Mike Wood

@northumbrian_ @Chrislike16 @QuestionerMoney @BobTaffy69 @marshpw0102 @leeamott1 @lukeshepherdson @44tunafish @Martagnan72 A friend of mine works on HS2. Told me a story of how a local council planning department demanded changes in the visual appearance of the bridges in their area. Necessitated a complete redesign, oodles of cost and a lot of lost time.

@Chrislike16 @ThePrizeForce @QuestionerMoney @BobTaffy69 @marshpw0102 @leeamott1 @lukeshepherdson @44tunafish @Martagnan72 We have no chance of upgrading it unless we have a massive overhaul of planning and procurement. HS2 showed how ridiculous we are as a nation... hundreds of millions of pounds on f**king bat tunnels... hundreds of thousands of pages of planning documents. Its crazy.

@BobTaffy69 @northumbrian_ @marshpw0102 @leeamott1 @lukeshepherdson @ThePrizeForce @44tunafish @Martagnan72 So looks like Burnham Coronation & I really hope He does well as successful Goverments are good for us all...I'll just say if Ed Milliband is in his Cabinet, he's doomed.

@Chrislike16 @QuestionerMoney @BobTaffy69 @northumbrian_ @marshpw0102 @leeamott1 @lukeshepherdson @44tunafish @Martagnan72 It's an issue definitely but if we were to think about the road network and imagine a point-to-point system I'm sure that there is probably a lot of redundancy & roads which carry such low volumes little need be done. Rat runs only exist because there's a human behind the wheel.

@ThePrizeForce @QuestionerMoney @BobTaffy69 @northumbrian_ @marshpw0102 @leeamott1 @lukeshepherdson @44tunafish @Martagnan72 Interesting Mike, but what about all our B roads, rat runs in cities & towns, farm lanes, terraced streets , etc?

UK Gilt traders.

@Chrislike16 @QuestionerMoney @BobTaffy69 @northumbrian_ @marshpw0102 @leeamott1 @lukeshepherdson @44tunafish @Martagnan72 If it was up to me, I'd spend the transport budget on making the roads good for driverless cars.

@Chrislike16 @QuestionerMoney @BobTaffy69 @northumbrian_ @marshpw0102 @leeamott1 @lukeshepherdson @44tunafish @Martagnan72 Before retirement would regularly catch the train to the airport. Worked fine. Caught the train into London once it twice per week, fine. Over the weekend I went on atrain pub crawl, all good.

@Chrislike16 @QuestionerMoney @BobTaffy69 @northumbrian_ @marshpw0102 @leeamott1 @lukeshepherdson @44tunafish @Martagnan72 I don't know why the state obsesses about the railways. It's almost like it's some sort virility totum for politicians. Right now they seem to work ok. Let's focus on more important things that impact everyone, eg energy.

@QuestionerMoney @BobTaffy69 @northumbrian_ @marshpw0102 @leeamott1 @lukeshepherdson @ThePrizeForce @44tunafish @Martagnan72 I travelled by train in 1981 to 1983 from Hereford to Edinburgh every couple of months, disaster journeys under state ownership...1998 to 99 Hereford to Paddington once a week, even bigger disaster & often had to go back via Newport & upto Hereford..trains in UK are just rubbish

@marshpw0102 @__YC9__ Will be historic if Scotland make it to the knockout stage

@marshpw0102 @__YC9__ No satisfying some people

Scotland will qualify in 3rd, make history & Clarke will go down as Scotlands most successful manager. Another mediocre campaign, which bizarrely is enough to qualify. With the same negative, cautious Clarke approach we’ve seen before. While other nations with less resources, facilities & player pools, show up looking better coached, style & mentality. Clarke reaps the rewards of having the best Scotland squad in years at his disposal & doing the bare minimum with it. Scotlands World Cup will be remembered for everything but the football.

@Chrislike16 @northumbrian_ @BobTaffy69 @marshpw0102 @leeamott1 @lukeshepherdson @44tunafish @Martagnan72 We spend money on discouraging work while enacting policies that discourage investment, employment and innovation. Just simply bizarre to me that the clever people in govt can't figure this out.

@northumbrian_ @BobTaffy69 @marshpw0102 @leeamott1 @lukeshepherdson @ThePrizeForce @44tunafish @Martagnan72 Then he'll be out in 2 years, can't have same old, sane old.

@worstall Where's the Disasters Emergency Committee and the TV appeals for aid?

The terrors of climate change brought home to us all. telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/2…

@LostTransport @thesundaysport @BradfemlyWalsh Loved Jonathan Meades' line about the country being divided by the Irony Curtain.

@ThePrizeForce @thesundaysport @BradfemlyWalsh Well although Lincolnshire just extends past Sheffield, Grantham is very much part of the East Midlands If you just want a north/south split then I subscribe to the Jonathan Meades model (so Northern) It's all contentious 😂

Burnham will be the first PM born in the north west of England since David Lloyd George. If I were Granada Reports, I'd be going big on this

@reporterboy @_CallumAnderson @RoyalMail So much of this stuff. Everyone suddenly getting upset about Steve Bray's boombox is another.

@_CallumAnderson @RoyalMail You’d never have said that if they’d done it before 2024. Never.

Really @RoyalMail? Unnecessarily poor form.

