Cycling UK Forum

Ben@Forest wrote: ↑6 Feb 2022, 7:42am It has to be said that the area where the incident occurred is often busy, but mainly in a 'walkers and sightseers' way. When this incident happened it had been turned into 'Costa Del Tees' with BBQs and boozy parties. So many cars were parked along the road that the council came to paint emergency double yellow lines along it. It's a pretty small B-road but is important for locals for whom it's the only road in and out and at least once it actually got blocked by parked vehicles. Visitors also left tonnes of rubbish and there was casual vandalism. Visitors do frequently park in front of, or by, farmers' gates here, which means farm vehicles can't turn in or out. Double puncture or not he should not have parked his car where he did without permission.

I live a few hundred yards away from this incident and know the farmer very well, he's a good man for sure. What Ben says above is absolutely correct and there is far more to this than is reported in the press. There had been gangs of drunken yobs tearing about up this normally quiet road all day, chasing each other in fast cars, wrecking walls lighting fires on private property....etc etc. No sign whatsoever of any police despite several calls from farms about the madness going on in this quiet rural location. They were acting like maniacs, we all saw it.

They completely blocked his access road to the farm on a busy day when he was in and out of that only entrance during hay time, he politely asked them to move it so he could get in and out with his tractor/trailer and got thumped by a drunken yob in response. It looks very much like they intended to abandon the car there. Was he meant to wait until either the police turned up (unlikely from past history) or just abandon work for the day. It got out of hand when he moved the car which he did quickly and recklessly to avoid getting beaten up while doing it hence the mess he made of it. He was also frightened.
The jury made the right decision when they had all the facts which were unreported in the press.

cycle tramp wrote: ↑4 Jan 2022, 9:24pm

PhilD28 wrote: ↑4 Jan 2022, 7:11pm

thirdcrank wrote: ↑4 Jan 2022, 7:02pm

I'm genuinely interested to know what you have in mind here. My memory is probably a bit blurred. The 1997 general election was just before I retired and I remember a feeling of optimism for the future. In spite of finishing work at 2200 on te day of the election and starting at 0600 next day, I stayed up most of the night rejoicing as the results came in. In short, within a few years I was disillusioned.

How about Sure Start, Nursing Bursaries, Huge Funding increases for education and the NHS (waiting lists down to realistic levels at last).

>cough<..... P.F.I* anyone...?


(*private finance initiative/ pay for it indefinitely)

You entirely miss my point, why am I not surprised. try reading the link I provided.

If anyone believes a Tory government would have been better and dealt with Iraq any differently during that period you are suffering total delusion. Btw, I was one of the people alongside Tony Benn on the anti war in Iraq march in London….were any of you?

thirdcrank wrote: ↑4 Jan 2022, 7:29pm I was only looking for "a lot of solid socialist policies" rather than his skills in party politics.

My impression - nothing more - is that things like Sure start were in reality based on means testing, even though those value-laden words were avoided. eg The Minimum income guarantee was actually the introduction of means testing to the state retirement pension without using those words. My first-hand experience of this came from being Citizens Advice Bureau volunteer in those years and my memory is of repeatedly explaining to clients that what they had assumed from the spin they had heard.

Well I'm in the middle of something here at the moment, so I'll just provide a link for the good the bad and the ugly of Blair, including his socialist policies. Hope that helps. It's all too easy to tar Blair with Iraq and wipe out the good he did, including devolution (doesn't get any more socialist) Huge reduction in poverty in this country during his premiership, again very socialist, the shoring up of a failing NHS service a huge asset to those who can't afford private healthcare....the list goes on.

I think currently those who believe in socialism ought to targeting their ire at this government not Blair and this stupid gong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premiersh ... l_policies

thirdcrank wrote: ↑4 Jan 2022, 7:02pm

PhilD28 wrote: ↑4 Jan 2022, 2:53pm

Pebble wrote: ↑4 Jan 2022, 10:18am Not me, I would have him back as PM tomorrow.

Me too, head and shoulders above this bunch of charlatans we've had for the last 10 years. He was wrong about Iraq (an understatement I know) but there were a lot of solid socialist policies pushed through by him and his government.

