Thanks to @BJO for the comedy Corbyn pile-on. Will the crank left ever stop pining for their lost loser?
Hush now.
The Cons loons have their NatCon conference and also rail against the decision not to chuck a large number of our existing laws on the bonfire convinced that "one last push" of pure Brexiters will see us reach nirvana.
So why shouldn't the Left have the same.
Last push? That's a joke. Nothing has been repealed whatsoever so far, and the ones that Kemi has lined up for the so called chop are things like laws concerning the 2020 Olympics. First push would be nice.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
Interesting question whether the curvature of the Gen X line shows them suddenly discovering Toryism in late middle age, or depicts two very different cohorts who happen to be grouped into the one generation. I'd suspect the latter. I'm in my late 40s and on the cusp between those who profited massively from house price rises, free university education and generous pensions, and those who lost out.
The DB pensions went first, then tuition fees and loans came in, and finally the housing ladder got pulled up.
More in Common are an organisation set up after the murder of Jo Cox, quoting her maiden speech which she said 'We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.'
They don't do voodoo polling.
It's squarely in the pack too. The headline gap between the big parties may be smaller than others but LLG is 60%, bang on recent average. RefCon is a little higher than some - 36%.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
What do we mean by empty? Aren't there homes all across the plushest areas of London bought for investment with no-one there.
Very few by international standards. There will always be some redundancy in any sort of capital stock. But redundancy in housing isn't the silver bullet here - the scale of the issue is too small to justify swingeing intervention (and bureaucracy) needed to fill up the few empty homes.
Just need to build more units. And more infrastructure to support them.
Very few but very valuable. Foreign buyers owning multi-million pound houses that are left empty is a known factor. Unless you plan to convert them all into small flats, it is largely irrelevant.
I don't think that is true. Just look at the table in the Mail article. Unoccupied properties vary between 8 and 30% for the inner London boroughs listed. That is based on numbers of properties, not their value.
Still very few by international standards - see article attached (which argues we need MORE empty homes):
Second lowest rate in Europe after Poland apparently.
Drive around rural France and Italy and you're assailed by whole villages of empty and abandoned houses, some still maintained and others crumbling slowly into ruins. Even whole small towns in parts of the mezzogiorno. Empty homes are a result of too much supply and not enough demand. We have the opposite problem.
Your stats dont include second homes. So a Russian oligarch owning a dacha outside Moscow and five empty London flats he registers as second homes adds zero to the numbers.
I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes.
I would expect the Tories to hold Dumfries and Galloway, the SNP voteshare has now fallen further since 2019 in polls than the Tory voteshare in Scotland.
Reading West will almost certainly go Labour I agree on current polls. Mid Bedfordshire could go LD in a by election if they really work it but their problem is Labour were second in 2019 there not them
Agree with most of that.
D&G should be an easy win for the SNP, but with all that is going on you may well be right. A few months ago it would have been a slam dunk.
Reading - Agree.
Mid Beds - You make a good point. There are lots of seats where Labour are in 2nd but can't win, whereas the LDs can, but convincing the electorate you can from 3rd is a challenge. That is harder in a GE than a by-election where the LDs can throw the kitchen sink at it. So I would still go for a LD win, BUT it is a hell of a majority and it assumes that Lab do not run a spoiler campaign and split the vote, which I don't think they will do.
Re. D&G: It's not a bad opportunity for Labour to do a bit of groundwork in the constituency too. I can't see them winning the by election, but it's not unreasonable for them to be looking for a solid second place in the GE next year. Me mam'll be voting for them, and she went SNP last time.
That's how the Conservatives win I think.
Yeah - the SNP were the 'stop Tories' party but now a lot of those who lent their vote feel a bit uncomfortable with them now.
Normally the SNP could ferry in activists by the boatload but, currently, maybe not.
I'll say it again, becoming a homeowner begets Tory voters but the party is so NIMBY.
Is there any party that is really in favour of the scale of development the UK needs? They all seem to find reasons for saying no in practice, be it the costs, location, pollution, newts, etc.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
Interesting question whether the curvature of the Gen X line shows them suddenly discovering Toryism in late middle age, or depicts two very different cohorts who happen to be grouped into the one generation. I'd suspect the latter. I'm in my late 40s and on the cusp between those who profited massively from house price rises, free university education and generous pensions, and those who lost out.
The DB pensions went first, then tuition fees and loans came in, and finally the housing ladder got pulled up.
I’m 44 and I feel like I got through by the “skin of my teeth”. I may literally be the inflection point.
I had to incur university debt in NZ, and although it was not massive, I didn’t pay it off until my 30s. It’s very hard to pay down debt when you’re earning a starter wage.
I pretty much didn’t take holidays in my 20s.
I managed to get onto the housing ladder in 2010, but had I been even a few years younger I wouldn’t have been able to secure what I did.
The US destroyed FBI dossiers on Lord Mountbatten at the request of the British Government after the discovery of a wartime file accusing the royal of being a paedophile, his biographer has claimed.
Writing for The Mail's new Royals section, Andrew Lownie expanded on his 2019 discovery of a Second World War-era file which contained the claim that the Earl was a 'homosexual with a lusting for young boys'.
When he made a request to the FBI for other files the agency held on Mountbatten, he was told they had been destroyed 'after you asked for them'.
Dr Lownie, the author of The Mountbattens: their Lives & Loves, claimed this had been 'clearly' carried out at the 'request of the British Government'.
The historian also lamented the 'absurd' difficulty faced by biographers in getting access to royal archives in the UK after finding that files on King Edward VIII and his American wife Wallis Simpson were 'mysteriously' withdrawn from public view.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
What do we mean by empty? Aren't there homes all across the plushest areas of London bought for investment with no-one there.
Very few by international standards. There will always be some redundancy in any sort of capital stock. But redundancy in housing isn't the silver bullet here - the scale of the issue is too small to justify swingeing intervention (and bureaucracy) needed to fill up the few empty homes.
Just need to build more units. And more infrastructure to support them.
Very few but very valuable. Foreign buyers owning multi-million pound houses that are left empty is a known factor. Unless you plan to convert them all into small flats, it is largely irrelevant.
I don't think that is true. Just look at the table in the Mail article. Unoccupied properties vary between 8 and 30% for the inner London boroughs listed. That is based on numbers of properties, not their value.
Still very few by international standards - see article attached (which argues we need MORE empty homes):
Second lowest rate in Europe after Poland apparently.
Drive around rural France and Italy and you're assailed by whole villages of empty and abandoned houses, some still maintained and others crumbling slowly into ruins. Even whole small towns in parts of the mezzogiorno. Empty homes are a result of too much supply and not enough demand. We have the opposite problem.
Your stats dont include second homes. So a Russian oligarch owning a dacha outside Moscow and five empty London flats he registers as second homes adds zero to the numbers.
The statistical significance of this Russian oligarch is zero.
It may be annoying, and it may be worth doing something about, for it has turned some pockets of London into dead-zones, but as a serious factor in the broader housing market it is not relevant.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
What do we mean by empty? Aren't there homes all across the plushest areas of London bought for investment with no-one there.