@LostTransport @thesundaysport @BradfemlyWalsh This all raises the tricky question of is Lincolnshire northern?

@thesundaysport @BradfemlyWalsh First Northern Prime Minister since Harold Wilson (I don't count Scots as Northern - they're something different)

@DanielPriestley The Solution Selling '9 Box Model'. Swore by this approach for years.

Here's the counterintuitive truth about sales. The fastest way to kill a deal is to present your solution too early. Inexperienced salespeople love to solutionise. The prospect says, "I want to get fit," and they jump in with the plan. The prospect says, "I'm stuck," and out comes the playbook. It feels helpful, efficient, and like exactly what they're being paid to do. It also makes the person dig their heels in. Because nothing has been earned yet. The solution arrives before the prospect feels understood, and the moment it does, they push back. Not on the solution. On the speed. The fix is to slow down and go in this order. 1. Insights first. Tell them what you're picking up on, mirror back the emotions, name the issues separately. 2. Then methods. The principles you'd apply to this exact situation, drawn from the patterns you've seen in dozens of others. 3. And only then the solution. By this point, the solution lands as the obvious next step rather than a pitch. Insights, methods, solution. In that order. Skip the first two and you'll spend the rest of the conversation fighting resistance you created yourself. Free 20-minute Masterclass on the exact marketing system I use to drive 8-figure growth: bit.ly/3ShUMne

Brexit Day Bendy Banana - The Full Story It really is true that European Union law insists that a Class I banana must be free from excessive curvature. Bendy bananas are illegal with a £5,000 fine or 6 months in pokey. That is not the EU nor the bendy banana problem. The problem is that this is the law. The source for this is the Codex Alimentarius, a reference book from the United Nations. Which is a collection of the details about how the food trade is organised. These manufacturers, suppliers, of this type of food use this system to grade stuff. These other folk do this other and so on. It is a collection of industry standards. Class I bananas, for human consumption, should be free of excessive curvature. This is so Bert in the warehouse knows what to send Fred in the greengrocers' when a box of Class I bananas, for human consumption, is ordered. It's a standard, a shorthand, within a trade. I have, in my time, written an international standard. I know this stuff, see? The EU problem is that the continent is run by those whose world view is based upon Roman Law. There must be a law for everything. You know, morons. Thus the Codex is transposed into law. Thus the 6 months and £5k for a bendy banana. As opposed to the English/British system of common law. Which is that people who don't ship according to industry standards don't get any more business. Or, in extremis, the judge says they're defrauding the buyer by not meeting trade standards and reaches for his black cap. The point being that industry standards can be changed by the major wholesalers and buyers getting together, agreeing that as we've had to move on from the Cavendish cultivar - as we once did the Gros Michel - therefore we need to change those trade standards. Publish the new standards and we're done. The EU had a law that made apricot marmalade illegal - you could only put oils of citrus into jams/marmalades made from citrus, d'ye see? - at that peril of the 6 months and £5k. They just changed that a few weeks back. It took them two decades to change the law, to make apricot marmalade legal. The problem is that the EU thinks this must all be the law. Instead of what it is, an industry standard. This is not the way to encourage innovation across a continent. Brexit made us free of these cretins. True, true, we've still our own domestic we need to root out but at least we can go on to Hang the Lanyards which we cannot if we're part of an entire continent run by them. The point of the bendy banana story is that the European Union made them illegal. We're well shot of that nonsense.

@DPJHodges As the Tories discovered in the 1990s, regicide leaves deep wounds and divisions that never really heal.

Forget the talk about the national interest. A vengeful Keir Starmer is trying to kneecap Andy Burnham before he has even set foot in Downing Street > Daily Mail > dailymail.com/columnists/art…

@TVAddictStill @v_j_freeman No I don't. That fact points to a deeper structural issue of how Labour recruit and promote through the early part of a potential politicians career.

@ThePrizeForce @v_j_freeman There are two issues: leader and promoting. I was addressing the 2nd. For leader, it's true it'd 51 years since Thatcher was elected. Are there any Labour women after that who you think should have been made leader, though?

Stellä Creäsy grinning like a cat who got the cream while allowing herself to be a man’s well placed ornament. I’m sure it will work out better for her than it does for ‘us’.

@BobTaffy69 @nuffniceness @TheNews47 Yep. I have never gone along with this idea that there has to be a new GE. We have a parliamentary system not a presidential system.

@ThePrizeForce @nuffniceness @TheNews47 Agreed we went through Johnson, then the madness of Truss then Sunak with no elections. Eight tory pms since 1945 i believe became pm without election.

🚨 BREAKING: Following Keir Starmer’s resignation, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has demanded an immediate General Election.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Do you agree with this?

@holland_tom I think Harald would have played for Turkey.

So rude. I’d hoped he would enjoy talking about Harald Hardrada…

@DrHelenFry Just ordered a copy of The Walls have Ears.

Did you learn something new from this thread? If so, please consider showing your support and 'Follow' my X page @DrHelenFry for more unique WW2 content like this. I have plenty more history to share! (end).

In 1944, one of Hitler’s most decorated paratroop generals was captured in Brest and secretly brought to a grand English country house. Hidden microphones recorded every word he said about the German war effort. What he revealed still surprises historians today: (🧵)