It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
Warm but not blistering summers, mild winters, frequent rainfall, it's pretty decent as climates go, even with more extreme occurences than there used to be.
The lack of sunlight is one of the main gripes immigrants (and many of the natives) have with the UK, and the problem gets worse the further north and west you go.
The idea that migrants are dying to come to Britain to take advantage of summers in Mablethorpe is one of the most stupid ideas I’ve read on here. It reads as self-parody.
I don't think it is the reason people come here, but it's clearly not a terrible climate.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
The Green Party I imagine.
But I do think we have become a bit too used to things being low grade crappy, and we could be more dynamic in seeking to address that without going full Truss fantasy land.
The Greens would prefer that nobody had any cows. All that meat and methane!
There does seem to be a small group of people who get a bit rosy eyed about pre-agricultural life being blissful harmony and plenty. I recall reading one of Yuval Noah Harari's books, and whilst he was making a point about the downsides of people being tied to the land and their level of health/wealth throughout history, it definitely seemed to include an element of seeing hunter gathering as some idealised state, despite him putting some caveats on that impression.
Back in 1975, communism seemed a viable alternative to Western liberal capitalism, and 40% of the world's population lived in absolute poverty.
In 2022, communism is an absurdity, and 8% of the world's population live in absolute poverty. For all our problems, this is one of the best times to be alive.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
The Green Party I imagine.
But I do think we have become a bit too used to things being low grade crappy, and we could be more dynamic in seeking to address that without going full Truss fantasy land.
Sure. Too many people in public life are useless, including the current government, and priorities are skewed towards protecting the interests of well to do pensioners.
That doesn't make things the end of days.
I don't think it is. Perspective is important. But people lamenting that things are seemingly getting worse, even if on a global scale they are still good, doesn't mean they think it is end of days either. Even use of colourful or hyperbolic language doesn't mean people think it is the end of days. Such description can be useful to illustrate a problem.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
As far as you're concerned Britain was finished as a nation as soon as it voted for Brexit.
You scratch around for any evidence that supports this thesis, however tenuous, and turn it up to 11 and dismiss the rest.
You don’t seem to have read my original post.
Brexit was of course a disaster, pretty much anyone sentient now realises that, but Britain’s malaise has deeper roots, even if the very notion of malaise is dismissed by the head-in-sand brigade.
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
Warm but not blistering summers, mild winters, frequent rainfall, it's pretty decent as climates go, even with more extreme occurences than there used to be.
The lack of sunlight is one of the main gripes immigrants (and many of the natives) have with the UK, and the problem gets worse the further north and west you go.
The idea that migrants are dying to come to Britain to take advantage of summers in Mablethorpe is one of the most stupid ideas I’ve read on here. It reads as self-parody.
Quite right. They are obviously aiming for Brighton and Margate.
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
Warm but not blistering summers, mild winters, frequent rainfall, it's pretty decent as climates go, even with more extreme occurences than there used to be.
The lack of sunlight is one of the main gripes immigrants (and many of the natives) have with the UK, and the problem gets worse the further north and west you go.
The idea that migrants are dying to come to Britain to take advantage of summers in Mablethorpe is one of the most stupid ideas I’ve read on here. It reads as self-parody.
I don't think it is the reason people come here, but it's clearly not a terrible climate.
Of course it’s not. The original poster - who has a “migration theory of everything” - claims that it is one of the key pull factors.
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
Warm but not blistering summers, mild winters, frequent rainfall, it's pretty decent as climates go, even with more extreme occurences than there used to be.
The lack of sunlight is one of the main gripes immigrants (and many of the natives) have with the UK, and the problem gets worse the further north and west you go.
The idea that migrants are dying to come to Britain to take advantage of summers in Mablethorpe is one of the most stupid ideas I’ve read on here. It reads as self-parody.
It's hardly stupid to note that the UK has one of the best climates in a rich country in this part of the world. Sure, California beats it, but you can't move there very easily from Africa without papers, and Spain is better overall, but the wages are dire. Once you make the decision to move, this is the kind of thing that explains "why Manchester and not Helsinki", for instance.
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
Warm but not blistering summers, mild winters, frequent rainfall, it's pretty decent as climates go, even with more extreme occurences than there used to be.
The lack of sunlight is one of the main gripes immigrants (and many of the natives) have with the UK, and the problem gets worse the further north and west you go.
The idea that migrants are dying to come to Britain to take advantage of summers in Mablethorpe is one of the most stupid ideas I’ve read on here. It reads as self-parody.
I don't think it is the reason people come here, but it's clearly not a terrible climate.
Of course it’s not. The original poster - who has a “migration theory of everything” - claims that it is one of the key pull factors.
That's just a fake claim on your part. If you want to argue against a straw man, you're welcome to do so, but not with me any more.
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
Warm but not blistering summers, mild winters, frequent rainfall, it's pretty decent as climates go, even with more extreme occurences than there used to be.
The lack of sunlight is one of the main gripes immigrants (and many of the natives) have with the UK, and the problem gets worse the further north and west you go.
The idea that migrants are dying to come to Britain to take advantage of summers in Mablethorpe is one of the most stupid ideas I’ve read on here. It reads as self-parody.
It's hardly stupid to note that the UK has one of the best climates in a rich country in this part of the world. Sure, California beats it, but you can't move there very easily from Africa without papers, and Spain is better overall, but the wages are dire. Once you make the decision to move, this is the kind of thing that explains "why Manchester and not Helsinki", for instance.
No, it’s quite splendidly stupid. Delightfully batshit.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
It’s a very long time since I reread the rise and fall of the great powers but I vaguely recall a chart indicating that about 1850 the UK had something like 50% of the worlds industrial output. Way, way above the level of dominance that China has today.
Yes, but scale does matter as well, of course.
For an example that might please our other Scottish posters, there was a time when 99% of all the world's aluminium was produced in just one factory - Foyers, on the shores of Loch Ness.
And even today nearly all internationally traded bananas are of Derbyshire ancestry.
As someone born and bred in Derbyshire, I've always thought I was bananas...
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Similar stat re petroleum at one time: the West Lothian oil fields. Remember [edit, sorry] @DavidL and I were talking about torbanite and the court case it prompted and [edit] he was a bit surprised how seriously it was taken at the time? That sort of stuff.
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
Warm but not blistering summers, mild winters, frequent rainfall, it's pretty decent as climates go, even with more extreme occurences than there used to be.
The lack of sunlight is one of the main gripes immigrants (and many of the natives) have with the UK, and the problem gets worse the further north and west you go.
The idea that migrants are dying to come to Britain to take advantage of summers in Mablethorpe is one of the most stupid ideas I’ve read on here. It reads as self-parody.
I don't think it is the reason people come here, but it's clearly not a terrible climate.
Of course it’s not. The original poster - who has a “migration theory of everything” - claims that it is one of the key pull factors.
That's just a fake claim on your part. If you want to argue against a straw man, you're welcome to do so, but not with me any more.
Apparently they are flocking to Manchester as it is balmier than Helsinki.
There isn’t really any point arguing with you as your contributions must be construed as a surrealist form of performance art.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
Warm but not blistering summers, mild winters, frequent rainfall, it's pretty decent as climates go, even with more extreme occurences than there used to be.
The lack of sunlight is one of the main gripes immigrants (and many of the natives) have with the UK, and the problem gets worse the further north and west you go.
The idea that migrants are dying to come to Britain to take advantage of summers in Mablethorpe is one of the most stupid ideas I’ve read on here. It reads as self-parody.
I don't think it is the reason people come here, but it's clearly not a terrible climate.
Of course it’s not. The original poster - who has a “migration theory of everything” - claims that it is one of the key pull factors.
That's just a fake claim on your part. If you want to argue against a straw man, you're welcome to do so, but not with me any more.
Apparently they are flocking to Manchester as it is balmier than Helsinki.
There isn’t really any point arguing with you as your contributions must be construed as a surrealist form of performance art.
It is a measure of climate change that I can now conceive it vaguely possible that someone might move to the UK, for the climate. If you think the world is dramatically heating up, the UK is a good destination
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
Warm but not blistering summers, mild winters, frequent rainfall, it's pretty decent as climates go, even with more extreme occurences than there used to be.
The lack of sunlight is one of the main gripes immigrants (and many of the natives) have with the UK, and the problem gets worse the further north and west you go.
The idea that migrants are dying to come to Britain to take advantage of summers in Mablethorpe is one of the most stupid ideas I’ve read on here. It reads as self-parody.
I don't think it is the reason people come here, but it's clearly not a terrible climate.
Of course it’s not. The original poster - who has a “migration theory of everything” - claims that it is one of the key pull factors.
That's just a fake claim on your part. If you want to argue against a straw man, you're welcome to do so, but not with me any more.
Apparently they are flocking to Manchester as it is balmier than Helsinki.
There isn’t really any point arguing with you as your contributions must be construed as a surrealist form of performance art.
It is a measure of climate change that I can now conceive it vaguely possible that someone might move to the UK, for the climate. If you think the world is dramatically heating up, the UK is a good destination
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
No, they move here because it remains one of the easiest places in Europe to find a job, even if you are an outsider without family connections, because this is a tolerant and open minded country, because we speak English and because, for all the moaning and grumbling, this is a great place to live.
The fact that 500k immigrants a year have absolutely no problem seeing that really should make the doomsters pause in their Brexit lamentations.
"Rocketing Immigration Proves Brexit is a Success - claims Lone Remaining Brexiteer".
Ach, I knew it was a mistake to mention the B word as soon as I posted that. Pavlovian.
