Best Of

FPT to Turbotubbs.....

If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....

....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph

If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.

The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.

I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.

Yes but the narrative of those hostile to Rayner is to paint as negative a picture of her as possible to forestall any attempt at rehabilitation in a year or two.

The fact remains she breached the Ministerial Code and that made her position untenable. Whether said Code is fit for purpose is another question - we want to ensure Government is as free as possible from allegations of corruption or inappropriate influence such as from third party lobbying companies - but the notion complex non-Government related private financial transactions need to be held to such a high standard - well, I understand why many would wish our Ministers to be beyond any kind of reproach especially since the Expenses Scandal - doesn't sit well with me and some latitude for genuine errors should exist (as distinct from deliberate and planned tax evasion).

She was a damn fool not to seek further advice as recommended.

But I'm remembering how but for a chance conversation with my accountant I would once have ended up paying the wrong rate of stamp duty too, and it would never even have crossed my mind to check.

There but for the grace of God...

Probably about the size of it. And it's not easy to distinguish between "get more advice because I'm covering myself" and "get more advice because you really need more advice".

Some other big-picture observations.

It's good to be back in a world where ethical judgements cause ministers to resign, not ethical advisers.

The chorus of "this wouldn't have happened if Rayner hadn't been so aggressive in opposition" is obviously claptrap.

Politicians of various colours have returned from worse things than this.

She only resigned after the ethical advisor told her she had broke the ministerial code. That's fine, but you don't extra Brownie points, especially after 2 weeks of deflecting and lying. It's a standard political scandal.

But the stamp duty thing only blew up on Wednesday evening, didn't it? So thirty six hours from revelation to resignation. Before that Raynergate was some unflattering photos and "she has multiple houses".

Of course the best of all is not to have ministerial scandals. But the way this one has played out is better than the way that many scandals played out under Johnson and Sunak. (Though Truss did better with her one scandal, didn't she? Something about fruity behaviour by a junior minister at a conference?)

Again not true. She was accused of the stamp duty thing over a week ago. She then employed a very expensive KC to look at her tax affairs over last weekend, who said no you have paid the wrong amount, which was confirmed on the Monday.

Monday was the point when she could have said, hands up, mistake, really sorry.

Instead, it dragged, then she did the teary interview and claimed how could she have known, she had taken advice from 3 different legal opinions on her tax affairs who had all told her it was ok. Before finally being investigated and it being shown she had no legal advice at all over the stamp duty implications of buying this house, these "legal opinions" didn't exist, and was actually told twice to go and get some proper tax advice, which she didn't do.

FPT to Turbotubbs.....

If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....

....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph

If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.

The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.

I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.

Yes but the narrative of those hostile to Rayner is to paint as negative a picture of her as possible to forestall any attempt at rehabilitation in a year or two.

The fact remains she breached the Ministerial Code and that made her position untenable. Whether said Code is fit for purpose is another question - we want to ensure Government is as free as possible from allegations of corruption or inappropriate influence such as from third party lobbying companies - but the notion complex non-Government related private financial transactions need to be held to such a high standard - well, I understand why many would wish our Ministers to be beyond any kind of reproach especially since the Expenses Scandal - doesn't sit well with me and some latitude for genuine errors should exist (as distinct from deliberate and planned tax evasion).

She was a damn fool not to seek further advice as recommended.

But I'm remembering how but for a chance conversation with my accountant I would once have ended up paying the wrong rate of stamp duty too, and it would never even have crossed my mind to check.

There but for the grace of God...

Most of the population will have had similar experiences. The whole thing has essentially been a nonsense.

But an important political job dione by the Telegraph, with which they are
delighted.

Most of the population don't own more than one home, or have Trusts for their kids.

Most MPs on the other hand might be different.

OTOH, most/all people whose children suffer medical disaster do have trusts for their child. The compensation is owned by the child who whether as a child or [edit] often also as an adult, as here, is legally incapable oif managing it. So a trust is vital. Indeed, I'm not sure it's even possible to pay the compo without a trust to receive it. That's the fair comparison.

Nor did Ms Rayner own two houses except in the technical sense, which was due to expire soon anyway. Which is fewer than a lot of MPs.

A tabloid story in thr most traditional sense - overheated rhetoric and Victorian hypocrisy, but this time from the billiknaire tax evaders' house journal of the Telegraph.

Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .

That will end up as Ref +2 though.
Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc

No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .

That’s it, reform is toast.

They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.

Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .

Maybe if Labour keep calling the Reformers racists and thickies theyll all come back.

The racist-abuse culture that Farage & Co are seeding and feeding certainly has potential to revolt a chunk of Reform voters, but for another chunk it is the culture they want.

