Monday 31 July 2017

Fun Online Polls: HS2 vs the Graduate Tax; When did The Big Ship sail?

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

If the UK govt had £60 billion to spare, what's a better use of the money?

Spend it on the HS2 railway - 16%
Waive the 9% Graduate Tax - 84%


Good, that's what I thought.

A low turnout on an obscure issue. Some people missed the point - at present the UK government probably doesn't have £60 billion to spare, in which case it should do neither.

This was just a dig at the Tories who insist that HS2 is a good investment (if Labour were in power, no doubt they would say the same, having dreamed up this crap pre-2010) but that writing off student loans/waiving the Graduate Tax is unaffordable.
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Something else that has been bugging me recently is, when did The Big Ship sail on the Ally-ally-oh?

The way we sang it when we were at school, it was the Nineteenth of September, but that's a long time ago, and it didn't strike me as very important, being a silly nursery rhyme.

However, having Googled it recently, it turns out that some people sang that it sailed on the Last Day of September.

Hmmm.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

6 comments:

PJH said...

"..in which case it should do neither. "

Which should have been an option. Which probably contributed to..

"A low turnout ..."

NickM said...

30 days has September... 30-19=11. Isn't that the change from Julian to Gregorian so it's the same thing in different calendars.

NickM has an MSc in astrophysics.

Mark Wadsworth said...

NM, genius. Only the rhyme's origins appear to be 19th century...

Dinero said...

The existing Railways are subsidised by the government, what does the government propose for HS2.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Din, that's the great unknown.

Shiney said...

@NickM @MW

You meet all sorts on this Blog! Long may it continue.