It's OK. You can't help it. That's what "Pavlovian" means, after all!
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
Warm but not blistering summers, mild winters, frequent rainfall, it's pretty decent as climates go, even with more extreme occurences than there used to be.
The lack of sunlight is one of the main gripes immigrants (and many of the natives) have with the UK, and the problem gets worse the further north and west you go.
The idea that migrants are dying to come to Britain to take advantage of summers in Mablethorpe is one of the most stupid ideas I’ve read on here. It reads as self-parody.
I don't think it is the reason people come here, but it's clearly not a terrible climate.
Of course it’s not. The original poster - who has a “migration theory of everything” - claims that it is one of the key pull factors.
That's just a fake claim on your part. If you want to argue against a straw man, you're welcome to do so, but not with me any more.
Apparently they are flocking to Manchester as it is balmier than Helsinki.
There isn’t really any point arguing with you as your contributions must be construed as a surrealist form of performance art.
It is a measure of climate change that I can now conceive it vaguely possible that someone might move to the UK, for the climate. If you think the world is dramatically heating up, the UK is a good destination
I’ll certainly concede that.
Another 2C and parts of southern Europe will become really quite unpleasant. With lethal heatwaves every year. More fires
Might not happen and Britain might freeze in return, due to Gulf Stream failure, but it must now be a factor in the thinking of any intelligent migrant under 30
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
Warm but not blistering summers, mild winters, frequent rainfall, it's pretty decent as climates go, even with more extreme occurences than there used to be.
The lack of sunlight is one of the main gripes immigrants (and many of the natives) have with the UK, and the problem gets worse the further north and west you go.
The idea that migrants are dying to come to Britain to take advantage of summers in Mablethorpe is one of the most stupid ideas I’ve read on here. It reads as self-parody.
I don't think it is the reason people come here, but it's clearly not a terrible climate.
Of course it’s not. The original poster - who has a “migration theory of everything” - claims that it is one of the key pull factors.
That's just a fake claim on your part. If you want to argue against a straw man, you're welcome to do so, but not with me any more.
Apparently they are flocking to Manchester as it is balmier than Helsinki.
There isn’t really any point arguing with you as your contributions must be construed as a surrealist form of performance art.
It is a measure of climate change that I can now conceive it vaguely possible that someone might move to the UK, for the climate. If you think the world is dramatically heating up, the UK is a good destination
I’ll certainly concede that.
Another 2C and parts of southern Europe will become really quite unpleasant. With lethal heatwaves every year. More fires
Might not happen and Britain might freeze in return, due to Gulf Stream failure, but it must now be a factor in the thinking of any intelligent migrant under 30
Canada too I’d have thought. (Which was of the premises of the “Go Canada” strategy for UK geopolitics that I promised to write a thread header on).
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
Warm but not blistering summers, mild winters, frequent rainfall, it's pretty decent as climates go, even with more extreme occurences than there used to be.
The lack of sunlight is one of the main gripes immigrants (and many of the natives) have with the UK, and the problem gets worse the further north and west you go.
The idea that migrants are dying to come to Britain to take advantage of summers in Mablethorpe is one of the most stupid ideas I’ve read on here. It reads as self-parody.
Quite right. They are obviously aiming for Brighton and Margate.
The places claiming to be the sunniest in the UK are Ventnor, Shanklin, Eastbourne and Torbay.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
It’s a very long time since I reread the rise and fall of the great powers but I vaguely recall a chart indicating that about 1850 the UK had something like 50% of the worlds industrial output. Way, way above the level of dominance that China has today.
Yes, but scale does matter as well, of course.
For an example that might please our other Scottish posters, there was a time when 99% of all the world's aluminium was produced in just one factory - Foyers, on the shores of Loch Ness.
Similar stat re petroleum at one time: the West Lothian oil fields. Remember [edit, sorry] @DavidL and I were talking about torbanite and the court case it prompted and [edit] he was a bit surprised how seriously it was taken at the time? That sort of stuff.
That BBC program was great. ISTR he did another excellent program about early geologists as well.
The BBC does some stuff really well, and it's a shame they often then hide it away again. There are some programs I'd pay over and above the licence fee to rewatch, and which are too niche to appear on the 'other' repeat channels.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
The most probable outcome is that they will be bought up by large rental companies who will use financial engineering and scale to make it pay.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
The most probable outcome is that they will be bought up by large rental companies who will use financial engineering and scale to make it pay.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
The most probable outcome is that they will be bought up by large rental companies who will use financial engineering and scale to make it pay.
You need to put up taxes on owning multiple homes, to encourage a property owning democracy.
WA 3rd Congressional District - Joe Kent Request Machine Recount LATEST RESULTS
Note that as per state law, only thing reviewed by election workers for requested MACHINE recounts, are UNDER-VOTES in the race at issue, which for WA03 = approx 4k
With six of seven counties having conducted & certified their portions of the machine recount in race for 3rd Dist. US House race:
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Democrat) original machine count = 160,314 machine recount so far = 160,321= change >> +7 votes (+6 in Clark Co and +1 in Cowlitz)
Joe Kent original machine count = 157,685 machine recount so far = 157.689 change >> +4 votes (+2 in Clark, +1 in Cowlitz and +1 in Thurston)
Write in votes original machine count = 1,760 machine recount so far = 1,766 change >> +6 votes (all in Clark)
Vote Margin MGP versus JK original machine count >> +2,929 machine recount so far >> +2,932 change >> net +3 votes
Last county standing is Skamania which will conduct then certify it's part of recount next Tuesday, Dec. 20; the number of under-votes they have to review = 122 or thereabouts.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
The most probable outcome is that they will be bought up by large rental companies who will use financial engineering and scale to make it pay.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Aren’t you one of the highest paid people on here?
The only working class people you meet are your drugs suppliers.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
What rubbish. Less than 5% of the UK population are landlords and most are just getting some extra income when abroad or often as public school teachers, army officers, vicars or academics etc in work accommodation. Indeed many especially in big cities or young welcome the flexibility of renting. Far better second homes rented out than left vacant half the year as weekend or holiday homes or just investments in London by wealthy foreigners.
Even if rented out properties were sold first time buyers in London and the Home Counties would mostly not be able to afford them anyway, with rising rates making getting a mortgage more difficult too and that is where the problem is. North of Watford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
The UK went through systemic low investment for a lot of the sixties and seventies, when it was grappling with the transition away from empire and old energy providers, unstable prices and industrial unrest. It certainly did make people think it was falling behind Germany and even Italy, but things seemed to reverse afterwards and nowadays there's not much in the difference between the rich European countries. One big difference is that, speaking English and having a temperate oceanic climate, the UK is far more attractive to low-wage migration than its chilly peers.
You think immigrants move to the UK for the climate?
Warm but not blistering summers, mild winters, frequent rainfall, it's pretty decent as climates go, even with more extreme occurences than there used to be.
The lack of sunlight is one of the main gripes immigrants (and many of the natives) have with the UK, and the problem gets worse the further north and west you go.
The idea that migrants are dying to come to Britain to take advantage of summers in Mablethorpe is one of the most stupid ideas I’ve read on here. It reads as self-parody.
Quite right. They are obviously aiming for Brighton and Margate.
The places claiming to be the sunniest in the UK are Ventnor, Shanklin, Eastbourne and Torbay.
Allegedly 2.5kh/yr sun for Ventnor. I checked Dunbar (sunny Scottish east coast resort - Met Office says just inder 1.5kh. Definitely prefer the latter - too fair and pale to cope with too many walks on Tennyson Down and along Shanklin Chine.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
The Green Party I imagine.
But I do think we have become a bit too used to things being low grade crappy, and we could be more dynamic in seeking to address that without going full Truss fantasy land.
The Greens would hate 1870. All that coal?!!
Well, they probably want to go back before the industrial revolution entirely, but given the actual ideology of our Green Party I didn't think they'd want to go back to a time before Das Kapital.
If we knew then what we know now about the impact of CO2 emissions, the capitalists would still have been happy to screw the planet to line their pockets.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Oat milk flat white. Yawn.
As a drinker of them, I also benefited from the cheapness, yet I can also see what it was doing to millions of people stuck in low wage jobs competing with unlimited labour.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Oat milk flat white. Yawn.
As a drinker of them, I also benefited from the cheapness, yet I can also see what it was doing to millions of people stuck in low wage jobs competing with unlimited labour.
So not only quite rich yourself, but also an oat milk flat white drinker.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Oat milk flat white. Yawn.
As a drinker of them, I also benefited from the cheapness, yet I can also see what it was doing to millions of people stuck in low wage jobs competing with unlimited labour.
Now I'm puzzled. Why do you drink private landlords and how come they're cheap?
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Oat milk flat white. Yawn.
As a drinker of them, I also benefited from the cheapness, yet I can also see what it was doing to millions of people stuck in low wage jobs competing with unlimited labour.
Don't understand this oat milk flat white opprobrium. It's about the cheapest and simplest milk substitute without any of the dodginess of others. This is like claiming that buying porridge is oppressing Scottish farmers.
The Leaning Tower and the surrounding Piazza dei Miracoli should be on everyone's bucket list.
It's worthwhile to stay a night or two. All the tourist coaches depart, and it's quite pleasant, and good value. Also you can walk to the airport. Fly into Florence, train to Pisa, fly back from Pisa is a nice short break, especially out of season.
Flying to Pisa instead of Florence is an excellent idea. Pisa is a nicer smaller airport. And almost walkable from downtown Pisa
There is a light rail shuttle thingy from the airport to the railway station. Here, you can use the left luggage facilities while visiting sights.
