PM calls for an end to 'freedom passes' in London

 The Independent Newspaper announces:

TfL told to hike fares and strip elderly of free travel to access new £1bn bailout

Measures including extending congestion charge area ‘totally unacceptable to the mayor’, source says

Transport for London (TfL) has been offered an additional billion pounds in bailout money from the government - along with further demands for fare hikes and cuts to free travel entitlements for children and pensioners, it has been reported.

The capital’s transport operator, which is overseen by the mayor’s office, first received a cash injection from the government in May on the condition the operator raise the congestion charge by 30 per cent and temporarily stop free travel initiatives for children and those over 60.

However as public transport has continued to drop to unprecedented levels due to the impact of the coronavirus on daily life, the government is understood to have offered a further £1bn to add to the previous £1.6bn financial boost.

Sources close to the talks cited by Reuters said TfL had been told by ministers that any funding would have to be accompanied by ending remaining free travel entitlements and hiking up fares....

 More at  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tfl-bus-london-underground-fare-free-travel-bailout-sadiq-khan-b1058724.html

Claimants of 'working age benefits' are accustomed to endless 'conditionality' and sanctions imposed upon them by central Government, and this Tory Government is already increasing the 'working age benefits' franchise by steadily gazumping the state retirement age, "work until you drop dead of exhaustion from pointless Universal Credit Claimant Commitment 'conditionality';" but London's 60+ Oyster Card helps keep London moving and reduces Global Warming while alleviating poverty among those unlikely to ever find paid work again.

Meanwhile, in Herefordshire, the Shire Council in a two-Tory safe seats area has plans for reducing congestion and Global Warming by measures including extending public transport. And Hereford &  South MP Jesse Norman is First Secretary to the Treasury. What conditionality might be lumbered upon this democratically elected coalition council comprising Independent, Its Our County and Green Party councillors [in order of numbers of council seats]?

 

Is "100 per cent British beef" really 100 per cent British?

Is "100% British beef" really low in food miles? slide show

.... academics, policy makers and businesses increasingly consider a shift towards so-called “plant-based” diets which principally require less land, energy, and other resources.

Why exactly is that so? Whilst meat’s, less so dairy’s, high environmental impact has received some public attention, rarely the biophysical reasons for it are made explicit. Essentially, in the production of all animal-sourced foods that involve the metabolism of an animal, energy is lost and emitted to the environment. Rather than electricity or fuels, energy here means the nutritional energy within the plants eaten by animals that in turn produce or become food. The feed conversion ratio puts the feed input in relation to the food output. Raising and slaughtering cattle for beef, for example, requires about 18kg of feed for 1kg of yielded meat; 4kg/1kg for pork; 2kg/1kg for chicken (de Ruiter et al. 2017). Based in the laws of thermodynamics, this poor energetic efficiency is to an extent improvable but ultimately inevitable whenever animate beings, who by moving and maintaining body heat use energy, grow the tissue that becomes food for another animate being. Thus, via an additional body, animal-sourced foods are an energetic detour in comparison to the energetic shortcut of so-called “plant-based” diets in which humans eat plants directly.

The physical necessity of feed conversion losses not only means that meat and dairy too are based on plants (in form of feed crops), but that base of plants is also much greater than what is required for direct human consumption of plants. Thus, by focussing only on the consumption end, the conventional use of the term “plant-based” falls short of conveying the plant-intensive (and thus energy- and land-intensive) materiality of animal-sourced foods. That term we use to describe our food, as much in academia as in everyday life, only scratches the surface of the materiality of production, and I contend that so does our mindfulness of why meat and dairy play a major role in mass extinction and climate breakdown....

Source: https://discoversociety.org/2019/08/07/all-food-is-plant-based-particularly-meat-and-dairy/

 See also