Very few by international standards. There will always be some redundancy in any sort of capital stock. But redundancy in housing isn't the silver bullet here - the scale of the issue is too small to justify swingeing intervention (and bureaucracy) needed to fill up the few empty homes.
Just need to build more units. And more infrastructure to support them.
Very few but very valuable. Foreign buyers owning multi-million pound houses that are left empty is a known factor. Unless you plan to convert them all into small flats, it is largely irrelevant.
I don't think that is true. Just look at the table in the Mail article. Unoccupied properties vary between 8 and 30% for the inner London boroughs listed. That is based on numbers of properties, not their value.
Still very few by international standards - see article attached (which argues we need MORE empty homes):
Second lowest rate in Europe after Poland apparently.
Drive around rural France and Italy and you're assailed by whole villages of empty and abandoned houses, some still maintained and others crumbling slowly into ruins. Even whole small towns in parts of the mezzogiorno. Empty homes are a result of too much supply and not enough demand. We have the opposite problem.
Glancing at Rightmove, Chatham in Kent looks cheapish for the southeast ?
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
They are not able to buy houses. Private housing estates are seed beds for Tory voters and there are too many lying fallow.
As a former Conservative voter who lies on the Boomer / GenX boundary, I will certainly not be voting for them in the foreseeable future. I regard the current crop as a mixture of fools, populists and English nationalists and none of them have any message that would win my vote.
Unless they have a radical cleaning out in the next 5 or 10 years, I might never vote Conservative ever again.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
What do we mean by empty? Aren't there homes all across the plushest areas of London bought for investment with no-one there.
Very few by international standards. There will always be some redundancy in any sort of capital stock. But redundancy in housing isn't the silver bullet here - the scale of the issue is too small to justify swingeing intervention (and bureaucracy) needed to fill up the few empty homes.
Just need to build more units. And more infrastructure to support them.
Very few but very valuable. Foreign buyers owning multi-million pound houses that are left empty is a known factor. Unless you plan to convert them all into small flats, it is largely irrelevant.
I don't think that is true. Just look at the table in the Mail article. Unoccupied properties vary between 8 and 30% for the inner London boroughs listed. That is based on numbers of properties, not their value.
Still very few by international standards - see article attached (which argues we need MORE empty homes):
Second lowest rate in Europe after Poland apparently.
Drive around rural France and Italy and you're assailed by whole villages of empty and abandoned houses, some still maintained and others crumbling slowly into ruins. Even whole small towns in parts of the mezzogiorno. Empty homes are a result of too much supply and not enough demand. We have the opposite problem.
Your stats dont include second homes. So a Russian oligarch owning a dacha outside Moscow and five empty London flats he registers as second homes adds zero to the numbers.
The statistical significance of this Russian oligarch is zero.
It may be annoying, and it may be worth doing something about, for it has turned some pockets of London into dead-zones, but as a serious factor in the broader housing market it is not relevant.
Certainly statistically far less significant than the domestic and foreign second home owners in our near European neighbours.
Take the French village where I am an evil second home owner. Half the houses are permanently empty. Of the rest, probably half are second homes. Mainly of Parisians, but there’s also me, and a Luxembourgeois family.
Second home ownership in Britain is very low by European standards. In Italy it’s something mad like 50% of families owning a second home. And just about every one of my Finnish colleagues has a cabin in the woods for summer.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
They are not able to buy houses. Private housing estates are seed beds for Tory voters and there are too many lying fallow.
As a former Conservative voter who lies on the Boomer / GenX boundary, I will certainly not be voting for them in the foreseeable future. I regard the current crop as a mixture of fools, populists and English nationalists and none of them have any message that would win my vote.
Unless they have a radical cleaning out in the next 5 or 10 years, I might never vote Conservative ever again.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
What do we mean by empty? Aren't there homes all across the plushest areas of London bought for investment with no-one there.
Very few by international standards. There will always be some redundancy in any sort of capital stock. But redundancy in housing isn't the silver bullet here - the scale of the issue is too small to justify swingeing intervention (and bureaucracy) needed to fill up the few empty homes.
Just need to build more units. And more infrastructure to support them.
Very few but very valuable. Foreign buyers owning multi-million pound houses that are left empty is a known factor. Unless you plan to convert them all into small flats, it is largely irrelevant.
I don't think that is true. Just look at the table in the Mail article. Unoccupied properties vary between 8 and 30% for the inner London boroughs listed. That is based on numbers of properties, not their value.
Still very few by international standards - see article attached (which argues we need MORE empty homes):
Second lowest rate in Europe after Poland apparently.
Drive around rural France and Italy and you're assailed by whole villages of empty and abandoned houses, some still maintained and others crumbling slowly into ruins. Even whole small towns in parts of the mezzogiorno. Empty homes are a result of too much supply and not enough demand. We have the opposite problem.
Your stats dont include second homes. So a Russian oligarch owning a dacha outside Moscow and five empty London flats he registers as second homes adds zero to the numbers.
The statistical significance of this Russian oligarch is zero.
It may be annoying, and it may be worth doing something about, for it has turned some pockets of London into dead-zones, but as a serious factor in the broader housing market it is not relevant.
Certainly statistically far less significant than the domestic and foreign second home owners in our near European neighbours.
Take the French village where I am an evil second home owner. Half the houses are permanently empty. Of the rest, probably half are second homes. Mainly of Parisians, but there’s also me, and a Luxembourgeois family.
Second home ownership in Britain is very low by European standards. In Italy it’s something mad like 50% of families owning a second home. And just about every one of my Finnish colleagues has a cabin in the woods for summer.
The only Italian family I know owned two second homes. Confirms what you say.
I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes. I'm not Darren Grimes.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
What do we mean by empty? Aren't there homes all across the plushest areas of London bought for investment with no-one there.
Very few by international standards. There will always be some redundancy in any sort of capital stock. But redundancy in housing isn't the silver bullet here - the scale of the issue is too small to justify swingeing intervention (and bureaucracy) needed to fill up the few empty homes.
Just need to build more units. And more infrastructure to support them.
Very few but very valuable. Foreign buyers owning multi-million pound houses that are left empty is a known factor. Unless you plan to convert them all into small flats, it is largely irrelevant.
I don't think that is true. Just look at the table in the Mail article. Unoccupied properties vary between 8 and 30% for the inner London boroughs listed. That is based on numbers of properties, not their value.
Still very few by international standards - see article attached (which argues we need MORE empty homes):
Second lowest rate in Europe after Poland apparently.
Drive around rural France and Italy and you're assailed by whole villages of empty and abandoned houses, some still maintained and others crumbling slowly into ruins. Even whole small towns in parts of the mezzogiorno. Empty homes are a result of too much supply and not enough demand. We have the opposite problem.
Your stats dont include second homes. So a Russian oligarch owning a dacha outside Moscow and five empty London flats he registers as second homes adds zero to the numbers.
The statistical significance of this Russian oligarch is zero.