I have stayed in the NH Hotel by the station a couple of times on work trips - recommended.
Also recommended, Ristorante buca di san Ranieri, not far from there.
Actually you’re right. Firenze airport is much improved with the light rail
I rescind my advice. Tho Pisa is still a fun little airport
Just logged on, and saw this at top of thread.
Reminds me of the time I visited Florence, the tourist trap part by the main train station, for about half-hour. Only time I was ever in there.
Sorta. Cause I caught a train to Pisa . . . and almost immediately realized I'd left my backpack at the checked luggage office in Florence station. So got off the train at next stop (not far) and hung out in a rather dreary semi-slumish area for next train back into town (hoping no ticket inspector accosted me) reclaimed my impedimenta then got NEXT train to Pisa.
Which I like a LOT better than Florence, despite fact that train station was occupied by what appeared to be paratroopers (hard to tell with Italian love of uniforms). Turned out there was a big anti-war demo sched. for next day (this was just before W (with assist from TB) launched Iraq invasion.
Likely helped that it was February, but Pisa was not over-clogged with tourists or touts. And small enough to walk around much of the city, the old part anyway, in a day or so. As I recall, they were still working to stabilize the Leaning Tower.
Even at my low level of near-total cluelessness, knowing virtually no Italian and experiencing the country for less than a week, can testify to the existence and (at least some of the pleasures) of La Dolce Vita!
I went to Pisa and Florence in Feb 2006. Pisa is worth a trip, but the historical core is very very small. You can 'do' Pisa in an afternoon. Florence, meanwhile, was fantastic. Astonishingly cold, but the February cold kept the tourista away, a bit. Certainly didn't feel over-touristed. I was there for four days and it wasn't enough. I know there's nothing revolutionary about liking well-known tourist hotspots, but there it is: for me, it more than lived up to its reputation.
Glad you enjoyed your visit to Florence! Indeed, most of the folks I know who've been there did also.
So my reaction was aberrant (but gladly NOT abhorrent!) Suspect due to fact I'd been traveling just the right amount of time to be feeling a tad funky & peevish. By time I got to Pisa, was in a better frame of mind.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
What rubbish. Less than 5% of the UK population are landlords and most are just getting some extra income when abroad or often as public school teachers, army officers, vicars or academics etc in work accommodation. Indeed many especially in big cities or young welcome the flexibility of renting. Far better second homes rented out than left vacant half the year as weekend or holiday homes or just investments in London by wealthy foreigners.
Even if rented out properties were sold first time buyers in London and the Home Counties would mostly not be able to afford them anyway, with rising rates making getting a mortgage more difficult too and that is where the problem is. North of Watford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
"north of WAtford few having problems getting on the housing ladder"
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
The most probable outcome is that they will be bought up by large rental companies who will use financial engineering and scale to make it pay.
Turn them into forced sellers as well.
Owner occupiers are great, but there is an absolutely massive rental crisis in the UK now, especially in London. An enormous number of rental properties have left the market since Section 24 - yes, that's great for the people who can afford and want to buy, but the vast majority of people renting aren't in that position.
Rents up 17% this year in London, according to the FT, with many landlords prioritising those who can pay the whole year up front. Not a great win for tenants.
Skyrocketing rents due to supply shortages hit the poorest tenants hardest - i.e. those just scraping buy with no chance of (or are a long way off) being able to buy a house.
It's not a simple matter of "let's tax landlords into oblivion and everyone will be able to buy a house" because as the rental market of the last couple of years shows, that simply isn't the case for everyone currently renting.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Aren’t you one of the highest paid people on here?
The only working class people you meet are your drugs suppliers.
My best mate is an electrician who grew up on the same estate as I did. I got lucky and had parents who gave enough of a shit to make sure my sister and I got a good education.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Aren’t you one of the highest paid people on here?
The only working class people you meet are your drugs suppliers.
I watched as more than one friend was pushed from one career to the next, as the previous job became minimum wage.
One moved to Australia.
The rents went up. Wages often went down - mostly it was a job ended and the replacement was less well paid. The conditions of the jobs became shittier as time went on.
I found the contrast with my own increasing wealth worth thinking about.
The problem is that rather than improving productivity, both governments and industry liked the "cheap boiled sweet"* of cheap labour. And it isn't just in the UK - I see the same enthusiasm among employers in Europe.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
What rubbish. Less than 5% of the UK population are landlords and most are just getting some extra income when abroad or often as public school teachers, army officers, vicars or academics etc in work accommodation. Indeed many especially in big cities or young welcome the flexibility of renting. Far better second homes rented out than left vacant half the year as weekend or holiday homes or just investments in London by wealthy foreigners.
Even if rented out properties were sold first time buyers in London and the Home Counties would mostly not be able to afford them anyway, with rising rates making getting a mortgage more difficult too and that is where the problem is. North of Watford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
"north of WAtford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
My erse.
Average house price North West £231k, London £677k, so that is true actually. Average salaries in London are not three times those of the North West. In fact they are barely more than 1.5 times bigger
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
If the polling he cites shows that "everyone’s a Remainer" then presumably you think this polling shows that everyone wants to bring back the death penalty?
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Oat milk flat white. Yawn.
As a drinker of them, I also benefited from the cheapness, yet I can also see what it was doing to millions of people stuck in low wage jobs competing with unlimited labour.
Don't understand this oat milk flat white opprobrium. It's about the cheapest and simplest milk substitute without any of the dodginess of others. This is like claiming that buying porridge is oppressing Scottish farmers.
Buying porridge is how the English colonialists keep the Scottish economy as a subsistence farming economy. Any Scottish villein daring not to grow the crop is merciless tortured by the Porridge Tax Collectors.
WA 3rd Congressional District - Joe Kent Request Machine Recount LATEST RESULTS
Note that as per state law, only thing reviewed by election workers for requested MACHINE recounts, are UNDER-VOTES in the race at issue, which for WA03 = approx 4k
With six of seven counties having conducted & certified their portions of the machine recount in race for 3rd Dist. US House race:
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Democrat) original machine count = 160,314 machine recount so far = 160,321= change >> +7 votes (+6 in Clark Co and +1 in Cowlitz)
Joe Kent original machine count = 157,685 machine recount so far = 157.689 change >> +4 votes (+2 in Clark, +1 in Cowlitz and +1 in Thurston)
Write in votes original machine count = 1,760 machine recount so far = 1,766 change >> +6 votes (all in Clark)
Vote Margin MGP versus JK original machine count >> +2,929 machine recount so far >> +2,932 change >> net +3 votes
Last county standing is Skamania which will conduct then certify it's part of recount next Tuesday, Dec. 20; the number of under-votes they have to review = 122 or thereabouts.
There is really a county in the USA called Skamania.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
Only private landlords. I'd have a big expansion of council and other forms of rental to make up for the difference.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
As far as you're concerned Britain was finished as a nation as soon as it voted for Brexit.
You scratch around for any evidence that supports this thesis, however tenuous, and turn it up to 11 and dismiss the rest.
You don’t seem to have read my original post.
Brexit was of course a disaster, pretty much anyone sentient now realises that, but Britain’s malaise has deeper roots, even if the very notion of malaise is dismissed by the head-in-sand brigade.
I think we have problems but I'm far from convinced we have a unique malaise.
In fact, I think Britain has quite a lot going for it.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
What rubbish. Less than 5% of the UK population are landlords and most are just getting some extra income when abroad or often as public school teachers, army officers, vicars or academics etc in work accommodation. Indeed many especially in big cities or young welcome the flexibility of renting. Far better second homes rented out than left vacant half the year as weekend or holiday homes or just investments in London by wealthy foreigners.
Even if rented out properties were sold first time buyers in London and the Home Counties would mostly not be able to afford them anyway, with rising rates making getting a mortgage more difficult too and that is where the problem is. North of Watford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
"north of WAtford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
My erse.
Average house price North West £231k, London £677k, so that is true actually. Average salaries in London are not three times those of the North West. In fact they are barely more than 1.5 times bigger
231K is still far too high for many people.
Anbd please don't claim that inheritances solve it all. They don't.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Admittedly there's no violin small enough for the BTL landlords, but unfortunately I don't think a wave of fire sales is likely to end how you would like. Renting is so prevalent because the price of property is so outrageous that much of the population hasn't a hope in Hell of ever buying - and supply is so constricted that even a substantial wave of rental properties coming into the market as fire sales is unlikely to make enough of a difference to prices to change the situation sufficiently.
Instead, what we'll most likely get (and I believe that this is already happening) is a contraction in the number of available rentals on the market in the short term - so that renters end up being forced to pay scalper landlords even more for the remaining available homes - followed in the medium term by most of the rentals being bought up not by first time buyers, but by other landlords who have managed their finances better than the ones who've gone bust.
The net result is that few renters transition to owner-occupancy and all the remaining renters end up being fleeced for even more (because, having risen, rents ain't coming back down again.)
The only sustainable solutions to our woefully unbalanced, property speculation-based economy involve taxing incomes less and assets (especially houses) more, coupled with a vast program of building that will necessarily entail local communities, especially in the South East, having large housing estates and whole new towns forced upon them over the objections of existing homeowners. Or, to put it another way, an effective program of redistribution from the winners of the current system - broadly, the old and rich - to the losers - broadly, the young and poor. It goes without saying that the vast legions of wealthy asset holders who stand to lose out from reform (monied pensioners with big houses and nimbies, two groups that are fairly close to being a perfect circle on a Venn diagram) would scream with rage.