I never liked him or his style but he did deliver. Whether he deserves a knighthood...I don't think anyone does for "doing their job", honours should be reserved for those who do good works outside of their jobs and for altruistic reasons, not as a reward for doing what they are paid for doing anyway. (My emphasis)

I'm genuinely interested to know what you have in mind here. My memory is probably a bit blurred. The 1997 general election was just before I retired and I remember a feeling of optimism for the future. In spite of finishing work at 2200 on te day of the election and starting at 0600 next day, I stayed up most of the night rejoicing as the results came in. In short, within a few years I was disillusioned.

How about Sure Start, Nursing Bursaries, Huge Funding increases for education and the NHS (waiting lists down to realistic levels at last).
I think I was pretty clear about my dislike for the person and his debacle of Iraq. And I stand by the fact that I would far rather see Blair as PM than this damnation of a man we have now, which was what I was agreeing with.

Yes as a lifelong socialist and Labour Party Member I was disappointed that Blair was Right of centre, but he kept the damned tories out of power for three terms, for that I am grateful and would like to see the same occur again. He would have wiped the floor with Johnson at PMQ's were he leader of the opposition.

Oops, I forgot that little thing called The Northern Ireland Peace Process.

Pebble wrote: ↑4 Jan 2022, 10:18am Not me, I would have him back as PM tomorrow.

Me too, head and shoulders above this bunch of charlatans we've had for the last 10 years. He was wrong about Iraq (an understatement I know) but there were a lot of solid socialist policies pushed through by him and his government.

I never liked him or his style but he did deliver. Whether he deserves a knighthood...I don't think anyone does for "doing their job", honours should be reserved for those who do good works outside of their jobs and for altruistic reasons, not as a reward for doing what they are paid for doing anyway.

pwa wrote: ↑3 Jan 2022, 5:07am

661-Pete wrote: ↑2 Jan 2022, 10:11am

reohn2 wrote: ↑2 Jan 2022, 9:49am ....the consultant was a second generation Indian,his assistant was Polish,the anaesthetist was a 70year old India lady,the two charge nurses onnthe ward,working 12 hour shifts about,were both of African extract....

Exactly. My experience two years ago wasn't quite so international ... but I recall my surgeon appeared to be French: at any rate she had a French name and a pronounced accent. And the nurses were of course of several different ethnic groups.

And I wouldn't be surprised if they were all excellent. But you should be asking yourself why it is necessary to recruit from abroad on such a scale. Why is it necessary? My own conclusion is that for decades we have not been doing enough to make these professions attractive, and we have not been doing enough to direct young UK citizens into them. Recruiting from abroad, whilst it has given us fine people, has been a lazy alternative to sorting out the problems that prevent us filling positions with homegrown talent. The problem isn't the foreign recruits who do enter the NHS, it is the absence of UK recruits who ought to have entered the NHS.

Not caring about this, and being totally happy with large scale reliance on foreign recruits, is more consistent with a right wing way of thinking than with the left wing. Why care about the factors that make it hard to recruit locally when you can get what you need abroad? Why care about your workforce when instead you can treat them as a commodity and ignore their grievances and lack of morale, easily replacing them with people from poorer countries? That is a right wing way of dealing with workers and it is unacceptable to me. Large scale recruiting from abroad has been an alternative to sorting out problems.

I don't think for one minute that Boris will sort this out, but I wish Labour would pull their collective finger out and get to work on it. My hope is that Starmer and Co will have a stab at doing something about this in a year or two from now. But if they rely too much on what ought to be a temporary fix of recruiting from abroad whilst just tinkering around the edges of the underlying causes of poor domestic recruiting and retention, I'll be deeply disappointed with them.

Or alternatively, having skilled people from other countries come and work in the UK while our skilled people go and work abroad (yes they do... I spent much of my life doing exactly that as have many of my work friends) is healthy for any nation as it leads to understanding of other cultures.

I do agree that we do not put enough effort into training and skilling our own workforce, quite the opposite, such as removing nursing bursaries, there are also many similar engineering examples where technical education via colleges has been undervalued and underfunded for many years.

Personally I love the fact that we are becoming a multi-cultural society, and hate the fact that we don't place enough emphasis on preparing and educating/training our own workforce. Reducing poverty in this country would be a good start as would encouraging our manufacturing sector to manufacture products here and not just offshore it to China etc.

francovendee wrote: ↑2 Jan 2022, 9:00am Don't hold your breath. If it does get mentioned in the mail I'd be shocked.
The fact is we need immigrants. Skilled and unskilled to fill roles where there is a shortage of labour.
I suppose you could argue that now it will be by invite rather than a right and Boris's lot can say we are controlling our borders.
I suspect total immigration figures will remain the same as when there was free movement from the EU.
Not sure how this will sit with 'The UK is an overcrowded island we don't want more people coming into the country' brigade.