FPT

Can Steve Reed build more houses than Angie?

Other than small boats this government will rise or fall on this surely.

It's only a small proportion of the country that worries about housing costs. On average they are the lowest they have been since the '80s. I think a crash in prices is actually more of a risk to them than the opposite, particularly in London/SE if they introduce a property value tax and people start worrying about negative equity.

I think the NHS is a much bigger risk. But all of this is trumped by a general sense of inertia.

Are they?

There is a crucial distinction between house prices and housing costs.

For a start, you have 35%ish of the country that own their property outright. Then you have another 30% who own with a mortgage - they got hammered a bit during the period with high interest rates, but most people with a mortgage do not spend a particularly high proportion of their income on housing. For both these groups, high house prices are a good thing - they are an asset, not a liability or a cost.

Then you have social renters - 15%. A mixed picture, sometimes good, might not want to buy. And then private renters - another 15%. Not all private rents are insanely high - that tends to be an issue in the big cities, not our towns, and not all private renters want to buy anyway (e.g. students).

So you're not left with many people for whom lower house prices is a good thing (and particularly not in the main voting cohorts), nor many people with particularly high housing costs. There are broader societal/economic reasons why you might want to change this, but ultimately this is why housing is not a major issue in the polling.

That's largely wrong.

For many of those who own their own place, even outright, high house prices are a bad thing, as they want to upgrade in the future. And even if they don't, again for many, high house prices are neutral, as those gains will be on paper forever. And even if house prices are neutral for older homeowners, many will have to fork over fortunes if they want to help their children get on the housing ladder.

Private rent is determined in large part by the cost of housing, (though other factors such as government regulations also play a part), so reducing property prices would reduce the cost of rent. Students may not want to buy now (though I'm not sure about that - I once visited a friend at business school where housing was very cheap and finance readily available and he said that many of his classmates had bought a place for the two years and would then sell it or rent it out when they moved on) but they are likely to in a few years.

And of course there are costs throughout the economy because of high property prices generally, of which high house prices are an important component, though most people won't recognise those.

I think the reason housing doesn't feature is not that more people wouldn't benefit from lower house prices, just as they would benefit from lower food or energy prices, it's that both governing parties have been equally crap about this for a generation and nobody seriously expects either of them to sort it out.

Both main parties in Ireland have been monumentally useless over housing, but people in Ireland are still furious about the issue.

I wonder whether in Britain it has been tied up with the immigration issue. Britons may believe the argument that the housing crisis is primarily a crisis created by immigration, and so they're furious about immigration, whereas in Ireland people are more focused on the lack of supply.

Yep, there's that too. Housebuilding in your area:

• Deflates the value of your most valuable asset
  
• Puts more pressure on your local services
  
• Wrecks the nice view across the fields
  
• Puts you at risk of negative equity (if you have a mortgage)
  
• Is only necessary due to the Boriswave (in the public's eye)
  
• and even private renters are rightly deeply sceptical that housebuilding will solve the problem - it certainly hasn't in Edinburgh and the Lothians, which has had the fastest housebuilding programme pretty much anywhere. All it's done is facilitate even faster population growth, including students.
  

I think this is one of those topics where people have a vague sense that housebuilding is good for the country, but the NIMBYism is very strong and frankly rational. It's only in some city centres where you are going to get a degree of local support for it.

I was listening about this award winning development on Today this morning which could be a good model for bolting on multiple homes onto existing villages and towns without ballsing them up. Some interesting rules were put in place such as no more than 40% of residents over 65 (think it was 65) to ensure a good mix of people so a proper “community”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpd9l8d03eeo

https://www.architecture.com/awards-and-competitions-landing-page/awards/riba-regional-awards/riba-south-west-award-winners/2025/hazelmead-bridport-cohousing?srsltid=AfmBOoplvHjcZ0ERK_Ub86e9XzTE1CMliX2bgm88hrWlq0WjXntEutMe

One problem is that extra housebuilding in any single area doesn’t even touch the sides of the latent demand for housing in this country.

So unless we see mass housebuilding everywhere, people are going to rationally believe that any development local to them is all downside with no upside.

Agreed but if the government was to “force” housebuilding on towns and villages than this looks like a model that delivers a good amount in a relatively small space with a good quality of life by the look of things.

It’s 53 houses that wouldn’t kill the look of most villages or small towns. I don’t know how many villages and small towns there are in the UK but bolting something like this onto as many as possible starts to reduce the problem. The architect was also saying that the properties were 20% cheaper than their normal equivalents in the market so again gives more chance to buy.

