Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by landlord exploiting this.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
While we can quibble over the exact numbers, you are broadly correct: the cost of housebuilding has increased with the cost of inputs like bricks and wood and the like. (And an increase in the cost of building labour, but let's not go there.)
So yes - a significant downward house price move would mean that new homes were not being built.
It is worth noting, though, that home prices can be well below replacement costs for very long periods of time. Indeed, they currently are in much of the North and East of England.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sa yell come uvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
OK: do you come from a bad English family with inherited wealth, like the Malfoys?
I come from a completely fucked up Cornish family which - despite some very posh antecedents in the far distant past - was so poor in recent times that my maternal granny worked in a mine aged 9 and my paternal great grandfather mined tin under the sea at Botallack and died at about 35
Any new funds have been generated by the latest generations. Put it that way
It's none of their effing business, Leon. This isn't PoliticalBareyoursoul.com
No, it’s fine. I do use myself as an example in my “anecdata” so i don’t mind revealing facts, especially if they are germane
I just have no wish to be actually doxxed. There are few of us artisan flint dildo carvers left, so I’m quite easy to identify
Incidentally on this recent family trip my Dad revealed he’s been doing some more family tree research and he’s discovered that enough of our ancient poshness/wealth survived into the early 19th century such that we owned a really large chunk of the land on which modern Truro is now built. If we owned it now we’d be super rich landed gentry
But then came a couple of generations of wastrels culminating in some mad dude who owned a string of taverns, drank away most of the money, gambled the rest, lost it all, and within 50 years we were toiling down the tin mines
Family history is so fascinating. All must rise and fall
In a few days we should be getting a break from the tanking pound and soaring gilts as, in descending order of likelihood, at least one of the following happens:
A young man shot and wounded the chief recruitment officer at a military enlistment station in Russia’s Irkutsk region on Monday
When people think it's safer to shoot up the recruiting center than to join the army, it's a sign things aren't going well
Apparently a number of recruitment offices have also fallen victim to arson.
All those people who were perfectly happy to see the population of Ukraine exterminated just so long as they didn't have to go and get their own hands bloody. Not happy bunnies. Not happy at all.
Lots of riots in Dagestan too, videos of this on Twitter.
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
Assuming you take out the biggest mortgage you can afford, you are better off in a scenario where the interest rate is 10% than if the interest rate is 2%, because:
a) the principal is smaller so you get more bang for your buck on any overpayments b) general inflation works in your favour c) interest rate risk is more likely to be in your favour
Fundamentally, high interest rates because of high inflation mean that consumers are entering into accelerated (real terms) paydowns of their mortgages.
However, while you are probably in a decent position if you took your mortgage out when rates were 10%, that isn't the case if you took it out when rates were 3%. In the latter scenario, you are entering into an accelerated (real terms) mortgage payback at the same time that your disposible income is being squeezed by rising commodities prices.
Yes, but if you took out a mortgage at 3%, you should probably have considered that such rates were historically anomalous.
You should indeed:
And yet pretty much every parent in the land urged their children to "get on the property ladder".
Their experience of the property market was usually from buying in a high-inflation, high-interest rate environment where the ladder effect was real.
There is no better time to own a property than during a very long period, during which interest rates have done nothing other than decline.
Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by investors exploiting this for good, stable returns.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
No way big builders are spending £250k building a identikit house on a new estate.
Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by investors exploiting this for good, stable returns.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
I am rather doubtful of the house price crash story. Prices will go sideways, maybe come off a bit, but I don't see a massive correction. Inflation means that prices can go down quite a lot in real terms (which is what matters, since housing is a real asset) with just flat nominal prices. You'll only get a crash if you get a big rise in unemployment, and even then you will see a degree of forbearance from the banks which will limit the number of forced sales. This is also another way of saying that the BOE probably isn't going to hike as much as the markets are fearing. I do absolutely think that cable parity will come soon though.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sa yell come uvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
OK: do you come from a bad English family with inherited wealth, like the Malfoys?
I come from a completely fucked up Cornish family which - despite some very posh antecedents in the far distant past - was so poor in recent times that my maternal granny worked in a mine aged 9 and my paternal great grandfather mined tin under the sea at Botallack and died at about 35
Any new funds have been generated by the latest generations. Put it that way
It's none of their effing business, Leon. This isn't PoliticalBareyoursoul.com
No, it’s fine. I do use myself as an example in my “anecdata” so i don’t mind revealing facts, especially if they are germane
I just have no wish to be actually doxxed. There are few of us artisan flint dildo carvers left, so I’m quite easy to identify
Incidentally on this recent family trip my Dad revealed he’s been doing some more family tree research and he’s discovered that enough of our ancient poshness/wealth survived into the early 19th century such that we owned a really large chunk of the land on which modern Truro is now built. If we owned it now we’d be super rich landed gentry
But then came a couple of generations of wastrels culminating in some mad dude who owned a string of taverns, drank away most of the money, gambled the rest, lost it all, and within 50 years we were toiling down the tin mines
Family history is so fascinating. All must rise and fall
Indeed. My mother's family used to own the Bowmore Distillery but my maternal grandfather ran a gents' outfitters in Felixstowe.
BREAKING: Labour members have backed a motion calling for proportional representation. First time a major party represented in the UK parliament has suggested ditching first past the post. https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1574443496064401410
Hardly, Labour promised it once before, and got as far as holding a commission to come up with the alternative. Then Palmer and his mates ditched the promise altogether. How history might have gone differently….
And a bit further back, the Liberals were pushing it through Parliament when the proposal got derailed by the First World War.
Starmer has said he isn't putting it in the manifesto, so it is second term material if at all.
Absolutely cannot be done unless in manifesto. And that's the bear minimum. Frankly, I think public would expect a referendum.
Oh look, not only are living standards being blasted back to the 1950s*, it looks like we're going to have smog to go with it. Lovely.
*Except for Tory MPs, party donors, and other bulk consumers of foie gras
Had my first wood burner fire of the season yesterday evening. Gas central heating remains firmly off.
If one person unblocks an open fire it's a quaint feature, and leaving the gas off might even save them money.
If a million people unblock their open fires then the air becomes filthy, a load of them sicken and die from breathing in particulates, and desperate homeowners venture forth into streets and parks and start hacking down trees for firewood.
There's still partial clearings visible in woodlands here from the miner's strike, so it wouldn't be the first time the environment had been affected by economics. A bit more 'management' in some council woodlands wouldn't go amiss.
Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by investors exploiting this for good, stable returns.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
First-time buyers make up a fraction of buyers. New-build homes make up a fraction of sales. You can still have a functioning market in which new-build homes are aspirational and out of the reach of most first-time buyers.
If this kind of market doesn't work for the type of housebuilders (and land bankers) who build the kind of estates that generate opposition to building, then maybe we would be better off with fewer of them, and we could have a more continental market structure.
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
Assuming you take out the biggest mortgage you can afford, you are better off in a scenario where the interest rate is 10% than if the interest rate is 2%, because:
a) the principal is smaller so you get more bang for your buck on any overpayments b) general inflation works in your favour c) interest rate risk is more likely to be in your favour
Fundamentally, high interest rates because of high inflation mean that consumers are entering into accelerated (real terms) paydowns of their mortgages.
However, while you are probably in a decent position if you took your mortgage out when rates were 10%, that isn't the case if you took it out when rates were 3%. In the latter scenario, you are entering into an accelerated (real terms) mortgage payback at the same time that your disposible income is being squeezed by rising commodities prices.
Yes, but if you took out a mortgage at 3%, you should probably have considered that such rates were historically anomalous.
