Best Of

A case study in why resisting reasonable development entirely can come back to bite you (if the developer ploy here works)? Work in the system to resist where you can, don't just pretend the system doesn't exist because you don't like it.

Council rejects 100 homes.

Developer wins appeal for 75 homes.

Developer then submits another 65 homes on the remaining land.

End result? Residents could get 140 homes instead of the original 100. Now they claim they’re being “picked on”.

https://nitter.poast.org/jakewg_/status/2063551764796752183#m

No sympathy for NIMBYs

What about local democracy?

Sadly I seem to repeat the same issue

we have the same population as France but 7 million fewer homes..

We've arrived at this point almost entirely by virtually unrestricted immigration and given the birth rate we could very easily shrink our population back again by making further immigration almost impossible.

That is a much better deal for almost everyone than continually concreting over the country to build horrible Barratt new builds without any accompanying infrastructure.

No more immigration, almost no more new housing, and in 15 years time housing will be affordable again. As a bonus, we can fill in the various holes in our labour force by redeployment of the people who are building houses to cope with immigration.

Here’s 170 you can redeploy already.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/170-jobs-lost-historic-gateshead-34087173

Where to start;

No one is building homes to cope with immigration, we aren’t building enough homes because not enough people can afford new ones. Largely flatlining wages after inflation , higher prices and supply and demand mean there are too few buyers who can afford them.

If we stop immigration the average age will be 45 in 2040 with far too few young people and a rapidly ageing population. Are the pensioners going to build their own houses.


In this scenario under sixteens would drop from 18% to 14%, the working population from 62% to 55% and the over 67’s would grow from about 19% to 29%…

So dependency would go from roughly 2:1 to close to 1:1.

Hey Presto not only no need for new houses with a collapsed economy no money to build them either!

Peter.

We've spent 25 years trying the approach of allowing mass immigration to increase the working age population in the face of what would otherwise be a natural decline and it has led to poor productivity growth, stagnant wages, inflated asset values and political instability. It's about time the people who advocated it learned to have some humility.

We have had 25 years of large scale immigration.
We have increased the working age population.
We have so far managed to avoid the economic cliff edge of a naturally declining population.
We have had low productivity and low wage growth.

And you have abjectly failed to establish a causal link between them.

Other Countries with high immigration have had productivity growth; the US for one.

Developed Countries like Japan have had slow wage growth and little immigration.

Peter.

The onus isn't on me to prove a causal link. I have democracy on my side.

No you have Populism and what’s popular isn’t always right and what’s right isn’t always popular.

Essential you are adopting the Trumpian logic, that for something to be true the majority just has to believe it.

Much like his Meet the Press walk out. His evidence consisted of only what he believed, nothing more.

I am old fashioned, I like evidence based argument and still believe in objective truth.

Peter.

That’s not Trumpoan logic. It’s politics.

We’ve had governance by opinion poll for many years.

It hasn't worked very well.

So, you don't like democracy then?

The problem is people having factually wrong opinions. On immigration for example you can legitimately want less of it, or be comfortable with a high level. But it's a problem if people think that immigration is currently very high when it isn't, or that most new housing goes to immigrants when it doesn't, and politicians devise policies based on those demonstrably wrong perceptions.

I think your biggest problem (and that of your liberal ilk) is that you think you're always right - and any contrary opinion is therefore "wrong" - and are totally blind to the fact you have an ideology of your own; you genuinely think the facts support it.

I'd anchor that ideology around the complete fungibility of all individuals, and championing things like choosing your own identity and free movement regardless of any evidence of the social problems this causes.

We all suffer from cognitive bias, whether we are liberal or illiberal.
We get comfort from people who think like us and get frustrated by people who don't.
We all look for evidence that supports our views and ignore evidence that doesn't.
We all do.

The remedy is to be aware of that behaviour and actively manage it when it comes to evidence.

But our opinions also depend on our values and these are not evidence based but deeply and emotionally ingrained. It takes a lot to shift them.

So we can amicably disagree when it comes to values, but we shouldn't accept "alternative facts" when the evidence contradicts them.

Totally, my contention is that category of people think they're someone immune from it.

A bit more humility wouldn't go amiss.

PB Brains Trust.

Can I do a straw poll?

I'm just putting in an objection to a planning proposal. Along the way I have discovered that Erewash Borough Council do not publish objections they receive on their website; to see them you have to make a trip during opening hours to the Council Office, or perhaps put in an FOI - which I think would not deliver a response within the consultation period.

My own Council in Ashfield have published them with names and addresses redacted for about 20 years.

What do other places do?

(My interest is piqued because this makes it more difficult for disabled people to engage, as they are lumped with driving to the Council office - but 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, or taking a taxi / Uber trip each way, which costs up to £20, and disabled people are more often in poverty. Or they can find another method, such as a long mobility aid trip, which up here is dodgy because of road conditions).

Wouldn't there be a "reasonable adjustment" requirement on the council? Maybe write them a polite letter setting out your need for the information to be provided another way?

