General Discussion
Coastal defences are generally the responsibility of the Environment Agency, or as we know in the case of the sea wall, Network Rail (mainly taxpayer funded). The government will stump up the funds for flood defence and add it to our £1trillion+ debt.
Next time your fridge or washing machine breaks down Mrs C, we'll just dismiss it as a #firstworldproblem, shall we?
Isn't the leisure centre on TDC's list of assets it wants to be rid of? If it does go private I imagine there will be a few changes.
@Mcjrpc As the railway clearly offends you so much, where would you like it to be relocated, and who will pay for that? I have just looked at a photo from 1895 and the railway looks pretty much as it does now, maybe it's the beach that has changed.
Once Brunel had decided he wanted the railway to hug the coast on this part of the line, there really was no other place to put the station in Dawlish. Given the monumental projects Brunel pioneered in his career I don't think you can accuse him lacking aspiration, he was a major influence in making the town what it is today.
@Mcjrpc You might not think Dawlish has prospered much in recent years, but do you really think the town would be a better place if the rail links to London and the rest of the country were severed?
Anybody who thinks getting rid of the railway would somehow enhance the town is living in cloud cuckoo land. A rail link aids prosperity, once it's gone decline sets in, you only have to witness the resorts on the north coast that lost their railways in the Beeching era to realise that. It's not just about tourists either, plenty of workers commute to Exeter and elsewhere, and how many people ...
@leatash What is it exactly that you want the government to do to tackle the "problem" of state pension payments? The state pension is hardly a king's ransom, and if a pensioner doesn't have a private pension back-up I don't know how they comfortably exist. It's quite simple, people are living longer and have to be paid a pension.
@Lynne Of course, the average covers a multitude of circumstances from a modest terrace to a £million+ property. And on the other side of the coin, people who have managed to scrimp and save have seen those savings seriously eroded by near zero interest rates.
The UCL report so vaunted by the pro-immigration lobby has been pretty much rubbished by Mervyn Stone, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at UCL who described it as “fatally flawed” , and “the study was ‘obviously driven to make the case it claims to have made’. He added: ‘If any honest statistician had made the same painstaking but assumption-based calculations, the last word he/she would have ...