You should indeed:
And yet pretty much every parent in the land urged their children to "get on the property ladder".
parents only talk from their own experience...thats why its best to take what they say with a pinch of salt....success has many fathers but failure is an orphan always remember that
You're right about the property market and interest rates, but regarding the wider application of that proverb there are many who tell their children "learn from my mistake" and "don't make the same mistake I did". Of course often the children go ahead and make the same mistake (ain't life ironic?), but the proverb suggests that almost all parents tend not to admit their big life mistakes to their children, which isn't so.
Politically, Truss's mistake was probably overestimating how much her thinking had been absorbed by the body politic. She assumed people would understand the direction she was going in, but instead she's left them confused. Given the delay because of the Queen's death, it might have been better to save her 'shock and awe' plan until after the party conference.
It cannot really be known how much of the attack on the pound was priced in, once the Truss Government signalled that growth was the priority, not paying down the deficit. They may have thought if t'were done, tis better that t'were done quickly.
The situation is not a comfortable one, I'll admit that freely. Given that Truss publicly stated she was prepared to be unpopular, I must assume that she has a plan to improve her popularity before a general election.
I'd say the problem she has is that the market understood her plans too well and hated them because they know how they'd come into contact with reality. Firstly, it's pretty unorthodox economics to start with - more Reaganomics than Thatcher, which ballooned America's deficit as the tax cuts didn't end up paying for themselves through growth. But at least he had the dollar. I think that policy's designer disavowed it in the end when realised there was no intention to balance the books, just let the deficit grow as it would cause more problems for opponents. Vanishingly few economists believe of and in itself slashing taxes, mostly for the wealthiest as opposed to say some limited but well targeted tax cuts, is a route to growth that can deliver the numbers Kwarteng has promised. There's as much chance people/firms pocket the benefits or invest it less productively for the UK economy than you want. That's before we get to headwinds, both self-created (Brexit) and global or partially so (cost of living, a possible slowdown, inflation fears) that might make even a well thought of growth strategy fail to deliver. That might not matter if they believed that if the sums don't end up adding up, you could cut easily public spending. But that's going to be tricky, both because we've got the emergency stuff pencilled in, and by looking at the public realm. Having done austerity in 2010-15 and been treading water since it's going to be very, very difficult if not impossible to do Austerity 2: Electric Trussaloo and really reshape the state as she wants. Inflation is going to hit budgets in real terms, you've already got pay strikes and more to come, the NHS is not in a great state - and there's simply nothing really left to cut from the benefits bill unless you want to go after pensioners or have stories of people starving and freezing to death. That's before we get to the promises made in 2019 or new spending designed to go for growth. Which brings us to the next problem - we're around 2 years out from an election - even if Kwarteng is of iron mind, cut your cloth and it may be pretty certain you lose it. Thatcher had a full term to turn things around, woeful and split opposition and had shored up things with her 81 budget by raising taxes. Truss and Kwarteng probably have 18 months max, a bare cupboard and a leaky roof. So of course markets have reacted with alarm when the plan appears to be "trust us, we've got this great theory" which a) hasn't really been a success in the past, b) is being done in a situation that's difficult for it anyway and c) few believe have the time or political space to do the pain part of it that might be necessary to make it work even on its own terms.
They've just spent too much time around SW1 listening to people from the same colleges at Oxford with fashionable libertarian views who tell each other how great they are without living in the real world and understanding what might be achievable and what might not.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sa yell come uvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
OK: do you come from a bad English family with inherited wealth, like the Malfoys?
I come from a completely fucked up Cornish family which - despite some very posh antecedents in the far distant past - was so poor in recent times that my maternal granny worked in a mine aged 9 and my paternal great grandfather mined tin under the sea at Botallack and died at about 35
Any new funds have been generated by the latest generations. Put it that way
It's none of their effing business, Leon. This isn't PoliticalBareyoursoul.com
No, it’s fine. I do use myself as an example in my “anecdata” so i don’t mind revealing facts, especially if they are germane
I just have no wish to be actually doxxed. There are few of us artisan flint dildo carvers left, so I’m quite easy to identify
Incidentally on this recent family trip my Dad revealed he’s been doing some more family tree research and he’s discovered that enough of our ancient poshness/wealth survived into the early 19th century such that we owned a really large chunk of the land on which modern Truro is now built. If we owned it now we’d be super rich landed gentry
But then came a couple of generations of wastrels culminating in some mad dude who owned a string of taverns, drank away most of the money, gambled the rest, lost it all, and within 50 years we were toiling down the tin mines
Family history is so fascinating. All must rise and fall
Indeed. My mother's family used to own the Bowmore Distillery but my maternal grandfather ran a gents' outfitters in Felixstowe.
I find stories of dynastic decline somehow more compelling than endless ascent
It’s beautiful Tess Durbeyfield, actually of the d’Urbevilles
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
Assuming you take out the biggest mortgage you can afford, you are better off in a scenario where the interest rate is 10% than if the interest rate is 2%, because:
a) the principal is smaller so you get more bang for your buck on any overpayments b) general inflation works in your favour c) interest rate risk is more likely to be in your favour
Fundamentally, high interest rates because of high inflation mean that consumers are entering into accelerated (real terms) paydowns of their mortgages.
However, while you are probably in a decent position if you took your mortgage out when rates were 10%, that isn't the case if you took it out when rates were 3%. In the latter scenario, you are entering into an accelerated (real terms) mortgage payback at the same time that your disposible income is being squeezed by rising commodities prices.
Yes, but if you took out a mortgage at 3%, you should probably have considered that such rates were historically anomalous.
You should indeed:
And yet pretty much every parent in the land urged their children to "get on the property ladder".
parents only talk from their own experience...thats why its best to take what they say with a pinch of salt....success has many fathers but failure is an orphan always remember that
You're right about the property market and interest rates, but regarding the wider application of that proverb there are many who tell their children "learn from my mistake" and "don't make the same mistake I did". Of course often the children go ahead and make the same mistake (ain't life ironic?), but the proverb suggests that almost all parents tend not to admit their big life mistakes to their children, which isn't so.
The biggest mistake is to keep making the same mistakes. The other biggest mistake is to overcorrect and make the opposite mistake. Just avoid doing anything and it'll be fine.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sa yell come uvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
OK: do you come from a bad English family with inherited wealth, like the Malfoys?
I come from a completely fucked up Cornish family which - despite some very posh antecedents in the far distant past - was so poor in recent times that my maternal granny worked in a mine aged 9 and my paternal great grandfather mined tin under the sea at Botallack and died at about 35
Any new funds have been generated by the latest generations. Put it that way
It’s easy to forget just how many people worked down the mines. At the peak of UK production in 1913 5% of the UK population was working in coal mining. They dug out that coal by hand, at the coal face.
Jonathan Portes @jdportes · 2h Some good news: after predicting that the minimum wage would lead to soaring unemployment, and that Brexit would boost UK GDP by 4%, Patrick Minford looks like he might have got one right!
Oh look, not only are living standards being blasted back to the 1950s*, it looks like we're going to have smog to go with it. Lovely.
*Except for Tory MPs, party donors, and other bulk consumers of foie gras
Had my first wood burner fire of the season yesterday evening. Gas central heating remains firmly off.
If one person unblocks an open fire it's a quaint feature, and leaving the gas off might even save them money.
If a million people unblock their open fires then the air becomes filthy, a load of them sicken and die from breathing in particulates, and desperate homeowners venture forth into streets and parks and start hacking down trees for firewood.