It may be annoying, and it may be worth doing something about, for it has turned some pockets of London into dead-zones, but as a serious factor in the broader housing market it is not relevant.
Certainly statistically far less significant than the domestic and foreign second home owners in our near European neighbours.
Take the French village where I am an evil second home owner. Half the houses are permanently empty. Of the rest, probably half are second homes. Mainly of Parisians, but there’s also me, and a Luxembourgeois family.
Second home ownership in Britain is very low by European standards. In Italy it’s something mad like 50% of families owning a second home. And just about every one of my Finnish colleagues has a cabin in the woods for summer.
In lots of central and eastern Europe too - many (maybe most) Czech families have a little dacha/cabin out in the woods or whatever; usually v modest but still.
Personally I've never seen the appeal; it's enough keeping on top of one gaff never mind two.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
What do we mean by empty? Aren't there homes all across the plushest areas of London bought for investment with no-one there.
Very few by international standards. There will always be some redundancy in any sort of capital stock. But redundancy in housing isn't the silver bullet here - the scale of the issue is too small to justify swingeing intervention (and bureaucracy) needed to fill up the few empty homes.
Just need to build more units. And more infrastructure to support them.
Very few but very valuable. Foreign buyers owning multi-million pound houses that are left empty is a known factor. Unless you plan to convert them all into small flats, it is largely irrelevant.
I don't think that is true. Just look at the table in the Mail article. Unoccupied properties vary between 8 and 30% for the inner London boroughs listed. That is based on numbers of properties, not their value.
Still very few by international standards - see article attached (which argues we need MORE empty homes):
Second lowest rate in Europe after Poland apparently.
Drive around rural France and Italy and you're assailed by whole villages of empty and abandoned houses, some still maintained and others crumbling slowly into ruins. Even whole small towns in parts of the mezzogiorno. Empty homes are a result of too much supply and not enough demand. We have the opposite problem.
Glancing at Rightmove, Chatham in Kent looks cheapish for the southeast ?
Yes, it is. If you'd been there, you'd understand why.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
They are not able to buy houses. Private housing estates are seed beds for Tory voters and there are too many lying fallow.
As a former Conservative voter who lies on the Boomer / GenX boundary, I will certainly not be voting for them in the foreseeable future. I regard the current crop as a mixture of fools, populists and English nationalists and none of them have any message that would win my vote.
Unless they have a radical cleaning out in the next 5 or 10 years, I might never vote Conservative ever again.
There are various strands of Conservatism. Some I like better than others. The Cameron version suited me better than most. Sunak is fine but some of those around him are hard to thole.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
What do we mean by empty? Aren't there homes all across the plushest areas of London bought for investment with no-one there.
Very few by international standards. There will always be some redundancy in any sort of capital stock. But redundancy in housing isn't the silver bullet here - the scale of the issue is too small to justify swingeing intervention (and bureaucracy) needed to fill up the few empty homes.
Just need to build more units. And more infrastructure to support them.
Very few but very valuable. Foreign buyers owning multi-million pound houses that are left empty is a known factor. Unless you plan to convert them all into small flats, it is largely irrelevant.
I don't think that is true. Just look at the table in the Mail article. Unoccupied properties vary between 8 and 30% for the inner London boroughs listed. That is based on numbers of properties, not their value.
Still very few by international standards - see article attached (which argues we need MORE empty homes):
Second lowest rate in Europe after Poland apparently.
Drive around rural France and Italy and you're assailed by whole villages of empty and abandoned houses, some still maintained and others crumbling slowly into ruins. Even whole small towns in parts of the mezzogiorno. Empty homes are a result of too much supply and not enough demand. We have the opposite problem.
Your stats dont include second homes. So a Russian oligarch owning a dacha outside Moscow and five empty London flats he registers as second homes adds zero to the numbers.
The statistical significance of this Russian oligarch is zero.
It may be annoying, and it may be worth doing something about, for it has turned some pockets of London into dead-zones, but as a serious factor in the broader housing market it is not relevant.
Certainly statistically far less significant than the domestic and foreign second home owners in our near European neighbours.
Take the French village where I am an evil second home owner. Half the houses are permanently empty. Of the rest, probably half are second homes. Mainly of Parisians, but there’s also me, and a Luxembourgeois family.
Second home ownership in Britain is very low by European standards. In Italy it’s something mad like 50% of families owning a second home. And just about every one of my Finnish colleagues has a cabin in the woods for summer.
The only Italian family I know owned two second homes. Confirms what you say.
Surely the second second home is actually a third home?
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
What do we mean by empty? Aren't there homes all across the plushest areas of London bought for investment with no-one there.
Very few by international standards. There will always be some redundancy in any sort of capital stock. But redundancy in housing isn't the silver bullet here - the scale of the issue is too small to justify swingeing intervention (and bureaucracy) needed to fill up the few empty homes.
Just need to build more units. And more infrastructure to support them.
Very few but very valuable. Foreign buyers owning multi-million pound houses that are left empty is a known factor. Unless you plan to convert them all into small flats, it is largely irrelevant.
I don't think that is true. Just look at the table in the Mail article. Unoccupied properties vary between 8 and 30% for the inner London boroughs listed. That is based on numbers of properties, not their value.
Still very few by international standards - see article attached (which argues we need MORE empty homes):
Second lowest rate in Europe after Poland apparently.
Drive around rural France and Italy and you're assailed by whole villages of empty and abandoned houses, some still maintained and others crumbling slowly into ruins. Even whole small towns in parts of the mezzogiorno. Empty homes are a result of too much supply and not enough demand. We have the opposite problem.
Your stats dont include second homes. So a Russian oligarch owning a dacha outside Moscow and five empty London flats he registers as second homes adds zero to the numbers.
The statistical significance of this Russian oligarch is zero.
It may be annoying, and it may be worth doing something about, for it has turned some pockets of London into dead-zones, but as a serious factor in the broader housing market it is not relevant.
Bingo. And as someone else said before, its worth remembering that empty houses should exist in a healthy economy.
The severe shortage of empty homes at the minute means that any slum landlord or developer with run down houses, or small boxy developments, knows they'll have a tenant/buyer because there's no alternative.
In a healthy economy anyone holding run-down or inadequate homes should be incapable of letting them out or selling them, except perhaps at a heavy discount being sold for refurbishment.
At the moment people can buy a property, neglect it and know they can let it out to someone who will pay their mortgage for them, as there is no alternative. There should be an alternative and any parasite doing that (and not all landlords are parasites, but these are) should be left having to pay their mortgage out of their own pocket as they have nobody wanting to rent the property.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
What do we mean by empty? Aren't there homes all across the plushest areas of London bought for investment with no-one there.
Very few by international standards. There will always be some redundancy in any sort of capital stock. But redundancy in housing isn't the silver bullet here - the scale of the issue is too small to justify swingeing intervention (and bureaucracy) needed to fill up the few empty homes.
Just need to build more units. And more infrastructure to support them.
Very few but very valuable. Foreign buyers owning multi-million pound houses that are left empty is a known factor. Unless you plan to convert them all into small flats, it is largely irrelevant.
