Potholes.

You said above 'they cannot speak in anything other than the future tense ..., which is also true of all parties in opposition'. Reform are in government in some county councils. Hence their pre-election 'we will' statements in opposition can be verified by letting some time pass and testing whether their promises turned into results. Since they have been in government in some places since May 2025, they have had almost a year in which their promises could have been delivered. As more time passes we will have more chances to see what became of those promises.

Theo

Is that in fact true? Or are there constraints placed on what they can do by e.g. central government?

This is exactly the sort of opacity I ran into a decade ago trying to work out who in fact was dictating we had to have wind turbines everywhere. At the end of the day the answer was 'the EU' . Which is when I joined UKIP.

Well I suppose I am somewhat motivated to actually do that.

Does anybody know the chapter and verse?

Why not actually trot along and ask them?

Anything a politician says which is totally unprovable is to their advantage. What the public hears is "we *would* have done...", so associating that Party with the wanted action. The fact that it doesn't stand up to analysis is for others to complain about, and whether or not Joe Public is listening at /that/ time is a matter of chance.

I find it of some amusement that "PMQ" and, for example, the BBC's "Question Time" are pointless, as the questions are never answered. I wonder if it would help if "question" was changed to "answer". Probably not. :-(

The system governs the people. How often to we get a say about the system? The last time was the Alternative Vote referendum about 15 years ago; I don't know about any vote on the system before that.

As a sort of aside, a week or so ago I was thinking about "the system" while watching the consistently depressing event know as PMQ. Anything Starmer said Badenoch immediately said the opposite, and I wondered why this was. And then I remembered that she wasn't only leader of The Opposition, but what is commonly known as The Official Opposition. So the system refers to it as official opposition. This, of course, gets us nowhere other than arguing opposites all the time. What if it wasn't called an "Opposition", but, for example, an "Alternative"? Perhaps it's just semantics, but at present if the party in government says "white", the official comment from the other side is "black", because that's the "opposite". Why can't it be "grey", as that might lead to a sensible compromise?

True, but it's still a crash with probably the same result.

That's why I call them the cowards in parliament. They want to rule, to make the laws but pass the buck to councils to take the flack. They sold off the utilities because they didn't want the responsibility of running them. Councils have followed suit by ridding themselves of their housing stocks & subcontracting as much as they can.

You'll find most - if not all - publicly accessible PFI contracts are heavily redacted. Not sure about contracts with the public sector in general.

Quite. From what I read they're not exactly trailblazing. They seem to hit the news more for incompetence and expulsions.

Maybe once the hard data (quantitative and qualitative) starts to feed in we'll see what many here seem to believe - Reform are best placed to manage government.

Sadly no school teaches the basics of metaphysics. In particular the problem of induction, which is the trick used by every conspiracy theorist and politicians to gull those that think they are smarter than they are..

...a man in a train compartment is bust tearing up newspapers and throwing them out of the window..."Why are you doing that?" "Ït keeps the Elephants down. " "But there aren't any elephants!" "Effective, isn't it!"

Make believe solutions to non existent problems is a speciality of politicians, mainly on the left

Those programs and sessions are important to see just how much we are having our tails twisted.

Actually no. The frequency of air crashes continues to diminish. It takes a really weird set of circumstances to crash a plane accidentally these days.

Or even deliberately, as in the Air India fracas. The captain had to do the one thing wrong at exactly the wrong time to guarantee the crash. Within a window of about 10 seconds.

Well yes, +1 to all of that.

The argument is about putting intelligent practical people in charge and taking back control from the lardarses . It needs to happen every 50 tears or so when the situation gets intolerable.

The hope is that Reform can do it, because for sure no one else is even interested in admitting the problem...

Every reason if its 'dodgy'.

And one has to wonder why...

There are plenty of chancers flocking to what is perceived as a no brainer for election - namely Reform

And the hard left and the Europhiles will be busy infiltrating to find anything to smear with and to bring the party into disrepute. At leats Nigel doesnt f*ck around. If ytjey overstep te mark out they go., No Tommy Robinsons allowed.

At least I believe Reform will give it a go.

It is definitely not easy to shake up a system and redesign the way government works at every level to make it work for the people rather than for the Bureaucrats and Eurocrats. Even more so without breaking too many eggs, like the MAGA movement has done.

But I do not believe there is anyone as stupid as TRUMP in the party and all the Maga like people are in the BNP anyway.

I hope they will be honest and say 'this is a complete buggers muddle, and there are no quick or easy solutions, but this is how we are going to try'

Yes, non-trunk highways are a county council matter. There is nothing stopping them fixing them.

However, when in government they may discover a fact which everyone knew all along, which is that the Tories cut council budgets to the bone ('austerity', 'shrinking the state', 'getting rid of waste'). Councils have a certain set of things that they must fund my law, adult social care being one of them. Given that the demand in that area cannot be controlled (more people are getting old and needing to go into a home; also councils were forced to sell off their own OAP homes and have to rely on expensive private sector provision), budgets for things the council is not forced to provide by law, such as highway repairs, get squeezed.

Additionally council tax is capped (Tories again), so councils can neither reduce expenditure nor increase income. So they have limited room to manoeurve.

A number of (mostly Tory) councils like Woking came up with a cunning wheeze

- borrow money at government bond rates (Public Works Loan Board) and invest in commercial property, which should in theory make a higher rate of return. But, as any investor should know, buying risky assets with safe money exposes you to short term shortfall risks - which is why Woking council went bust in 2023 owing 1.2 billion quid (on £24m annual budget).

So central government does not fix potholes, councils do, and are free to set their priorities to fix them if they deem that important. But in practice they have no money since a series of Tory governments have squeezed them. There are no signs that a Reform government in Westminster will fund councils better - they need to tell us how they will raise taxes to pay for it.

Theo

"...every 50 tears or so..."!!!

That must be one of the most perfectly appropriate typos I've ever seen!

LOL Thanks Jeff. I am the worlds worse typist and my C programs take at least 10 compiler passes to iron out the typos.

And age related conditions are making s*it worse.

I can but apologise...