There is a big difference between a wood burner and an open fire in terms of efficiency (85% compared to about 10%) Also in my case all the wood is sourced from my own garden from dead or pruned trees or neighbours rather than being mulched by a tree surgeon. Bearing in mind I season for 3 to 5 years it probably releases the CO2 no faster. Don't have an answer for the particulates issue though, nor for imported hardwood for burning which really isn't necessary as much locally cut wood goes to waste (Hardwood trees cut down by a local house developer was shredded; what a waste).
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sa yell come uvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
OK: do you come from a bad English family with inherited wealth, like the Malfoys?
I come from a completely fucked up Cornish family which - despite some very posh antecedents in the far distant past - was so poor in recent times that my maternal granny worked in a mine aged 9 and my paternal great grandfather mined tin under the sea at Botallack and died at about 35
Any new funds have been generated by the latest generations. Put it that way
It’s easy to forget just how many people worked down the mines. At the peak of UK production in 1913 5% of the UK population was working in coal mining. They dug out that coal by hand, at the coal face.
A hard job & a hard life.
My Dad can personally remember, as a child, seeing men of about 35-40 clutching onto lampposts as they walked home in Redruth - not because they were drunk, but because of the mining-induced lung diseases quickly crippling them, and killing them
The unluckiest were the ones that went to South Africa, he says. They would come back all sunburned and healthy looking, and with good money in their pockets from their adventures in the hard rock mines of the Karoo, but they were the ones that died the fastest
Oh look, not only are living standards being blasted back to the 1950s*, it looks like we're going to have smog to go with it. Lovely.
*Except for Tory MPs, party donors, and other bulk consumers of foie gras
Had my first wood burner fire of the season yesterday evening. Gas central heating remains firmly off.
If one person unblocks an open fire it's a quaint feature, and leaving the gas off might even save them money.
If a million people unblock their open fires then the air becomes filthy, a load of them sicken and die from breathing in particulates, and desperate homeowners venture forth into streets and parks and start hacking down trees for firewood.
There is a big difference between a wood burner and an open fire in terms of efficiency (85% compared to about 10%) Also in my case all the wood is sourced from my own garden from dead or pruned trees or neighbours rather than being mulched by a tree surgeon. Bearing in mind I season for 3 to 5 years it probably releases the CO2 no faster. Don't have an answer for the particulates issue though, nor for imported hardwood for burning which really isn't necessary as much locally cut wood goes to waste (Hardwood trees cut down by a local house developer was shredded; what a waste).
There's a huge range in the efficiency of a woodburner depending on whether you are sensible and put it on an internal wall and away from the mouth of the chimney, or whether you are an idiot and put it on an external wall right underneath the mouth of the chimney and then insulate the chimney to the max just to make sure the smoke comes out at the top nice and hot. The numerator in efficiency is useful energy.
Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by landlord exploiting this.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
While we can quibble over the exact numbers, you are broadly correct: the cost of housebuilding has increased with the cost of inputs like bricks and wood and the like. (And an increase in the cost of building labour, but let's not go there.)
So yes - a significant downward house price move would mean that new homes were not being built.
It is worth noting, though, that home prices can be well below replacement costs for very long periods of time. Indeed, they currently are in much of the North and East of England.
Thanks. But what I think people need to appreciate more is the exponential increase in build costs over the last 10 years. If you really want more affordable housing you have to find a way of building it cheaper, not just assuming it will happen because of a house price crash.
Holy crap, was going to comment on how dreadful adverts are (haven’t seen tv ads for ages) but was derailed by seeing a trailer for a programme called “Make me Prime Minister” which appears to be an Apprentice type politics competition.
Life has jumped the shark as I’m sure any of the contestants will be better than the current and last. And David Cameron, judging by his screen time needs to cut down on the pies and cakes.
BREAKING: Labour members have backed a motion calling for proportional representation. First time a major party represented in the UK parliament has suggested ditching first past the post. https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1574443496064401410
Hardly, Labour promised it once before, and got as far as holding a commission to come up with the alternative. Then Palmer and his mates ditched the promise altogether. How history might have gone differently….
And a bit further back, the Liberals were pushing it through Parliament when the proposal got derailed by the First World War.
Starmer has said he isn't putting it in the manifesto, so it is second term material if at all.
Absolutely cannot be done unless in manifesto. And that's the bear minimum. Frankly, I think public would expect a referendum.
And will probably require more than a term to implement once boundaries investigated, passed for consideration, reviewed, agreed and public information on 'how to vote' arranged. So in place for late 2030s
Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by investors exploiting this for good, stable returns.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
First time buyers make up a fraction of buyers. New-build homes make up a fraction of sales. You can still have a functioning market in which new-build homes are aspirational and out of the reach of most first time buyers.
If this kind of market doesn't work for the type of housebuilders (and land bankers) who build the kind of estates that generate opposition to building, then maybe we would be better off with fewer of them, and we could have a more continental market structure.
And it's at this stage that we should remind ourselves of how loose building regs have become and how shite many new build homes therefore are. Tiny little poky boxes full of tiny little poky rooms that people only think of buying because they're so desperate to escape the rental trap.
Council houses. Fucktons of em. Built to decent standards. If the state invests in enough good homes it'll put a lid on house prices, liberate chunks of people's incomes from being wasted on vastly overinflated rents and mortgages, and therefore pay for itself through investment and consumption in the remainder of the economy.
Ridiculous house prices are the great disease of the British economy, social rentals are the cure. Labour should snap to it.
Just to muse on the train journey from London to Cornwall it did use to be something special when they had a proper dining car. In First Class, they would ask which sitting you wanted - two sittings, one for those getting off at Exeter and they'd offer second sitting for those travelling further down (I was going to St Erth).
I'll confess - you didn't eat on that train for the food but for the views which were, especially past Exeter, stunning.
The modern trains are comfortable enough and tailor to the current age - if you have your laptop, phone or tablet you can ride in comfort but it's not the same...
To be fair, the at-seat service, if you get on the right train, starts in the far west of Cornwall and you can enjoy it all for nothing right up to Reading.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sa yell come uvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
OK: do you come from a bad English family with inherited wealth, like the Malfoys?
I come from a completely fucked up Cornish family which - despite some very posh antecedents in the far distant past - was so poor in recent times that my maternal granny worked in a mine aged 9 and my paternal great grandfather mined tin under the sea at Botallack and died at about 35
Any new funds have been generated by the latest generations. Put it that way
It's none of their effing business, Leon. This isn't PoliticalBareyoursoul.com
No, it’s fine. I do use myself as an example in my “anecdata” so i don’t mind revealing facts, especially if they are germane
I just have no wish to be actually doxxed. There are few of us artisan flint dildo carvers left, so I’m quite easy to identify
Incidentally on this recent family trip my Dad revealed he’s been doing some more family tree research and he’s discovered that enough of our ancient poshness/wealth survived into the early 19th century such that we owned a really large chunk of the land on which modern Truro is now built. If we owned it now we’d be super rich landed gentry
But then came a couple of generations of wastrels culminating in some mad dude who owned a string of taverns, drank away most of the money, gambled the rest, lost it all, and within 50 years we were toiling down the tin mines
Family history is so fascinating. All must rise and fall
Indeed. My mother's family used to own the Bowmore Distillery but my maternal grandfather ran a gents' outfitters in Felixstowe.