I don't think that is true. Just look at the table in the Mail article. Unoccupied properties vary between 8 and 30% for the inner London boroughs listed. That is based on numbers of properties, not their value.
Still very few by international standards - see article attached (which argues we need MORE empty homes):
Second lowest rate in Europe after Poland apparently.
Drive around rural France and Italy and you're assailed by whole villages of empty and abandoned houses, some still maintained and others crumbling slowly into ruins. Even whole small towns in parts of the mezzogiorno. Empty homes are a result of too much supply and not enough demand. We have the opposite problem.
Your stats dont include second homes. So a Russian oligarch owning a dacha outside Moscow and five empty London flats he registers as second homes adds zero to the numbers.
The statistical significance of this Russian oligarch is zero.
It may be annoying, and it may be worth doing something about, for it has turned some pockets of London into dead-zones, but as a serious factor in the broader housing market it is not relevant.
Certainly statistically far less significant than the domestic and foreign second home owners in our near European neighbours.
Take the French village where I am an evil second home owner. Half the houses are permanently empty. Of the rest, probably half are second homes. Mainly of Parisians, but there’s also me, and a Luxembourgeois family.
Second home ownership in Britain is very low by European standards. In Italy it’s something mad like 50% of families owning a second home. And just about every one of my Finnish colleagues has a cabin in the woods for summer.
The only Italian family I know owned two second homes. Confirms what you say.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
They are not able to buy houses. Private housing estates are seed beds for Tory voters and there are too many lying fallow.
As a former Conservative voter who lies on the Boomer / GenX boundary, I will certainly not be voting for them in the foreseeable future. I regard the current crop as a mixture of fools, populists and English nationalists and none of them have any message that would win my vote.
Unless they have a radical cleaning out in the next 5 or 10 years, I might never vote Conservative ever again.
Where does that leave you? Lib Dem? NOTA?
Therein lies the problem. I voted LD in 2017 and did not bother to vote in 2019. It was the first election I have skipped since I was old enough to vote.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
What do we mean by empty? Aren't there homes all across the plushest areas of London bought for investment with no-one there.
Very few by international standards. There will always be some redundancy in any sort of capital stock. But redundancy in housing isn't the silver bullet here - the scale of the issue is too small to justify swingeing intervention (and bureaucracy) needed to fill up the few empty homes.
Just need to build more units. And more infrastructure to support them.
Very few but very valuable. Foreign buyers owning multi-million pound houses that are left empty is a known factor. Unless you plan to convert them all into small flats, it is largely irrelevant.
I don't think that is true. Just look at the table in the Mail article. Unoccupied properties vary between 8 and 30% for the inner London boroughs listed. That is based on numbers of properties, not their value.
Still very few by international standards - see article attached (which argues we need MORE empty homes):
Second lowest rate in Europe after Poland apparently.
Drive around rural France and Italy and you're assailed by whole villages of empty and abandoned houses, some still maintained and others crumbling slowly into ruins. Even whole small towns in parts of the mezzogiorno. Empty homes are a result of too much supply and not enough demand. We have the opposite problem.
Your stats dont include second homes. So a Russian oligarch owning a dacha outside Moscow and five empty London flats he registers as second homes adds zero to the numbers.
The statistical significance of this Russian oligarch is zero.
It may be annoying, and it may be worth doing something about, for it has turned some pockets of London into dead-zones, but as a serious factor in the broader housing market it is not relevant.
Certainly statistically far less significant than the domestic and foreign second home owners in our near European neighbours.
Take the French village where I am an evil second home owner. Half the houses are permanently empty. Of the rest, probably half are second homes. Mainly of Parisians, but there’s also me, and a Luxembourgeois family.
Second home ownership in Britain is very low by European standards. In Italy it’s something mad like 50% of families owning a second home. And just about every one of my Finnish colleagues has a cabin in the woods for summer.
In lots of central and eastern Europe too - many (maybe most) Czech families have a little dacha/cabin out in the woods or whatever; usually v modest but still.
Personally I've never seen the appeal; it's enough keeping on top of one gaff never mind two.
I think for a lot of people it's a tangible "happy place". The part of their brain that says it's OK to relax and put the cares of the world out of mind gets triggered when they crest the hill and the little village or the lake where the second home is comes into view. For others that might be somewhere else, like the gym or the football stadium, but for a lot of people it's the second home.
It certainly has that effect for me, more so than arriving on a holiday somewhere new. I compartmentalise holidays in a different way. They are exciting, exotic, travel broadening the mind. Not necessarily relaxation per se.
Jesus. This testimony about the Met arrests before the Coronation is absolutely damning. It turns out the 3 safety volunteers arrested actually work in partnership with the Met and were wearing hi vis vests with the Met name on them.
The Republic protestors were not allowed to contact the police liaison officer they had been working with who could have confirmed they were following the agreed rules.
And yet the Met spokesman can still sit in front of the committee and say the arress and holding for 16 hours was justified.
Fecking lunacy
I wish this was an outlier of the Met Police behaviour, but we all know sadly this typical of their incompetence/arrogance.
Idiotic question from Conservative MP Lee Anderson, who asks Republic leader Graham Smith, who was wrongly detained by the Metropolitan police for sixteen hours during the coronation: "If you embrace democracy so much, why don't you put your placards away and stand for election?" https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1658780054246109184
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
They are not able to buy houses. Private housing estates are seed beds for Tory voters and there are too many lying fallow.
As a former Conservative voter who lies on the Boomer / GenX boundary, I will certainly not be voting for them in the foreseeable future. I regard the current crop as a mixture of fools, populists and English nationalists and none of them have any message that would win my vote.
Unless they have a radical cleaning out in the next 5 or 10 years, I might never vote Conservative ever again.
I am more shocked that you ever voted Conservative than would not vote Conservative again.
I would say you were left of Keir Starmer based on your posts let alone the Tories!
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
What do you expect when the Boomers have pulled up the ladder behind them and all the Conservatives stand for is taxing working people and ensuring Buy To Let landlords get a secure rental income? And HYUFD's favourite of course, ensuring people who are already well off get a nice inheritance, rather than paying their own costs out of their own money.
Previous generations of Conservatives stood for aspiration and by 40 enough people would be homeowners and shareholders and have a stake in the economy that leads people to vote Conservative to keep that secure.
If all Millenials face is a future of paying for others, and debt and the graduate tax and mounting bills - why vote Conservative?
Unless the Conservatives return to being the party of aspiration they deserve to lose. And I will join my cohort in voting against them.
The biggest Tory poll bounce this century came from Osborne's inheritance tax cut proposals
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
Britain has more bedrooms per capita than ever before. One problem is that a lot of these bedrooms are empty - my Dad lives in a South London house with five bedrooms and only my step-mother for company.
The only members of either of their extended families who lives more than an hour away is me and my daughter - and we will now never stay with them again when visiting London because they still refuse to let people lock the bathroom doors.
You can't just leave that hanging there! What's the story?
