Simon Jeffrey

@simonjeffrey

Personal opinions about transport and devolution policy.

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Are we going to end up with a real FIFA vs Pro-Evo but for real? How about a Free Trade World Cup for FIFA World Cup off-years? A celebration of (economic) openness. Coldplay railing against non-tariff barriers and calling for mutual recognition (of qualifications) during half-time show.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· 26d

A sad day. But not sure anything will ever come close to the exhilaration, ecstasy and no small amount of agony King Kev brought to every and especially this young Newcastle fan in the Keegan Years. RIP.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· 28d

Curious how NPPF with zones around stations and small site and new medium site category could lead to a very s106-lite pattern of private development and focused on outer London. Developers pay nowt (1-9) or ~20% cash in lieu (10-49) for offsite. Less hassle, lower barrier to entry, faster turnover.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· 29d

For a moment thought Maguire was going to do flip the column here and talk about NRL’s impending takeover of the ownership and running of Super League from the northern set.

Much has been written about the ideological complexion of Burnham's government-in-waiting this week. And that sort of thing will matter. But his defining critique of the Labour Party and its failures in government is cultural. "You have to stay connected, or you die," he told me in May, as he watched Wigan Warriors win the Challenge Cup final. "The difference between the Labour Party and rugby league is that, although rugby league has its challenges, it's run by the northern set - and the same can't always be said about the Labour Party."

That is about to change - and change profoundly. Labour's northern set is back in business. This is their party now, and in little more than 72 hours it will be their government. You would be

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· 29d

City of London considered Historic England's proposals and said 'disagree'. Planning Inspectorate found that decision to be sound. Great things can (will) happen when you choose to be a living city and don't give in to Unesco attempts to fossilise you.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· Jul 16

Yeah no change Nov to June but Cons supporters split pro-vs-anti Net Zero (and even then the pros are all at soft end of 'try' vs 'every reasonable measure') but Reform voters fully anti. Could say the elite consensus on the right was probably out of whack with popular opinion in their bloc.

YouGov polling from June 2026 showing support as described in post

YouGov polling from November 2025 showing support as described in post

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· Jul 12

Rye Lane jubilant

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· Jun 8

Arsenal in Champions League final. Starmer writes letter saying £4.99 awful. Doesn’t attend despite being season-ticket holder and it’s in newly post-Orban Budapest so chance to visit Magyar. Knicks in Finals, Trump says ‘$100k tickets? Oh well, watch on cable. And shut the city down, I’m going.’

BBC article quote: Many of the team's devoted fans can't afford tickets to the first home game of the series, with the cheapest online resale tickets currently going for more than $10,000 (E7,468) and running up to more than $100,000.
Regular Knicks games already rank among the most expensive in the NBA.
"That's the way life goes," Trump told reporters on Friday when asked about the extreme ticket prices. "It's sort of semi-free to watch it on television."
The president recently said he accepted an invitation from Knicks owner James Dolan to attend Monday - indicating that he might also attend the fourth game on Wednesday.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· May 27

Where does it say ‘abandon net zero’? Clean Power 2030 isn’t ‘Net Zero’. It’s a very expensive way to push the last bit of gas off the grid while making petrols cars/gas boilers less attractive to replace. Today’s the perfect day to reflect on whether we’re getting this right/why no one copying us.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· May 26

Not sure this has even been a great period for London’s economy. But London’s high nominal wages/house prices mean taxman takes a bigger wedge while disposable income is pretty flat vs rest of the country. And 20 years of tax policy has tilted that even further.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· May 20

Common unscientific opinion: Birmingham partly underperforms relative to Manchester - at the very least in brand and swagger terms - due to recent football underperformance. Villa and potentially Birmingham City renaissance are good omens.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· May 20

People kicking off about fuel duty pause are getting Coalition flashbacks. But there are certain (Cameron-Osborne) downward slopes on this chart during low inflation when freezes were indefensible, and other, upward bits/high inflation where it’s not so clear cut.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· May 13

Miliband wimped out of the biggest policy decision he’s had to make. North Sea oil and gas in there too.