We're not going to get such a rebalancing in favour of earned incomes and the interests of the have-nots from the Tories, because that's not what they're for. They are the party of wealth and don't give a flying fuck about anyone who doesn't already have it. Labour could do it - their powerbase is in cities and pulling the teeth of the landed interest in the Home Counties is, therefore, much less of a problem for them. However, as I've previously pointed out, rich pensioners and their heirs are a huge and growing slice of the electorate, and going after earned incomes yet again is always easier than bleeding well-off homeowners.
If we get a Labour Government then Starmer and Reeves might surprise us all and not actually keep soaking workers' incomes endlessly to pay for their projects (whilst leaving property fortunes and the pensioner triple lock safely untouched,) but I've little faith that they will. It's very depressing.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Oat milk flat white. Yawn.
He’s gone full Farage. Never go full Farage.
I'm not sure Farage would drink oat milk.
FWIW, I never do. Trying porridge made with water once was bad enough.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
What rubbish. Less than 5% of the UK population are landlords and most are just getting some extra income when abroad or often as public school teachers, army officers, vicars or academics etc in work accommodation. Indeed many especially in big cities or young welcome the flexibility of renting. Far better second homes rented out than left vacant half the year as weekend or holiday homes or just investments in London by wealthy foreigners.
Even if rented out properties were sold first time buyers in London and the Home Counties would mostly not be able to afford them anyway, with rising rates making getting a mortgage more difficult too and that is where the problem is. North of Watford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
"north of WAtford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
My erse.
Average house price North West £231k, London £677k, so that is true actually. Average salaries in London are not three times those of the North West. In fact they are barely more than 1.5 times bigger
Syllogisms, HYUFD-style: (1) House prices in London are three times those in the North West (2) Wages in London are 1.5 times those in the North West Therefore - er - few people north of Watford have any problems getting on the housing ladder.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Oat milk flat white. Yawn.
As a drinker of them, I also benefited from the cheapness, yet I can also see what it was doing to millions of people stuck in low wage jobs competing with unlimited labour.
Don't understand this oat milk flat white opprobrium. It's about the cheapest and simplest milk substitute without any of the dodginess of others. This is like claiming that buying porridge is oppressing Scottish farmers.
Buying porridge is how the English colonialists keep the Scottish economy as a subsistence farming economy. Any Scottish villein daring not to grow the crop is merciless tortured by the Porridge Tax Collectors.
You have nothing to lose but your Oats!
Don't forget Mr Cameron carefully chose a porridge factory for one of his most notorious tours during indyref1. Though the photo call gave sone decidedly mixed results.
Similar stat re petroleum at one time: the West Lothian oil fields. Remember [edit, sorry] @DavidL and I were talking about torbanite and the court case it prompted and [edit] he was a bit surprised how seriously it was taken at the time? That sort of stuff.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
In other words, you'll find any meaning you can and then say it's a disaster.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
What rubbish. Less than 5% of the UK population are landlords and most are just getting some extra income when abroad or often as public school teachers, army officers, vicars or academics etc in work accommodation. Indeed many especially in big cities or young welcome the flexibility of renting. Far better second homes rented out than left vacant half the year as weekend or holiday homes or just investments in London by wealthy foreigners.
Even if rented out properties were sold first time buyers in London and the Home Counties would mostly not be able to afford them anyway, with rising rates making getting a mortgage more difficult too and that is where the problem is. North of Watford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
"north of WAtford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
My erse.
Average house price North West £231k, London £677k, so that is true actually. Average salaries in London are not three times those of the North West. In fact they are barely more than 1.5 times bigger
231K is still far too high for many people.
Anbd please don't claim that inheritances solve it all. They don't.
You don’t need inheritances in the North. A couple each earning £25k to £30k have £50 to £60k combined income and times 4.25 for a mortgage can easily afford a £231k property and put down a deposit. Only in London and the Home Counties do average earners need parental assistance and inheritances to buy rather than just as an additional help,
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
You're not wrong and I've no visibility of this but the idea of the London rental market being made up of single properties (it's just the wife's old flat) owned by individual renters isn't accurate.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Oat milk flat white. Yawn.
As a drinker of them, I also benefited from the cheapness, yet I can also see what it was doing to millions of people stuck in low wage jobs competing with unlimited labour.
Don't understand this oat milk flat white opprobrium. It's about the cheapest and simplest milk substitute without any of the dodginess of others. This is like claiming that buying porridge is oppressing Scottish farmers.
Buying porridge is how the English colonialists keep the Scottish economy as a subsistence farming economy. Any Scottish villein daring not to grow the crop is merciless tortured by the Porridge Tax Collectors.
You have nothing to lose but your Oats!
Don't forget Mr Cameron carefully chose a porridge factory for one of his most notorious tours during indyref1. Though the photo call gave sone decidedly mixed results.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
The most probable outcome is that they will be bought up by large rental companies who will use financial engineering and scale to make it pay.
Making lenders take into account rental payments when considering mortgage applications would help.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Oat milk flat white. Yawn.
As a drinker of them, I also benefited from the cheapness, yet I can also see what it was doing to millions of people stuck in low wage jobs competing with unlimited labour.
Don't understand this oat milk flat white opprobrium. It's about the cheapest and simplest milk substitute without any of the dodginess of others. This is like claiming that buying porridge is oppressing Scottish farmers.
Buying porridge is how the English colonialists keep the Scottish economy as a subsistence farming economy. Any Scottish villein daring not to grow the crop is merciless tortured by the Porridge Tax Collectors.
You have nothing to lose but your Oats!
Don't forget Mr Cameron carefully chose a porridge factory for one of his most notorious tours during indyref1. Though the photo call gave sone decidedly mixed results.
It was an "Insult to Scotland."
I think it's vital that we avoid such things. They could think of leaving us! And, you know, they're so helpful, and at so few billions of cost.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
What rubbish. Less than 5% of the UK population are landlords and most are just getting some extra income when abroad or often as public school teachers, army officers, vicars or academics etc in work accommodation. Indeed many especially in big cities or young welcome the flexibility of renting. Far better second homes rented out than left vacant half the year as weekend or holiday homes or just investments in London by wealthy foreigners.
Even if rented out properties were sold first time buyers in London and the Home Counties would mostly not be able to afford them anyway, with rising rates making getting a mortgage more difficult too and that is where the problem is. North of Watford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
"north of WAtford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
My erse.
Average house price North West £231k, London £677k, so that is true actually. Average salaries in London are not three times those of the North West. In fact they are barely more than 1.5 times bigger
231K is still far too high for many people.
Anbd please don't claim that inheritances solve it all. They don't.
You don’t need inheritances in the North. A couple each earning £25k to £30k have £50 to £60k combined income and times 4.25 for a mortgage can easily afford a £231k property and put down a deposit. Only in London and the Home Counties do average earners need parental assistance and inheritances to buy
rather than just as an additional help,
Hence too in 2019 the North and Midlands elected their highest number of Tory MPs for decades while London remained sold Labour
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
You're not wrong and I've no visibility of this but the idea of the London rental market being made up of single properties (it's just the wife's old flat) owned by individual renters isn't accurate.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
It depends whether using the same house to house more people is worse than housing fewer people. Politically it seems that two adults and a child have more moral worth than four or five young workers, but perhaps not.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
What rubbish. Less than 5% of the UK population are landlords and most are just getting some extra income when abroad or often as public school teachers, army officers, vicars or academics etc in work accommodation. Indeed many especially in big cities or young welcome the flexibility of renting. Far better second homes rented out than left vacant half the year as weekend or holiday homes or just investments in London by wealthy foreigners.
Even if rented out properties were sold first time buyers in London and the Home Counties would mostly not be able to afford them anyway, with rising rates making getting a mortgage more difficult too and that is where the problem is. North of Watford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
"north of WAtford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
My erse.
Average house price North West £231k, London £677k, so that is true actually. Average salaries in London are not three times those of the North West. In fact they are barely more than 1.5 times bigger
231K is still far too high for many people.
Anbd please don't claim that inheritances solve it all. They don't.
You don’t need inheritances in the North. A couple each earning £25k to £30k have £50 to £60k combined income and times 4.25 for a mortgage can easily afford a £231k property and put down a deposit. Only in London and the Home Counties do average earners need parental assistance and inheritances to buy
rather than just as an additional help,
Hence too in 2019 the North and Midlands elected their highest number of Tory MPs for decades while London remained sold Labour
One rather obvious factor, if to you too boring and footling a detail. It's called INTEREST RATES GOING UP.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
What rubbish. Less than 5% of the UK population are landlords and most are just getting some extra income when abroad or often as public school teachers, army officers, vicars or academics etc in work accommodation. Indeed many especially in big cities or young welcome the flexibility of renting. Far better second homes rented out than left vacant half the year as weekend or holiday homes or just investments in London by wealthy foreigners.
Even if rented out properties were sold first time buyers in London and the Home Counties would mostly not be able to afford them anyway, with rising rates making getting a mortgage more difficult too and that is where the problem is. North of Watford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
"north of WAtford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
My erse.
Average house price North West £231k, London £677k, so that is true actually. Average salaries in London are not three times those of the North West. In fact they are barely more than 1.5 times bigger
231K is still far too high for many people.
Anbd please don't claim that inheritances solve it all. They don't.