I find stories of dynastic decline somehow more compelling than endless ascent
It’s beautiful Tess Durbeyfield, actually of the d’Urbevilles
Tom Hardy knew a good theme when he saw it
Some impressive examples in the Palaiologos (Byzantine imperial dynasty) family
In 1578, the members of the family living in Pesaro were embroiled in a scandal as brothers Leonidas and Scipione Paleologus, and their nephew Theodore, were arrested for attempted murder. What happened to Scipione is not known, but Leonidas was executed. On account of his young age, Theodore was exiled from Pesaro rather than executed. Following his exile, Theodore established himself as an assassin and appears to have garnered an impressive reputation. In 1599, he entered into the service of Henry Clinton, the Earl of Lincoln, in England. Theodore lived in England for the rest of his life and fathered six children, whose fates were caught up in the English Civil War of 1642–1651. His son Ferdinand Paleologus, escaping the war, settled on the recently colonized island of Barbados in the Caribbean, where he became known as the "Greek prince from Cornwall" and owned a cotton or sugar plantation.
There are stories of further descendants ending up as common English seamen with names like Tom Pellylog.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sauvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
Your dad was an artisanal flint knapper and you have followed
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sa yell come uvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
OK: do you come from a bad English family with inherited wealth, like the Malfoys?
I come from a completely fucked up Cornish family which - despite some very posh antecedents in the far distant past - was so poor in recent times that my maternal granny worked in a mine aged 9 and my paternal great grandfather mined tin under the sea at Botallack and died at about 35
Any new funds have been generated by the latest generations. Put it that way
It’s easy to forget just how many people worked down the mines. At the peak of UK production in 1913 5% of the UK population was working in coal mining. They dug out that coal by hand, at the coal face.
A hard job & a hard life.
My Dad can personally remember, as a child, seeing men of about 35-40 clutching onto lampposts as they walked home in Redruth - not because they were drunk, but because of the mining-induced lung diseases quickly crippling them, and killing them
The unluckiest were the ones that went to South Africa, he says. They would come back all sunburned and healthy looking, and with good money in their pockets from their adventures in the hard rock mines of the Karoo, but they were the ones that died the fastest
Hideous
South Africa mined a lot of asbestos.
& after the first research was published demonstrating the link between asbestos & mesothelioma, the government did their best to quash it & tripled production.
Won't someone think of the social and professional embarrassment such lunacy causes us poor Tory members?
After the special fiscal operation I am convinced the best explanation for it is that Liz Truss is still a Lib Dem sleeper.
It is the only plausible explanation.
Hey matey, welcome back.
dont know what this does for the credibility of Mark Littlewood at the IEA. He was all over the news on friday saying what a great idea the Truss package was...
In a few days we should be getting a break from the tanking pound and soaring gilts as, in descending order of likelihood, at least one of the following happens:
A young man shot and wounded the chief recruitment officer at a military enlistment station in Russia’s Irkutsk region on Monday
When people think it's safer to shoot up the recruiting center than to join the army, it's a sign things aren't going well
Apparently a number of recruitment offices have also fallen victim to arson.
All those people who were perfectly happy to see the population of Ukraine exterminated just so long as they didn't have to go and get their own hands bloody. Not happy bunnies. Not happy at all.
Lots of riots in Dagestan too, videos of this on Twitter.
See:
The nuclear threat might change the mood in Russia itself, stoking widespread fear
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sa yell come uvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
OK: do you come from a bad English family with inherited wealth, like the Malfoys?
I come from a completely fucked up Cornish family which - despite some very posh antecedents in the far distant past - was so poor in recent times that my maternal granny worked in a mine aged 9 and my paternal great grandfather mined tin under the sea at Botallack and died at about 35
Any new funds have been generated by the latest generations. Put it that way
It's none of their effing business, Leon. This isn't PoliticalBareyoursoul.com
No, it’s fine. I do use myself as an example in my “anecdata” so i don’t mind revealing facts, especially if they are germane
I just have no wish to be actually doxxed. There are few of us artisan flint dildo carvers left, so I’m quite easy to identify
Incidentally on this recent family trip my Dad revealed he’s been doing some more family tree research and he’s discovered that enough of our ancient poshness/wealth survived into the early 19th century such that we owned a really large chunk of the land on which modern Truro is now built. If we owned it now we’d be super rich landed gentry
But then came a couple of generations of wastrels culminating in some mad dude who owned a string of taverns, drank away most of the money, gambled the rest, lost it all, and within 50 years we were toiling down the tin mines
Family history is so fascinating. All must rise and fall
Indeed. My mother's family used to own the Bowmore Distillery but my maternal grandfather ran a gents' outfitters in Felixstowe.
I find stories of dynastic decline somehow more compelling than endless ascent
It’s beautiful Tess Durbeyfield, actually of the d’Urbevilles
Tom Hardy knew a good theme when he saw it
Some impressive examples in the Palaiologos (Byzantine imperial dynasty) family
In 1578, the members of the family living in Pesaro were embroiled in a scandal as brothers Leonidas and Scipione Paleologus, and their nephew Theodore, were arrested for attempted murder. What happened to Scipione is not known, but Leonidas was executed. On account of his young age, Theodore was exiled from Pesaro rather than executed. Following his exile, Theodore established himself as an assassin and appears to have garnered an impressive reputation. In 1599, he entered into the service of Henry Clinton, the Earl of Lincoln, in England. Theodore lived in England for the rest of his life and fathered six children, whose fates were caught up in the English Civil War of 1642–1651. His son Ferdinand Paleologus, escaping the war, settled on the recently colonized island of Barbados in the Caribbean, where he became known as the "Greek prince from Cornwall" and owned a cotton or sugar plantation.
There are stories of further descendants ending up as common English seamen with names like Tom Pellylog.
Brilliant. There’s totally a story in that
In his/her marvellous book on Venice, Jan Morris describes going through the Venetian phone book and finding descendants of the most famous Doges of Venice, still with their distinctive surnames, working as TV repairmen, etc
But descendants of Byzantine Emperors is even better. I wonder if any of those families can credibly trace back to actual Rome?
Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by investors exploiting this for good, stable returns.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
No way big builders are spending £250k building a identikit house on a new estate.
I have a copy of "Build It" magazine with me, and their calculator has the following as build cot per SqM:
2 bed bungalow (90 SqM £165,700) at £1841 per SqM
3 bed house (160 SqM £223,100) at £1,393 per SqM
4 bed House (200SqM £266, 600) at £1,333 per SqM
These prices are before land and other costs, such as section 106 requirements etc.
I think @darkage is in the right ball park on costs. House building is a highly geared business, but that gearing works the other way in a sinking market.
Won't someone think of the social and professional embarrassment such lunacy causes us poor Tory members?
After the special fiscal operation I am convinced the best explanation for it is that Liz Truss is still a Lib Dem sleeper.
It is the only plausible explanation.
Hey matey, welcome back.
dont know what this does for the credibility of Mark Littlewood at the IEA. He was all over the news on friday saying what a great idea the Truss package was...
What credibility? IEA is just a lobbying outfit funded by dark money. It's an "Institute" the same way that Trump University is a University.
Just to muse on the train journey from London to Cornwall it did use to be something special when they had a proper dining car. In First Class, they would ask which sitting you wanted - two sittings, one for those getting off at Exeter and they'd offer second sitting for those travelling further down (I was going to St Erth).
I'll confess - you didn't eat on that train for the food but for the views which were, especially past Exeter, stunning.
The modern trains are comfortable enough and tailor to the current age - if you have your laptop, phone or tablet you can ride in comfort but it's not the same...
To be fair, the at-seat service, if you get on the right train, starts in the far west of Cornwall and you can enjoy it all for nothing right up to Reading.
Er, the woman behind me has just done exactly that!
Food smelled and looked delicious and the wine was apparently much enjoyed
All very civilised, as we speed towards the Great Wen
Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by investors exploiting this for good, stable returns.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
First time buyers make up a fraction of buyers. New-build homes make up a fraction of sales. You can still have a functioning market in which new-build homes are aspirational and out of the reach of most first time buyers.