Yes on all points, immigration has been an important part of the UK labour (and cultural) scene in the UK for a very long time, to try and stop it without understanding the part it plays is rank stupidity. I note that Priti dense is up in arms about the suggestion of allowing more Indian citizens into the UK even as part of a trade deal.

On the one hand this govt are making it far more difficult for our nearest trade partners in Europe to work and live in the UK, while on the other the developing trade deal with India is today reported to be dependent upon making it much easier for Indian citizens to live and work in the UK.
A big article front page of the Guardian today. I wonder if it will make headlines in the Mail.

"Welcome here kind stranger" - Paul Brady (at his best).

Mike Sales wrote: ↑29 Dec 2021, 11:01am Goverment should be encouraging insulation of homes much more, and should have started doing so long ago.
Imprisoning advocates for this is perverse. This is a climate emergency,
and we should have been trying to get away from gas generation.
We do have plenty of wind, waves and tides to exploit, and Putin cannot mess with those.
FoE and others have been saying this for decades.

I agree entirely.

pwa wrote: ↑29 Dec 2021, 10:03am Do we think taxes on energy should be lowered or removed in order to keep energy affordable, or do we think energy prices should be made high to make people use energy more responsibly, given the climate crisis? I have a feeling that there are voices on this Forum, my own included, that flit between one position and the other depending on what is foremost in our minds at the time. There is a dilemma here.

I suggest that from a climate change perspective, higher prices will force down consumption and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But as a mechanism for bringing that about, it is harsh on people who cannot afford to keep their homes warm. They need help to reduce their consumption through insulation, more efficient heating, etc. By definition, the poor cannot afford expensive home modifications that would reduce their need for energy. They need a viable alternative to living in deep fuel poverty.

Good points certainly, but I believe that having public ownership of utilities would allow a wider range of tactics to be employed to help deal with some of these issues. assuming of course we had a government who cared about dealing with such real and pressing issues.

Meanwhile in the real world neither bringing the utilities back into public ownership nor this government doing anything to significantly help with the growing issue of fuel poverty is going to happen until it affects their ability to hold onto power.

francovendee wrote: ↑29 Dec 2021, 7:57am I don't think the Government can be blamed for gas price increases. They can be criticised for the very low amounts kept in storage.
High prices will filter through but having some gas bought earlier would smooth the rises.
An interruption to supplies would show this policy for what it is.

If all essential utilities were in the public domain and managed correctly, it would be much easier to buffer the public from price increases, at least for a time until supply stabilised. It would be much easier to manage for public good rather than for the benefit of a few private shareholders if we were all shareholders again.

Of course there are many things a decent govt could do anyway starting with removing vat and recovering those lost taxes from elsewhere, I’m sure we have many suggestions as to where those lost taxes could be recovered.

Brexit: ‘the biggest disaster any government has ever negotiated’
Lisa O'Carroll (Guardian)

Simon Spurrell, Managing Director of The Cheshire Cheese Company
Simon Spurrell co-founder of the Cheshire Cheese Company. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
A British cheesemaker who predicted Brexit would cost him hundreds of thousands of pounds in exports has called the UK’s departure from the EU single market a disaster, after losing his entire wholesale and retail business in the bloc over the past year. Simon Spurrell, the co-founder of the Cheshire Cheese Company, said personal advice from a government minister to pursue non-EU markets to compensate for his losses had proved to be “an expensive joke”.

“It turns out our greatest competitor on the planet is the UK government because every time they do a fantastic deal, they kick us out of that market – starting with the Brexit deal,” he said.

Spurrell predicted in January that Brexit would cost him £250,000 in sales. “We lost £270,000, so I got one thing right,” he said, describing the post-Brexit EU trade deal as the “biggest disaster that any government has ever negotiated in the history of trade negotiations”.

His online retail business was hit immediately after the Brexit negotiator David Frost failed to secure a frictionless trade deal addressing sales to individual customers in the EU.