You don’t need inheritances in the North. A couple each earning £25k to £30k have £50 to £60k combined income and times 4.25 for a mortgage can easily afford a £231k property and put down a deposit. Only in London and the Home Counties do average earners need parental assistance and inheritances to buy rather than just as an additional help,
Well, you have to admit @Carnyx that he hasn't claimed inheritances solve it all.
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Oat milk flat white. Yawn.
As a drinker of them, I also benefited from the cheapness, yet I can also see what it was doing to millions of people stuck in low wage jobs competing with unlimited labour.
Don't understand this oat milk flat white opprobrium. It's about the cheapest and simplest milk substitute without any of the dodginess of others. This is like claiming that buying porridge is oppressing Scottish farmers.
Buying porridge is how the English colonialists keep the Scottish economy as a subsistence farming economy. Any Scottish villein daring not to grow the crop is merciless tortured by the Porridge Tax Collectors.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
What rubbish. Less than 5% of the UK population are landlords and most are just getting some extra income when abroad or often as public school teachers, army officers, vicars or academics etc in work accommodation. Indeed many especially in big cities or young welcome the flexibility of renting. Far better second homes rented out than left vacant half the year as weekend or holiday homes or just investments in London by wealthy foreigners.
Even if rented out properties were sold first time buyers in London and the Home Counties would mostly not be able to afford them anyway, with rising rates making getting a mortgage more difficult too and that is where the problem is. North of Watford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
"north of WAtford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
My erse.
Average house price North West £231k, London £677k, so that is true actually. Average salaries in London are not three times those of the North West. In fact they are barely more than 1.5 times bigger
231K is still far too high for many people.
Anbd please don't claim that inheritances solve it all. They don't.
You don’t need inheritances in the North. A couple each earning £25k to £30k have £50 to £60k combined income and times 4.25 for a mortgage can easily afford a £231k property and put down a deposit. Only in London and the Home Counties do average earners need parental assistance and inheritances to buy rather than just as an additional help,
Well, you have to admit @Carnyx that he hasn't claimed inheritances solve it all.
No, you just need them toi pay for the increased energy and food and fuel and other prices when you've paid the interest on a 4.25x mortgage.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Admittedly there's no violin small enough for the BTL landlords, but unfortunately I don't think a wave of fire sales is likely to end how you would like. Renting is so prevalent because the price of property is so outrageous that much of the population hasn't a hope in Hell of ever buying - and supply is so constricted that even a substantial wave of rental properties coming into the market as fire sales is unlikely to make enough of a difference to prices to change the situation sufficiently.
Instead, what we'll most likely get (and I believe that this is already happening) is a contraction in the number of available rentals on the market in the short term - so that renters end up being forced to pay scalper landlords even more for the remaining available homes - followed in the medium term by most of the rentals being bought up not by first time buyers, but by other landlords who have managed their finances better than the ones who've gone bust.
The net result is that few renters transition to owner-occupancy and all the remaining renters end up being fleeced for even more (because, having risen, rents ain't coming back down again.)
The only sustainable solutions to our woefully unbalanced, property speculation-based economy involve taxing incomes less and assets (especially houses) more, coupled with a vast program of building that will necessarily entail local communities, especially in the South East, having large housing estates and whole new towns forced upon them over the objections of existing homeowners. Or, to put it another way, an effective program of redistribution from the winners of the current system - broadly, the old and rich - to the losers - broadly, the young and poor. It goes without saying that the vast legions of wealthy asset holders who stand to lose out from reform (monied pensioners with big houses and nimbies, two groups that are fairly close to being a perfect circle on a Venn diagram) would scream with rage.
We're not going to get such a rebalancing in favour of earned incomes and the interests of the have-nots from the Tories, because that's not what they're for. They are the party of wealth and don't give a flying fuck about anyone who doesn't already have it. Labour could do it - their powerbase is in cities and pulling the teeth of the landed interest in the Home Counties is, therefore, much less of a problem for them. However, as I've previously pointed out, rich pensioners and their heirs are a huge and growing slice of the electorate, and going after earned incomes yet again is always easier than bleeding well-off homeowners.
If we get a Labour Government then Starmer and Reeves might surprise us all and not actually keep soaking workers' incomes endlessly to pay for their projects (whilst leaving property fortunes and the pensioner triple lock safely untouched,) but I've little faith that they will. It's very depressing.
The biggest problems for Labour trying to do this -
1) The Green thing - All Development Is Evul. 2) A dislike by some on the Left for certain types of development on the basis of political belief.
What would probably work the best, would be town planning, using traditional building styles. Not Brutalist tower blocks, but mixed mode, mimicking the better examples of villages growing into towns.
As for oat milk flat whites (which I enjoy as much as the next person), the sign of us retaining our economic clout as a country will be when most local coffee shops have it all made by a machine rather than a human barista.
Perfectly technically possible now, but the fact it doesn’t happen shows that wages in the service sector are too low. Same as hand car washes.
Not that I’d particularly enjoy being served by a machine: the coffee would doubtless taste just as good and the queues would be shorter, but it wouldn’t feel as personal. But, rather like cheap taxis signifying a poor or unequal society and expensive ones showing the opposite, automated coffee vending is a sign of a country with healthily high pay.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
You're not wrong and I've no visibility of this but the idea of the London rental market being made up of single properties (it's just the wife's old flat) owned by individual renters isn't accurate.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
It depends whether using the same house to house more people is worse than housing fewer people. Politically it seems that two adults and a child have more moral worth than four or five young workers, but perhaps not.
If the four or five are living in living space that is meant for 2 parents and one child yes hell it is. Workers should not have to be in a position as an adult where the only way they can afford to live is 2 or more unconnected adults to a room. 2 parents 1 child implies 2 bedrooms...that means for 4 or 5 then you are looking at 2 sharing a room though unrelated and 2/3 sharing the other room
As for oat milk flat whites (which I enjoy as much as the next person), the sign of us retaining our economic clout as a country will be when most local coffee shops have it all made by a machine rather than a human barista.
Perfectly technically possible now, but the fact it doesn’t happen shows that wages in the service sector are too low. Same as hand car washes.
Not that I’d particularly enjoy being served by a machine: the coffee would doubtless taste just as good and the queues would be shorter, but it wouldn’t feel as personal. But, rather like cheap taxis signifying a poor or unequal society and expensive ones showing the opposite, automated coffee vending is a sign of a country with healthily high pay.
Or, like Switzerland, barista coffee for 9 francs.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
You're not wrong and I've no visibility of this but the idea of the London rental market being made up of single properties (it's just the wife's old flat) owned by individual renters isn't accurate.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
It depends whether using the same house to house more people is worse than housing fewer people. Politically it seems that two adults and a child have more moral worth than four or five young workers, but perhaps not.
If the four or five are living in living space that is meant for 2 parents and one child yes hell it is. Workers should not have to be in a position as an adult where the only way they can afford to live is 2 or more unconnected adults to a room. 2 parents 1 child implies 2 bedrooms...that means for 4 or 5 then you are looking at 2 sharing a room though unrelated and 2/3 sharing the other room
I don't disagree but when you get 15-20 sharing the same space I would argue it's more a question of exploitation than accommodation.
As for oat milk flat whites (which I enjoy as much as the next person), the sign of us retaining our economic clout as a country will be when most local coffee shops have it all made by a machine rather than a human barista.
Perfectly technically possible now, but the fact it doesn’t happen shows that wages in the service sector are too low. Same as hand car washes.
Not that I’d particularly enjoy being served by a machine: the coffee would doubtless taste just as good and the queues would be shorter, but it wouldn’t feel as personal. But, rather like cheap taxis signifying a poor or unequal society and expensive ones showing the opposite, automated coffee vending is a sign of a country with healthily high pay.
That same point is very visible in Australia
Lots of cheap jobs are automated. You can go to a macdonald’s in Perth and barely meet a human behind the counter. A sign of success and affluence
As for oat milk flat whites (which I enjoy as much as the next person), the sign of us retaining our economic clout as a country will be when most local coffee shops have it all made by a machine rather than a human barista.
Perfectly technically possible now, but the fact it doesn’t happen shows that wages in the service sector are too low. Same as hand car washes.
Not that I’d particularly enjoy being served by a machine: the coffee would doubtless taste just as good and the queues would be shorter, but it wouldn’t feel as personal. But, rather like cheap taxis signifying a poor or unequal society and expensive ones showing the opposite, automated coffee vending is a sign of a country with healthily high pay.
That same point is very visible in Australia
Lots of cheap jobs are automated. You can go to a macdonald’s in Perth and barely meet a human behind the counter. A sign of success and affluence
But that would require British companies to, you know, invest money. While they can throw cheap labour at jobs rather than invest money they will absolutely do the former.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
You're not wrong and I've no visibility of this but the idea of the London rental market being made up of single properties (it's just the wife's old flat) owned by individual renters isn't accurate.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
It depends whether using the same house to house more people is worse than housing fewer people. Politically it seems that two adults and a child have more moral worth than four or five young workers, but perhaps not.
If the four or five are living in living space that is meant for 2 parents and one child yes hell it is. Workers should not have to be in a position as an adult where the only way they can afford to live is 2 or more unconnected adults to a room. 2 parents 1 child implies 2 bedrooms...that means for 4 or 5 then you are looking at 2 sharing a room though unrelated and 2/3 sharing the other room
I don't disagree but when you get 15-20 sharing the same space I would argue it's more a question of exploitation than accommodation.