If this kind of market doesn't work for the type of housebuilders (and land bankers) who build the kind of estates that generate opposition to building, then maybe we would be better off with fewer of them, and we could have a more continental market structure.
And it's at this stage that we should remind ourselves of how loose building regs have become and how shite many new build homes therefore are. Tiny little poky boxes full of tiny little poky rooms that people only think of buying because they're so desperate to escape the rental trap.
Council houses. Fucktons of em. Built to decent standards. If the state invests in enough good homes it'll put a lid on house prices, liberate chunks of people's incomes from being wasted on vastly overinflated rents and mortgages, and therefore pay for itself through investment and consumption in the remainder of the economy.
Ridiculous house prices are the great disease of the British economy, social rentals are the cure. Labour should snap to it.
I don't think the problem is 'loose building regulations', it is more that the building regulations don't improve the standard of actual building.
If you think the answer is in council house building, well that has to be funded like everything else, and Councils (and housing associations) are too slow, inefficient, risk averse at this to get anything done efficiently, you will be pumping in £500k to get the same house that a private developer would build for £250k.
Holy crap, was going to comment on how dreadful adverts are (haven’t seen tv ads for ages) but was derailed by seeing a trailer for a programme called “Make me Prime Minister” which appears to be an Apprentice type politics competition.
Life has jumped the shark as I’m sure any of the contestants will be better than the current and last. And David Cameron, judging by his screen time needs to cut down on the pies and cakes.
Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by investors exploiting this for good, stable returns.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
First time buyers make up a fraction of buyers. New-build homes make up a fraction of sales. You can still have a functioning market in which new-build homes are aspirational and out of the reach of most first time buyers.
If this kind of market doesn't work for the type of housebuilders (and land bankers) who build the kind of estates that generate opposition to building, then maybe we would be better off with fewer of them, and we could have a more continental market structure.
And it's at this stage that we should remind ourselves of how loose building regs have become and how shite many new build homes therefore are. Tiny little poky boxes full of tiny little poky rooms that people only think of buying because they're so desperate to escape the rental trap.
Council houses. Fucktons of em. Built to decent standards. If the state invests in enough good homes it'll put a lid on house prices, liberate chunks of people's incomes from being wasted on vastly overinflated rents and mortgages, and therefore pay for itself through investment and consumption in the remainder of the economy.
Ridiculous house prices are the great disease of the British economy, social rentals are the cure. Labour should snap to it.
There's already Birmingham if that model worked, but it appears people instead prefer to compete to live in desirable areas.
Never mind the polls. Splendid news. The MCC have backed down over Eton v Harrow and Oxford V Cambridge at least for 2023.. some face saving words from the Chief Exec.. they must have known the MCC management position would lose heavily in the vote at the SGM tomorrow Well done the Membership.....
Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by investors exploiting this for good, stable returns.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
No way big builders are spending £250k building a identikit house on a new estate.
I have a copy of "Build It" magazine with me, and their calculator has the following as build cot per SqM:
2 bed bungalow (90 SqM £165,700) at £1841 per SqM
3 bed house (160 SqM £223,100) at £1,393 per SqM
4 bed House (200SqM £266, 600) at £1,333 per SqM
These prices are before land and other costs, such as section 106 requirements etc.
I think @darkage is in the right ball park on costs. House building is a highly geared business, but that gearing works the other way in a sinking market.
Those are prices for single bespoke houses though.
Oh look, not only are living standards being blasted back to the 1950s*, it looks like we're going to have smog to go with it. Lovely.
*Except for Tory MPs, party donors, and other bulk consumers of foie gras
Had my first wood burner fire of the season yesterday evening. Gas central heating remains firmly off.
If one person unblocks an open fire it's a quaint feature, and leaving the gas off might even save them money.
If a million people unblock their open fires then the air becomes filthy, a load of them sicken and die from breathing in particulates, and desperate homeowners venture forth into streets and parks and start hacking down trees for firewood.
There is a big difference between a wood burner and an open fire in terms of efficiency (85% compared to about 10%) Also in my case all the wood is sourced from my own garden from dead or pruned trees or neighbours rather than being mulched by a tree surgeon. Bearing in mind I season for 3 to 5 years it probably releases the CO2 no faster. Don't have an answer for the particulates issue though, nor for imported hardwood for burning which really isn't necessary as much locally cut wood goes to waste (Hardwood trees cut down by a local house developer was shredded; what a waste).
One imagines that somewhat less than 100% of desperate, impoverished homeowners (let alone universal credit claimants) who are resorting to these measures will have either a few grand down the back of the sofa to buy a fancy pants wood burner, nor a large garden and obliging neighbours with their own mature trees from which to harvest armfuls of convenient branches. More likely people will be smashing up Ikea bookcases and garden fence panels to avoid freezing to death for another 24 hours.
Also, if your plan requires new housing to be far more high-spec and expensive, it's not going to free up consumption and investment, rather you have to redirect activity from other parts of the economy to deliver the social housing.
There is a lot of quibbling with @darkage's numbers, but I'm afraid he is broadly correct.
The reality is that the cost of inputs like bricks and glass have gone through the roof - mostly because energy makes up a very high proportion of their cost of manufacture.
With that said: it's worth remembering that house price building costs can go down as well as up. In the event of a house price correction, those materials would likely become cheaper too.
Just to muse on the train journey from London to Cornwall it did use to be something special when they had a proper dining car. In First Class, they would ask which sitting you wanted - two sittings, one for those getting off at Exeter and they'd offer second sitting for those travelling further down (I was going to St Erth).
They do still do proper at-seat three-course meals in a kind of half-dining car, if you pick the right train: https://www.gwr.com/travelling-with-us/pullman-dining -- I did that last year on my way back from a holiday in Cornwall.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sa yell come uvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
OK: do you come from a bad English family with inherited wealth, like the Malfoys?
I come from a completely fucked up Cornish family which - despite some very posh antecedents in the far distant past - was so poor in recent times that my maternal granny worked in a mine aged 9 and my paternal great grandfather mined tin under the sea at Botallack and died at about 35
Any new funds have been generated by the latest generations. Put it that way
It's none of their effing business, Leon. This isn't PoliticalBareyoursoul.com
No, it’s fine. I do use myself as an example in my “anecdata” so i don’t mind revealing facts, especially if they are germane
I just have no wish to be actually doxxed. There are few of us artisan flint dildo carvers left, so I’m quite easy to identify
Incidentally on this recent family trip my Dad revealed he’s been doing some more family tree research and he’s discovered that enough of our ancient poshness/wealth survived into the early 19th century such that we owned a really large chunk of the land on which modern Truro is now built. If we owned it now we’d be super rich landed gentry
But then came a couple of generations of wastrels culminating in some mad dude who owned a string of taverns, drank away most of the money, gambled the rest, lost it all, and within 50 years we were toiling down the tin mines
Family history is so fascinating. All must rise and fall
Indeed. My mother's family used to own the Bowmore Distillery but my maternal grandfather ran a gents' outfitters in Felixstowe.
I find stories of dynastic decline somehow more compelling than endless ascent
It’s beautiful Tess Durbeyfield, actually of the d’Urbevilles
Tom Hardy knew a good theme when he saw it
Some impressive examples in the Palaiologos (Byzantine imperial dynasty) family
In 1578, the members of the family living in Pesaro were embroiled in a scandal as brothers Leonidas and Scipione Paleologus, and their nephew Theodore, were arrested for attempted murder. What happened to Scipione is not known, but Leonidas was executed. On account of his young age, Theodore was exiled from Pesaro rather than executed. Following his exile, Theodore established himself as an assassin and appears to have garnered an impressive reputation. In 1599, he entered into the service of Henry Clinton, the Earl of Lincoln, in England. Theodore lived in England for the rest of his life and fathered six children, whose fates were caught up in the English Civil War of 1642–1651. His son Ferdinand Paleologus, escaping the war, settled on the recently colonized island of Barbados in the Caribbean, where he became known as the "Greek prince from Cornwall" and owned a cotton or sugar plantation.
