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Afternoon all

Sometimes you get your beliefs and views challenged head on and last evening, at a local meeting, I had the rare opportunity to meet and have a prolonged 1-to-1 conversation with a property developer or rather a senior planner at one of the big developers.

They are looking to redevelop a brownfield site near us (the site has a gasholder, electricity pylons and high pressure gas pipes running across it and is designated Metropolitan Open Land (MoL) in the Newham Local Plan).

The two big problems from the developer side were first the cost of decontamination. Removing a foot of topsoil across a 22 acre site isn't cheap or easy - deconstructing and cleaning a gasholder isn't easy or cheap with decades of accumulated and highly toxic sludge at the bottom.

On top of that, the second problem was the cost of construction - the cost of labour and materials had spiked in the past 3-5 years but that was exacerbated by Section 106 payments, community infrastructure levy payments and the carbon off-set tax. In other words, London was, in his view, the most expensive place in the world to build.

All that was further compounded by the fact flats and houses weren't being sold at the prices developers needed to make even a small profit so the argument very often came down to economics rather than NIMBY-ism. Could the site be developed - was it viable as a development opportunity?

The paradox, he said, was that the places where people most needed houses and the places most people wanted to live were the ones where the costs of construction were at their highest - specifically, Inner London brownfield sites. Newham isn't replete with Green Belt - the MoL was meant to be a form of urban green belt to provide some green space and prevent complete urban sprawl.

He also told me (and I don't know if it's true) in Q1 in London, 4,000 new dwellings were started and 3,000 completed but the requirement is 88,000 new dwellings per year which in his view was wholly unachievable.

I left the meeting frustrated and depressed - the housing problem has been widely portrayed as a struggle between developers and locals but it's nothing like that - it's a series of economic paradoxes which make sensible development economically unviable and force developers into over-dense applications simply in order to make the sums add up.

It may be there are special issues with brownfield and contaminated sites and the costs of their remediation which need to be mitigated "somehow" (and I've no idea how) but the fact the scarcity of alternatives mean such sites now have to be considered speaks volumes as to the size of the problems and the paucity of other solutions.

Mamdani is of course going to be a disaster.

But as Leon points out, whole generations have essentially given up believing in capitalism, as it seems to have stopped working for anyone but greedy boomers and crypto-fascists.

Yes. When you look at generational inequality - especially property - you can see why young people are being radicalised to the hard left

When you look at insane levels of immigration - across the west, some of it deeply malignant - you can see why other young people are being radicalised to the hard right

Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold

Young people are going hard left over stagnant wages, student debt and not enough affordable homes, middle aged people are going hard nationalist right over immigration, pensioners tend to be most centrist ironically eg Carney and Macron and May won their highest voteshare with over 65s and Harris tied Trump with pensioners and Reform do best with 50-60 year olds not over 65s

Young nowadays are a bunch of lazy scroungers wanting everything on a plate for nothing.

"Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants not servants of their household. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers"

You are Socrates and I claim my €5.00

Morning all

As always, those wanting (quite legitimately) to protest Trump's visit get it all wrong. Shouting, screaming and chanting mean nothing to him as they don't and shouldn't to political people. Indeed, all the evidence shows moderate opposition is put off by the antics of those exteemely opposed.

Dignified opposition to Trump would be much more effective - I remember when the Japanese Emperor visited, veterans who had been POWs in Japanese-run camps came to the procession and turned their backs on him symbolically, in silence. Imagine if Trump's procession was greeted not by boos and jeers but by absolute silence. That silence would be shown on Fox, Newsmax, OAN and all the other pro-Trump networks and they'd all be frantically trying to explain it.

That kind of dignified protest would be far more effective than all the raucous indignation. It would also show we are a law-abiding, dignified nation not that image constantly put forward by those whose sole aim is to constantly talk down the country.

"It is clear enemies of the United Kingdom are using social media to foment division in this country."

Did anyone ever doubt this? They have been doing it for a decade.

The real question is, why aren't we doing it back to them twice as hard? That's the only way to deter dictatorships from attacking you.

If you shitpost worse about them, they will think twice. If they can drop a bomb on you, you need to be able to drop five bombs on them.