'Rules requiring public bodies such as schools and hospitals to promote equality when making decisions should be scrapped, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch will say in a speech on Tuesday.

In what the party says is the first step in a wider programme to "restore common sense", Badenoch will argue that the Public Sector Equality Duty has been used to promote "dangerous and divisive agendas".

She will say it has "become a minefield that exposes almost every significant public decision to legal challenge.

Badenoch's speech comes after the murder of Henry Nowak and the police's response fuelled questions about equality policies and laws.

The Conservatives are trying to forge a distinct response from both Labour, who have strengthened equality protections, and Reform UK, who want to go further than the Tories and scrap the Equality Act altogether.'

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy5vyqykpx5o

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd7p7p4xdq9o

Shocking story. The new proposed law against drug gang cuckooing has a maximum sentence of 5 years - that is way too low, should be more, at least 20, if not life. I don't see a substantial difference to kidnapping which comes with maximum life sentencing.

Have dealt with only one case in the past though there were likely more. They take advantage of low IQ people, befriend them, and then use grooming-like tactics. More akin to grooming than kidnap. It's emptying bank accounts, getting them to apply for loans, credit cards, benefit fraud etc while dealing out of (usually) social housing. The victims are usually known to Social Workers but if the victim is isolated then the issue is not picked up until its too late.

The potential solution is somewhere on the spectrum from significant prison time to more investment in social work.

...

Your final comment: yes, that’s what I was thinking when I read those Labour MPs’ claims.

Much easier to blame a football match than admit the reality - they were not popular enough to win because they had overseen a total mess up of the economy. (Which was, in fairness, not entirely their fault.)

Just as the Labour left constantly blame the Falklands War for 1983, when actually it was mostly due to their own terrible mistakes.

The Longest Suicide Note In History was what created 1983.

I remember, as a child, a trade union activist on stage at the (televised) Labour conference arguing that the U.K. should leave NATO and the EEC and join COMECON and the Warsaw Pact.

The Falklands War made the Conservative majority a bit bigger.

Classic correlation not causation.

Is that the Falklands, Labour’s manifesto, or the size of the bribe paid to the official in question by Moscow?

Thank goodness with Labour jettisoning socialism we no longer have any politicians left who would trouser dirty Russian money.

There's plenty of socialism that isn’t like the comic Suicide Note manifesto.

It’s not a choice between unfettered capitalism and East Germany. As large numbers of social democratic parties have proved, around the world.

If the Labour Party had been selling the politics of, say, the German SPD, in 1983, them there would have been no split. And they might well have won a majority at the election.

Instead they chose East Germany.

Thatcher clearly led best PM polls in 1983 so likely would have won anyway

Yes... but after, and as a result of, the Falklands

See if you can guess when the Falklands War took place on this timeline.

I did politics as part of my degree. One of the modules was taken by David Marquand, ex-SDP MP. He made the point - using the graph below - that the Conservatives by the 1983 election were at the point they would have been anyway with swingback (I don't think he called it that, but it's a term we all use). They had a spike with the Falklands War, but then started to fade back, before a final recovery in the way governing parties often do (and especially when the leader of the opposition is insanely left wing).
His view was that had Argentina not invaded the Falklands the result in 1983 would have been pretty much exactly the same. It's worth noting that by the standards of GEs at the time, the Tories didn't do THAT well in terms of share of the popular vote - the landslide was delivered - as it always is - by how badly the party doing second had done.

I got a troll flag last night for genuinely defending Badenoch.

I won't be doing that again.

Totally deserved.

Pete is one of the finest posters on this board. Giving him a troll flag is pathetic.

Should have been a permanent ban.

What do you mean? I answer your every query. I reiterate. Feargal Sharkey's RX7 was an FB!

I'm being whimsical. Enjoy it.

Most unlike you. Did you fall out of bed the wrong side?

Taken a punt on a €XX,XXX engine from the Netherlands and went light headed.

a

Hearing there’s been multiple stabbings at a school in Blackley.

The sooner the govt bans pointed knives the sooner this stops.

Not enough.

All metal tools must be banned. Styrofoam cutlery only. All those who oppose this are clearly in favour of mountains of corpses. All hail our glorious socialist paradise!

For fun - many kinds of plastic can be melted and fashioned into a shank.

Was a big problem in US prisons with plastic bags being made into weapons like that.

I saw that on a US prison show. When I contracted and worked away from home I used to watch lots of YouTube and that included US prison shows. They made a shank from a plastic bag and also made hooch in a large plastic bag.

One crim even fertilised another by getting his nut butter to her via a vent. Never met, never will, but he fertilised her. Insane.

If only these crim twits turned their obvious innovation skills to the productive economy.

I think the US prison system is a more persistent problem for the USA than many even of the other persistent problems, but gets little mention.

1.9 million inmates, of whom most do work (complained about by normal businesses as unfair competition), many prisons run with light by commercial companies who have a profit motive for keeping people inside and giving them squalid conditions. Forced labour is legal.

And it does not create a low crime society.