$Greg Jackson & @g_J X.com According to independent experts, Zonal Pricing would conservatively have saved £50-100/year on household bills (perhaps more if it improved infrastructure decisions) - within a couple of years - whilst making energy cleaner. The government says its solution - Reformed National Pricing - could save £20-40/year by 2040. A fraction the saving and a decade late. Zonal pricing was itself a compromise between nodal pricing and the current system. It's like nodal was the real deal. Freshly squeezed orange juice. Zonal was a nearly as good substitute - orange juice from concentrate, and reformed national pricing is so diluted it's more like flavoured water. This isn't reopening old wounds - but surely a cost-benefit analysis of zonal vs the alternatives should have been done before the decision. And this is all assuming that these plans survive incumbent lobbying....$

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· May 13

Never understood why wording of tax red lines didn’t lead govt to say eg … ‘our aging population is something we need to adapt to. Only fair those with wealth in pension pots contribute as part of that. So a new 3p basic and 5p higher rate Health and Social Care Levy paid by over65s for over65s’

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· May 12

First Labour-adjacent document I’ve read with an actual theory and method behind it. Luckily it’s one I largely share. More power to them.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· May 7

If Prince William is going to Turkey for the final should prove he’s a man of the people and make a proper trip of it

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· May 6

Very inefficient and ultimately doomed system trying to do a redistributive tax and benefit system alongside industrial and environmental policy through the electricity bills rather than have low prices and govt paying for things through tax

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· May 6

‘It’s gas that makes us vulnerable to high prices’ - apparently not (much, at least). High policy costs to make up 75% of bills by 2030 mean we will be neither hugely vulnerable to high wholesale costs or zero wholesale costs, whatever the source.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· May 2

Centre for London haven’t even published the report and research this is apparently based on. It was a presentation. Where are the charts?! Crazy that it gets published next to BBC News and looks identical to it. If BBC Sport can get its own section and style, BBC Local News should too.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· May 1

We have the highest minimum wage in the world. Don’t think Resolution Foundation are anti-high minimum wage but honest about costs and benefits of it overshooting. And this about reaching highest in world 66% of median salary.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· May 1

Inflation in sectors that are significantly low wage now good indicator of future for an economy with 10m+ jobs set by NMW. Can’t absorb so pass through e.g. supermarkets. LPC says 0.06-0.24pp of CPI now. Impact of increase from 66%-75% will be non-linear.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· Apr 27

He’s good at this. Does seem a bit odd to not name check UK on this if Nordics and Australia included.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· Apr 27

That is a ridiculous claim. Those are tiny tweaks that will make a small difference at the margin. The system of funding is quite plainly not ‘setting Wales up to fail’ - it’s providing greater spend than local revenues could sustain, or need would imply. The IFS crystal clear just last month.

Taking these updates into account, our revised findings are:
• After adjusting for changes in responsibilities over time, Welsh Government funding in 2025-26 is projected to be 18.3% higher in real terms than in 2019-20 (previously estimated at 16.3%). On a per-person basis, and after accounting for population growth, this represents an increase of 13.8% (previously 11.9%).
• On as close to a like-for-like basis as possible, Welsh Government resource funding in 2025-26 will be 15.0 higher in real terms than in 2010-11 (previously 13.0% After accounting for population growth, this equates to 9.6% higher funding per person (previously 7.4%).
く
• Official forecasts now show average real-terms growth of 1.0% per year over the next three years (previously 1.1%).
Growth is expected to be 1.8% in 2026-27 (previously 1.4%), followed by average growth of 0.6% per year in the subsequent two years (previously 1.0%).