Spurrell said he had lost 20% of sales overnight after discovering he needed to provide a £180 health certificate on each order, including gift packs costing £25 or £30. He said the viability of his online retail had come to a “dead stop”.

Artisan cheese produced by the Cheshire Cheese Company.
Cheese produced by Spurrell’s company. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images
After he embarked on a personal crusade to draw attention to the plight of UK exporters involving almost 200 media interviews around the world, he was invited to an online meeting with Victoria Prentis, a minister at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. She suggested that emerging markets could compensate for the Brexit-related hole in the Cheshire Cheese Company’s finances.

Spurrell said he had pursued new business in Norway and Canada but post-Brexit trade deals sealed by the government had put barriers in place.

“We no longer have any ability to deal with the EU as our three distributors in Germany, France and Italy have said we have become too expensive because of the new checks and paperwork.

“And now we’ve also lost Norway since the trade deal, as duty for wholesale is 273%. Then we tried Canada but what the government didn’t tell us is that duty of 244% is applied on any consignment over $20 [£15].”

That meant Canadian customers who ordered a gift pack worth £50, including transport fees, were asked to pay £178 extra in duty when the courier arrived at their door, Spurrell said. “As you can imagine, customers were saying: ‘You can take that back, we don’t want it anymore’.”

Norwegian duty on a £30 cheese pack amounted to £190 extra, he said.

Spurrell is now pursuing the domestic market with greater vigour but says the cost of marketing has gone “through the roof” because all his competitors are having to do the same.

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“Before we could sell across the EU, now we are all fishing in the same pond. We used to be the biggest online sellers but now we are absolutely bombarded with attacks by all our cheese rivals because they are buying all the ads on Google to try to beat us. These are competitors who would never have bothered us before,” he said.

The “sad” thing, Spurrell said, is that it is the small to medium-sized companies such as his, important employers up and down the country, have been hammered by Brexit and other trade deals struck by the government, rather than giant rivals.

He noted that the Canadian company Saputo, with a market capital of more than C$14bn (£8.3bn), had done well out of the Norwegian deal as producers of three of the four “premier” cheeses singled out for “significantly reduced tariffs”.

Anyone worried about corrosion and high tensile steel bolts (I'm not I use grease or ACF 50 on them) high tensile stainless bolts are available, those in the link are about 50% higher UTS and hence similar increase in fatigue resistance than the typical A2 SS bolts supplied with racks. https://www.spaldingfasteners.co.uk/m5- ... ts-din933/

I still prefer plain high tensile carbon steel which have double the UTS, but I appreciate my application may be more demanding than most.

pwa wrote: ↑22 Dec 2021, 12:58pm

PhilD28 wrote: ↑22 Dec 2021, 8:31am

pwa wrote: ↑22 Dec 2021, 8:01am M5 or M6 is surely dictated more by the braze-ons on the frame than by the rack. You can usually widen the apertures on a rack a little if you need to. But the frame comes with fittings for one or the other. I had a Thorn that would only take M5 when the rack would take M6. So M5 it was.

Later Thorn frames use M6 rack braze ons. I have re -drilled and re tapped my M5 to M6 for about the last 30 years after bolt fatigue failure in Morocco. It takes minutes to do. Any custom builder will offer either if you ask.

I expect you are correct, but changing bolts for new ones prior to a tour is a few minutes of work and eliminates fatigue, as does making sure bolts are not supporting racks in an awkward way. The rack ends should clamp close to the face of the frame fitting and not be held out on a spacer, if at all possible, so the bolt doesn't have too much to do. If the bolt isn't properly supported it will have bending forces on it, and that is where failure becomes likely. And bolts should never be allowed to work loose. On a tour I check that every morning before the off. And surely, rack apertures can generally be made a tiny bit wider if an wider bolt is needed. I have done that in the past.

The simplest most effective thing you can do to prevent failure is to ditch the A2 stainless steel bolts most rack manufacturers or big box stores/bike shops sell and replace with High tensile carbon steel bolts. A2 stainless has a UTS of about 500-700 MPa compared to the at least 1000 MPa or much more dependent upon the spec of decent high tensile steel.

All the points you made are indeed good practice

Regarding changing bolts before a tour, that helps, but on the tours I undertake, typically 3 months or more and heavily loaded, often of rough surfaces and and sometimes off road, that's plenty of time for fatigue to become a problem (if not for the bolts, certainly for me).