There are stories of further descendants ending up as common English seamen with names like Tom Pellylog.
Brilliant. There’s totally a story in that
In his/her marvellous book on Venice, Jan Morris describes going through the Venetian phone book and finding descendants of the most famous Doges of Venice, still with their distinctive surnames, working as TV repairmen, etc
But descendants of Byzantine Emperors is even better. I wonder if any of those families can credibly trace back to actual Rome?
Establishing descent from antiquity is, to some people, as fascinating as SETI. However, as Wikipedia remarks:
"No European DFA is accepted as established."
The problem tends to be getting from about 450 to about 650. No-one has managed it for our royal family in any of their multiple ancestries. That won't be for lack of effort.
Won't someone think of the social and professional embarrassment such lunacy causes us poor Tory members?
After the special fiscal operation I am convinced the best explanation for it is that Liz Truss is still a Lib Dem sleeper.
It is the only plausible explanation.
Hey matey, welcome back.
dont know what this does for the credibility of Mark Littlewood at the IEA. He was all over the news on friday saying what a great idea the Truss package was...
What credibility? IEA is just a lobbying outfit funded by dark money. It's an "Institute" the same way that Trump University is a University.
The ideas they have been pontificating about for decades have finally been implemented as they wanted.
And the result has been to crash the £ and send the bond markets into meltdown.
I guess they will carry on and continue to be funded, but they have had their moment and it seems their ideas turned out to be utter hogwash. As expected.
A fascinating day politically - Rachel Reeves gave what I thought was a reasonable considered speech at the Labour Conference. I was slightly puzzled on one aspect - if you're going to condemn Truss and Kwarteng for irresponsible borrowing, fine but if you're still going to borrow the same and just spend it on something different (nurses) to what extent is that any more responsible?
I would have liked Reeves to have said more about reducing borrowing and thereby the deficit. That would give her more credibility on spending - it now seems expected Kwarteng is going for a savage round next year. Given current inflation, a freeze on current spending levels will be a near 10% real terms cut.
Unfortunately, if Labour choose to oppose the spending plans, they'll have to explain themselves how to square the borrowing circle. Reeves spoke of a windfall tax from energy companies - that will be popular of course though I have my doubts. Even so, to what extent would it plug a £45 billion gap?
The abolition of the NI levy has left a £12 billion funding gap for the provision of care for vulnerable adults and children. Put that on top of a severely tight spending round and you may see any number of authorities heading down the Section 114 route.
It's not 1980 - we don't have North Sea Oil or privatisation receipts to help fund the supply side revolution. We are also tight on labour capacity - how will the new growth be achieved if we can't fill the shortages of workers irrespective of how much fruit is in the shops?
Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by investors exploiting this for good, stable returns.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
I am rather doubtful of the house price crash story. Prices will go sideways, maybe come off a bit, but I don't see a massive correction. Inflation means that prices can go down quite a lot in real terms (which is what matters, since housing is a real asset) with just flat nominal prices. You'll only get a crash if you get a big rise in unemployment, and even then you will see a degree of forbearance from the banks which will limit the number of forced sales. This is also another way of saying that the BOE probably isn't going to hike as much as the markets are fearing. I do absolutely think that cable parity will come soon though.
One reason house prices keep going up is the expectation that they will keep going up. Hence why everyone's parents say "you'll regret it if you don't get on the property ladder".
But once property prices start going down, they're likely to keep going down until they find a bottom - which they probably won't do until interest rates peak.
Because (ceteris paribus) as long as interest rates keep rising (and mortgage affordability keeps falling), we can reasonably infer house prices will continue fall.
Other factors will doubtless come into play, but would you buy a house today if you thought it would be cheaper in one year?
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sa yell come uvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
OK: do you come from a bad English family with inherited wealth, like the Malfoys?
I come from a completely fucked up Cornish family which - despite some very posh antecedents in the far distant past - was so poor in recent times that my maternal granny worked in a mine aged 9 and my paternal great grandfather mined tin under the sea at Botallack and died at about 35
Any new funds have been generated by the latest generations. Put it that way
It's none of their effing business, Leon. This isn't PoliticalBareyoursoul.com
No, it’s fine. I do use myself as an example in my “anecdata” so i don’t mind revealing facts, especially if they are germane
I just have no wish to be actually doxxed. There are few of us artisan flint dildo carvers left, so I’m quite easy to identify
Incidentally on this recent family trip my Dad revealed he’s been doing some more family tree research and he’s discovered that enough of our ancient poshness/wealth survived into the early 19th century such that we owned a really large chunk of the land on which modern Truro is now built. If we owned it now we’d be super rich landed gentry
But then came a couple of generations of wastrels culminating in some mad dude who owned a string of taverns, drank away most of the money, gambled the rest, lost it all, and within 50 years we were toiling down the tin mines
Family history is so fascinating. All must rise and fall
Indeed. My mother's family used to own the Bowmore Distillery but my maternal grandfather ran a gents' outfitters in Felixstowe.
I find stories of dynastic decline somehow more compelling than endless ascent
It’s beautiful Tess Durbeyfield, actually of the d’Urbevilles
Tom Hardy knew a good theme when he saw it
Some impressive examples in the Palaiologos (Byzantine imperial dynasty) family
In 1578, the members of the family living in Pesaro were embroiled in a scandal as brothers Leonidas and Scipione Paleologus, and their nephew Theodore, were arrested for attempted murder. What happened to Scipione is not known, but Leonidas was executed. On account of his young age, Theodore was exiled from Pesaro rather than executed. Following his exile, Theodore established himself as an assassin and appears to have garnered an impressive reputation. In 1599, he entered into the service of Henry Clinton, the Earl of Lincoln, in England. Theodore lived in England for the rest of his life and fathered six children, whose fates were caught up in the English Civil War of 1642–1651. His son Ferdinand Paleologus, escaping the war, settled on the recently colonized island of Barbados in the Caribbean, where he became known as the "Greek prince from Cornwall" and owned a cotton or sugar plantation.
There are stories of further descendants ending up as common English seamen with names like Tom Pellylog.
Brilliant. There’s totally a story in that
In his/her marvellous book on Venice, Jan Morris describes going through the Venetian phone book and finding descendants of the most famous Doges of Venice, still with their distinctive surnames, working as TV repairmen, etc
But descendants of Byzantine Emperors is even better. I wonder if any of those families can credibly trace back to actual Rome?
Establishing descent from antiquity is, to some people, as fascinating as SETI. However, as Wikipedia remarks:
"No European DFA is accepted as established."
The problem tends to be getting from about 450 to about 650. No-one has managed it for our royal family in any of their multiple ancestries. That won't be for lack of effort.
Yes, it’s the end of the Western Roman Empire that fucks it all up
But surely a few aristo Roman families moved to Constantinople…..
Just to muse on the train journey from London to Cornwall it did use to be something special when they had a proper dining car. In First Class, they would ask which sitting you wanted - two sittings, one for those getting off at Exeter and they'd offer second sitting for those travelling further down (I was going to St Erth).
I'll confess - you didn't eat on that train for the food but for the views which were, especially past Exeter, stunning.
The modern trains are comfortable enough and tailor to the current age - if you have your laptop, phone or tablet you can ride in comfort but it's not the same...
