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Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.

Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).

To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.

Would be interested to know (though probably unknowable) how many of the marchers on Saturday attend religious events of any kind. In my own part of the world sectarian marchers tend to identify along religious lines but I hae ma doots about how much genuine religious observance is attached. The Christian nationalism (in the UK at least) seems emptily performative, though I'm willing to be surprused by news that Tommy Robinson cuts up his coke with a communion wafer.

Pro-Christian is an alternative way of saying anti-Muslim.

'I'm no of fan of Christ our saviour and lord, but at least he never said anything positive about Muslims.'

Phillips sounds a bit confused, it seems very unlikely that many immigrants, christian or otherwise, were on the TR march.

It's an attempt by the terminally online to import American style political Christianity, the Charlie Kirk tendency.

For a bunch of "patriots" they seem very keen on us copying America.

It is partly that but perhaps also that many marchers feel the loss not of Christianity per se but of what we might call cultural Christianity. They do not go to church but want to know it is there, and has not been turned into a mosque or posh flats.

ETA and replacing HMQ with HMK probably has not helped in this regard. Another mistake by Liz Truss.

If you watch the rally though, the Christianity they're pushing is not cultural Christianity that anyone in Britain would recognise. It wasn't a rousing rendition of Abide with Me, it was hyper evangelical Christianity that is being imported from America. When I was watching it some of the speakers were trying to get the audience to chant "Christ is King" and most of them just looked baffled

I was confirmed into the C of E by the Bishop of Durham and was a server for a few years attending many communion sevices, and at one time was able to recite the whole communion service without reference to the prayer book

My wife was a member of the Brethren, but found them too extreme not least when they would not allow a piano at our wedding, notwithstanding my wife had played regularly at the Deep Sea Fisherman's Mission

It resulted in us being married in the Church of Scotland

We both have Christian upbringings and outlooks, but simply reject narrow minded prejudiced opinions largely taken out of contact from the Bible

I do wonder if these so called Christians really stop and ask

'What would Jesus do?'

He'd be deported.
He's a trouble maker from the Middle East.

I've no idea and not much more interest but it is entirely possible that she was making her own way when they met in low paid employment but that her parents are loaded and helped her out buying this property. The 2 versions are not necessarily inconsistent.

My concern is despite all this gotcha nonsense for Farage and Rayner the focus is never on how ridiculous our rules and indeed taxes are on the buying of property. Why on earth should buying a house be a taxable event? How does this help job mobility, younger buyers wanting to have families, investment in the housing stock etc etc? Are we not acting directly against several important public policies? They are stupid taxes and have become ever more so as we try to penalise those with more than one property.

CGT on the vendor? Both taxes try to claw back some of the capital gain in the housing market boosted by successive, mainly Tory, governments.

CGT on the vendor makes a lot more sense than what we do right now but it also discourages downsizing, job mobility etc. Almost all taxes have some negative effects but property taxes seem to me to be much more pernicious than most.

The only tax on real property that makes sense is a land value tax because it encourages efficient use of land. The rest is fiddling.

I agree in principle and like the effect, but it fails the easy-to-implement test. Last sale price + local HPI is the way IMO.

We bought our house in 1976 for £15,000

It's current market value is circa £500,000 whereas applying inflation only it would be just over £100,000

You apply it to land value, on a district (not individual property) level.

That's not my understanding of @Eabhal suggestion

HPI is either house price inflation or house price index, I think (both meaning the same). So you uprate the assessed value of a house based on sale prices of neighbouring properties (which is largely what the online house price estimators do at present - and a fair bit of what local estate agents do*). Doesn't pick up extensions etc so would need to decide how (and whether) to account for that, depending on whether we want to encourage extension building - council tax also doesn't automatically adjust for extensions, to my personal advantage, until revaluation on sale, I believe. It could be done though, through planning applications and/or building control (latter as planning applications not needed for permitted development).

You could do similar on land value - do the same price tracking but take out the RICS rebuild cost or similar.

I support all of these approaches in principle. I am however interested in my particular case, where my land would nowadays support probably three or even four houses. It's a 1920s semi with a long garden - now rather than a row of semis along the road, there would be a cul-de-sac or another parallel road put in. Does that mean my land is high value? On the market it wouldn't be as you couldn't build the extra houses without purchasing neighbouring ones and knocking them down too - there's not enough space on the side for an access road. If you did a simple value per sqm calculation based on local averages then it would be assessed as high value nonetheless.

I wouldn't make any kind of adjustments for improvements to the house - we want to encourage that kind of investment, so a shell you buy In Greenock that you turn into a £500k house would still be charged as if it's worth £50k.

Yes, that was what I was thinking with the "(and whether)". I'm not quite sure of the implications, but encouraging value add and extensions seems like a logical thing to do - better that someone adds capacity to a house on existing land than moving to a bigger house?

We've gone from a 3 to 5 bed semi through extending and also added a room and built in garage downstairs, so I may be biased on this!

It is this sort of reasoning, that extensions add value, that increased the notional value of Angela Rayner's son's trust's house. Some on here (and elsewhere) argued the opposite was the case.

I bloody well hope they do!

Both times we extended, we also looked at moving. Each time the extension cost looked comparable to the extra cost of moving to a house with the capacity already added. Which would make sense in a well-functioning market.

Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.

Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).

To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.

Would be interested to know (though probably unknowable) how many of the marchers on Saturday attend religious events of any kind. In my own part of the world sectarian marchers tend to identify along religious lines but I hae ma doots about how much genuine religious observance is attached. The Christian nationalism (in the UK at least) seems emptily performative, though I'm willing to be surprused by news that Tommy Robinson cuts up his coke with a communion wafer.

Pro-Christian is an alternative way of saying anti-Muslim.

'I'm no of fan of Christ our saviour and lord, but at least he never said anything positive about Muslims.'

Phillips sounds a bit confused, it seems very unlikely that many immigrants, christian or otherwise, were on the TR march.

It's an attempt by the terminally online to import American style political Christianity, the Charlie Kirk tendency.

For a bunch of "patriots" they seem very keen on us copying America.

It is partly that but perhaps also that many marchers feel the loss not of Christianity per se but of what we might call cultural Christianity. They do not go to church but want to know it is there, and has not been turned into a mosque or posh flats.

ETA and replacing HMQ with HMK probably has not helped in this regard. Another mistake by Liz Truss.

If you watch the rally though, the Christianity they're pushing is not cultural Christianity that anyone in Britain would recognise. It wasn't a rousing rendition of Abide with Me, it was hyper evangelical Christianity that is being imported from America. When I was watching it some of the speakers were trying to get the audience to chant "Christ is King" and most of them just looked baffled

I imagine this will die a death soon, but if it doesn't, a shift will occur. There are a number of hyper evangelical outlets especially in the cities, with Christ is Lord and King mixed with awful loud music and hyperbolic long talks. It has a long tail right down to the person who waves their arms in the air during trad hymns and hugs a lot in the peace and is the only charismatic in the village.

But politically far right?? No. Absolutely not. They tend to be LD, Labour, Tory, and to have a lot of ethnicities in the flock. Some are nearly all black. They tend to be opposed to all other faiths because their faith is exclusive, but only in the same sense that religions in the modern world usually are - they are opposed nicely and politely. Quite a few are pacifists.

Danny Kruger, my goodness. Blanche has a Reform MP.

Pity, though Kruger is very socially conservative and an evangelical Christian, anti abortion, anti euthanasia and anti same sex marriage and hostile to much of Islam and economically very small state so no great surprise

Perfect fit for the narrow minded far right attracted to Farage

I am very pleased he has gone as that is not my conservative party, though it could be yours

That just rude G.

If it was only the 'narrow minded far right' attracted to Reform they wouldn't be polling around the mid 30s.

If I remember correctly, you only ended up voting for "my/your" Conservative Party because Mrs G filled in an returned your ballot paper?

It is not rude just an opinion

And as far as my wife is concerned, when you have been happily married for 62 years you discuss matters and agree, but your suggestion would be illegal, and I would ask you to withdraw it

Do you always vote the same, BigG? My wife and I certainly discuss, but we've often ended up voting for different parties. I enjoy the discussions, which are always civil - we're not trying to persuade each other - and in which we both generally learn things we haven't considered and we're not far apart politically, but I'd say we vote differently probably half of the time. The last two Westminster votes (one of which was a by election) we've voted the same though.

ETA: Thinking about it, the last two are the ones where votes have maybe mattered - in previous elections we've both indulged our consciences by voting for different no-hope (in the seat) parties. The only time we would likely have voted differently when it mattered, had we been in a competitive seat, would likely have been 2015 maybe (her Con, me Lab, but close decision for both of us).

Yes - we even both voted for Blair twice, to be fair my wife is not that political though when I asked her about Burnham a couple of days ago she responded

' I like Andy'

Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.

Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).

To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.

Would be interested to know (though probably unknowable) how many of the marchers on Saturday attend religious events of any kind. In my own part of the world sectarian marchers tend to identify along religious lines but I hae ma doots about how much genuine religious observance is attached. The Christian nationalism (in the UK at least) seems emptily performative, though I'm willing to be surprused by news that Tommy Robinson cuts up his coke with a communion wafer.

Pro-Christian is an alternative way of saying anti-Muslim.

'I'm no of fan of Christ our saviour and lord, but at least he never said anything positive about Muslims.'

Phillips sounds a bit confused, it seems very unlikely that many immigrants, christian or otherwise, were on the TR march.

It's an attempt by the terminally online to import American style political Christianity, the Charlie Kirk tendency.

For a bunch of "patriots" they seem very keen on us copying America.

It is partly that but perhaps also that many marchers feel the loss not of Christianity per se but of what we might call cultural Christianity. They do not go to church but want to know it is there, and has not been turned into a mosque or posh flats.

ETA and replacing HMQ with HMK probably has not helped in this regard. Another mistake by Liz Truss.

If you watch the rally though, the Christianity they're pushing is not cultural Christianity that anyone in Britain would recognise. It wasn't a rousing rendition of Abide with Me, it was hyper evangelical Christianity that is being imported from America. When I was watching it some of the speakers were trying to get the audience to chant "Christ is King" and most of them just looked baffled

I was confirmed into the C of E by the Bishop of Durham and was a server for a few years attending many communion sevices, and at one time was able to recite the whole communion service without reference to the prayer book

My wife was a member of the Brethren, but found them too extreme not least when they would not allow a piano at our wedding, notwithstanding my wife had played regularly at the Deep Sea Fisherman's Mission

It resulted in us being married in the Church of Scotland

We both have Christian upbringings and outlooks, but simply reject narrow minded prejudiced opinions largely taken out of contact from the Bible

I do wonder if these so called Christians really stop and ask

'What would Jesus do?'

Yes I'm a lay preacher and (non serving) Elder of my local United Reformed Church. The Christianity that is being pushed at these rallies is not one I recognise either. It's the kind of Evangelical political Christian Nationalism that we see in the States. It seems to me that the bigwigs in the alt right are swallowing it as part of the whole MAGA package.