[Boiler]

It wouldn't hurt to give the Trans-Pennine route a major upgrade but also, to reverse this fuck-up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Mark_5A

However, I now see Chiltern's got that rolling stock.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Cheers. I actually thought more infrastructure was shared with HS2 than that, but encouraging.

[Boiler]

I've travelled along the Trans-Pennine route in the past: it desperately needed longer trains as much as it needed competent management. It's a while ago now but three-car Class 170 DMUs were completely unsuitable - and as for the P*c*rs...

[Tubby Isaacs]

UK is the fastest growing economy in the G7 this year. Wouldn't normally bother too much with the data of 2 quarters, but they do it us. 0.3% growth in a quarter isn't normally something to cheer, but it was axiomatic a couple of days ago that the fast growth in Q1 was all down to stockpiling for Trump tariffs, and that construction was now doing particularly badly. It grew by 1.2% this quarter. And everything else had been flattened by Reeves' "jobs tax". Talking of which, it probably has cost some jobs by starting at too low a level. But lots of people have been telling us that it was a scandal that employees had to claim tax credits (it is sometimes, sometimes it isn't because the alternative is those people not being employed at all, and it is they who benefit primarily from tax credits). What would you do as a government if this was something you were targeting? You'd probably raise the minimum wage in real terms, and make these low paying employers pay more NI towards the cost of tax credits. That's exactly what they've done. To virtually universal condemnation.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I thought Reeves was sounding surprisingly bullish the other day. Now I realize she must have seen the figures.