To be fair, the at-seat service, if you get on the right train, starts in the far west of Cornwall and you can enjoy it all for nothing right up to Reading.
Memories of KX to/from Edinburgh in the late 1960s. Proper stuff, Deltics and kitchen cars, and silver service in the dining car while galloping up Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. But there is something to be said for GNER/LNER and their First Class - which has meals and refreshments included.
A fascinating day politically - Rachel Reeves gave what I thought was a reasonable considered speech at the Labour Conference. I was slightly puzzled on one aspect - if you're going to condemn Truss and Kwarteng for irresponsible borrowing, fine but if you're still going to borrow the same and just spend it on something different (nurses) to what extent is that any more responsible?
I would have liked Reeves to have said more about reducing borrowing and thereby the deficit. That would give her more credibility on spending - it now seems expected Kwarteng is going for a savage round next year. Given current inflation, a freeze on current spending levels will be a near 10% real terms cut.
Unfortunately, if Labour choose to oppose the spending plans, they'll have to explain themselves how to square the borrowing circle. Reeves spoke of a windfall tax from energy companies - that will be popular of course though I have my doubts. Even so, to what extent would it plug a £45 billion gap?
The abolition of the NI levy has left a £12 billion funding gap for the provision of care for vulnerable adults and children. Put that on top of a severely tight spending round and you may see any number of authorities heading down the Section 114 route.
It's not 1980 - we don't have North Sea Oil or privatisation receipts to help fund the supply side revolution. We are also tight on labour capacity - how will the new growth be achieved if we can't fill the shortages of workers irrespective of how much fruit is in the shops?
A fascinating day politically - Rachel Reeves gave what I thought was a reasonable considered speech at the Labour Conference. I was slightly puzzled on one aspect - if you're going to condemn Truss and Kwarteng for irresponsible borrowing, fine but if you're still going to borrow the same and just spend it on something different (nurses) to what extent is that any more responsible?
I would have liked Reeves to have said more about reducing borrowing and thereby the deficit. That would give her more credibility on spending - it now seems expected Kwarteng is going for a savage round next year. Given current inflation, a freeze on current spending levels will be a near 10% real terms cut.
Unfortunately, if Labour choose to oppose the spending plans, they'll have to explain themselves how to square the borrowing circle. Reeves spoke of a windfall tax from energy companies - that will be popular of course though I have my doubts. Even so, to what extent would it plug a £45 billion gap?
The abolition of the NI levy has left a £12 billion funding gap for the provision of care for vulnerable adults and children. Put that on top of a severely tight spending round and you may see any number of authorities heading down the Section 114 route.
It's not 1980 - we don't have North Sea Oil or privatisation receipts to help fund the supply side revolution. We are also tight on labour capacity - how will the new growth be achieved if we can't fill the shortages of workers irrespective of how much fruit is in the shops?
On windfall tax, i'm sceptical the energy companies will still be in windfall territory by 2024, which someone might enquire of her, given credibility is going to be crucial if we are to avoid being spivved by city chancers forever more
Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by investors exploiting this for good, stable returns.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
No way big builders are spending £250k building a identikit house on a new estate.
I have a copy of "Build It" magazine with me, and their calculator has the following as build cot per SqM:
2 bed bungalow (90 SqM £165,700) at £1841 per SqM
3 bed house (160 SqM £223,100) at £1,393 per SqM
4 bed House (200SqM £266, 600) at £1,333 per SqM
These prices are before land and other costs, such as section 106 requirements etc.
I think @darkage is in the right ball park on costs. House building is a highly geared business, but that gearing works the other way in a sinking market.
Those are prices for single bespoke houses though.
Materials/labour/plant/scaffolding etc. For a straightforward design of standard quality. Before architects and site managers costs.
Macron has been antagonistic to the U.K. in recent times. The whole vaccines farrago for one, and he is a s strong player in the EU, which has strongly defended its position (as is its right) in the trade negotiations with the U.K. Of course he is a friend, ally but also has French interests at heart, and if that means screwing the U.K. he will. Life isn’t black and white twirler posts.
Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by investors exploiting this for good, stable returns.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
First time buyers make up a fraction of buyers. New-build homes make up a fraction of sales. You can still have a functioning market in which new-build homes are aspirational and out of the reach of most first time buyers.
If this kind of market doesn't work for the type of housebuilders (and land bankers) who build the kind of estates that generate opposition to building, then maybe we would be better off with fewer of them, and we could have a more continental market structure.
And it's at this stage that we should remind ourselves of how loose building regs have become and how shite many new build homes therefore are. Tiny little poky boxes full of tiny little poky rooms that people only think of buying because they're so desperate to escape the rental trap.
Council houses. Fucktons of em. Built to decent standards. If the state invests in enough good homes it'll put a lid on house prices, liberate chunks of people's incomes from being wasted on vastly overinflated rents and mortgages, and therefore pay for itself through investment and consumption in the remainder of the economy.
Ridiculous house prices are the great disease of the British economy, social rentals are the cure. Labour should snap to it.
There's already Birmingham if that model worked, but it appears people instead prefer to compete to live in desirable areas.
The entire point is that a large fraction of the populace can't "compete to live in desirable areas." They can barely afford to live full stop.
Besides which, much post-war public housing is desirable. Yes, some of it is in grotty tower blocks and sink estates, but well-constructed, low rise, spacious Sixties apartments, for example, often retail for a bloody fortune.
The aim of housing policy should be to prioritise quality, security and affordability of good homes over their commoditisation. Let us have an end to the attitude that all houses must be an investment designed to make their owners rich at everyone else's expense.
If there were sufficient, decent quality, affordable housing to go around then of course people who really wanted to live in swanky abodes - old manor houses in Oxfordshire, chocolate box cottages in Dorset, pieds-a-terre in Belgravia - could still "compete" for the privilege. It would just absolve the rest of us of having to waste our lives on this needless treadmill if we didn't want to. Decent, run-of-the-mill homes should be available to people at decent, run-of-the-mill prices, and not feel like unobtainable luxuries.
Comments
So yes - a significant downward house price move would mean that new homes were not being built.
It is worth noting, though, that home prices can be well below replacement costs for very long periods of time. Indeed, they currently are in much of the North and East of England.
I just have no wish to be actually doxxed. There are few of us artisan flint dildo carvers left, so I’m quite easy to identify
Incidentally on this recent family trip my Dad revealed he’s been doing some more family tree research and he’s discovered that enough of our ancient poshness/wealth survived into the early 19th century such that we owned a really large chunk of the land on which modern Truro is now built. If we owned it now we’d be super rich landed gentry
But then came a couple of generations of wastrels culminating in some mad dude who owned a string of taverns, drank away most of the money, gambled the rest, lost it all, and within 50 years we were toiling down the tin mines
Family history is so fascinating. All must rise and fall
Quite impressive.
Absolutely cannot be done unless in manifesto. And that's the bear minimum. Frankly, I think public would expect a referendum.
If this kind of market doesn't work for the type of housebuilders (and land bankers) who build the kind of estates that generate opposition to building, then maybe we would be better off with fewer of them, and we could have a more continental market structure.
They've just spent too much time around SW1 listening to people from the same colleges at Oxford with fashionable libertarian views who tell each other how great they are without living in the real world and understanding what might be achievable and what might not.
It’s beautiful Tess Durbeyfield, actually of the d’Urbevilles
Tom Hardy knew a good theme when he saw it
A hard job & a hard life.
Jonathan Portes
@jdportes
·
2h
Some good news: after predicting that the minimum wage would lead to soaring unemployment, and that Brexit would boost UK GDP by 4%, Patrick Minford looks like he might have got one right!