It's an old house, so the locks on the internal doors are old-style key in lock turns a bolt kind of things.
More than a decade ago one of their grandsons, then aged around six, found themselves locked in the toilet and unable to unlock the door. Very upsetting, but didn't quite reach the stage where the small guy had to be rescued by the fire brigade putting a ladder up to the window.
After that, no keys in the locks. None. Not just when he's visiting, but ever. One of the bathroom doors doesn't even latch closed, so I know that when my brother's in-laws are visiting for a few hours they will take it in turns to act as a sentry outside the door. We tried bringing doorstops with us, which is better than nothing, but not really good enough.
The young man (I guess he's a step-nephew?) in question is at university now. I presume that he's locked and unlocked many doors now, and I can't imagine how mortifying it must be to visit his grandmother's house and have to deal with this absurdity. But you try telling a pair of boomers they might be doing something wrong. They just won't listen.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
They are not able to buy houses. Private housing estates are seed beds for Tory voters and there are too many lying fallow.
As a former Conservative voter who lies on the Boomer / GenX boundary, I will certainly not be voting for them in the foreseeable future. I regard the current crop as a mixture of fools, populists and English nationalists and none of them have any message that would win my vote.
Unless they have a radical cleaning out in the next 5 or 10 years, I might never vote Conservative ever again.
There are various strands of Conservatism. Some I like better than others. The Cameron version suited me better than most. Sunak is fine but some of those around him are hard to thole.
An unknown is what happens if two things occur: The Tory party thinks out (in opposition) what its actual principles are - the philosophy that undergirds all they do and distinguishes them from others - and secondly the Millennials and other younger groups experience actual Labour government as they cope with actual reality and hard choices.
There is no reason at the moment for younger groups (perhaps those under 90) to vote Tory, as recent actual experience has been devoid of principle and competence.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
The Conservatives haven't won that age group of 18 to 40 year olds since Cameron in 2010 but have won 3 general elections since. The Republicans haven't won that age group since Bush in 2000 but have won 2 presidential elections since and multiple midterms.
It is 40 to 60 year olds that decide elections, yes ideally more 30 to 40 year olds will get on the property ladder and become conservative but they lean Labour unless the Conservatives are well in front nationally anyway
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
What do you expect when the Boomers have pulled up the ladder behind them and all the Conservatives stand for is taxing working people and ensuring Buy To Let landlords get a secure rental income? And HYUFD's favourite of course, ensuring people who are already well off get a nice inheritance, rather than paying their own costs out of their own money.
Previous generations of Conservatives stood for aspiration and by 40 enough people would be homeowners and shareholders and have a stake in the economy that leads people to vote Conservative to keep that secure.
If all Millenials face is a future of paying for others, and debt and the graduate tax and mounting bills - why vote Conservative?
Unless the Conservatives return to being the party of aspiration they deserve to lose. And I will join my cohort in voting against them.
The biggest Tory poll bounce this century came from Osborne's inheritance tax cut proposals
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
I agree
You would think any sensible person would agree.
I think rent caps are madness. They just don't work.
'The scourge of empty homes' - well, it's unfortunate to see assets unused, but I don't think this is a major part of the housing problem, and to the extent that it is a problem it isn't one without one consistent reason or one consistent solution.
I agree with building more council houses, though that's only part of the solution. We need more private homes too. Again, this is a problem with many causes and without one big solution - though (with apologies for banging on about this) I am keen on experimenting more with public-sector-as-private-developer - enable the public sector to develop the sort of neighbourhoods it wants without necessarily having the inhabitants of those neighbourhoods all as Council house tenants.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
Britain has more bedrooms per capita than ever before. One problem is that a lot of these bedrooms are empty - my Dad lives in a South London house with five bedrooms and only my step-mother for company.
The only members of either of their extended families who lives more than an hour away is me and my daughter - and we will now never stay with them again when visiting London because they still refuse to let people lock the bathroom doors.
You can't just leave that hanging there! What's the story?
It's an old house, so the locks on the internal doors are old-style key in lock turns a bolt kind of things.
More than a decade ago one of their grandsons, then aged around six, found themselves locked in the toilet and unable to unlock the door. Very upsetting, but didn't quite reach the stage where the small guy had to be rescued by the fire brigade putting a ladder up to the window.
After that, no keys in the locks. None. Not just when he's visiting, but ever. One of the bathroom doors doesn't even latch closed, so I know that when my brother's in-laws are visiting for a few hours they will take it in turns to act as a sentry outside the door. We tried bringing doorstops with us, which is better than nothing, but not really good enough.
The young man (I guess he's a step-nephew?) in question is at university now. I presume that he's locked and unlocked many doors now, and I can't imagine how mortifying it must be to visit his grandmother's house and have to deal with this absurdity. But you try telling a pair of boomers they might be doing something wrong. They just won't listen.
Couldn't you just add a simple bolt lock to the inside of the doors? Less than two quid from Screwies.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
I agree
You would think any sensible person would agree.
We also need to build at (much) higher density. I grew up in a council house in Scotland - a terrace of 4 3 bed houses. The agricultural land behind it has been newly developed and in the same space there are 2 3 bed detached houses. Half the density. It’s nuts - on the other side of town there’s even greater waste of space with two bed bungalows sitting in the middle of large plots - prime agricultural land.
Recap: Mar 20 - Police make search warrant requests to Crown Office Mar 27 - end of SNP leadership contest. Humza Yousaf - backed by Sturgeon hierarchy - is narrow winner Apr 3 - Crown 'finalises' warrant & it's granted by sheriff Apr 5 - Police raid Sturgeon’s home/SNP HQ….
Differing opinions on whether 2 weeks for Crown (which has been overseeing police probe) to give nod to warrant may signal dragging of heels. Some legal sources say these things are usually turned round quickly, in a day/days. Others say if it's v complex it can take longer
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
What do you expect when the Boomers have pulled up the ladder behind them and all the Conservatives stand for is taxing working people and ensuring Buy To Let landlords get a secure rental income? And HYUFD's favourite of course, ensuring people who are already well off get a nice inheritance, rather than paying their own costs out of their own money.
Previous generations of Conservatives stood for aspiration and by 40 enough people would be homeowners and shareholders and have a stake in the economy that leads people to vote Conservative to keep that secure.
If all Millenials face is a future of paying for others, and debt and the graduate tax and mounting bills - why vote Conservative?
Unless the Conservatives return to being the party of aspiration they deserve to lose. And I will join my cohort in voting against them.
The biggest Tory poll bounce this century came from Osborne's inheritance tax cut proposals
Completely and factually incorrect.
Nope, true.
Going into the Tory conference of October 2007 Yougov for example had Brown's Labour ahead of Cameron's Tories 40% to 37%.
After Osborne's inheritance tax cut announcement at that conference however the next Yougov had Cameron's Tories on 41% to just 38% for Brown's Labour, forcing Brown to cancel the general election he had planned to give his premership the mandate from the voters he wanted but never got https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2010_United_Kingdom_general_election
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
Whilst I take the point, the sheer mass of Boomers is telling and not over yet. If we use the born-before-1965 definition, we still have about a decade before they even start to die off faster than being replaced, and the tail-enders won't all be dead until around 2045/50. For good or for ill, Boomer Pensionerism will be the deciding factor in British politics for many years to come.
Jesus. This testimony about the Met arrests before the Coronation is absolutely damning. It turns out the 3 safety volunteers arrested actually work in partnership with the Met and were wearing hi vis vests with the Met name on them.
The Republic protestors were not allowed to contact the police liaison officer they had been working with who could have confirmed they were following the agreed rules.
And yet the Met spokesman can still sit in front of the committee and say the arress and holding for 16 hours was justified.
Fecking lunacy
I wish this was an outlier of the Met Police behaviour, but we all know sadly this typical of their incompetence/arrogance.
Idiotic question from Conservative MP Lee Anderson, who asks Republic leader Graham Smith, who was wrongly detained by the Metropolitan police for sixteen hours during the coronation: "If you embrace democracy so much, why don't you put your placards away and stand for election?" https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1658780054246109184
Why? Corbyn was a republican and lost the 2019 election to the monarchist Tories. Now both Starmer and Sunak want to keep the monarchy. So if Smith really wants to advance his agenda, why doesn't he fill the gap in the market now and set up his own pro Republic party?
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
They are not able to buy houses. Private housing estates are seed beds for Tory voters and there are too many lying fallow.
As a former Conservative voter who lies on the Boomer / GenX boundary, I will certainly not be voting for them in the foreseeable future. I regard the current crop as a mixture of fools, populists and English nationalists and none of them have any message that would win my vote.
Unless they have a radical cleaning out in the next 5 or 10 years, I might never vote Conservative ever again.
I am more shocked that you ever voted Conservative than would not vote Conservative again.
I would say you were left of Keir Starmer based on your posts let alone the Tories!
Your precious Tory party has swung so far to the right that Starmer has plenty of political room and as for the Boomers who are pulling up the ladder behind them, I have nothing but utter contempt for them, the greedy b******ds and I say that was someone born in the early 60s so I am not a millennial or GenZ.
In fact, I feel that the Millennials and GenZ are being so used and abused by the Boomers that I will happily vote for anything that wrecks the Boomer complacency and that includes the lickspittle MPs who put the grey vote ahead of the country's needs.
The younger generation deserve better than to be treated as indentured servants serfs!
Recap: Mar 20 - Police make search warrant requests to Crown Office Mar 27 - end of SNP leadership contest. Humza Yousaf - backed by Sturgeon hierarchy - is narrow winner Apr 3 - Crown 'finalises' warrant & it's granted by sheriff Apr 5 - Police raid Sturgeon’s home/SNP HQ….
Differing opinions on whether 2 weeks for Crown (which has been overseeing police probe) to give nod to warrant may signal dragging of heels. Some legal sources say these things are usually turned round quickly, in a day/days. Others say if it's v complex it can take longer
Given the complexity of the case and the people likely to be arrested I'm not surprised it took so long as it probably kept on getting kicked up to the next senior person at the Crown Office.
You saw it with cash for honours.
IIRC every time Blair was questioned it had to be reviewed simply because of the seismic fallout if the police et al had got it wrong.
Helps when your appointed pal is in thecabinet and in charge of crown office. The case has been ongoing for 2 years and so any preparatory work will have been covered , an obvious stitch up to allow Useless get in.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
They are not able to buy houses. Private housing estates are seed beds for Tory voters and there are too many lying fallow.
As a former Conservative voter who lies on the Boomer / GenX boundary, I will certainly not be voting for them in the foreseeable future. I regard the current crop as a mixture of fools, populists and English nationalists and none of them have any message that would win my vote.
Unless they have a radical cleaning out in the next 5 or 10 years, I might never vote Conservative ever again.
I am more shocked that you ever voted Conservative than would not vote Conservative again.
I would say you were left of Keir Starmer based on your posts let alone the Tories!
Your precious Tory party has swung so far to the right that Starmer has plenty of political room and as for the Boomers who are pulling up the ladder behind them, I have nothing but utter contempt for them, the greedy b******ds and I say that was someone born in the early 60s so I am not a millennial or GenZ.
In fact, I feel that the Millennials and GenZ are being so used and abused by the Boomers that I will happily vote for anything that wrecks the Boomer complacency and that includes the lickspittle MPs who put the grey vote ahead of the country's needs.
The younger generation deserve better than to be treated as indentured servants serfs!
As I said, you are ideologically closer to Corbyn Labour than even the Cameron Tories
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
Whilst I take the point, the sheer mass of Boomers is telling and not over yet. If we use the born-before-1965 definition, we still have about a decade before they even start to die off faster than being replaced, and the tail-enders won't all be dead until around 2045/50. For good or for ill, Boomer Pensionerism will be the deciding factor in British politics for many years to come.
Unless you get people like me (pre-1965) who are so disgusted by how the younger generation are being treated that they turn against the whole idea of what the Boomers want and those that are prepared to unbalance and wreck the economy to give it to them.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
Whilst I take the point, the sheer mass of Boomers is telling and not over yet. If we use the born-before-1965 definition, we still have about a decade before they even start to die off faster than being replaced, and the tail-enders won't all be dead until around 2045/50. For good or for ill, Boomer Pensionerism will be the deciding factor in British politics for many years to come.
Indeed, the median voter in UK general elections is now 50 not 30, higher in local elections
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
What do you expect when the Boomers have pulled up the ladder behind them and all the Conservatives stand for is taxing working people and ensuring Buy To Let landlords get a secure rental income? And HYUFD's favourite of course, ensuring people who are already well off get a nice inheritance, rather than paying their own costs out of their own money.
Previous generations of Conservatives stood for aspiration and by 40 enough people would be homeowners and shareholders and have a stake in the economy that leads people to vote Conservative to keep that secure.
If all Millenials face is a future of paying for others, and debt and the graduate tax and mounting bills - why vote Conservative?
Unless the Conservatives return to being the party of aspiration they deserve to lose. And I will join my cohort in voting against them.
The biggest Tory poll bounce this century came from Osborne's inheritance tax cut proposals
Completely and factually incorrect.
Nope, true.
Going into the Tory conference of October 2007 Yougov for example had Brown's Labour ahead of Cameron's Tories 40% to 37%.
After Osborne's inheritance tax cut announcement at that conference however the next Yougov had Cameron's Tories on 41% to just 38% for Brown's Labour, forcing Brown to cancel the general election he had planned to give his premership the mandate from the voters he wanted but never got https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2010_United_Kingdom_general_election
And you claim to be a self-professed expert on opinion polls
By your own figures, a 4% bounce in the Tory share, is not remotely close to being the largest Tory bounce this century.
There was far more than just Osborne's speech happening then anyway. The Tories had a very competent Opposition leader in David Cameron. Labour's Gordon Brown was incompetent, had his own bounce that was unwinding and mishandled the situation completely. And the Tories still failed to win a majority at the next election anyway.
Contrast with 2019 as just one counter-example. The Conservatives polled just 17-18% with YouGov on three separate surveys in June 2019 and polled less than 25% in almost every survey in June 2019 by any pollster.
The Conservatives rose from 17-18% to over 30% and kept rising until scoring 45% in Great Britain at the General Election a few months later.
The Conservatives scored 28% higher at the General Election than the 17% they had in June 2019 according to YouGov. That bounce, confirmed with a landslide election victory, utterly dwarfs the bounce that Osborne was not solely responsible for which resulted in a Hung Parliament.
Your claim it is the largest bounce this century is totally preposterous and fallacious.
Jesus. This testimony about the Met arrests before the Coronation is absolutely damning. It turns out the 3 safety volunteers arrested actually work in partnership with the Met and were wearing hi vis vests with the Met name on them.
The Republic protestors were not allowed to contact the police liaison officer they had been working with who could have confirmed they were following the agreed rules.
And yet the Met spokesman can still sit in front of the committee and say the arress and holding for 16 hours was justified.
Fecking lunacy
I wish this was an outlier of the Met Police behaviour, but we all know sadly this typical of their incompetence/arrogance.
Idiotic question from Conservative MP Lee Anderson, who asks Republic leader Graham Smith, who was wrongly detained by the Metropolitan police for sixteen hours during the coronation: "If you embrace democracy so much, why don't you put your placards away and stand for election?" https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1658780054246109184
Why? Corbyn was a republican and lost the 2019 election to the monarchist Tories. Now both Starmer and Sunak want to keep the monarchy. So if Smith really wants to advance his agenda, why doesn't he fill the gap in the market now and set up his own pro Republic party?
One of the most pernicious fallacies about democracy is that it is solely about the ballot box.
Democracy is also about freedom of expression and protest, and free press among other things. It is beside the point that it's not an issue that is ever likely to decide a voter's choice at a general election - Republic campaign on a single issue, and one of the best ways to get that across is through legitimate and legal protest.
Jesus. This testimony about the Met arrests before the Coronation is absolutely damning. It turns out the 3 safety volunteers arrested actually work in partnership with the Met and were wearing hi vis vests with the Met name on them.
The Republic protestors were not allowed to contact the police liaison officer they had been working with who could have confirmed they were following the agreed rules.
And yet the Met spokesman can still sit in front of the committee and say the arress and holding for 16 hours was justified.
Fecking lunacy
I wish this was an outlier of the Met Police behaviour, but we all know sadly this typical of their incompetence/arrogance.
Idiotic question from Conservative MP Lee Anderson, who asks Republic leader Graham Smith, who was wrongly detained by the Metropolitan police for sixteen hours during the coronation: "If you embrace democracy so much, why don't you put your placards away and stand for election?" https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1658780054246109184
Why? Corbyn was a republican and lost the 2019 election to the monarchist Tories. Now both Starmer and Sunak want to keep the monarchy. So if Smith really wants to advance his agenda, why doesn't he fill the gap in the market now and set up his own pro Republic party?
If he wants to he can. But if he wants to peacefully protest he also can. Well he can at the moment, if your party embraces 30p and Cruella's bizarre form of authoritarianism further, I suspect legally that may no longer be true. This week's Nuremberg Rally has been quite scary.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
Britain has more bedrooms per capita than ever before. One problem is that a lot of these bedrooms are empty - my Dad lives in a South London house with five bedrooms and only my step-mother for company.
The only members of either of their extended families who lives more than an hour away is me and my daughter - and we will now never stay with them again when visiting London because they still refuse to let people lock the bathroom doors.
You can't just leave that hanging there! What's the story?
It's an old house, so the locks on the internal doors are old-style key in lock turns a bolt kind of things.
More than a decade ago one of their grandsons, then aged around six, found themselves locked in the toilet and unable to unlock the door. Very upsetting, but didn't quite reach the stage where the small guy had to be rescued by the fire brigade putting a ladder up to the window.
After that, no keys in the locks. None. Not just when he's visiting, but ever. One of the bathroom doors doesn't even latch closed, so I know that when my brother's in-laws are visiting for a few hours they will take it in turns to act as a sentry outside the door. We tried bringing doorstops with us, which is better than nothing, but not really good enough.
The young man (I guess he's a step-nephew?) in question is at university now. I presume that he's locked and unlocked many doors now, and I can't imagine how mortifying it must be to visit his grandmother's house and have to deal with this absurdity. But you try telling a pair of boomers they might be doing something wrong. They just won't listen.
Pretty shitty classing all boomers in with a pair of nutters. I am a boomer and have locks on all toilet doors and would not countenance not having one. Sure all sane people are the same.
Tories accused of betraying buy-to-let Britain to win the avocado vote
Party turns its back on loyal supporters in an effort to woo younger voters
Landlords say they are being made scapegoats for years of failed housing policy as new legislation is tipped to drive thousands more to sell up.
Conservatives will hope that the Renters' Reform Bill, which will be introduced to Parliament today, will be a Generation Rent vote-winner.
But it is the latest blow for landlords who have seen returns whittled away in recent years, as tax breaks were taken away from them and interest rates have soared.
A cornerstone of the legislation is the scrapping of Section 21, or ‘no-fault’ evictions, which will make it harder for landlords to remove tenants who refuse to pay rent or trash the property.
That's a lunatic statement. Starkey has gone down the rabbit hole. This NatCon loonfest is really something else.
In my opinion, it's hard to look at the aims of either and come to any other conclusion. That's not to say that any footballer or LOTO who cheerfully takes a knee shares those aims, of course.
Tories accused of betraying buy-to-let Britain to win the avocado vote
Party turns its back on loyal supporters in an effort to woo younger voters
Landlords say they are being made scapegoats for years of failed housing policy as new legislation is tipped to drive thousands more to sell up.
Conservatives will hope that the Renters' Reform Bill, which will be introduced to Parliament today, will be a Generation Rent vote-winner.
But it is the latest blow for landlords who have seen returns whittled away in recent years, as tax breaks were taken away from them and interest rates have soared.
A cornerstone of the legislation is the scrapping of Section 21, or ‘no-fault’ evictions, which will make it harder for landlords to remove tenants who refuse to pay rent or trash the property.
Tories accused of betraying buy-to-let Britain to win the avocado vote
Party turns its back on loyal supporters in an effort to woo younger voters
Landlords say they are being made scapegoats for years of failed housing policy as new legislation is tipped to drive thousands more to sell up.
Conservatives will hope that the Renters' Reform Bill, which will be introduced to Parliament today, will be a Generation Rent vote-winner.
But it is the latest blow for landlords who have seen returns whittled away in recent years, as tax breaks were taken away from them and interest rates have soared.
A cornerstone of the legislation is the scrapping of Section 21, or ‘no-fault’ evictions, which will make it harder for landlords to remove tenants who refuse to pay rent or trash the property.
A tiny baby step in the right direction, though from the sound of it the scrapping of Section 21 leaves so many loopholes it'll still be far too easy for people who pay their bills on time to be kicked out of their home.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
They are not able to buy houses. Private housing estates are seed beds for Tory voters and there are too many lying fallow.