I would argue when working adults cannot get privacy because the only way they can afford to live is bunk beds with another unrelated adult its already exploitation
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
You're not wrong and I've no visibility of this but the idea of the London rental market being made up of single properties (it's just the wife's old flat) owned by individual renters isn't accurate.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
It depends whether using the same house to house more people is worse than housing fewer people. Politically it seems that two adults and a child have more moral worth than four or five young workers, but perhaps not.
If the four or five are living in living space that is meant for 2 parents and one child yes hell it is. Workers should not have to be in a position as an adult where the only way they can afford to live is 2 or more unconnected adults to a room. 2 parents 1 child implies 2 bedrooms...that means for 4 or 5 then you are looking at 2 sharing a room though unrelated and 2/3 sharing the other room
Of course that seems to be moral common sense, but who says it's "meant" to be for one lot if the other lot are willing to pay more? It's a bit like saying I'm "meant" to live in Knightsbridge so someone else should be made move out and the price reset downward in my favour by about 99%.
As for oat milk flat whites (which I enjoy as much as the next person), the sign of us retaining our economic clout as a country will be when most local coffee shops have it all made by a machine rather than a human barista.
Perfectly technically possible now, but the fact it doesn’t happen shows that wages in the service sector are too low. Same as hand car washes.
Not that I’d particularly enjoy being served by a machine: the coffee would doubtless taste just as good and the queues would be shorter, but it wouldn’t feel as personal. But, rather like cheap taxis signifying a poor or unequal society and expensive ones showing the opposite, automated coffee vending is a sign of a country with healthily high pay.
Alternatively, a coffee will be very expensive in your local cafe, where they make a point of humans being employed to serve. Think "Afternoon Tea at the Ritz".
As for oat milk flat whites (which I enjoy as much as the next person), the sign of us retaining our economic clout as a country will be when most local coffee shops have it all made by a machine rather than a human barista.
Perfectly technically possible now, but the fact it doesn’t happen shows that wages in the service sector are too low. Same as hand car washes.
Not that I’d particularly enjoy being served by a machine: the coffee would doubtless taste just as good and the queues would be shorter, but it wouldn’t feel as personal. But, rather like cheap taxis signifying a poor or unequal society and expensive ones showing the opposite, automated coffee vending is a sign of a country with healthily high pay.
That same point is very visible in Australia
Lots of cheap jobs are automated. You can go to a macdonald’s in Perth and barely meet a human behind the counter. A sign of success and affluence
But that would require British companies to, you know, invest money. While they can throw cheap labour at jobs rather than invest money they will absolutely do the former.
British companies should try to work out how to not go bust after the funding round.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
You're not wrong and I've no visibility of this but the idea of the London rental market being made up of single properties (it's just the wife's old flat) owned by individual renters isn't accurate.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
It depends whether using the same house to house more people is worse than housing fewer people. Politically it seems that two adults and a child have more moral worth than four or five young workers, but perhaps not.
If the four or five are living in living space that is meant for 2 parents and one child yes hell it is. Workers should not have to be in a position as an adult where the only way they can afford to live is 2 or more unconnected adults to a room. 2 parents 1 child implies 2 bedrooms...that means for 4 or 5 then you are looking at 2 sharing a room though unrelated and 2/3 sharing the other room
Of course that seems to be moral common sense, but who says it's "meant" to be for one lot if the other lot are willing to pay more? It's a bit like saying I'm "meant" to live in Knightsbridge so someone else should be made move out and the price reset downward in my favour by about 99%.
Not commenting in the least about people being forced out or suggesting it. Merely saying when the only way to move out is to bunk up with other unrelated adults then something has gone very seriously wrong. I am pretty sure no one on this board ever had to share a bedroom with a stranger when they moved out and would have been horrified at the idea.
I don't know what the solution is because frankly we dont have enough housing for the people who live here. We seem incapable of building on the scale needed to have rents either at least frozen or moving downwards and most who rent cant afford to buy
As for oat milk flat whites (which I enjoy as much as the next person), the sign of us retaining our economic clout as a country will be when most local coffee shops have it all made by a machine rather than a human barista.
Perfectly technically possible now, but the fact it doesn’t happen shows that wages in the service sector are too low. Same as hand car washes.
Not that I’d particularly enjoy being served by a machine: the coffee would doubtless taste just as good and the queues would be shorter, but it wouldn’t feel as personal. But, rather like cheap taxis signifying a poor or unequal society and expensive ones showing the opposite, automated coffee vending is a sign of a country with healthily high pay.
Alternatively, a coffee will be very expensive in your local cafe, where they make a point of humans being employed to serve. Think "Afternoon Tea at the Ritz".
A lot of coffee shops are owned by kindly folk who aren't maximising profits from their investment of their own or their parents' money. To the extent they are run as community spaces and services, robots are unlikely to take over. However in captive settings like workplaces robots will certainly take over.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
You're not wrong and I've no visibility of this but the idea of the London rental market being made up of single properties (it's just the wife's old flat) owned by individual renters isn't accurate.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
It depends whether using the same house to house more people is worse than housing fewer people. Politically it seems that two adults and a child have more moral worth than four or five young workers, but perhaps not.
If the four or five are living in living space that is meant for 2 parents and one child yes hell it is. Workers should not have to be in a position as an adult where the only way they can afford to live is 2 or more unconnected adults to a room. 2 parents 1 child implies 2 bedrooms...that means for 4 or 5 then you are looking at 2 sharing a room though unrelated and 2/3 sharing the other room
Of course that seems to be moral common sense, but who says it's "meant" to be for one lot if the other lot are willing to pay more? It's a bit like saying I'm "meant" to live in Knightsbridge so someone else should be made move out and the price reset downward in my favour by about 99%.
Not commenting in the least about people being forced out or suggesting it. Merely saying when the only way to move out is to bunk up with other unrelated adults then something has gone very seriously wrong. I am pretty sure no one on this board ever had to share a bedroom with a stranger when they moved out and would have been horrified at the idea.
I don't know what the solution is because frankly we dont have enough housing for the people who live here. We seem incapable of building on the scale needed to have rents either at least frozen or moving downwards and most who rent cant afford to buy
It's maths - if the population grows by X hundred thousand, then if you don't build X hundred thousand bedrooms, any problems with capacity are Immigrant Blaming.
As for oat milk flat whites (which I enjoy as much as the next person), the sign of us retaining our economic clout as a country will be when most local coffee shops have it all made by a machine rather than a human barista.
Perfectly technically possible now, but the fact it doesn’t happen shows that wages in the service sector are too low. Same as hand car washes.
Not that I’d particularly enjoy being served by a machine: the coffee would doubtless taste just as good and the queues would be shorter, but it wouldn’t feel as personal. But, rather like cheap taxis signifying a poor or unequal society and expensive ones showing the opposite, automated coffee vending is a sign of a country with healthily high pay.
I think this is a bad take, or at least a bad example. If you remove the (albeit limited) artisan aspect of coffee shops, you destroy most of the value proposition.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
You're not wrong and I've no visibility of this but the idea of the London rental market being made up of single properties (it's just the wife's old flat) owned by individual renters isn't accurate.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
A few things to say on this topic. First I have to admit to being a landlord, though it's not my primary economic activity. And to getting somewhat irritated at therefore being considered scum or the equivalent. But anyway: 1) Not all landlords try to split places up to maximize income, though I'm sure some do. I wouldn't rent out any property that I wouldn't be happy to live in myself. 2) if you use a limited company, the tax changes around not being able to offset finance charges don't apply. It's a business and is taxed in the normal way. 3) rental yeilds in London are crap. You can't possibly get the same yeilds in London as in places like Manchester or Southampton. So I don't know who rents out places in London unless they got them 'avcidentally'. 4) the other legislative changes coming down the track, in terms of giving greater stability to tenants and improving energy efficiency etc all seem good to me. I like tenants that stay a long time. 5) I suspect that the people complaining they can't make money any longer have been buying properties with high levels of borrowing and without fixing. Pretty much the same problem as small energy suppliers not hedging. Shit business model can go wrong. What a surprise...
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
You're not wrong and I've no visibility of this but the idea of the London rental market being made up of single properties (it's just the wife's old flat) owned by individual renters isn't accurate.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
It depends whether using the same house to house more people is worse than housing fewer people. Politically it seems that two adults and a child have more moral worth than four or five young workers, but perhaps not.
If the four or five are living in living space that is meant for 2 parents and one child yes hell it is. Workers should not have to be in a position as an adult where the only way they can afford to live is 2 or more unconnected adults to a room. 2 parents 1 child implies 2 bedrooms...that means for 4 or 5 then you are looking at 2 sharing a room though unrelated and 2/3 sharing the other room
Of course that seems to be moral common sense, but who says it's "meant" to be for one lot if the other lot are willing to pay more? It's a bit like saying I'm "meant" to live in Knightsbridge so someone else should be made move out and the price reset downward in my favour by about 99%.
Not commenting in the least about people being forced out or suggesting it. Merely saying when the only way to move out is to bunk up with other unrelated adults then something has gone very seriously wrong. I am pretty sure no one on this board ever had to share a bedroom with a stranger when they moved out and would have been horrified at the idea.
I don't know what the solution is because frankly we dont have enough housing for the people who live here. We seem incapable of building on the scale needed to have rents either at least frozen or moving downwards and most who rent cant afford to buy
No, albeit I've never moved to a much richer country either. But I've certainly shared with unrelated adults who weren't strangers.
Regrettably it seems that 75%+ of people with permanent claims to housing is enough to ensure nothing changes in the other regards you mention. (edit: misread one comment)
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
You're not wrong and I've no visibility of this but the idea of the London rental market being made up of single properties (it's just the wife's old flat) owned by individual renters isn't accurate.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
It depends whether using the same house to house more people is worse than housing fewer people. Politically it seems that two adults and a child have more moral worth than four or five young workers, but perhaps not.