The unluckiest were the ones that went to South Africa, he says. They would come back all sunburned and healthy looking, and with good money in their pockets from their adventures in the hard rock mines of the Karoo, but they were the ones that died the fastest
Hideous
Congratulations to @GiorgiaMeloni on her party's success in the Italian elections.
From supporting Ukraine to addressing global economic challenges, the UK and Italy are close allies. 🇬🇧🇮🇹
https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1574476937015304192
Life has jumped the shark as I’m sure any of the contestants will be better than the current and last. And David Cameron, judging by his screen time needs to cut down on the pies and cakes.
It is the only plausible explanation.
Council houses. Fucktons of em. Built to decent standards. If the state invests in enough good homes it'll put a lid on house prices, liberate chunks of people's incomes from being wasted on vastly overinflated rents and mortgages, and therefore pay for itself through investment and consumption in the remainder of the economy.
Ridiculous house prices are the great disease of the British economy, social rentals are the cure. Labour should snap to it.
Just to muse on the train journey from London to Cornwall it did use to be something special when they had a proper dining car. In First Class, they would ask which sitting you wanted - two sittings, one for those getting off at Exeter and they'd offer second sitting for those travelling further down (I was going to St Erth).
I'll confess - you didn't eat on that train for the food but for the views which were, especially past Exeter, stunning.
The modern trains are comfortable enough and tailor to the current age - if you have your laptop, phone or tablet you can ride in comfort but it's not the same...
To be fair, the at-seat service, if you get on the right train, starts in the far west of Cornwall and you can enjoy it all for nothing right up to Reading.
In 1578, the members of the family living in Pesaro were embroiled in a scandal as brothers Leonidas and Scipione Paleologus, and their nephew Theodore, were arrested for attempted murder. What happened to Scipione is not known, but Leonidas was executed. On account of his young age, Theodore was exiled from Pesaro rather than executed. Following his exile, Theodore established himself as an assassin and appears to have garnered an impressive reputation. In 1599, he entered into the service of Henry Clinton, the Earl of Lincoln, in England. Theodore lived in England for the rest of his life and fathered six children, whose fates were caught up in the English Civil War of 1642–1651. His son Ferdinand Paleologus, escaping the war, settled on the recently colonized island of Barbados in the Caribbean, where he became known as the "Greek prince from Cornwall" and owned a cotton or sugar plantation.
There are stories of further descendants ending up as common English seamen with names like Tom Pellylog.
It may well be cancelled if Liz Truss fuck things up further.
Enjoying the new iPhone?
& after the first research was published demonstrating the link between asbestos & mesothelioma, the government did their best to quash it & tripled production.
Wbu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9_fBDDTIuI&ab_channel=espertron
The nuclear threat might change the mood in Russia itself, stoking widespread fear
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/25/nuclear-threat-might-change-the-mood-in-russia-itself-stoking-widespread-fear
In his/her marvellous book on Venice, Jan Morris describes going through the Venetian phone book and finding descendants of the most famous Doges of Venice, still with their distinctive surnames, working as TV repairmen, etc
But descendants of Byzantine Emperors is even better. I wonder if any of those families can credibly trace back to actual Rome?
2 bed bungalow (90 SqM £165,700) at £1841 per SqM
3 bed house (160 SqM £223,100) at £1,393 per SqM
4 bed House (200SqM £266, 600) at £1,333 per SqM
These prices are before land and other costs, such as section 106 requirements etc.
I think @darkage is in the right ball park on costs. House building is a highly geared business, but that gearing works the other way in a sinking market.
Life is good.
Food smelled and looked delicious and the wine was apparently much enjoyed
All very civilised, as we speed towards the Great Wen
If you think the answer is in council house building, well that has to be funded like everything else, and Councils (and housing associations) are too slow, inefficient, risk averse at this to get anything done efficiently, you will be pumping in £500k to get the same house that a private developer would build for £250k.
https://twitter.com/andyverity/status/1574436805562322945?s=20&t=1vc1pgQ0DqaG5UgpPAoZJg
We might even see 30.
Didn't realise you were such an Apple fan, we seem to have a lot in common Sir
He is not fit to wear United or England's shirts
The reality is that the cost of inputs like bricks and glass have gone through the roof - mostly because energy makes up a very high proportion of their cost of manufacture.
But let me give you a US example. Bank of America says the average cost for materials to build a single-family home jumped 42% from 2018 to 2021. And it will likely have only got worse in 2022.
With that said: it's worth remembering that house price building costs can go down as well as up. In the event of a house price correction, those materials would likely become cheaper too.
"No European DFA is accepted as established."
The problem tends to be getting from about 450 to about 650. No-one has managed it for our royal family in any of their multiple ancestries. That won't be for lack of effort.
And the result has been to crash the £ and send the bond markets into meltdown.
I guess they will carry on and continue to be funded, but they have had their moment and it seems their ideas turned out to be utter hogwash. As expected.
But it is cooler in summer and much more beautiful* all year around
*well, Cannock Chase is. I don't Cannock itself would win many awards in that regard!
I would have liked Reeves to have said more about reducing borrowing and thereby the deficit. That would give her more credibility on spending - it now seems expected Kwarteng is going for a savage round next year. Given current inflation, a freeze on current spending levels will be a near 10% real terms cut.
Unfortunately, if Labour choose to oppose the spending plans, they'll have to explain themselves how to square the borrowing circle. Reeves spoke of a windfall tax from energy companies - that will be popular of course though I have my doubts. Even so, to what extent would it plug a £45 billion gap?
The abolition of the NI levy has left a £12 billion funding gap for the provision of care for vulnerable adults and children. Put that on top of a severely tight spending round and you may see any number of authorities heading down the Section 114 route.
It's not 1980 - we don't have North Sea Oil or privatisation receipts to help fund the supply side revolution. We are also tight on labour capacity - how will the new growth be achieved if we can't fill the shortages of workers irrespective of how much fruit is in the shops?
But once property prices start going down, they're likely to keep going down until they find a bottom - which they probably won't do until interest rates peak.
Because (ceteris paribus) as long as interest rates keep rising (and mortgage affordability keeps falling), we can reasonably infer house prices will continue fall.
Other factors will doubtless come into play, but would you buy a house today if you thought it would be cheaper in one year?
But surely a few aristo Roman families moved to Constantinople…..
TBF, I'm not sure why you felt the need to add 'Tory' either.
OECD Economics
@OECDeconomy
In the 🇪🇺, gas supply #disruptions from reduced Russian flows risk hitting the #economy hard.
In case of a cold winter & without alternative sources, European #gas storage levels will fall dangerously low – below 30%.
Sizeable gas demand reduction measures are needed.
https://twitter.com/OECDeconomy/status/1574372249272217601
Of course he is a friend, ally but also has French interests at heart, and if that means screwing the U.K. he will.
Life isn’t black and white twirler posts.
Besides which, much post-war public housing is desirable. Yes, some of it is in grotty tower blocks and sink estates, but well-constructed, low rise, spacious Sixties apartments, for example, often retail for a bloody fortune.
The aim of housing policy should be to prioritise quality, security and affordability of good homes over their commoditisation. Let us have an end to the attitude that all houses must be an investment designed to make their owners rich at everyone else's expense.
If there were sufficient, decent quality, affordable housing to go around then of course people who really wanted to live in swanky abodes - old manor houses in Oxfordshire, chocolate box cottages in Dorset, pieds-a-terre in Belgravia - could still "compete" for the privilege. It would just absolve the rest of us of having to waste our lives on this needless treadmill if we didn't want to. Decent, run-of-the-mill homes should be available to people at decent, run-of-the-mill prices, and not feel like unobtainable luxuries.