Using this long-standing official approach, we estimate that in 2024-25 the Welsh Government's funding per person from the UK government was equivalent to 124.5% of the amount departments spent per person on comparable services in England. Accounting for devolved revenues (such as net revenue from the Welsh rates of income tax), the figure increases to 126.8%. These estimates, based on the official HM Treasury methodology, therefore suggest that the Welsh Government receives substantially higher funding relative to England than the Holtham Commission's 2010 estimates of Wales's relative needs (114 - 117%) would imply it would
require.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· Apr 27

And how much does that affect electricity prices and the electrification of heating and transport that will support much greater decarbonisation than any marginal reduction in gas use? And the grid is absolutely fine with dispatchable supply close to demand. Getting it from North Sea is the issue.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· Apr 18

Nuclear has ticked up again, now towards 5.3GW. Highest availability in a couple of years. Great to see but, also, couldn’t have picked a less helpful time of day, week or year to step up output. Sunny Saturdays in April not when we need that baseload so much.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· Apr 17

Not so fun facts about uninsured drivers: they kill and maim a lot of people.

• Every 20 minutes, someone is the victim of an uninsured or hit-and-run driver. That's three an hour, 72 a day, more than
26,000 a year.
• Every day, at least one person is so seriously injured by an uninsured or hit-and-run driver that they need lifelong care.
That's more than 360 people a year whose lives are forever changed for the worse.
• Every week, at least one person is killed by a driver who is not insured. That's more than 50 people a year whose lives are cut short, more than 50 families a year who lose a loved one.
• Every day, there is an average of 300,000 uninsured vehicles on UK roads. The total number across the year is over 1
million.
• Every year, using government figures, we estimate that uninsured and hit-and-run drivers cost the economy almost
£2.4 billion.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· Apr 17

Interesting to read from some in the EU who also think Commission sticking to the pre-Ukraine/Trump trade deal playbook with neighbours like the UK is dogmatic and geopolitically short-sighted.

BBC News article excerpt:

The European Commission - the bloc's executive arm that negotiates trade deals on behalf of EU member states, has also drawn criticism.
Countries that do a lot of trade and feel a particular affinity with the UK complain off the record that while it is important to safeguard EU interests, the commission is being "too rigid" and should be more imaginative and flexible when it comes to doing bespoke deals with the UK.
Especially, EU diplomats have told me, bearing in mind the threats to Europe economically and in security terms by China, Russia and of late, the US too.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· Apr 16

John Kingman presented the clearest off-the-shelf option for Reeves that could fund military capital spend increase over next decade in his piece last year. Pension funds are forming their own, building with and buying stock from housing associations. Keen to buy more. Let them.

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· Apr 15

Hadn't realised quite how impeccable Sheinbaum's Green credentials were.

$Passage from El Pais article: The president’s stance is paradoxical. Sheinbaum studied physics and energy engineering. Before entering politics, in the 1990s, she published several articles in specialized journals that established her as a pioneer in climate change studies in Mexico. Years later, she served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where she co-authored a study on greenhouse gas emissions from the industrial sector. In 2007, the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its contributions to understanding climate change, which was already considered to be one of humanity’s greatest challenges. Even during her 2024 presidential campaign, Sheinbaum pledged to maintain the fracking ban implemented by her predecessor. In December 2023, she stated that the activity “requires large quantities of water.” She added that “the water used [for fracking] is difficult to reuse.” As president, however, Sheinbaum has had to put those environmental concerns on the back burner and give way to pragmatism, prioritizing Mexico’s energy sovereignty vis-à-vis the United States. This transition has been quiet. One of the first signs of change — though it was difficult to understand at the time — was when, in Congress, Morena rejected a constitutional amendment through which López Obrador wanted to prohibit hydraulic fracturing. A legislator from Morena — with access to the National Palace — confirmed to EL PAÍS that this refusal was intentional, meant to keep open the window that now allows the government to fully embrace fracking.$

Simon Jeffrey@simonjeffrey· Apr 11

Great stuff. Hardly in the village and very much hidden from view by trees and the much larger ELECTRICITY SUB-STATION with GIANT PYLONS it’s not entirely coincidentally located next to.