entering the stratosphere”.
- UK and European wholesale natural gas prices are already trading at close to 10 times normal levels and other forecasters have also raised their inflation predictions.
- The energy regulator Ofgem will on Friday (26 Aug) announce the energy price cap for the period between October and January, which most analysts expect to rise to more than £3,500 for a household with average usage of energy — an increase of 75 per cent on current levels.
Related article from Reuters: Europe's efforts to shield households from soaring energy costs https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europes-efforts-shie...
Comment · 4 years ago
Related video report from ITV News (from 2018):
Why aren't European hospitals under strain like the NHS? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ukbJKWwCYM
Comment · 4 years ago
NHS funding has increased massively under the Conservatives
That is simply not true. The Conservatives came to power in 2010. Here's what the The King's Fund [1] has to say on funding:
"In the decade following the global financial crisis in 2008, the health service faced the most prolonged spending squeeze in its history: between 2009/10 and 2018/19 health spending increased by an average of just 1.5% per year in real terms, compared to a long-term average increase of 3.6 per cent per year. These pressures were not unique to the UK, whose public spending on health care as a share of GDP is above the EU average, though lower than several comparable nations, including Germany, France, Denmark and the Netherlands." (Source: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/positions/nhs-funding)
[1] The The King's Fund is an independent charitable organisation working to improve health and care in England.
I can also recommended this short video (3 min): Brexit update (August 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUiJxH2pclM
(As an aside, our national newspapers, mostly right-wing and Conservative-supporting, have poisoned political discourse for decades in the UK. The FT is the only national newspaper with a higher standard of journalism than the others.)