Your communities number is something like 25k->50k in England. Approximately 20k Church of England church buildings is always a useful indicator - remembering that that includes urban, but not all places have one.

If you watch for how many places have small council estates built in the 20s-30s or in the 3 decades post-war, it is an indicator of the feel it gives to places. They are, for example, all over Derbyshire.

The Nimbyism is really about not liking change - once they have been there for a decade they will be accepted. If you look, for example, at projects doing new mobility infra in towns or cities, the loudest shouting is often about "but it will cause congestion because of all the roadworks".

Getting things done quickly, and in discrete focused phases if larger projects, makes a huge difference.

The issue mentioned in another post about benefits not being delivered is far more serious imo, and is partly to do with Councils having been gutted of capacity to manage such effectively and professionally. Often conditions can be defined unprofessionally such that they are unenforcible *.

* A classic example would be "X must be done when 50 houses are built", so it is in the developer interest to stop at 49 and lose 2% of revenue. That particular one is probably managed now as part of SOP.

In Somerset it took 5 years to negotiate the section 106. Despite 98% of their asks being accepted on the first draft.

And they just told us it will be 12 months before they will even look at the next planning application (unless we pay for them to hire a consultant to work in their planning department).

HS2 got caught by that one as well: “you will pay us to employ the professionals who will spend their entire working life ferreting out ways to block your planning application or else” is a nice racket.

Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .

That will end up as Ref +2 though.
Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc

Is there any event in the cosmos that can't be interpreted as 'fantastic for Nigel Farage'? There have been some strange ones over the years labelled in this way: the sacking of Owen Paterson, Grant Shapps issuing a tweet about a reduction in bingo tax.

At present I think he is getting huge oxygen from the media and the government are an utter shambles

Labour and the conservatives have to lift their game but that will take a considerable time even if they can

I hate the phrase and hated it even more in 2008 but they both do need to get on with the job
Labour have a country to run and the Tories have been around for 350 years and are HM opposition. Their contant blubbing (the politicians and party not anyone here) because they might lose seats etc is getting very old. Grow a set and fight for some votes and stop shitting yourself because Lee Anderson might be under the bed making 30p soup

FPT

Can Steve Reed build more houses than Angie?

Other than small boats this government will rise or fall on this surely.

It's only a small proportion of the country that worries about housing costs. On average they are the lowest they have been since the '80s. I think a crash in prices is actually more of a risk to them than the opposite, particularly in London/SE if they introduce a property value tax and people start worrying about negative equity.

I think the NHS is a much bigger risk. But all of this is trumped by a general sense of inertia.

Are they?

There is a crucial distinction between house prices and housing costs.

For a start, you have 35%ish of the country that own their property outright. Then you have another 30% who own with a mortgage - they got hammered a bit during the period with high interest rates, but most people with a mortgage do not spend a particularly high proportion of their income on housing. For both these groups, high house prices are a good thing - they are an asset, not a liability or a cost.

Then you have social renters - 15%. A mixed picture, sometimes good, might not want to buy. And then private renters - another 15%. Not all private rents are insanely high - that tends to be an issue in the big cities, not our towns, and not all private renters want to buy anyway (e.g. students).

So you're not left with many people for whom lower house prices is a good thing (and particularly not in the main voting cohorts), nor many people with particularly high housing costs. There are broader societal/economic reasons why you might want to change this, but ultimately this is why housing is not a major issue in the polling.

That's largely wrong.

For many of those who own their own place, even outright, high house prices are a bad thing, as they want to upgrade in the future. And even if they don't, again for many, high house prices are neutral, as those gains will be on paper forever. And even if house prices are neutral for older homeowners, many will have to fork over fortunes if they want to help their children get on the housing ladder.

Private rent is determined in large part by the cost of housing, (though other factors such as government regulations also play a part), so reducing property prices would reduce the cost of rent. Students may not want to buy now (though I'm not sure about that - I once visited a friend at business school where housing was very cheap and finance readily available and he said that many of his classmates had bought a place for the two years and would then sell it or rent it out when they moved on) but they are likely to in a few years.

And of course there are costs throughout the economy because of high property prices generally, of which high house prices are an important component, though most people won't recognise those.

I think the reason housing doesn't feature is not that more people wouldn't benefit from lower house prices, just as they would benefit from lower food or energy prices, it's that both governing parties have been equally crap about this for a generation and nobody seriously expects either of them to sort it out.

Both main parties in Ireland have been monumentally useless over housing, but people in Ireland are still furious about the issue.

I wonder whether in Britain it has been tied up with the immigration issue. Britons may believe the argument that the housing crisis is primarily a crisis created by immigration, and so they're furious about immigration, whereas in Ireland people are more focused on the lack of supply.