It's a terrible way to live, but it's how we need to think when dealing with the Russias, Chinas, Irans and North Koreas of this world.

Well, if Russia sews discord here, we might petition the government or vote in an election or referendum. If we sew discord in Russia or China, the most that can happen is an internal opponent falls out of a poorly-secured window.

Yes, we are very vulnerable because we are a relatively free and open society. Our enemies are not free and open.

To counter this, we should not trample on freedom and openness. Oddly enough, that is exactly what the hard right want to do. It's almost as though they're working hand-in-glove with out enemies...

This illustrates the stupidity of successive governments cutting the BBC World Service.

And cuts to the British Council.

(Mrs J loves the British Council. After the had returned from a couple of years in London (then Iran...), she knew a passable amount of English. As a teenager she started going to the British Council library in Ankara, and thinks she read every book in it, including rather non age-appropriate ones. She then did her degree at METU in Ankara, which teaches in English. But much of her knowledge of English culture comes from the British Council during those years. It is an amazing force for promoting out country, the same as the world service.)

"It is clear enemies of the United Kingdom are using social media to foment division in this country."

Did anyone ever doubt this? They have been doing it for a decade.

The real question is, why aren't we doing it back to them twice as hard? That's the only way to deter dictatorships from attacking you.

If you shitpost worse about them, they will think twice. If they can drop a bomb on you, you need to be able to drop five bombs on them.

It's a terrible way to live, but it's how we need to think when dealing with the Russias, Chinas, Irans and North Koreas of this world.

Well, if Russia sews discord here, we might petition the government or vote in an election or referendum. If we sew discord in Russia or China, the most that can happen is an internal opponent falls out of a poorly-secured window.

Yes, we are very vulnerable because we are a relatively free and open society. Our enemies are not free and open.

To counter this, we should not trample on freedom and openness. Oddly enough, that is exactly what the hard right want to do. It's almost as though they're working hand-in-glove with out enemies...

Is cousin marriage a disputed topic here?

I presume we all agree that it shouldn't be allowed..

It is contra-indicated for genetic health reasons, but I don't have the same visceral reaction to it as I do with sibling incest.

And if it was a same-sex marriage, or one of the two had been sterilised, there'd be nothing to worry about in health terms either.

Having a pregnancy at 40 is also contra-indicated. The risk is probably higher. We don't ban that.

It's easier to ban cousin marriage than pregnancy at age 40, though.

Not really. You can ban civil marriage but that doesn't stop people from having a marriage ceremony and subsequently having sex.
Prohibition is rarely effective, and it strikes me as ludicrous to be advocating for another unenforceable law when the police lack the resources to enforce most of the laws already on the statute books. It's like the absurd "ban the burka" debate (let's set women free by telling them what they can wear) and comes from the same unpleasant motivation, IMHO.

Prohibition Is very often effective.

There are a small handful of examples where it has been noticeable ineffective, but a much larger set of situations where it has been so effective that it doesn't register.

Cousin marriage strikes me as something that shouldn't really be too controversial. There are reasonable arguments in favour of a ban and reasonable principles in favour of not creating a ban. Reasonable democracies have instituted a ban and other reasonable democracies do not.

If it were banned, I assume we're talking of banning first cousin marriages, and that still leaves second and third cousins. One of the things that's really surprised me about moving to rural Ireland is just how extensive people's knowledge about their extended families are here. I'd be surprised if that wasn't also the case for the communities where cousin marriage is more common in Britain, so it wouldn't necessarily be all that disruptive.

So it seems to be a low stakes change in the law. You'd make a modest contribution to reducing the risk of genetic defects, at the cost of a modest extension of the limitations that already exist on permitted marriages. Not much reason to get het up by anyone. Oh for a day when that would be the most contentious issue in our politics.

You can do like Iran: discourage cousin marriage and provide genetic testing for key conditions (like thalassaemia) for couples looking to marry/conceive. That will reduce the risk of genetic defects without having to control people's lives more.

People should be well informed about risks, able to control their fertility and have access to abortion. The state shouldn't be dictating who people can marry or have kids with. Eugenics was a bad thing.

Do you think it should be legal to marry your sister?

The problem with marrying your sister is that she's from a bad family, and her brother's a git.