If the four or five are living in living space that is meant for 2 parents and one child yes hell it is. Workers should not have to be in a position as an adult where the only way they can afford to live is 2 or more unconnected adults to a room. 2 parents 1 child implies 2 bedrooms...that means for 4 or 5 then you are looking at 2 sharing a room though unrelated and 2/3 sharing the other room
Of course that seems to be moral common sense, but who says it's "meant" to be for one lot if the other lot are willing to pay more? It's a bit like saying I'm "meant" to live in Knightsbridge so someone else should be made move out and the price reset downward in my favour by about 99%.
Not commenting in the least about people being forced out or suggesting it. Merely saying when the only way to move out is to bunk up with other unrelated adults then something has gone very seriously wrong. I am pretty sure no one on this board ever had to share a bedroom with a stranger when they moved out and would have been horrified at the idea.
I don't know what the solution is because frankly we dont have enough housing for the people who live here. We seem incapable of building on the scale needed to have rents either at least frozen or moving downwards and most who rent cant afford to buy
It's maths - if the population grows by X hundred thousand, then if you don't build X hundred thousand bedrooms, any problems with capacity are Immigrant Blaming.
I moved up to the south east from cornwall to work....when I moved up renting just a room cost me 16% of my monthly wage....nowadays on minimum wage that single room would cost me almost 40% of my wage. That is the issue and I am hearing from friends that landlords are talking about rent increases of 15% or more this year
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
You're not wrong and I've no visibility of this but the idea of the London rental market being made up of single properties (it's just the wife's old flat) owned by individual renters isn't accurate.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
A good point.
Speaking from experience, ten years ago when I was saving for a deposit I lived in a not particularly leafy part of east london and paid £850 a month for a particularly grotty one bed flat - about 450sq feet. A quick look on zoopla shows a near identical flat on the same street now going for over £1500pcm.
The building I lived in was an old victorian terraced house subdivided into individual flats on each floor, and was owned by a single landlord. He owned 26 properties all in all. The flat above the one to me was an identical one bed and was occupied by four people - an immigrant family.
While I saved up and got out as soon as I could, a) I wouldn't be able to save any more with rents being what they are today and b) there's no chance the immigrant family above me would ever be able to buy a place of their own.
I don't think the answer is to squeeze landlords, as most will pass their costs on to those who have no choice but to rent - though as others have said downthread, it's the world's smallest violin for the ones who do go bust.
The answer is to build, build, build, so that supply matches demand.
Taxing landlords out of the market only allows a few lucky cash rich and high earning renters to buy - those without deposits or the ability to save for one, those on low incomes, those who are transitory and young and aren't looking to put down roots, will suffer in the form of higher rental prices. Which is exactly what we've seen across the UK in student towns and in London over the last couple of years.
I'm very much enjoying the latest round of wailing from landlords having to handle falling property prices and rising interest rates. Hopefully the government pushes even harder and forces them into bankruptcy so the properties are repossessed and sold to owner occupiers.
Have to say that's a courageous idea (as Sir Humphrey would say).
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
The London rental market of the last couple of years shows what happens when you have an ever increasing pool of people looking to rent (i.e. young people, new immigrants, etc, lots of people either without the ability or desire to buy a house), chasing after an ever decreasing puddle of available rental properties.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
You're not wrong and I've no visibility of this but the idea of the London rental market being made up of single properties (it's just the wife's old flat) owned by individual renters isn't accurate.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
It depends whether using the same house to house more people is worse than housing fewer people. Politically it seems that two adults and a child have more moral worth than four or five young workers, but perhaps not.
If the four or five are living in living space that is meant for 2 parents and one child yes hell it is. Workers should not have to be in a position as an adult where the only way they can afford to live is 2 or more unconnected adults to a room. 2 parents 1 child implies 2 bedrooms...that means for 4 or 5 then you are looking at 2 sharing a room though unrelated and 2/3 sharing the other room
Of course that seems to be moral common sense, but who says it's "meant" to be for one lot if the other lot are willing to pay more? It's a bit like saying I'm "meant" to live in Knightsbridge so someone else should be made move out and the price reset downward in my favour by about 99%.
Not commenting in the least about people being forced out or suggesting it. Merely saying when the only way to move out is to bunk up with other unrelated adults then something has gone very seriously wrong. I am pretty sure no one on this board ever had to share a bedroom with a stranger when they moved out and would have been horrified at the idea.
I don't know what the solution is because frankly we dont have enough housing for the people who live here. We seem incapable of building on the scale needed to have rents either at least frozen or moving downwards and most who rent cant afford to buy
No, albeit I've never moved to a much richer country either. But I've certainly shared with unrelated adults who weren't strangers.
Regrettably it seems that 75%+ of people with permanent claims to housing is enough to ensure nothing changes in the other regards you mention. (edit: misread one comment)
Sharing a house with unrelated adults is a lot different to sharing a bedroom with unrelated adults which is what I was referring to. I certainly did shared houses with people when I first moved out. I did not share a bedroom with one
It's a bit overblown. Compared to most times and places, we still live in paradise. Western economies have all (with the exception of commodity producers) seen real wages outside of the elite stagnate, compared to the 1950-2000 period.
The conclusion of the piece is a bit glib and less clever than it thinks, like a lot of the content of the Economist. I don't think it's overblown. If anything I think it doesn't quite do enough to capture the depths of our malaise.
Yes, that was my take.
The “good” news, is that there are now a plethora of these pieces and one hopes they signify an evolution in elite consensus which in time will drive improvement.
It means slaying several sacred cows; not just Brexit of course (already on its deathbed) but also aspects of Thatcherism and “NHSism”.
One perverse positive these pieces never mention is that now that Britain has fallen quite a way behind that the potential for catch-up is greater too.
There’s no inherent and eternal reason for Britain to be poorer than its peers.
It’s positively anomalous. Since about the 9th century the English peasant has been noticeably richer than the average continental (with some major hiccups of course)
That only faltered post WW2, and was then amended - but now we sink again
Again, all the "Sick Man of Europe" nonsense was massively overblown in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. Poverty, as it was traditionally understood, was pretty well eliminated from this country after WW2. Anyone alive in 2000 was way better off than anyone alive in 1945.
This is just declinist copium.
That life is better than the exhausted and war-torn Britain of 1945 is just not good enough.
I don’t know whether the sick-manism was overblown. Here’s British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson in 1979:
“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours…It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”
Is life better when you have one cow, but your neighbour has none?
Or when you have nine cows but your neighbour has ten?
The UK has been in "decline" relative to everyone else since about 1870. But, who would wish to revert to the position of 1870?
Nobody. How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022? Britain’s cows have the mange.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
My original post was triggered by the Economist piece, one of a slew of articles discussing the current British malaise.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Remainers sniffing their own farts comes to mind here.
Yeh yeh, your mother smells like poo as well.
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
Ah it must be true because remainer Alastair Meeks says so.
Well, he cites polling, but if your preferred form of opinion sampling is examining your own stools then it probably won’t convince.
You're on the remainer merry-go-round where you all write and say all of these self aggrandising pieces without even a hint of self awareness or awareness around why Brexit happened in the first place. You simply lack any understanding of how the other half live in the UK. You've never seen or experienced poverty of working class people and you've never lived through the choice of putting food on the table or heating one's home simply because work doesn't pay enough and for years work hasn't paid enough.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
Oat milk flat white. Yawn.
As a drinker of them, I also benefited from the cheapness, yet I can also see what it was doing to millions of people stuck in low wage jobs competing with unlimited labour.
Don't understand this oat milk flat white opprobrium. It's about the cheapest and simplest milk substitute without any of the dodginess of others. This is like claiming that buying porridge is oppressing Scottish farmers.
Real milk is better. But oat is at least better than soya, both in taste, health factors, and economics.
Comments
How about just reading the first world standards achievable in 2022?
Britain’s cows have the mange.
In 2022, communism is an absurdity, and 8% of the world's population live in absolute poverty. For all our problems, this is one of the best times to be alive.
Brexit was of course a disaster, pretty much anyone sentient now realises that, but Britain’s malaise has deeper roots, even if the very notion of malaise is dismissed by the head-in-sand brigade.
The original poster - who has a “migration theory of everything” - claims that it is one of the key pull factors.
Delightfully batshit.
GDP per head in 2021 was $50,000. Let's assume for the sake of argument, that the vote in 2016 was 52/48 to stay in the EU, and (fanfare of trumpets) the figure would have been $51,000.
Is that really how you measure disaster?
There isn’t really any point arguing with you as your contributions must be construed as a surrealist form of performance art.
The word disaster has many meanings.
Might not happen and Britain might freeze in return, due to Gulf Stream failure, but it must now be a factor in the thinking of any intelligent migrant under 30
(Which was of the premises of the “Go Canada” strategy for UK geopolitics that I promised to write a thread header on).
Everyone’s a Remainer these days anyway, as Meeks notes I think in his piece.
The BBC does some stuff really well, and it's a shame they often then hide it away again. There are some programs I'd pay over and above the licence fee to rewatch, and which are too niche to appear on the 'other' repeat channels.
