The current minimum EPC rating is D. The legislation to raise it to C hasn't been dropped, they just haven't decided exactly what date it will take place. And it's stupid legislation because many old properties cannot be sensibly raised from D to C, and these are the properties (e.g. terraced housing) which are typically rented out. So, we have a housing crisis with too few properties available to rent and the legislation will force landlords to take rental property off the market. Madness.
There's a lot of not-joined-up thinking in the UK government. Has been for ages.
Like, the housing crisis in the UK, there's a lot of empty houses, they're just in places with no jobs, could encourage employers to go there, but HS2 mumble mumble. Could build more houses, but greenbelt, and existing homeowners like the house prices going up, and lots of builders were Polish and oh look Brexit.
Right now, winter fuel allowance is literally burning money because the houses are not good enough. This is also not sensible.
I remember that the UK was forced to privatise Rail in the way that it did because of EU competition rules. I was commuting by Rail at the time and the manner in which it was privatised was considered to be barmy by both myself and fellow passengers.
This is just another “bendy bananas”-tier myth. The UK was never forced to privatise because of EU competition rules, see, for example, France, an EU member state that retained publicly owned railways during the same period.
There are EU competition rules that require separating operations from infrastructure, but it is and always has been fine to do this as separate divisions under the same publicly owned umbrella.
I don't understand how is this "forced privatisation"? There's nothing preventing a state owned rail company from operating, no? All this says is that private companies must be allowed competitive access. Am I missing something?
No nothing preventing it but you cannot just have a state operator bid for it. The contract in question is basically the entire Netherlands passenger operations, with some small exceptions.
The key problem the EU has is the size of the contract. The contract cannot be for the entire country (more or less), it needs to be split into smaller ones (eg: one contract for intercity, one contract for local services near Amsterdam, etc). Netherlands defense is that the passenger rail system cannot be split up like this as it would cause operational problems and thus should not be franchised. I'm simplifying this from memory but it's roughly correct I think.
There is no doubt in my mind were it to be split up like the EU is requiring, that de facto some of it would be privatized. It has/is happening in every European state that has complied with the EU rules.
To me that is very close to forced privatisation. The current (Labour) UK model (government owned franchises with no bidding) would 100% not be allowed.
Likewise. I used to possess a hand-written letter from Sophie Wilson (of Acorn/ARM fame) replying to my own hand-written query letter at around 1981 when I was 16 and learning to program my Acorn Atom.
I know both usages, and as an Englishman I am a native English speaker. However, I would agree that the most common usage would be the non-Red opponents of the communistic takeover of Russia in the early 1920s. Isn't the cocktail named as a direct reference to these people?
All the base structure and common words are Germanic/Scandinavian. Yes, "fancier" vocabulary and constructed words like television or telephone are Latin/Greek derived. You could restrict English to its Germanic roots and still make (stilted) conversation. You could not do the same using only its added French/Latin/Greek vocabulary.
Reducing things to exclusively Germanic/Scandinavian roots without any crossing to old French etc would massively restrict vocabulary so yes you could hold a conversation but you could also hold one without any of those words. Both could seem natural or really stilted depending on the subject and your approach to dialogue.
When you say fancy it’s not just allure or autocrat, but also words like age, air, alarm, aunt, chair, money, beef, dance, etc
Fascinating. I was hoping to see the "zero mile" marker in Alfreton and it was present. The fingerpost in Brownhills (in the West Midlands) is worth knowing as well:
