At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
I don't really believe in the hard way any more.
The solution to an ageing population is to age healthier, work well for longer, and require less care during our elder years. I think that's do-able with small changes to food production and preparation of dietary staples, and better dietary and health advice. This would also lighten the load on hospitals.
It's likely that there's an easy way through everything else too.
I am also reminded of Adam Smith's famous dictum:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.'
At present, we don't really have peace - at least we're spending billions prosecuting a war (thank goodness we're not shedding British blood, just treasure), we don't have easy taxes by any stretch of the imagination, and whether we have tolerable administration of justice is highly debatable.
A lot of complex solutions can mooted, but we should try the simpler ones first imo.
You could also add Smith's ferocious strictures against permitting merchants to influence government policy. ISTR that they were, unaccountably, deleted from an edition of the book edited by a Conservative grandee - albeit quite some years ago now. Though I don't think for a moment that either of them had the current '**** business' philosophy in mind at all.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
Only 58% in Scotland. So it's not just London that's a problem.
Well blame Sturgeon for Scotland having the 2nd lowest home ownership rate in the UK after Sadiq Khan's London
Indeed. Credit the SNP with reversing the big sell off of public property for huge discounts. And with building council houses again. To the degree that Labour councils are doing it too.
Round here, the new ones're smallish, but rather good on external inspection, with separate back yards and parking areas.
My granddaughter's 4th floor apartment in Leeds is tiny and comprises a lounge - kitchen, shower room and bedroom (cost £160,000) and she is paying £550 per month
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
I don't really believe in the hard way any more.
The solution to an ageing population is to age healthier, work well for longer, and require less care during our elder years. I think that's do-able with small changes to food production and preparation of dietary staples, and better dietary and health advice. This would also lighten the load on hospitals.
It's likely that there's an easy way through everything else too.
I am also reminded of Adam Smith's famous dictum:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.'
At present, we don't really have peace - at least we're spending billions prosecuting a war (thank goodness we're not shedding British blood, just treasure), we don't have easy taxes by any stretch of the imagination, and whether we have tolerable administration of justice is highly debatable.
A lot of complex solutions can mooted, but we should try the simpler ones first imo.
You could also add Smith's ferocious strictures against permitting merchants to influence government policy. ISTR that they were, unaccountably, deleted from an edition of the book edited by a Conservative grandee - albeit quite some years ago now. Though I don't think for a moment that either of them had the current '**** business' philosophy in mind at all.
Oh, I totally agree. Smith was very much against the power of corporations becoming too great. These are lessons that for some reason we need to keep learning despite them being published hundreds of years ago. Much like the Sermon on the Mount.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
Only 58% in Scotland. So it's not just London that's a problem.
Well blame Sturgeon for Scotland having the 2nd lowest home ownership rate in the UK after Sadiq Khan's London
Indeed. Credit the SNP with reversing the big sell off of public property for huge discounts. And with building council houses again. To the degree that Labour councils are doing it too.
Round here, the new ones're smallish, but rather good on external inspection, with separate back yards and parking areas.
My granddaughter's 4th floor apartment in Leeds is tiny and comprises a lounge - kitchen, shower room and bedroom (cost £160,000) and she is paying £550 per month
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
The problem is who is going to lead us out of the present mess
I don’t know.
The absence of clear thinking - not just in the political class, but also in the media - is a depressing component of the problem.
It seems events are overwhelming a political class unsuited to the crisis, and not just here in the UK but in many others countries
I fear a lot of pain is heading the way of all politicians and unfortunately the public will be the ones paying the price, quite literally
Two sides to that. Even a great leader can only lead if people are willing to be led.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
No you have no idea, looking through everything via the lens of your anti Tory agenda.
Ignoring the impact of the uncontrolled immigration of the Blair years as Leon correctly states. Plus trying to dismiss the fact home ownership rates in the UK are dragged down by non Tory London and Scotland
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
The problem is who is going to lead us out of the present mess
I don’t know.
The absence of clear thinking - not just in the political class, but also in the media - is a depressing component of the problem.
It seems events are overwhelming a political class unsuited to the crisis, and not just here in the UK but in many others countries
I fear a lot of pain is heading the way of all politicians and unfortunately the public will be the ones paying the price, quite literally
It is tempting to throw up one’s hands but to me it starts by unclogging the u-bend in Downing Street.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Fair comment but just how is any government going to address it and get elected
That is the problem. We are where we are because pensioners vote, and because people who aren't pensioners are wedded to the idea of inheriting their wealth (cf the dementia tax).
However, there are a few things that could be done right now, such as bringing interest rates up (BoE independence aside), stricter mortgage lending criteria, increasing taxes on second homes, punitive taxation of undeveloped land being held in land banks, easing of planning restrictions, more medium density (5 storey) properties, maybe even a state funded construction company building thousands of houses at cost to compete with the developer oligopoly. Oh, and ending leasehold so flats are attractive purchases again - at the moment they're not.
Increased taxes on second homes and punitive taxation of undeveloped land is absolutely necessary, as is easing planning restrictions but I do not see a place for a state funded construction company
As far as leasehold on flats is concerned they should all be sold on a 999 year lease and a peppercorn ground rent
Unfortunately we have a policy vacuum from all the main parties and not just on housing but across all aspects of government and while the conservatives are in total disarray, a labour government facing the same problems would be struggling within months of gaining office
I have no doubt the next election is a good one to lose
The trouble with leasehold isn't the length of the lease, it's the punitive service charges and maintenance bills over which you have no control. Tribunal is weighted in favour of freeholders and lawyers are expensive, plus the freeholder can bill you for the best legal counsel in the world by adding it to your service charge. So called qualifying long term agreements are ripe for corruption, best practice is rarely followed in terms of negotiating reasonable costs (why bother if you're not the one paying?). The rest of the world manages perfectly well without leasehold - including Scotland which introduced commonhold. It's only England that insists on this rip-off. Because it benefits property developers and large freehold investor groups, often based offshore, rather than the poor mugs who buy a leasehold flat thinking they own the property when, in fact, they don't own a single brick.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
Only 58% in Scotland. So it's not just London that's a problem.
Well blame Sturgeon for Scotland having the 2nd lowest home ownership rate in the UK after Sadiq Khan's London
Indeed. Credit the SNP with reversing the big sell off of public property for huge discounts. And with building council houses again. To the degree that Labour councils are doing it too.
Round here, the new ones're smallish, but rather good on external inspection, with separate back yards and parking areas.
My granddaughter's 4th floor apartment in Leeds is tiny and comprises a lounge - kitchen, shower room and bedroom (cost £160,000) and she is paying £550 per month
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
I don't really believe in the hard way any more.
The solution to an ageing population is to age healthier, work well for longer, and require less care during our elder years. I think that's do-able with small changes to food production and preparation of dietary staples, and better dietary and health advice. This would also lighten the load on hospitals.
It's likely that there's an easy way through everything else too.
I am also reminded of Adam Smith's famous dictum:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.'
At present, we don't really have peace - at least we're spending billions prosecuting a war (thank goodness we're not shedding British blood, just treasure), we don't have easy taxes by any stretch of the imagination, and whether we have tolerable administration of justice is highly debatable.
A lot of complex solutions can mooted, but we should try the simpler ones first imo.
You could also add Smith's ferocious strictures against permitting merchants to influence government policy. ISTR that they were, unaccountably, deleted from an edition of the book edited by a Conservative grandee - albeit quite some years ago now. Though I don't think for a moment that either of them had the current '**** business' philosophy in mind at all.
Oh, I totally agree. Smith was very much against the power of corporations becoming too great. These are lessons that for some reason we need to keep learning despite them being published hundreds of years ago. Much like the Sermon on the Mount.
KyF's interesting comments on freehold just now seem a very apposite example!
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
No you have no idea, looking through everything via the lens of your anti Tory agenda.
Ignoring the impact of the uncontrolled immigration of the Blair years as Leon correctly states. Plus trying to dismiss the fact home ownership rates in the UK are dragged down by non Tory London and Scotland
Remind me the homeowner rates in London when Johnson was mayor
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
No you have no idea, looking through everything via the lens of your anti Tory agenda.
Ignoring the impact of the uncontrolled immigration of the Blair years as Leon correctly states. Plus trying to dismiss the fact home ownership rates in the UK are dragged down by non Tory London and Scotland
I generally avoid responding to you because it is a massive waste of time and it is like explaining algebra to gerbil, but I’d note that the uncontrolled immigration you refer to picked up after 2004 and has pretty much continued unabated to the present day, albeit the composition has changed since Brexit.
The Tories have governed for 12 of that 18 year period.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
I don't really believe in the hard way any more.
The solution to an ageing population is to age healthier, work well for longer, and require less care during our elder years. I think that's do-able with small changes to food production and preparation of dietary staples, and better dietary and health advice. This would also lighten the load on hospitals.
It's likely that there's an easy way through everything else too.
I am also reminded of Adam Smith's famous dictum:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.'
At present, we don't really have peace - at least we're spending billions prosecuting a war (thank goodness we're not shedding British blood, just treasure), we don't have easy taxes by any stretch of the imagination, and whether we have tolerable administration of justice is highly debatable.
A lot of complex solutions can mooted, but we should try the simpler ones first imo.
You could also add Smith's ferocious strictures against permitting merchants to influence government policy. ISTR that they were, unaccountably, deleted from an edition of the book edited by a Conservative grandee - albeit quite some years ago now. Though I don't think for a moment that either of them had the current '**** business' philosophy in mind at all.
Oh, I totally agree. Smith was very much against the power of corporations becoming too great. These are lessons that for some reason we need to keep learning despite them being published hundreds of years ago. Much like the Sermon on the Mount.
KyF's interesting comments on freehold just now seem a very apposite example!
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
I don't really believe in the hard way any more.
The solution to an ageing population is to age healthier, work well for longer, and require less care during our elder years. I think that's do-able with small changes to food production and preparation of dietary staples, and better dietary and health advice. This would also lighten the load on hospitals.
It's likely that there's an easy way through everything else too.
I am also reminded of Adam Smith's famous dictum:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.'
At present, we don't really have peace - at least we're spending billions prosecuting a war (thank goodness we're not shedding British blood, just treasure), we don't have easy taxes by any stretch of the imagination, and whether we have tolerable administration of justice is highly debatable.
A lot of complex solutions can mooted, but we should try the simpler ones first imo.
You could also add Smith's ferocious strictures against permitting merchants to influence government policy. ISTR that they were, unaccountably, deleted from an edition of the book edited by a Conservative grandee - albeit quite some years ago now. Though I don't think for a moment that either of them had the current '**** business' philosophy in mind at all.
Oh, I totally agree. Smith was very much against the power of corporations becoming too great. These are lessons that for some reason we need to keep learning despite them being published hundreds of years ago. Much like the Sermon on the Mount.
KyF's interesting comments on freehold just now seem a very apposite example!
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as a especially property owning democracy is actually not really true anymore.
Going back to your original argument, Gordon Brown stoking a huge housing bubble through cheap borrowing and mass immigration must be the biggest factor in undoing the 'golden legacy' that New Labour took over.
I don’t think Gordon Brown has much to do with it, and immigration has had less impact on household formation and demand than other factors.
The issue has been crap planning policy leading to insufficient housebuilding, and low interest rates creating inflated house prices, speculation, and the rise of buy-to-let.
"Gordon Brown" is just tory story shorthand for "let's see if we can somehow blame the last Labour government for the problems we have today".
'The real trick of McKinsey is being everywhere. If you are a corporate strategist, you can try to do the best you can with what your analysts tell you and your own data. But if you hire McKinsey you are sure their advice will be at least as good as the one they are giving your competitors. Of course they don’t make it obvious. They have internal shielding, privacy protection, the whole shebang. But you might get invited to be part of the benchmark which matters and their internal documentation pulls cleverly from all their cases. It’s subtle but hiring them is the closest you can get to a cartel without crossing the line. That’s why they are so expensive.'
Would any PBer care to elaborate?
That’s sounds like the “negative but positive “ pitch that McKinsey and the other big consultancies would like you to believe.
Personally I think their advice is a bit like AI. Sounds awesome and produces some funky art (PowerPoint) but when you give it a real problem like fully autonomous driving, it fails.
Their mind set seems to run on tram lines - all about outsourcing, turning your business into a hedge fund that owns IP. Despite that model having failed many, many times. Works for a bit - until you need new IP. And all your knowledge creators have been outsourced…
Thanks for the info. Have you any companies in mind when you talk of dropping the in house researchers and suffering for it?
Boeing are a classic of forgetting how to do their primary skill - creating new planes and manufacturing them.
Also Boeing (again) and LockMart for losing all their skills in creating new rockets and space vehicles.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as a especially property owning democracy is actually not really true anymore.
Going back to your original argument, Gordon Brown stoking a huge housing bubble through cheap borrowing and mass immigration must be the biggest factor in undoing the 'golden legacy' that New Labour took over.
I don’t think Gordon Brown has much to do with it, and immigration has had less impact on household formation and demand than other factors.
The issue has been crap planning policy leading to insufficient housebuilding, and low interest rates creating inflated house prices, speculation, and the rise of buy-to-let.
"Gordon Brown" is just tory story shorthand for "let's see if we can somehow blame the last Labour government for the problems we have today".
As sad as those people who continued to blame Thatcher for everything well into the 2010s.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
No you have no idea, looking through everything via the lens of your anti Tory agenda.
Ignoring the impact of the uncontrolled immigration of the Blair years as Leon correctly states. Plus trying to dismiss the fact home ownership rates in the UK are dragged down by non Tory London and Scotland
How far back would we have to go to find non-Tory London and Scotland were run by Tories?
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as a especially property owning democracy is actually not really true anymore.
Going back to your original argument, Gordon Brown stoking a huge housing bubble through cheap borrowing and mass immigration must be the biggest factor in undoing the 'golden legacy' that New Labour took over.
I don’t think Gordon Brown has much to do with it, and immigration has had less impact on household formation and demand than other factors.
The issue has been crap planning policy leading to insufficient housebuilding, and low interest rates creating inflated house prices, speculation, and the rise of buy-to-let.
"Gordon Brown" is just tory story shorthand for "let's see if we can somehow blame the last Labour government for the problems we have today".
That's fair enough. I mean, just look at the current state of the NHS - that bloody useless leftie Aneurin Bevan's got a lot to answer for.
'The real trick of McKinsey is being everywhere. If you are a corporate strategist, you can try to do the best you can with what your analysts tell you and your own data. But if you hire McKinsey you are sure their advice will be at least as good as the one they are giving your competitors. Of course they don’t make it obvious. They have internal shielding, privacy protection, the whole shebang. But you might get invited to be part of the benchmark which matters and their internal documentation pulls cleverly from all their cases. It’s subtle but hiring them is the closest you can get to a cartel without crossing the line. That’s why they are so expensive.'
Would any PBer care to elaborate?
That’s sounds like the “negative but positive “ pitch that McKinsey and the other big consultancies would like you to believe.
Personally I think their advice is a bit like AI. Sounds awesome and produces some funky art (PowerPoint) but when you give it a real problem like fully autonomous driving, it fails.
Their mind set seems to run on tram lines - all about outsourcing, turning your business into a hedge fund that owns IP. Despite that model having failed many, many times. Works for a bit - until you need new IP. And all your knowledge creators have been outsourced…
Thanks for the info. Have you any companies in mind when you talk of dropping the in house researchers and suffering for it?
Boeing are a classic of forgetting how to do their primary skill - creating new planes and manufacturing them.
Also Boeing (again) and LockMart for losing all their skills in creating new rockets and space vehicles.
To be fair to LockMart, they're not in the business of large rockets (deliberate bang rockets are a different matter). Their orbital rocket program went to ULA, who are still excellent (but expensive). And Tory Bruno totally owns Musk in the Twitter stakes.
Boeing's mucked up the SLS, and whilst the Orion capsule (made by LockMart) has had problems, it has been ready for yonks, whereas the SLS rocket has not been.
Incredible to think it's been two whole days since "The PM thinks he's done the decent thing by resigning. There is no need for an investigation and no need to suspend the whip"
A good chunk of our economic and social problems ultimately come down to housing. It's difficult for families to have children, settle into a community, or save for the future when 50% of their post-tax income disappears in rent; making housing cheaper is an obvious way to somewhat address our demographic crisis, collapsing social trust and crippling social care obligation. We can only do this by increasing supply which means more housebuilding.
However, any serious attempt at housebuilding is going to be deeply unpopular with the southeastern Boomer/NIMBY voting bloc, so no political party has the balls to actually do it.
I think the solution is to abandon the current approach of trying to glue identikit housing estates onto the outskirts of existing towns and instead try to target affordable housing to certain areas of the country and certain age brackets. Build new dense garden cities in places like Cornwall and incentivise young people to move there (perhaps with student loan relief schemes and flats reserved for under-30s).
Doing it this way means the London housing market remains obscene and thus politically somewhat acceptable to Boomers (as actual buyer demand there is being driven by wealthier older people) but younger renters have a cheaper alternative so they can build some wealth of their own.
Incredible to think it's been two whole days since "The PM thinks he's done the decent thing by resigning. There is no need for an investigation and no need to suspend the whip"
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as a especially property owning democracy is actually not really true anymore.
Going back to your original argument, Gordon Brown stoking a huge housing bubble through cheap borrowing and mass immigration must be the biggest factor in undoing the 'golden legacy' that New Labour took over.
I don’t think Gordon Brown has much to do with it, and immigration has had less impact on household formation and demand than other factors.
The issue has been crap planning policy leading to insufficient housebuilding, and low interest rates creating inflated house prices, speculation, and the rise of buy-to-let.
Call me naive, but I am fairly sure that allowing 5m migrants into the country - the greatest immigration in UK history - probably has impinged, just a tad, on the shortage of decent housing
If you let 15 people live in your house, you risk running out of bedrooms
Vast countries like the USA, Canada or Australia can allow great waves of immigration. They can build entire new towns one after the other without wrecking the landscape
We cannot. So the irresistible force of mass immigration meets the immovable object of English resistance to endless development, et voila
It's like someone has gone in and carefully removed those full stops.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as a especially property owning democracy is actually not really true anymore.
Going back to your original argument, Gordon Brown stoking a huge housing bubble through cheap borrowing and mass immigration must be the biggest factor in undoing the 'golden legacy' that New Labour took over.
I don’t think Gordon Brown has much to do with it, and immigration has had less impact on household formation and demand than other factors.
The issue has been crap planning policy leading to insufficient housebuilding, and low interest rates creating inflated house prices, speculation, and the rise of buy-to-let.
Call me naive, but I am fairly sure that allowing 5m migrants into the country - the greatest immigration in UK history - probably has impinged, just a tad, on the shortage of decent housing
If you let 15 people live in your house, you risk running out of bedrooms
Vast countries like the USA, Canada or Australia can allow great waves of immigration. They can build entire new towns one after the other without wrecking the landscape
We cannot. So the irresistible force of mass immigration meets the immovable object of English resistance to endless development, et voila
It's like someone has gone in and carefully removed those full stops.
Quite funky.
It’s desperately sad. Punctuation as a mid-life crisis.
Knowing, too, that he is a professional writer, he likely has to “go back” and remove those full stops. Which makes it worse.
According to today's Mail, Starmer's office isn't particularly keen on a Tamworth by-election because of potentially unfavourable comparisons with Tony Blair's performance in the by-election in the same seat in 1996 when there was a 22% swing to Labour and 14,000 Labour majority.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as a especially property owning democracy is actually not really true anymore.
Going back to your original argument, Gordon Brown stoking a huge housing bubble through cheap borrowing and mass immigration must be the biggest factor in undoing the 'golden legacy' that New Labour took over.
I don’t think Gordon Brown has much to do with it, and immigration has had less impact on household formation and demand than other factors.
The issue has been crap planning policy leading to insufficient housebuilding, and low interest rates creating inflated house prices, speculation, and the rise of buy-to-let.
"Gordon Brown" is just tory story shorthand for "let's see if we can somehow blame the last Labour government for the problems we have today".
As sad as those people who continued to blame Thatcher for everything well into the 2010s.
15 all.
Bounce bounce bounce ...
But she transformed the country. Gordon just had a bit of a fiddle.
A good chunk of our economic and social problems ultimately come down to housing. It's difficult for families to have children, settle into a community, or save for the future when 50% of their post-tax income disappears in rent; making housing cheaper is an obvious way to somewhat address our demographic crisis, collapsing social trust and crippling social care obligation. We can only do this by increasing supply which means more housebuilding.
However, any serious attempt at housebuilding is going to be deeply unpopular with the southeastern Boomer/NIMBY voting bloc, so no political party has the balls to actually do it.
I think the solution is to abandon the current approach of trying to glue identikit housing estates onto the outskirts of existing towns and instead try to target affordable housing to certain areas of the country and certain age brackets. Build new dense garden cities in places like Cornwall and incentivise young people to move there (perhaps with student loan relief schemes and flats reserved for under-30s).
Doing it this way means the London housing market remains obscene and thus politically somewhat acceptable to Boomers (as actual buyer demand there is being driven by wealthier older people) but younger renters have a cheaper alternative so they can build some wealth of their own.
The root issue is planning policy, and how it interrelates with the great English (if not British) dream of domesticated rural or semi-rural bliss.
Everyone wants to live in a Georgian rectory, with nothing to listen to except larksong, test cricket on the wireless, and the occasional dong from the church-bell.
That’s fine, I respect this, and I think government policy should actually strive to preserve and extend this opportunity (maybe not the rectory part) but you come up against the fact that Britain is very crowded by Western standards, and nobody wants new development near them.
The trick I think - and I’ve said this many times on here - is to turn planning policy from a prohibitory to a permissive regime *in the metros only*, but to encourage dense but high quality development in these cities.
In practical terms, I as Hackney house owner, should be free to develop pretty much *as high as I want* with my unlisted house, so long as I obey a reasonably strict Hackney design guide.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
All HYUFD understands is the I’m alright Jack mafioism that Bozo is the leader of.
A good chunk of our economic and social problems ultimately come down to housing. It's difficult for families to have children, settle into a community, or save for the future when 50% of their post-tax income disappears in rent; making housing cheaper is an obvious way to somewhat address our demographic crisis, collapsing social trust and crippling social care obligation. We can only do this by increasing supply which means more housebuilding.
However, any serious attempt at housebuilding is going to be deeply unpopular with the southeastern Boomer/NIMBY voting bloc, so no political party has the balls to actually do it.
I think the solution is to abandon the current approach of trying to glue identikit housing estates onto the outskirts of existing towns and instead try to target affordable housing to certain areas of the country and certain age brackets. Build new dense garden cities in places like Cornwall and incentivise young people to move there (perhaps with student loan relief schemes and flats reserved for under-30s).
Doing it this way means the London housing market remains obscene and thus politically somewhat acceptable to Boomers (as actual buyer demand there is being driven by wealthier older people) but younger renters have a cheaper alternative so they can build some wealth of their own.
This is a long article, and I have shared it here before, so apologies if you have already seen it, but I highly rate "The Housing Theory of Everything" which aligns with much of what you have said above.
TL;DR - "Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates." as the article goes on to demonstrate.
The interesting thing is that it's a western phenomenon rather than just a UK one, supposedly driven by the west's reliance on the "intangible economy" (i.e. intellectual property, software development, financial services) that concentrate wealth and people in small clusters. You have to wonder if fully remote working is the way out of that, though I don't subscribe to the view that WFH full time is a replacement for real contact with your team mates.
A good chunk of our economic and social problems ultimately come down to housing. It's difficult for families to have children, settle into a community, or save for the future when 50% of their post-tax income disappears in rent; making housing cheaper is an obvious way to somewhat address our demographic crisis, collapsing social trust and crippling social care obligation. We can only do this by increasing supply which means more housebuilding.
However, any serious attempt at housebuilding is going to be deeply unpopular with the southeastern Boomer/NIMBY voting bloc, so no political party has the balls to actually do it.
I think the solution is to abandon the current approach of trying to glue identikit housing estates onto the outskirts of existing towns and instead try to target affordable housing to certain areas of the country and certain age brackets. Build new dense garden cities in places like Cornwall and incentivise young people to move there (perhaps with student loan relief schemes and flats reserved for under-30s).
Doing it this way means the London housing market remains obscene and thus politically somewhat acceptable to Boomers (as actual buyer demand there is being driven by wealthier older people) but younger renters have a cheaper alternative so they can build some wealth of their own.
This is a long article, and I have shared it here before, so apologies if you have already seen it, but I highly rate "The Housing Theory of Everything" which aligns with much of what you have said above.
TL;DR - "Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates." as the article goes on to demonstrate.
The interesting thing is that it's a western phenomenon rather than just a UK one, supposedly driven by the west's reliance on the "intangible economy" (i.e. intellectual property, software development, financial services) that concentrate wealth and people in small clusters. You have to wonder if fully remote working is the way out of that, though I don't subscribe to the view that WFH full time is a replacement for real contact with your team mates.
It’s a great article, and worth posting over and over, but the situation is even worse in the UK than other places, given declining home ownership rates, the declining size even of homes actually built, and the over-dependence of the UK economy on the SE where the problem is especially acute.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as a especially property owning democracy is actually not really true anymore.
Going back to your original argument, Gordon Brown stoking a huge housing bubble through cheap borrowing and mass immigration must be the biggest factor in undoing the 'golden legacy' that New Labour took over.
I don’t think Gordon Brown has much to do with it, and immigration has had less impact on household formation and demand than other factors.
The issue has been crap planning policy leading to insufficient housebuilding, and low interest rates creating inflated house prices, speculation, and the rise of buy-to-let.
Call me naive, but I am fairly sure that allowing 5m migrants into the country - the greatest immigration in UK history - probably has impinged, just a tad, on the shortage of decent housing
If you let 15 people live in your house, you risk running out of bedrooms
Vast countries like the USA, Canada or Australia can allow great waves of immigration. They can build entire new towns one after the other without wrecking the landscape
We cannot. So the irresistible force of mass immigration meets the immovable object of English resistance to endless development, et voila
It's like someone has gone in and carefully removed those full stops.
Quite funky.
It’s desperately sad. Punctuation as a mid-life crisis.
Knowing, too, that he is a professional writer, he likely has to “go back” and remove those full stops. Which makes it worse.
Lol. I don’t
I tell you, once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you ever put those weird full stops. At the end of paragraphs.
Look. It says. I’ve finished. Full stop.
Yes I can see you’ve finished that’s the end of the paragraph
You don’t need them. And eschewing them is more elegant
It is worth noting that there is a school of policy thought that says, housing supply actually has little impact on overall prices*, therefore all the government should do is focus on getting underprivileged people into housing.
Having ditched planning reform after Amersham & Chesham, this is undoubtedly why the government is mooting these 50 year mortgages, and mortgages for welfare recipients etc.
*Because in the short term, the overwhelming factor is interest rates.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as a especially property owning democracy is actually not really true anymore.
Going back to your original argument, Gordon Brown stoking a huge housing bubble through cheap borrowing and mass immigration must be the biggest factor in undoing the 'golden legacy' that New Labour took over.
I don’t think Gordon Brown has much to do with it, and immigration has had less impact on household formation and demand than other factors.
The issue has been crap planning policy leading to insufficient housebuilding, and low interest rates creating inflated house prices, speculation, and the rise of buy-to-let.
Call me naive, but I am fairly sure that allowing 5m migrants into the country - the greatest immigration in UK history - probably has impinged, just a tad, on the shortage of decent housing
If you let 15 people live in your house, you risk running out of bedrooms
Vast countries like the USA, Canada or Australia can allow great waves of immigration. They can build entire new towns one after the other without wrecking the landscape
We cannot. So the irresistible force of mass immigration meets the immovable object of English resistance to endless development, et voila
It's like someone has gone in and carefully removed those full stops.
Quite funky.
It’s desperately sad. Punctuation as a mid-life crisis.
Knowing, too, that he is a professional writer, he likely has to “go back” and remove those full stops. Which makes it worse.
Lol. I don’t
I tell you, once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you ever put those weird full stops. At the end of paragraphs.
Look. It says. I’ve finished. Full stop.
Yes I can see you’ve finished that’s the end of the paragraph
You don’t need them. And eschewing them is more elegant
The first time you did it, I didn’t notice it. Now I find it very distracting.
Sorry, I’m keeping my stops, even if it ages me. I have done my best, however, to avoid double spacing after full stops, which apparently has an interesting history behind it.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
No you have no idea, looking through everything via the lens of your anti Tory agenda.
Ignoring the impact of the uncontrolled immigration of the Blair years as Leon correctly states. Plus trying to dismiss the fact home ownership rates in the UK are dragged down by non Tory London and Scotland
I generally avoid responding to you because it is a massive waste of time and it is like explaining algebra to gerbil, but I’d note that the uncontrolled immigration you refer to picked up after 2004 and has pretty much continued unabated to the present day, albeit the composition has changed since Brexit.
The Tories have governed for 12 of that 18 year period.
Except, as is so often the case with your vacuous half-informed discourse, that is not true
See here
Immigration takes off, noticeably and sharply, in 1997
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as a especially property owning democracy is actually not really true anymore.
Going back to your original argument, Gordon Brown stoking a huge housing bubble through cheap borrowing and mass immigration must be the biggest factor in undoing the 'golden legacy' that New Labour took over.
I don’t think Gordon Brown has much to do with it, and immigration has had less impact on household formation and demand than other factors.
The issue has been crap planning policy leading to insufficient housebuilding, and low interest rates creating inflated house prices, speculation, and the rise of buy-to-let.
Call me naive, but I am fairly sure that allowing 5m migrants into the country - the greatest immigration in UK history - probably has impinged, just a tad, on the shortage of decent housing
If you let 15 people live in your house, you risk running out of bedrooms
Vast countries like the USA, Canada or Australia can allow great waves of immigration. They can build entire new towns one after the other without wrecking the landscape
We cannot. So the irresistible force of mass immigration meets the immovable object of English resistance to endless development, et voila
It's like someone has gone in and carefully removed those full stops.
Quite funky.
It’s desperately sad. Punctuation as a mid-life crisis.
Knowing, too, that he is a professional writer, he likely has to “go back” and remove those full stops. Which makes it worse.
Lol. I don’t
I tell you, once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you ever put those weird full stops. At the end of paragraphs.
Look. It says. I’ve finished. Full stop.
Yes I can see you’ve finished that’s the end of the paragraph
You don’t need them. And eschewing them is more elegant
For years I have been beginning without indentation paragraphs which follow bulleted lists or figures on the same principle: the demarcation is achieved by the intervening list or figure, and it looks cleaner.
It feels like just yesterday he started in F1. This is probably partly the fact I am getting older, but also the fact it feels like there are 150 GPs every year nowadays ...
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
No you have no idea, looking through everything via the lens of your anti Tory agenda.
Ignoring the impact of the uncontrolled immigration of the Blair years as Leon correctly states. Plus trying to dismiss the fact home ownership rates in the UK are dragged down by non Tory London and Scotland
I generally avoid responding to you because it is a massive waste of time and it is like explaining algebra to gerbil, but I’d note that the uncontrolled immigration you refer to picked up after 2004 and has pretty much continued unabated to the present day, albeit the composition has changed since Brexit.
The Tories have governed for 12 of that 18 year period.
Except, as is so often the case with your vacuous half-informed discourse, that is not true
See here
Immigration takes off, noticeably and sharply, in 1997
There’s a notable hike in 2004. But fine, recut the numbers, the Tories have presided over - and continue to preside over - as much immigration as Labour ever did.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as a especially property owning democracy is actually not really true anymore.
Going back to your original argument, Gordon Brown stoking a huge housing bubble through cheap borrowing and mass immigration must be the biggest factor in undoing the 'golden legacy' that New Labour took over.
I don’t think Gordon Brown has much to do with it, and immigration has had less impact on household formation and demand than other factors.
The issue has been crap planning policy leading to insufficient housebuilding, and low interest rates creating inflated house prices, speculation, and the rise of buy-to-let.
Call me naive, but I am fairly sure that allowing 5m migrants into the country - the greatest immigration in UK history - probably has impinged, just a tad, on the shortage of decent housing
If you let 15 people live in your house, you risk running out of bedrooms
Vast countries like the USA, Canada or Australia can allow great waves of immigration. They can build entire new towns one after the other without wrecking the landscape
We cannot. So the irresistible force of mass immigration meets the immovable object of English resistance to endless development, et voila
It's like someone has gone in and carefully removed those full stops.
Quite funky.
It’s desperately sad. Punctuation as a mid-life crisis.
Knowing, too, that he is a professional writer, he likely has to “go back” and remove those full stops. Which makes it worse.
Lol. I don’t
I tell you, once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you ever put those weird full stops. At the end of paragraphs.
Look. It says. I’ve finished. Full stop.
Yes I can see you’ve finished that’s the end of the paragraph
You don’t need them. And eschewing them is more elegant
For years I have been beginning without indentation paragraphs which follow bulleted lists or figures on the same principle: the demarcation is achieved by the intervening list or figure, and it looks cleaner.
Yes. Now I’ve stopped using them I find end-paragraph full stops quite unsightly
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as a especially property owning democracy is actually not really true anymore.
Going back to your original argument, Gordon Brown stoking a huge housing bubble through cheap borrowing and mass immigration must be the biggest factor in undoing the 'golden legacy' that New Labour took over.
I don’t think Gordon Brown has much to do with it, and immigration has had less impact on household formation and demand than other factors.
The issue has been crap planning policy leading to insufficient housebuilding, and low interest rates creating inflated house prices, speculation, and the rise of buy-to-let.
Call me naive, but I am fairly sure that allowing 5m migrants into the country - the greatest immigration in UK history - probably has impinged, just a tad, on the shortage of decent housing
If you let 15 people live in your house, you risk running out of bedrooms
Vast countries like the USA, Canada or Australia can allow great waves of immigration. They can build entire new towns one after the other without wrecking the landscape
We cannot. So the irresistible force of mass immigration meets the immovable object of English resistance to endless development, et voila
It's like someone has gone in and carefully removed those full stops.
Quite funky.
It’s desperately sad. Punctuation as a mid-life crisis.
Knowing, too, that he is a professional writer, he likely has to “go back” and remove those full stops. Which makes it worse.
Lol. I don’t
I tell you, once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you ever put those weird full stops. At the end of paragraphs.
Look. It says. I’ve finished. Full stop.
Yes I can see you’ve finished that’s the end of the paragraph
You don’t need them. And eschewing them is more elegant
The first time you did it, I didn’t notice it. Now I find it very distracting.
Sorry, I’m keeping my stops, even if it ages me. I have done my best, however, to avoid double spacing after full stops, which apparently has an interesting history behind it.
I know people who do the double space. Don't mind it but not for me.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as a especially property owning democracy is actually not really true anymore.
Going back to your original argument, Gordon Brown stoking a huge housing bubble through cheap borrowing and mass immigration must be the biggest factor in undoing the 'golden legacy' that New Labour took over.
I don’t think Gordon Brown has much to do with it, and immigration has had less impact on household formation and demand than other factors.
The issue has been crap planning policy leading to insufficient housebuilding, and low interest rates creating inflated house prices, speculation, and the rise of buy-to-let.
Call me naive, but I am fairly sure that allowing 5m migrants into the country - the greatest immigration in UK history - probably has impinged, just a tad, on the shortage of decent housing
If you let 15 people live in your house, you risk running out of bedrooms
Vast countries like the USA, Canada or Australia can allow great waves of immigration. They can build entire new towns one after the other without wrecking the landscape
We cannot. So the irresistible force of mass immigration meets the immovable object of English resistance to endless development, et voila
It's like someone has gone in and carefully removed those full stops.
Quite funky.
It’s desperately sad. Punctuation as a mid-life crisis.
Knowing, too, that he is a professional writer, he likely has to “go back” and remove those full stops. Which makes it worse.
Lol. I don’t
I tell you, once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you ever put those weird full stops. At the end of paragraphs.
Look. It says. I’ve finished. Full stop.
Yes I can see you’ve finished that’s the end of the paragraph
You don’t need them. And eschewing them is more elegant
For years I have been beginning without indentation paragraphs which follow bulleted lists or figures on the same principle: the demarcation is achieved by the intervening list or figure, and it looks cleaner.
Yes. Now I’ve stopped using them I find end-paragraph full stops quite unsightly
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
No you have no idea, looking through everything via the lens of your anti Tory agenda.
Ignoring the impact of the uncontrolled immigration of the Blair years as Leon correctly states. Plus trying to dismiss the fact home ownership rates in the UK are dragged down by non Tory London and Scotland
I generally avoid responding to you because it is a massive waste of time and it is like explaining algebra to gerbil, but I’d note that the uncontrolled immigration you refer to picked up after 2004 and has pretty much continued unabated to the present day, albeit the composition has changed since Brexit.
The Tories have governed for 12 of that 18 year period.
Except, as is so often the case with your vacuous half-informed discourse, that is not true
See here
Immigration takes off, noticeably and sharply, in 1997
Looking at that graph, there seems to be a noticeable bump in 1984, 1994, then 2004, then 2014. Every 10 years or so. I assume co-incidence, but these things stand out
2004 and 2014 I can think of reasons. But nothing is coming to mind about 1994
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
No you have no idea, looking through everything via the lens of your anti Tory agenda.
Ignoring the impact of the uncontrolled immigration of the Blair years as Leon correctly states. Plus trying to dismiss the fact home ownership rates in the UK are dragged down by non Tory London and Scotland
I generally avoid responding to you because it is a massive waste of time and it is like explaining algebra to gerbil, but I’d note that the uncontrolled immigration you refer to picked up after 2004 and has pretty much continued unabated to the present day, albeit the composition has changed since Brexit.
The Tories have governed for 12 of that 18 year period.
Except, as is so often the case with your vacuous half-informed discourse, that is not true
See here
Immigration takes off, noticeably and sharply, in 1997
Apart from Cool Brittania, what changed in 1997? I don’t recall any particular immigration changes.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
No you have no idea, looking through everything via the lens of your anti Tory agenda.
Ignoring the impact of the uncontrolled immigration of the Blair years as Leon correctly states. Plus trying to dismiss the fact home ownership rates in the UK are dragged down by non Tory London and Scotland
I generally avoid responding to you because it is a massive waste of time and it is like explaining algebra to gerbil, but I’d note that the uncontrolled immigration you refer to picked up after 2004 and has pretty much continued unabated to the present day, albeit the composition has changed since Brexit.
The Tories have governed for 12 of that 18 year period.
Except, as is so often the case with your vacuous half-informed discourse, that is not true
See here
Immigration takes off, noticeably and sharply, in 1997
Apart from Cool Brittania, what changed in 1997? I don’t recall any particular immigration changes.
I was assuming the 'cool britannia' with Blair's win all over the news *was* the factor. Quite attractive if you're 20 and wondering where to go work for a while I guess?
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
No you have no idea, looking through everything via the lens of your anti Tory agenda.
Ignoring the impact of the uncontrolled immigration of the Blair years as Leon correctly states. Plus trying to dismiss the fact home ownership rates in the UK are dragged down by non Tory London and Scotland
I generally avoid responding to you because it is a massive waste of time and it is like explaining algebra to gerbil, but I’d note that the uncontrolled immigration you refer to picked up after 2004 and has pretty much continued unabated to the present day, albeit the composition has changed since Brexit.
The Tories have governed for 12 of that 18 year period.
Except, as is so often the case with your vacuous half-informed discourse, that is not true
See here
Immigration takes off, noticeably and sharply, in 1997
Apart from Cool Brittania, what changed in 1997? I don’t recall any particular immigration changes.
You misremember
"Under New Labour net migration to the United Kingdom quadrupled[1] from around 50,000 every year before 1997 to around 200,000 averaging out over 1997 to 2010."
Why?
"In 1997, Tony Blair was elected following the general election that year and started to dismantle restrictions on immigration, something NOT OUTLINED in the party's manifesto,[7] at the beginning of his term enacting major reforms to the country's immigration system and policies. One such major example was dismantling the primary purpose rule in 1997,[8] which was used to stop foreign spouses of immigrant workers and potential abuse of the system..."
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
Only 58% in Scotland. So it's not just London that's a problem.
Well blame Sturgeon for Scotland having the 2nd lowest home ownership rate in the UK after Sadiq Khan's London
Indeed. Credit the SNP with reversing the big sell off of public property for huge discounts. And with building council houses again. To the degree that Labour councils are doing it too.
Round here, the new ones're smallish, but rather good on external inspection, with separate back yards and parking areas.
The new council housing is superb, London Giffgaff parties would never have done it
I tell you, once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you ever put those weird full stops. At the end of paragraphs.
Look. It says. I’ve finished. Full stop.
Yes I can see you’ve finished that’s the end of the paragraph
You don’t need them. And eschewing them is more elegant
When I was about 13, I had a homework task which consisted of some English sentences, numbered 1 to 10. The task was to translate them into French.
My mark was 2 out of 10, because 8 of my sentences had no full stop. (The French was fine.)
It worked - I have never missed off full stops since.
Your teacher deserved a slap. He was an idiot.
top trolling
I remember losing a mark because I missed off the "Sir" in Sir Humphrey Davy.
It's funny how we remember these small injustices. When I was about 11 I lost marks for using the word "Israeli" as an adjective (eg "the Israeli government"). I was so sure I was in the right on that one that I argued back to the teacher - never a good idea!
That was well over 50 years ago, typing it now it still rankles. ;-)
I tell you, once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you ever put those weird full stops. At the end of paragraphs.
Look. It says. I’ve finished. Full stop.
Yes I can see you’ve finished that’s the end of the paragraph
You don’t need them. And eschewing them is more elegant
When I was about 13, I had a homework task which consisted of some English sentences, numbered 1 to 10. The task was to translate them into French.
My mark was 2 out of 10, because 8 of my sentences had no full stop. (The French was fine.)
It worked - I have never missed off full stops since.
Your teacher deserved a slap. He was an idiot.
top trolling
Well I mean how petty. If I had been his Dad I would certainly have given the teacher a piece of my mind if it were in a meaningful exam.
It obiously wasn't a meaningful exam. As an exam marker myself no notice is taken of punctuation or grammar. It was obviously part of the teacher pupil banter of the time. The amount that was prevalent in my Grammar School was legion. Nowadays obviously it wouldn't be allowed.
It is one of the great ironies of New Labour that their Open Door immigration policies, designed to make Britain more relaxed and international (or "to rub the noses of the Right in diversity"), led pretty directly to Brexit: their worst nightmare
Given that our population pyramid is looking more like a population dadbod the idea of importing workers does not frighten or bother me. I don't want to see what happens when an increasingly small working-age population needs to support a large generation with complex needs and the political power to avoid any contribution.
On housing, frankly we need to smash the power of the NIMBYs. Completely gut the ability to object to new housing developments. Fuck your view, fuck your "village character", fuck your endless concern trolling. Pair that up with a legal requirement for developers to fund services (schools, GP surgeries, proper integrated community stuff) and a tax on land revaluation after usage change. Bang developer heads together and put a bullet in the NIMBYs, crash house prices into the ground and set up a relief fund funded the valuation tax to help out single home owners who suffer negative equity as a consequence.
Not that I expect any party to do something that might hurt the asset holding class.
I tell you, once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you ever put those weird full stops. At the end of paragraphs.
Look. It says. I’ve finished. Full stop.
Yes I can see you’ve finished that’s the end of the paragraph
You don’t need them. And eschewing them is more elegant
When I was about 13, I had a homework task which consisted of some English sentences, numbered 1 to 10. The task was to translate them into French.
My mark was 2 out of 10, because 8 of my sentences had no full stop. (The French was fine.)
It worked - I have never missed off full stops since.
Your teacher deserved a slap. He was an idiot.
top trolling
Well I mean how petty. If I had been his Dad I would certainly have given the teacher a piece of my mind if it were in a meaningful exam.
What an excellent teacher. Teaching.
Not teaching, but demoralising a pupil. Easy enough to give him the marks for the actual task and remind him about his punctuation.
But if he had done would his pupil have remembered it 20 years later? Not a chance. The job of the teacher is to make sure that the lesson is learned.
My English teacher really didn't like my writing. I think the font was possibly best described as drunken spider on cocaine. His position was that if he couldn't read it, it didn't matter what it said. And he was right, however much I resented it at the time.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as an especially property owning democracy is actually not so true anymore.
In London however only 50% own their own homes, by far the lowest UK figure.
Exclude London, the biggest global city in Europe by gdp and the UK figures look much more like the OECD average
And? Should we remove Paris from France? The Rhineland from Germany? The Eastern seaboard and California from the US?
Paris is a significantly smaller percentage of France than London is of the UK. NYC and LA-San Francisco combined are also a smaller percentage of the USA than London is of the UK.
The Rhineland-Palatinate is cheaper than London and Paris as it has no big global city.
You really have no idea.
You look at everything through the prism of what is good for the Tory Party, in fact you are part of the problem.
You and your ilk have cheerled the country into decline.
No you have no idea, looking through everything via the lens of your anti Tory agenda.
Ignoring the impact of the uncontrolled immigration of the Blair years as Leon correctly states. Plus trying to dismiss the fact home ownership rates in the UK are dragged down by non Tory London and Scotland
I generally avoid responding to you because it is a massive waste of time and it is like explaining algebra to gerbil, but I’d note that the uncontrolled immigration you refer to picked up after 2004 and has pretty much continued unabated to the present day, albeit the composition has changed since Brexit.
The Tories have governed for 12 of that 18 year period.
Except, as is so often the case with your vacuous half-informed discourse, that is not true
See here
Immigration takes off, noticeably and sharply, in 1997
Tom Bowers book on Blair is interesting. It implies that New Labour were indifferent towards illegal immigration after entering power in 1997. On initially reading it, I thought that no government could be so reckless and it must therefore be completely false. I actually stopped reading the book, because I thought it was just a hatchet job. But actually, it looks increasingly like it is correct.
Given that our population pyramid is looking more like a population dadbod the idea of importing workers does not frighten or bother me. I don't want to see what happens when an increasingly small working-age population needs to support a large generation with complex needs and the political power to avoid any contribution. Frankly we need to smash the power of the NIMBYs. Completely gut the ability to object to new housing developments. Fuck your view, fuck your "village character", fuck your endless concern trolling. Pair that up with a legal requirement for developers to fund services (schools, GP surgeries, proper integrated community stuff) and a tax on land revaluation after usage change. Bang developer heads together and put a bullet in the NIMBYs, crash house prices into the ground and set up a relief fund funded the valuation tax to help out single home owners who suffer negative equity as a consequence.
Not that I expect any party to do something that might hurt the asset holding class.
I tell you, once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you ever put those weird full stops. At the end of paragraphs.
Look. It says. I’ve finished. Full stop.
Yes I can see you’ve finished that’s the end of the paragraph
You don’t need them. And eschewing them is more elegant
When I was about 13, I had a homework task which consisted of some English sentences, numbered 1 to 10. The task was to translate them into French.
My mark was 2 out of 10, because 8 of my sentences had no full stop. (The French was fine.)
It worked - I have never missed off full stops since.
Your teacher deserved a slap. He was an idiot.
top trolling
Well I mean how petty. If I had been his Dad I would certainly have given the teacher a piece of my mind if it were in a meaningful exam.
Depends. Re-read the anecdote. The teacher successfully and effectively taught full stops. The implication is also that French had been taught as well (as we are led to infer that with correct punctuation, 10/10 would have been achieved). That is real education as opposed to grade-chasing.
Speaking of foibles, for a brief period as a youngster I spelt chimney as "chimbley". No, I hadn't yet read any Dickens.
I used that spelling once or twice in little essays. My teacher, Mr. Libby, left it alone. Maybe he was charmed? I think he later told my parents that I had an "interesting mind".
Given that our population pyramid is looking more like a population dadbod the idea of importing workers does not frighten or bother me. I don't want to see what happens when an increasingly small working-age population needs to support a large generation with complex needs and the political power to avoid any contribution. Frankly we need to smash the power of the NIMBYs. Completely gut the ability to object to new housing developments. Fuck your view, fuck your "village character", fuck your endless concern trolling. Pair that up with a legal requirement for developers to fund services (schools, GP surgeries, proper integrated community stuff) and a tax on land revaluation after usage change. Bang developer heads together and put a bullet in the NIMBYs, crash house prices into the ground and set up a relief fund funded the valuation tax to help out single home owners who suffer negative equity as a consequence.
Not that I expect any party to do something that might hurt the asset holding class.
Luckily, we don't need to enact any of your crazed Marxist nonsense
Why? Technology
See my posts earlier today. We are on the cusp of a mighty technological revolution, driven by AI (but also involving drones, robots, VR, WFH, self drive vehicles, the Metaverse, and more) which will soon make hundreds of millions of workers redundant. So the problem will be excess workers, not the opposite, and we will have imported 5 million people for no reason
Given that our population pyramid is looking more like a population dadbod the idea of importing workers does not frighten or bother me. I don't want to see what happens when an increasingly small working-age population needs to support a large generation with complex needs and the political power to avoid any contribution. Frankly we need to smash the power of the NIMBYs. Completely gut the ability to object to new housing developments. Fuck your view, fuck your "village character", fuck your endless concern trolling. Pair that up with a legal requirement for developers to fund services (schools, GP surgeries, proper integrated community stuff) and a tax on land revaluation after usage change. Bang developer heads together and put a bullet in the NIMBYs, crash house prices into the ground and set up a relief fund funded the valuation tax to help out single home owners who suffer negative equity as a consequence.
Not that I expect any party to do something that might hurt the asset holding class.
Bloody VOTE then.
And don't expect a victimless house price crash
I have. In every election since I reached franchise age. And I'm not. But a house price crash with some kind of safety net is infinitely preferable to endlessly watching housing prices inflate until something explodes (either the market or society). It's not like there aren't a whole bunch of people losing out on the current inequitable system, trapped in endless cycles of fleece from various rentiers and unable to afford anywhere close to where the work might be.
Given that our population pyramid is looking more like a population dadbod the idea of importing workers does not frighten or bother me. I don't want to see what happens when an increasingly small working-age population needs to support a large generation with complex needs and the political power to avoid any contribution. Frankly we need to smash the power of the NIMBYs. Completely gut the ability to object to new housing developments. Fuck your view, fuck your "village character", fuck your endless concern trolling. Pair that up with a legal requirement for developers to fund services (schools, GP surgeries, proper integrated community stuff) and a tax on land revaluation after usage change. Bang developer heads together and put a bullet in the NIMBYs, crash house prices into the ground and set up a relief fund funded the valuation tax to help out single home owners who suffer negative equity as a consequence.
Not that I expect any party to do something that might hurt the asset holding class.
Luckily, we don't need to enact any of your crazed Marxist nonsense
Why? Technology
See my posts earlier today. We are on the cusp of a mighty technological revolution, driven by AI (but also involving drones, robots, VR, WFH, self drive vehicles, the Metaverse, and more) which will soon make hundreds of millions of workers redundant. So the problem will be excess workers, not the opposite, and we will have imported 5 million people for no reason
According to today's Mail, Starmer's office isn't particularly keen on a Tamworth by-election because of potentially unfavourable comparisons with Tony Blair's performance in the by-election in the same seat in 1996 when there was a 22% swing to Labour and 14,000 Labour majority.
I think one can be more exact. A Tamworth byelection is dangerous for everyone.
Step 1: Which of Lab and LD is the challenger? Lab isn't because it is not good at big swings at the moment. LDs aren't because they got close to Zero votes last time.
But Labour is the challenger because it came second, LDs nowhere and Lab used to hold the seat. simples. But LDs are the challenger because of NS, T and H, C and A etc.
Step 2: It's dangerous for the Tories because they might lose.
Step 3: It's dangerous for the country because they might win.
It follows that no-one, apart from PBers of course, wants a byelection because of the cost of losing and the difficulty of expectation management. There are no circumstances in which it is possible for PB followers not to want a byelection. That is weird.
Given that our population pyramid is looking more like a population dadbod the idea of importing workers does not frighten or bother me. I don't want to see what happens when an increasingly small working-age population needs to support a large generation with complex needs and the political power to avoid any contribution. Frankly we need to smash the power of the NIMBYs. Completely gut the ability to object to new housing developments. Fuck your view, fuck your "village character", fuck your endless concern trolling. Pair that up with a legal requirement for developers to fund services (schools, GP surgeries, proper integrated community stuff) and a tax on land revaluation after usage change. Bang developer heads together and put a bullet in the NIMBYs, crash house prices into the ground and set up a relief fund funded the valuation tax to help out single home owners who suffer negative equity as a consequence.
Not that I expect any party to do something that might hurt the asset holding class.
Bloody VOTE then.
And don't expect a victimless house price crash
I have. In every election since I reached franchise age. And I'm not. But a house price crash with some kind of safety net is infinitely preferable to endlessly watching housing prices inflate until something explodes (either the market or society). It's not like there aren't a whole bunch of people losing out on the current inequitable system, trapped in endless cycles of fleece from various rentiers and unable to afford anywhere close to where the work might be.
It is one of the great ironies of New Labour that their Open Door immigration policies, designed to make Britain more relaxed and international (or "to rub the noses of the Right in diversity"), led pretty directly to Brexit: their worst nightmare
I thought Brexit was all about sovereignty and any suggestion that xenophobia played a part is the last permitted form of bigotry.
At the moment if Tory MPs do decide to remove Johnson as Tory MPs failed to remove Major in 1995, then today's ConHome survey has Wallace and then Mordaunt preferred to succeed him
I think the ConHome survey is right. It is my gut feeling, although you never know who might come out of leftfield.
I think the scenario is different to 1995. Major wasn't the problem, it was the party. Currently Johnson is the problem (although the party isn't helping).
Indeed. Although the comments of myself and DavidL still stand. Replace the PM and you get rid of the most egregious excesses. But. What precisely will the new person do exactly about anything? No one has outlined any alternative policies. Including the Opposition. So all the basic problems remain.
Penny Mordaunt is campaigning for tax cuts.
The UK has three great interrelated challenges:
1. We have a graying population, an inverted population pyramid, and health care and pension costs are likely to persistently rise faster than GDP.
2. We have been too dependent on borrowing from abroad to buy for goods from abroad. This means we've gone from a position where the world owed the UK money, to one where the UK owes the world money.
3. Most Brits' savings are tied up in their homes. Regular saving has been eschewed, because why bother if you have £500,000 tied up in your house.
"Tax cuts" is not a policy. It is a code for "I don't know what to do, but I'd sure like to live in Downing Street".
Where are the Thatchers, the Howes, the Ridleys, the Josephs, the people who recognized the problem, and had the guts to tell people that solving it would not be easy?
The UK is a gerontocracy built on "wealth" created through ever increasing house prices, to the detriment of working age people who can no longer afford to have kids. I will vote for whichever government of whichever stripe has the guts to tackle this head on. Continuing to inflate the ponzi with 50 year mortgages, subprime mortgages to people on benefits, etc, ain't it.
Outside London and the Home counties where house prices are much cheaper and cost of living much lower that is not really the case
Second homes are funded by London prices. Hence one reason for inflation of the housing market UK wide.
And even in the NE of England a house is *average* 170K: average salary 27.5K - so on a 3 + 1 basis that means about 60K deposit. How realistic is that?
Exactly and @HYUFD is not recognising the issue which is a nationwide problem
Quite. It is a very crude calculation, but even a crude one can be very useful. And I should have said 'second homes and retirement homes', come to think of it.
Another way of looking at this is that the model we have in our heads of the UK as a especially property owning democracy is actually not really true anymore.
Going back to your original argument, Gordon Brown stoking a huge housing bubble through cheap borrowing and mass immigration must be the biggest factor in undoing the 'golden legacy' that New Labour took over.
I don’t think Gordon Brown has much to do with it, and immigration has had less impact on household formation and demand than other factors.
The issue has been crap planning policy leading to insufficient housebuilding, and low interest rates creating inflated house prices, speculation, and the rise of buy-to-let.
Call me naive, but I am fairly sure that allowing 5m migrants into the country - the greatest immigration in UK history - probably has impinged, just a tad, on the shortage of decent housing
If you let 15 people live in your house, you risk running out of bedrooms
Vast countries like the USA, Canada or Australia can allow great waves of immigration. They can build entire new towns one after the other without wrecking the landscape
We cannot. So the irresistible force of mass immigration meets the immovable object of English resistance to endless development, et voila
It's like someone has gone in and carefully removed those full stops.
Quite funky.
It’s desperately sad. Punctuation as a mid-life crisis.
Knowing, too, that he is a professional writer, he likely has to “go back” and remove those full stops. Which makes it worse.
Lol. I don’t
I tell you, once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you ever put those weird full stops. At the end of paragraphs.
Look. It says. I’ve finished. Full stop.
Yes I can see you’ve finished that’s the end of the paragraph
You don’t need them. And eschewing them is more elegant
For years I have been beginning without indentation paragraphs which follow bulleted lists or figures on the same principle: the demarcation is achieved by the intervening list or figure, and it looks cleaner.
I tell you, once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you ever put those weird full stops. At the end of paragraphs.
Look. It says. I’ve finished. Full stop.
Yes I can see you’ve finished that’s the end of the paragraph
You don’t need them. And eschewing them is more elegant
When I was about 13, I had a homework task which consisted of some English sentences, numbered 1 to 10. The task was to translate them into French.
My mark was 2 out of 10, because 8 of my sentences had no full stop. (The French was fine.)
It worked - I have never missed off full stops since.
Your teacher deserved a slap. He was an idiot.
top trolling
Well I mean how petty. If I had been his Dad I would certainly have given the teacher a piece of my mind if it were in a meaningful exam.
What an excellent teacher. Teaching.
Not teaching, but demoralising a pupil. Easy enough to give him the marks for the actual task and remind him about his punctuation.
But if he had done would his pupil have remembered it 20 years later? Not a chance. The job of the teacher is to make sure that the lesson is learned.
My English teacher really didn't like my writing. I think the font was possibly best described as drunken spider on cocaine. His position was that if he couldn't read it, it didn't matter what it said. And he was right, however much I resented it at the time.
I think there are better ways of doing it. If someone is a conscientious pupil it can be very demoralising. Because I was very good at Maths I was always called the professor by my maths teacher. He probably thought it harmless and funny, but it caused me issues with other pupils and teachers. Fortunately I wasn't really impacted by it, but I could have been.
Given that our population pyramid is looking more like a population dadbod the idea of importing workers does not frighten or bother me. I don't want to see what happens when an increasingly small working-age population needs to support a large generation with complex needs and the political power to avoid any contribution. Frankly we need to smash the power of the NIMBYs. Completely gut the ability to object to new housing developments. Fuck your view, fuck your "village character", fuck your endless concern trolling. Pair that up with a legal requirement for developers to fund services (schools, GP surgeries, proper integrated community stuff) and a tax on land revaluation after usage change. Bang developer heads together and put a bullet in the NIMBYs, crash house prices into the ground and set up a relief fund funded the valuation tax to help out single home owners who suffer negative equity as a consequence.
Not that I expect any party to do something that might hurt the asset holding class.
Luckily, we don't need to enact any of your crazed Marxist nonsense
Why? Technology
See my posts earlier today. We are on the cusp of a mighty technological revolution, driven by AI (but also involving drones, robots, VR, WFH, self drive vehicles, the Metaverse, and more) which will soon make hundreds of millions of workers redundant. So the problem will be excess workers, not the opposite, and we will have imported 5 million people for no reason
Lol. Marxism. You know when right-wingers are frightened when they do that flinch. I'm proposing to let the market do its thing. The most capitalist solution possible. Stop artificially dicking with the market and let supply and demand rip. Or are you worried your beloved little market might bite you in the arse for once?
Given that our population pyramid is looking more like a population dadbod the idea of importing workers does not frighten or bother me. I don't want to see what happens when an increasingly small working-age population needs to support a large generation with complex needs and the political power to avoid any contribution.
On housing, frankly we need to smash the power of the NIMBYs. Completely gut the ability to object to new housing developments. Fuck your view, fuck your "village character", fuck your endless concern trolling. Pair that up with a legal requirement for developers to fund services (schools, GP surgeries, proper integrated community stuff) and a tax on land revaluation after usage change. Bang developer heads together and put a bullet in the NIMBYs, crash house prices into the ground and set up a relief fund funded the valuation tax to help out single home owners who suffer negative equity as a consequence.
Not that I expect any party to do something that might hurt the asset holding class.
The asset holding class is the majority of people, nearly two-thirds in fact, if it means homeowners. Latest figure is 63/64%.
It is one of the great ironies of New Labour that their Open Door immigration policies, designed to make Britain more relaxed and international (or "to rub the noses of the Right in diversity"), led pretty directly to Brexit: their worst nightmare
I thought Brexit was all about sovereignty and any suggestion that xenophobia played a part is the last permitted form of bigotry.
It was all about sovereignty for me, and millions of Leavers (the polls say most Leavers)
But there is no way Leave would have won if Labour (with help from the Tories, to be fair) hadn't hacked off several million more voters via mass unmandated immigration, voters who otherwise likely didn't give much of a toss about "sovereignty"
Comments
Blood, toil, tears and sweat?
Naaah...
Ignoring the impact of the uncontrolled immigration of the Blair years as Leon correctly states. Plus trying to dismiss the fact home ownership rates in the UK are dragged down by non Tory London and Scotland
The Tories have governed for 12 of that 18 year period.
Also Boeing (again) and LockMart for losing all their skills in creating new rockets and space vehicles.
Quite astonishing really
Boeing's mucked up the SLS, and whilst the Orion capsule (made by LockMart) has had problems, it has been ready for yonks, whereas the SLS rocket has not been.
Time was quite big, even on the catch fencing.
Albon has gone to hospital having hit the pit wall head on.
https://twitter.com/hoffman_noa/status/1543622708704985088
What are the chances?
Incredible to think it's been two whole days since "The PM thinks he's done the decent thing by resigning. There is no need for an investigation and no need to suspend the whip"
However, any serious attempt at housebuilding is going to be deeply unpopular with the southeastern Boomer/NIMBY voting bloc, so no political party has the balls to actually do it.
I think the solution is to abandon the current approach of trying to glue identikit housing estates onto the outskirts of existing towns and instead try to target affordable housing to certain areas of the country and certain age brackets. Build new dense garden cities in places like Cornwall and incentivise young people to move there (perhaps with student loan relief schemes and flats reserved for under-30s).
Doing it this way means the London housing market remains obscene and thus politically somewhat acceptable to Boomers (as actual buyer demand there is being driven by wealthier older people) but younger renters have a cheaper alternative so they can build some wealth of their own.
Quite funky.
Punctuation as a mid-life crisis.
Knowing, too, that he is a professional writer, he likely has to “go back” and remove those full stops. Which makes it worse.
Bounce bounce bounce ...
But she transformed the country. Gordon just had a bit of a fiddle.
Everyone wants to live in a Georgian rectory, with nothing to listen to except larksong, test cricket on the wireless, and the occasional dong from the church-bell.
That’s fine, I respect this, and I think government policy should actually strive to preserve and extend this opportunity (maybe not the rectory part) but you come up against the fact that Britain is very crowded by Western standards, and nobody wants new development near them.
The trick I think - and I’ve said this many times on here - is to turn planning policy from a prohibitory to a permissive regime *in the metros only*, but to encourage dense but high quality development in these cities.
In practical terms, I as Hackney house owner, should be free to develop pretty much *as high as I want* with my unlisted house, so long as I obey a reasonably strict Hackney design guide.
https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/
TL;DR - "Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates." as the article goes on to demonstrate.
The interesting thing is that it's a western phenomenon rather than just a UK one, supposedly driven by the west's reliance on the "intangible economy" (i.e. intellectual property, software development, financial services) that concentrate wealth and people in small clusters. You have to wonder if fully remote working is the way out of that, though I don't subscribe to the view that WFH full time is a replacement for real contact with your team mates.
I tell you, once you get used to it, you’ll wonder why you ever put those weird full stops. At the end of paragraphs.
Look. It says. I’ve finished. Full stop.
Yes I can see you’ve finished that’s the end of the paragraph
You don’t need them. And eschewing them is more elegant
Having ditched planning reform after Amersham & Chesham, this is undoubtedly why the government is mooting these 50 year mortgages, and mortgages for welfare recipients etc.
*Because in the short term, the overwhelming factor is interest rates.
Now I find it very distracting.
Sorry, I’m keeping my stops, even if it ages me. I have done my best, however, to avoid double spacing after full stops, which apparently has an interesting history behind it.
See here
Immigration takes off, noticeably and sharply, in 1997
My mark was 2 out of 10, because 8 of my sentences had no full stop. (The French was fine.)
It worked - I have never missed off full stops since.
It feels like just yesterday he started in F1. This is probably partly the fact I am getting older, but also the fact it feels like there are 150 GPs every year nowadays ...
But fine, recut the numbers, the Tories have presided over - and continue to preside over - as much immigration as Labour ever did.
Like nasty little zits on the page
How very boring.
2004 and 2014 I can think of reasons. But nothing is coming to mind about 1994
The trophy. The trophy. Not Dorries.
"Under New Labour net migration to the United Kingdom quadrupled[1] from around 50,000 every year before 1997 to around 200,000 averaging out over 1997 to 2010."
Why?
"In 1997, Tony Blair was elected following the general election that year and started to dismantle restrictions on immigration, something NOT OUTLINED in the party's manifesto,[7] at the beginning of his term enacting major reforms to the country's immigration system and policies. One such major example was dismantling the primary purpose rule in 1997,[8] which was used to stop foreign spouses of immigrant workers and potential abuse of the system..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_under_New_Labour_from_1997_-_2010
Was the teach called Miss Snuffy?
That was well over 50 years ago, typing it now it still rankles. ;-)
On housing, frankly we need to smash the power of the NIMBYs. Completely gut the ability to object to new housing developments. Fuck your view, fuck your "village character", fuck your endless concern trolling. Pair that up with a legal requirement for developers to fund services (schools, GP surgeries, proper integrated community stuff) and a tax on land revaluation after usage change. Bang developer heads together and put a bullet in the NIMBYs, crash house prices into the ground and set up a relief fund funded the valuation tax to help out single home owners who suffer negative equity as a consequence.
Not that I expect any party to do something that might hurt the asset holding class.
My English teacher really didn't like my writing. I think the font was possibly best described as drunken spider on cocaine. His position was that if he couldn't read it, it didn't matter what it said. And he was right, however much I resented it at the time.
And don't expect a victimless house price crash
Why? Technology
See my posts earlier today. We are on the cusp of a mighty technological revolution, driven by AI (but also involving drones, robots, VR, WFH, self drive vehicles, the Metaverse, and more) which will soon make hundreds of millions of workers redundant. So the problem will be excess workers, not the opposite, and we will have imported 5 million people for no reason
Step 1: Which of Lab and LD is the challenger? Lab isn't because it is not good at big swings at the moment. LDs aren't because they got close to Zero votes last time.
But Labour is the challenger because it came second, LDs nowhere and Lab used to hold the seat. simples.
But LDs are the challenger because of NS, T and H, C and A etc.
Step 2: It's dangerous for the Tories because they might lose.
Step 3: It's dangerous for the country because they might win.
It follows that no-one, apart from PBers of course, wants a byelection because of the cost of losing and the difficulty of expectation management. There are no circumstances in which it is possible for PB followers not to want a byelection. That is weird.
Equally no-one wants wotsisname to be the MP.
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/christopher-pincher-must-go-say-24376056
I'm not saying I mentioned Sainz at 14 and Perez at 10 each way before the weekend even began, but if I did it would be 100% accurate.
But there is no way Leave would have won if Labour (with help from the Tories, to be fair) hadn't hacked off several million more voters via mass unmandated immigration, voters who otherwise likely didn't give much of a toss about "sovereignty"