Great to see some positive job news for the region following the huge number of redundancies over the last two years.

Government debt before the crash was nothing out of the ordinary and broadly similar to what we had under the previous Tory administration.


No argument on either of those points. Looks like we'll be going down the same path again as well.


When people use sweeping generalisations such as the 'public sector' I feel obliged to fall in line.

And the banks weren't the only part of the private sector to benefit from the money thrown at them.

I think that will be the case, The Hornsea array wind farm is currently waiting approval as part of the round 3 offshore wind programme, round 3 is for massive windfarms (1000's of turbines ) to be placed strategically around the u.k, Siemens are part of a collaboration who are the stakeholders in the hornsea array, therefore Hull would be an ideal base to ship turbine parts directly from the port to the construction site, i would imagine pen will be put to paper and plans for this manufacturing facility given the go ahead only if the round 3 wind farms are granted approval, a wind farm that size would require 100's of service technicians which would be recruited from the area i presume, ( based on siemens recruitment policy for they're other wind farms) going by other offshore windfarms i have seen around the u.k there will be 100's if not thousands of indirect jobs created if Hull is used as the base for the construction programme for the hornsea array.

caveat to the discussion

Kosh would have a Liberal Democrat government, so his grasp on reality is questionable.

carry on

Kosh has run out of parties to vote for.

Which leaves me with a problem at the next election as my principles won't let me abstain.

For those who reckon that this is only coming about through massive taxpayer-funded subsidies, you are probably correct - as far as the short-term is concerned.

Fossil fuel energy resources are finite, they will run out in the long term but more importantly, they will get massively more expensive in the short term. We have squandered the wealth of oil & gas in the North Sea, so we are now net importers and as such, are subject to the market forces that will see fossil fuel prices continue to rise.

Many new & novel technologies require some form of government intervention. I'm old enough to remember the argument against the introduction of unleaded gasoline ("we'll need a separate pump on EVERY forecourt"icon_wink.gif. I can also remember the massive programme of refitting every gas cooker, gas fire and gas boiler, so that we could switch from the noxious town gas to cleaner-burning natural gas. All of this happened without the consumer having to pay a penny at point of supply. It was paid through duty reductions and government spending & subsidies. So please don't tell me the private sector would handle the job, they'd just look for the cheapest option every time.

And for the deniers of anthropological climate-change - "go fook yourselves".

Great news for the region.

and dont forget the russians are looking at potentially huge untapped areas of the frozen north as sources of fossil fuels - if this happens they could have almost as much of a say in the pricing of fuel as the middle east, and could end up holding a lot of countries to ransom over fuel prices. any energy sources we can provide ourselves will help us in the long term

Despite a period of strong economic growth, and a decent start by Brown as chancellor the spend more than you earn drug eventually caught hold. Deficits were revised upwards year upon year as the economy slowed while the borrowing and spending increased. The deficit was worse than when Labour called in the IMF in 1976.

rlIt was all going wrong well before the crash.rl

We should have been building new a new wave of nuclear power stations long since. Another failure of the previous regime. As for the purporters of, as you put it, - anthropological climate change -, they've fooked themselves on regular occasions and delivering poor and inaccurate science has not helped their cause one iota.

And what about the subsidies for nuclear, care to even attempt to put a figure on them?

Then we get to the decommissioning, something else that has been heavily subsidised, with costs buried. Unfortunately the legacy remains. A local nuclear plant has just finished a fifteen year decommissioning, the doors were locked in December. The grandchildren of the last bloke out will be old men before the site is considered safe enough for demolition, never mind redevelopment.

What poor and inaccurate science are you deniers claiming now?

Reducing the amount of energy we consume as a nation should be the priority. Given the technolgies that are out there even a lot of modern housing and commercial structures are still very inefficient, older buildings are terrible.
As it stands Wind Power is going to have such a minor effect on the energy requirement it is a joke. When you consider that many have to be switched off due to high winds because there are no storage facilities for the extra electricty and the companies that own these 'Switched off' windmills get paid huge amounts to do so (£13,000 an hour for ONE was one report)

The cost of producing energy is a fairly calculable thing, of course there are costs many years down the line for nuclear but this still works out much cheaper than wind energy. Ranges from twice as cheap to 30% at the very low end.
Still we have the natural resources around the UK to enable relative CO2 free energy production but it appears that the funding for wave energy is massively underwhelming.
Also grants to enable energy production in the home are pretty much worthless or non existant now so no incentive, various methods could be included in every new home built but governments wont force it as they lose out on taxes.

We're doooomed...lol

This will be massive for this area, OK not the 10k jobs as predicted but you look at the bigger picture and it will bring at least half that amount.

Hopefully force the hand on the Castle st upgrade amingst other things and bring further investement to the area

There are a handful of MPs who know what they're doing or are at least doing their best with the right motivations. Unfortunately none of these will end up anywhere near ministerial posts, let alone PM. Our political system sucks.

My last hope was that we might make a go of a coalition government, as I'm a fan of consensus politics. Looks like we can't even manage that. I'm more depressed for my kids than myself TBH as there's no sign of the downward trend reversing or even stabilising.

interesting observation, I don't see much real evidence of a downward trend in my day to day dealings with things, other than the general educational standards and behaviour of people, but that isn't economic.

when you say "downward trend", what do you mean?