Yep, there's that too. Housebuilding in your area:

• Deflates the value of your most valuable asset
  
• Puts more pressure on your local services
  
• Wrecks the nice view across the fields
  
• Puts you at risk of negative equity (if you have a mortgage)
  
• Is only necessary due to the Boriswave (in the public's eye)
  
• and even private renters are rightly deeply sceptical that housebuilding will solve the problem - it certainly hasn't in Edinburgh and the Lothians, which has had the fastest housebuilding programme pretty much anywhere. All it's done is facilitate even faster population growth, including students.
  

I think this is one of those topics where people have a vague sense that housebuilding is good for the country, but the NIMBYism is very strong and frankly rational. It's only in some city centres where you are going to get a degree of local support for it.

I was listening about this award winning development on Today this morning which could be a good model for bolting on multiple homes onto existing villages and towns without ballsing them up. Some interesting rules were put in place such as no more than 40% of residents over 65 (think it was 65) to ensure a good mix of people so a proper “community”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpd9l8d03eeo

https://www.architecture.com/awards-and-competitions-landing-page/awards/riba-regional-awards/riba-south-west-award-winners/2025/hazelmead-bridport-cohousing?srsltid=AfmBOoplvHjcZ0ERK_Ub86e9XzTE1CMliX2bgm88hrWlq0WjXntEutMe

One problem is that extra housebuilding in any single area doesn’t even touch the sides of the latent demand for housing in this country.

So unless we see mass housebuilding everywhere, people are going to rationally believe that any development local to them is all downside with no upside.

Agreed but if the government was to “force” housebuilding on towns and villages than this looks like a model that delivers a good amount in a relatively small space with a good quality of life by the look of things.

It’s 53 houses that wouldn’t kill the look of most villages or small towns. I don’t know how many villages and small towns there are in the UK but bolting something like this onto as many as possible starts to reduce the problem. The architect was also saying that the properties were 20% cheaper than their normal equivalents in the market so again gives more chance to buy.

Your communities number is something like 25k->50k in England. Approximately 20k Church of England church buildings is always a useful indicator - remembering that that includes urban, but not all places have one.

If you watch for how many places have small council estates built in the 20s-30s or in the 3 decades post-war, it is an indicator of the feel it gives to places. They are, for example, all over Derbyshire.

The Nimbyism is really about not liking change - once they have been there for a decade they will be accepted. If you look, for example, at projects doing new mobility infra in towns or cities, the loudest shouting is often about "but it will cause congestion because of all the roadworks".

Getting things done quickly, and in discrete focused phases if larger projects, makes a huge difference.

The issue mentioned in another post about benefits not being delivered is far more serious imo, and is partly to do with Councils having been gutted of capacity to manage such effectively and professionally. Often conditions can be defined unprofessionally such that they are unenforcible *.

* A classic example would be "X must be done when 50 houses are built", so it is in the developer interest to stop at 49 and lose 2% of revenue. That particular one is probably managed now as part of SOP.

In Somerset it took 5 years to negotiate the section 106. Despite 98% of their asks being accepted on the first draft.

And they just told us it will be 12 months before they will even look at the next planning application (unless we pay for them to hire a consultant to work in their planning department).

That's interesting. Unilateral declarations followed by an intention to Appeal can help speed that up. Maybe.

The estate I am a trustee of can’t afford to piss off the council. There’s a lot of interaction on multiple topics.

Is there nobody in Truss's close circle of friends who can sit her down and say "Liz, luv, it's over. Move on with your life."

Sad.

She’s probably got a couple of years of getting high-five-figure speech payments from the likes of Turning Point USA, can probably make herself a couple of million and then retire off the back of that.

Like many of us it isn't about money, it's about sense and purpose in life. I don't think Truss is motivated by greed, she was about pure personal ambition. Now it's over and she has nothingness stretching endlessly in front of her.

Most people's lives are about seeking meaning in existence.

Even more than material needs, that search for meaning seems to be at the heart of our problems. The hotel protests, the flagrash... in large part they are about looking for a cause to fight for, even if that cause doesn't really make sense or have that broad public support. I can't help thinking that part of the Brexit impulse was a generation's jealousy of the parents having had proper evil foreigners to fight.

Politics doesn't feel like the right tool to generate meaning (though you see it on the harder left). Though I'm not sure what the better tool is.

Yes and that is what is so lacking in British politics, particularly in Starmer and Badenoch. There is no vision or direction of a positive future for Britain hence the attractiveness of rose tinted views of the past, which is Reforms appeal.