WA 3rd Congressional District - Joe Kent Request Machine Recount LATEST RESULTS
Note that as per state law, only thing reviewed by election workers for requested MACHINE recounts, are UNDER-VOTES in the race at issue, which for WA03 = approx 4k
With six of seven counties having conducted & certified their portions of the machine recount in race for 3rd Dist. US House race:
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Democrat)
original machine count = 160,314
machine recount so far = 160,321=
change >> +7 votes (+6 in Clark Co and +1 in Cowlitz)
Joe Kent
original machine count = 157,685
machine recount so far = 157.689
change >> +4 votes (+2 in Clark, +1 in Cowlitz and +1 in Thurston)
Write in votes
original machine count = 1,760
machine recount so far = 1,766
change >> +6 votes (all in Clark)
Vote Margin MGP versus JK
original machine count >> +2,929
machine recount so far >> +2,932
change >> net +3 votes
Last county standing is Skamania which will conduct then certify it's part of recount next Tuesday, Dec. 20; the number of under-votes they have to review = 122 or thereabouts.
For you low wages was good because it kept the price of your oat milk flat white down so you're desperately trying to justify your stance that relied on millions of people living in working poverty so you could get cheaper goods and services. The remainer merry-go-round would very much like to stop working class people from moving up in the world and having that unlimited labour pool of cheap unskilled workers would see life chances cut, once again, for millions. But you get your cheap oat milk flat whites again so who gives a flying fuck about them.
The only working class people you meet are your drugs suppliers.
Even if rented out properties were sold first time buyers in London and the Home Counties would mostly not be able to afford them anyway, with rising rates making getting a mortgage more difficult too and that is where the problem is. North of Watford few having problems getting on the housing ladder
Never go full Farage.
See a therapist.
The UK is suffering a malaise. But pretty much every major nation is in trouble, one way or another
So my reaction was aberrant (but gladly NOT abhorrent!) Suspect due to fact I'd been traveling just the right amount of time to be feeling a tad funky & peevish. By time I got to Pisa, was in a better frame of mind.
My erse.
Rents up 17% this year in London, according to the FT, with many landlords prioritising those who can pay the whole year up front. Not a great win for tenants.
Skyrocketing rents due to supply shortages hit the poorest tenants hardest - i.e. those just scraping buy with no chance of (or are a long way off) being able to buy a house.
It's not a simple matter of "let's tax landlords into oblivion and everyone will be able to buy a house" because as the rental market of the last couple of years shows, that simply isn't the case for everyone currently renting.
One moved to Australia.
The rents went up. Wages often went down - mostly it was a job ended and the replacement was less well paid. The conditions of the jobs became shittier as time went on.
I found the contrast with my own increasing wealth worth thinking about.
The problem is that rather than improving productivity, both governments and industry liked the "cheap boiled sweet"* of cheap labour. And it isn't just in the UK - I see the same enthusiasm among employers in Europe.
*One is OK, 3 or more make you sick.
Are you advocating the end of both the public and private rental sectors or just the private? There's a clear demand in London (accepting it may be less elsewhere) for short-term accommodation for students and for workers on short-term contracts.
There's undeniably a problem with properties bought up by wealthy foreigners for investment and we know a lot of very wealthy areas of London are like ghost towns but at the lower end of the housing market rental fulfils a clear need.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/should-the-death-penalty-be-reintroduced-for-cases-of-multiple-murder
You have nothing to lose but your Oats!
In fact, I think Britain has quite a lot going for it.
Anbd please don't claim that inheritances solve it all. They don't.
Instead, what we'll most likely get (and I believe that this is already happening) is a contraction in the number of available rentals on the market in the short term - so that renters end up being forced to pay scalper landlords even more for the remaining available homes - followed in the medium term by most of the rentals being bought up not by first time buyers, but by other landlords who have managed their finances better than the ones who've gone bust.
The net result is that few renters transition to owner-occupancy and all the remaining renters end up being fleeced for even more (because, having risen, rents ain't coming back down again.)
The only sustainable solutions to our woefully unbalanced, property speculation-based economy involve taxing incomes less and assets (especially houses) more, coupled with a vast program of building that will necessarily entail local communities, especially in the South East, having large housing estates and whole new towns forced upon them over the objections of existing homeowners. Or, to put it another way, an effective program of redistribution from the winners of the current system - broadly, the old and rich - to the losers - broadly, the young and poor. It goes without saying that the vast legions of wealthy asset holders who stand to lose out from reform (monied pensioners with big houses and nimbies, two groups that are fairly close to being a perfect circle on a Venn diagram) would scream with rage.
We're not going to get such a rebalancing in favour of earned incomes and the interests of the have-nots from the Tories, because that's not what they're for. They are the party of wealth and don't give a flying fuck about anyone who doesn't already have it. Labour could do it - their powerbase is in cities and pulling the teeth of the landed interest in the Home Counties is, therefore, much less of a problem for them. However, as I've previously pointed out, rich pensioners and their heirs are a huge and growing slice of the electorate, and going after earned incomes yet again is always easier than bleeding well-off homeowners.
If we get a Labour Government then Starmer and Reeves might surprise us all and not actually keep soaking workers' incomes endlessly to pay for their projects (whilst leaving property fortunes and the pensioner triple lock safely untouched,) but I've little faith that they will. It's very depressing.
FWIW, I never do. Trying porridge made with water once was bad enough.
I get down on my knees and thank the gods I was able to buy a crappy shoebox in London a decade ago, because rents are now so sky high that I'd have absolutely zero chance of saving for a deposit - even if house prices went significantly lower.
If you tax landlords to oblivion, all you get is the unedifying spectacle of some landlord property shifting to owner occupiers (relatively rich renters) while the left behind (poorer renters) are left to pay an ever increasing percentage of their monthly salary to secure the property that's left on the rental market.
Demand is rising year on year thanks to immigration, people moving back to the city post covid, etc. The answer is to increase supply to match demand by building more houses for both owner occupiers and renters. Interfering in the market to force landlords out only makes things worse for those who have no other choice than to rent.
(1) House prices in London are three times those in the North West
(2) Wages in London are 1.5 times those in the North West
Therefore - er - few people north of Watford have any problems getting on the housing ladder.
QED, innit?
It's a masterclass in confirmation bias.
Renting is industrial - I know anecdotally of one local businessman who has 90 properties, many of them corner sites. The first thing he does when buying a house is split it into as many bedrooms as possible so your two-bedroom family home becomes a five or six bedroom site with each room available for rent and a communal kitchen/bathroom.
That's not the worst examples of the new slums - it's well documented there are examples of 20 or more living in three bedroom semis in the suburbs and I'll be blunt here, this is where an open market for cheap labour ends up.
It's also the place where your dreams of multicultural immigration go to die.
1) The Green thing - All Development Is Evul.
2) A dislike by some on the Left for certain types of development on the basis of political belief.
What would probably work the best, would be town planning, using traditional building styles. Not Brutalist tower blocks, but mixed mode, mimicking the better examples of villages growing into towns.
Perfectly technically possible now, but the fact it doesn’t happen shows that wages in the service sector are too low. Same as hand car washes.
Not that I’d particularly enjoy being served by a machine: the coffee would doubtless taste just as good and the queues would be shorter, but it wouldn’t feel as personal. But, rather like cheap taxis signifying a poor or unequal society and expensive ones showing the opposite, automated coffee vending is a sign of a country with healthily high pay.
Lots of cheap jobs are automated. You can go to a macdonald’s in Perth and barely meet a human behind the counter. A sign of success and affluence
I don't know what the solution is because frankly we dont have enough housing for the people who live here. We seem incapable of building on the scale needed to have rents either at least frozen or moving downwards and most who rent cant afford to buy
1) Not all landlords try to split places up to maximize income, though I'm sure some do. I wouldn't rent out any property that I wouldn't be happy to live in myself.
2) if you use a limited company, the tax changes around not being able to offset finance charges don't apply. It's a business and is taxed in the normal way.
3) rental yeilds in London are crap. You can't possibly get the same yeilds in London as in places like Manchester or Southampton. So I don't know who rents out places in London unless they got them 'avcidentally'.
4) the other legislative changes coming down the track, in terms of giving greater stability to tenants and improving energy efficiency etc all seem good to me. I like tenants that stay a long time.
5) I suspect that the people complaining they can't make money any longer have been buying properties with high levels of borrowing and without fixing. Pretty much the same problem as small energy suppliers not hedging. Shit business model can go wrong. What a surprise...
Regrettably it seems that 75%+ of people with permanent claims to housing is enough to ensure nothing changes in the other regards you mention. (edit: misread one comment)
Speaking from experience, ten years ago when I was saving for a deposit I lived in a not particularly leafy part of east london and paid £850 a month for a particularly grotty one bed flat - about 450sq feet. A quick look on zoopla shows a near identical flat on the same street now going for over £1500pcm.
The building I lived in was an old victorian terraced house subdivided into individual flats on each floor, and was owned by a single landlord. He owned 26 properties all in all. The flat above the one to me was an identical one bed and was occupied by four people - an immigrant family.
While I saved up and got out as soon as I could, a) I wouldn't be able to save any more with rents being what they are today and b) there's no chance the immigrant family above me would ever be able to buy a place of their own.
I don't think the answer is to squeeze landlords, as most will pass their costs on to those who have no choice but to rent - though as others have said downthread, it's the world's smallest violin for the ones who do go bust.
The answer is to build, build, build, so that supply matches demand.
Taxing landlords out of the market only allows a few lucky cash rich and high earning renters to buy - those without deposits or the ability to save for one, those on low incomes, those who are transitory and young and aren't looking to put down roots, will suffer in the form of higher rental prices. Which is exactly what we've seen across the UK in student towns and in London over the last couple of years.