It's pothole season again

'Huge' pothole damages 30 cars in one evening leaving dozens of motorists stranded

Motorists have complained after a ‘huge’ pothole damaged 30 cars in one night, leaving some drivers waiting hours for assistance.

The hole was several inches deep and filled with water, making it difficult to see as vehicles approached it after dark.

Those caught up in the chaos on Monday said it was lucky there hadn’t been a serious accident at the spot on the B1062 between Beccles and Bungay in Suffolk, where the speed limit is 50mph.

A mobile tyre replacement fitter called out to several jobs at the spot admitted the epidemic of potholes on roads as councils direct resources elsewhere was good business for him – but costly for drivers.

The roads are rough in our bit of Derbyshire and even main roads are in a worse state than previous years. There was almost a third-world look to a short stretch of urban road I drove on yesterday.

Yes the roads are being patched, but the patches don't seem to last and meanwhile enough new potholes appear to overtake the rate of patching. 

Our friendly bus driver says the roads he drives on are in the worst he's ever seen. He's clumping in and out of potholes all day long and can't even weave around the big ones to avoid them.   

Deeply humiliating

Tertius Bonnin has a topical CAPX on Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s first female Prime Minister. Essentially a story of leadership and that rare ability to blend leadership with tough-minded political honesty.


What Britain can learn from Japanese Thatcherism

The parallels between Japan and Britain are striking – and for Westminster, deeply humiliating
Sanae Takaichi has proved that the public doesn’t want consensus if it means standing still
Japan’s Prime Minister is creating a new generation of popular capitalists

In the pre-dawn stillness of Tokyo’s Nagatacho district, the lights on the fifth floor of the Kantei remain stubbornly ablaze. Inside, Japan’s first female Prime Minister is likely to be on her fourth cup of tea and her eighteenth hour of work. Sanae Takaichi does not believe in Japan’s legendary ‘lost decades’ (roughly 1991-2021) of stagnation, only in the ‘work, work, work’ philosophy that has become her trademark, and now, her country’s new mandate.

For Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the last few years have been a slow-motion descent into the political abyss. Bogged down by archaic slush-fund scandals and a public weary of institutional inertia, the party’s brand has rarely been more toxic. And yet, Takaichi has found a way to capitalise on her party’s decline as her personal popularity has soared.


Well worth reading as a reminder of something we in the UK don't have and are apparently unwilling to vote for. The contrast with Keir Starmer's government could hardly be more humiliating.


The parallels between Japan and Britain are striking – and for Westminster, deeply humiliating. Both are island nations grappling with the weight of past glories, ageing demographics, high levels of national debt and a productivity puzzle that has defied a decade of technocratic tinkering. However, while Britain remains trapped in a cycle of managed decline, Takaichi’s Japan appears to have found an offramp.

Perhaps we could sponsor people too

Elon Musk says SpaceX will build a system to let anyone travel to the moon—here's the timeline

Pack your bags, you might go to the moon soon, not just any normal vacation. Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, has once again gone viral with his big vision for space travel.

On 10 February 2026, Musk announced that his company intends to build a system that would allow virtually anyone to journey to the Moon, showing a giant change in the way humans might access space.

Musk's announcement comes when space exploration is evolving super fast, with governments and private companies alike racing to make lunar and interplanetary travel a reality. According to Musk, the Moon is now a more practical first step than Mars because of its proximity and the frequency with which spacecraft can reach it.


If we could sponsor people to send to the moon, not thinking of anyone in particular, but someone willing to accept the donation of a smart spacesuit and new space goggles perhaps...

Mandate

Starmer loses another top aide but clings on – for now

In front of a packed meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Sir Keir also vowed that as long as he had “breath in my body” he would fight against Nigel Farage on behalf of the country, adding that he had “won every fight I’ve ever been in”.

He said: “After having fought so hard for the chance to change our country, I’m not prepared to walk away from my mandate and my responsibility to my country, or to plunge us into chaos as others have done.”

A chap is bound to wonder what Starmer's 'mandate' is supposed to be, but of course the answer is that the only mandate any of them recognise is to stay in power.

Yet a chap is also bound to wonder if silly political words such as 'mandate' have become useless verbal baggage, words which impress nobody. Or maybe they have evolved into a kind of mystical twaddle akin to astrology, climate dooming and celebrity lingo...

Hang on...

Have twaddle speakers adopted and covertly formalised the language Twaddlish as a signal of social superiority? As the advantages of an upper echelon accent fade away, perhaps Twaddlish has taken its place. 

Gosh, perhaps the mandate of state education is to promote Twaddlish.

Miller

The YT video which was the subject of this post has been deleted until it has been verified as accurate. At the moment this does not seem to be the case.

Please accept my apologies, as ever the rule is check, check, check.

AKH

To live a normal life again

‘To live a normal life again, it’s a dream come true’: UK’s first climate evacuees can cast off their homes and trauma

Forty-odd residents of Clydach Terrace in Ynysybwl, south Wales, relieved by council buyout after years in fear of fast flooding...

Of the 18 houses on the street, only 6a and 6b – newer builds set back from the road, and up a slope – will remain. One woman living there said she would not be moving, but her son, a little further down the road, will be...


It took some chutzpah to work the notion of 'climate evacuees' into the headline of a story which could have been a more analytical example of the various natural, self-imposed and civil engineering challenges of flood defence. 

The Grauniad manages it but - 

In some ways, the street is uniquely unlucky. The classic mining community row of early 20th-century stone houses was built on a natural floodplain, and its narrowness means there is no room for flood waters to dissipate. Crucially, the terrace is in a basin, meaning that a rise of just a centimetre over the retaining wall can almost instantly turn into 2 metres of water, engulfing nearby houses within minutes.

Beyond the Sleaze II

A sobering Blackout News piece on signs that Germany is gradually losing its automotive industry, much of it through self-inflicted official incompetence. Sounds familiar and reminds me of the sharp increase in the number of Chinese cars I've seen on local roads in the last year or so.

AI translation from the original German.

Germany is losing the automotive industry – if production migrates, it will not come back

The decline of the German automotive industry does not come with sirens, but with briefcases. The findings are brutal: the automotive industry is losing its substance – and much faster than many believe. This is reflected in plant closures, insolvencies and cancelled development budgets. There is a point at which all whitewashing ends: once production has migrated, it usually does not come back. This is because tools, supply chains and routines disappear with production, while new locations build up know-how at the same time. To do this, the suppliers follow the manufacturers to the locations abroad.

For the automotive industry, energy costs, taxes and approval times are crucial. This shapes the cost structures at the respective location. Germany combines high energy prices with a high tax burden, while permits eat up time. At the same time, the infrastructure is crumbling in many places and this is driving additional costs into every calculation. As a result, even strong brands are losing pace and speed, even though demand continues to exist globally.