As a former Conservative voter who lies on the Boomer / GenX boundary, I will certainly not be voting for them in the foreseeable future. I regard the current crop as a mixture of fools, populists and English nationalists and none of them have any message that would win my vote.
Unless they have a radical cleaning out in the next 5 or 10 years, I might never vote Conservative ever again.
I am more shocked that you ever voted Conservative than would not vote Conservative again.
I would say you were left of Keir Starmer based on your posts let alone the Tories!
Your precious Tory party has swung so far to the right that Starmer has plenty of political room and as for the Boomers who are pulling up the ladder behind them, I have nothing but utter contempt for them, the greedy b******ds and I say that was someone born in the early 60s so I am not a millennial or GenZ.
In fact, I feel that the Millennials and GenZ are being so used and abused by the Boomers that I will happily vote for anything that wrecks the Boomer complacency and that includes the lickspittle MPs who put the grey vote ahead of the country's needs.
The younger generation deserve better than to be treated as indentured servants serfs!
Bev, They are lazy whingers , always on the outrage bus blaming someone else for their woes. We had no options , no free government cash etc, you had to get out and work and earn your money, government did not pay for a house , etc etc. We also did not have thousands of excuses as to why we were being discriminated against and that was reason why we were losers. It was sink or swim.
Jesus. This testimony about the Met arrests before the Coronation is absolutely damning. It turns out the 3 safety volunteers arrested actually work in partnership with the Met and were wearing hi vis vests with the Met name on them.
The Republic protestors were not allowed to contact the police liaison officer they had been working with who could have confirmed they were following the agreed rules.
And yet the Met spokesman can still sit in front of the committee and say the arress and holding for 16 hours was justified.
Fecking lunacy
I wish this was an outlier of the Met Police behaviour, but we all know sadly this typical of their incompetence/arrogance.
Idiotic question from Conservative MP Lee Anderson, who asks Republic leader Graham Smith, who was wrongly detained by the Metropolitan police for sixteen hours during the coronation: "If you embrace democracy so much, why don't you put your placards away and stand for election?" https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1658780054246109184
Why? Corbyn was a republican and lost the 2019 election to the monarchist Tories. Now both Starmer and Sunak want to keep the monarchy. So if Smith really wants to advance his agenda, why doesn't he fill the gap in the market now and set up his own pro Republic party?
The question was posed at the enquiry into the behaviour of the Met regarding the wrongful arrests. As such it was completely irrelevant.
Added to that, it appears to imply that the right to protest is something which holds no importance whatsoever for the idiotic thug.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
Whilst I take the point, the sheer mass of Boomers is telling and not over yet. If we use the born-before-1965 definition, we still have about a decade before they even start to die off faster than being replaced, and the tail-enders won't all be dead until around 2045/50. For good or for ill, Boomer Pensionerism will be the deciding factor in British politics for many years to come.
I don't quite understand what you mean by "we still have about a decade before they even start to die off faster than being replaced".
Boomers (and indeed all the other generations in the graph) aren't being replaced at all any more at all as they have all come of age (indeed they'd done so by the early 1980s in the case of Boomers).
So they are all dying off, albeit quite slowly in the case of Gen X and Millennials as they are still young to middle aged.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
Whilst I take the point, the sheer mass of Boomers is telling and not over yet. If we use the born-before-1965 definition, we still have about a decade before they even start to die off faster than being replaced, and the tail-enders won't all be dead until around 2045/50. For good or for ill, Boomer Pensionerism will be the deciding factor in British politics for many years to come.
Indeed, the median voter in UK general elections is now 50 not 30, higher in local elections
There are plenty of boomers who aren't yet collecting their pensions.
Average age of each "generation"
87* Silent 68.5 Boomer 51 X 35 Millenial 19 Z 5.5 Alpha
*Average silent gener probably a little younger due to mortality in 90s.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
Whilst I take the point, the sheer mass of Boomers is telling and not over yet. If we use the born-before-1965 definition, we still have about a decade before they even start to die off faster than being replaced, and the tail-enders won't all be dead until around 2045/50. For good or for ill, Boomer Pensionerism will be the deciding factor in British politics for many years to come.
I don't quite understand what you mean by "we still have about a decade before they even start to die off faster than being replaced".
Boomers (and indeed all the other generations in the graph) aren't being replaced at all any more at all as they have all come of age (indeed they'd done so by the early 1980s in the case of Boomers).
So they are all dying off, albeit quite slowly in the case of Gen X and Millennials as they are still young to middle aged.
Boomer pensioners are still growing within the population I believe as some boomers still work. The youngest boomers won't retire for another decade.
That's a lunatic statement. Starkey has gone down the rabbit hole. This NatCon loonfest is really something else.
In my opinion, it's hard to look at the aims of either and come to any other conclusion. That's not to say that any footballer or LOTO who cheerfully takes a knee shares those aims, of course.
How can they aim to destroy the legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition when they themselves are entirely a part of that tradition? They combine elements of Marxism and Anti-Racism, both of which have deep roots in Western culture and political thought. It's like saying that Liverpool is aiming to destroy footballing tradition when it tries to beat Manchester United.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
They are not able to buy houses. Private housing estates are seed beds for Tory voters and there are too many lying fallow.
As a former Conservative voter who lies on the Boomer / GenX boundary, I will certainly not be voting for them in the foreseeable future. I regard the current crop as a mixture of fools, populists and English nationalists and none of them have any message that would win my vote.
Unless they have a radical cleaning out in the next 5 or 10 years, I might never vote Conservative ever again.
I am more shocked that you ever voted Conservative than would not vote Conservative again.
I would say you were left of Keir Starmer based on your posts let alone the Tories!
Your precious Tory party has swung so far to the right that Starmer has plenty of political room and as for the Boomers who are pulling up the ladder behind them, I have nothing but utter contempt for them, the greedy b******ds and I say that was someone born in the early 60s so I am not a millennial or GenZ.
In fact, I feel that the Millennials and GenZ are being so used and abused by the Boomers that I will happily vote for anything that wrecks the Boomer complacency and that includes the lickspittle MPs who put the grey vote ahead of the country's needs.
The younger generation deserve better than to be treated as indentured servants serfs!
Bev, They are lazy whingers , always on the outrage bus blaming someone else for their woes. We had no options , no free government cash etc, you had to get out and work and earn your money, government did not pay for a house , etc etc. We also did not have thousands of excuses as to why we were being discriminated against and that was reason why we were losers. It was sink or swim.
But at least we had some ladders available to climb up Malc and I knew plenty of lazy whingers in my teens - my generation was not all upwardly mobile workaholics.
The crime is that the ladders we had have now been removed.
I also think there a truth in Starkey’s statement.
I don’t know about BLM, but, yes, much of “critical race theory” is driven by a desire to delegitimise the Western liberal tradition and it’s accompanying historical narrative.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
I agree
You would think any sensible person would agree.
I think rent caps are madness. They just don't work.
'The scourge of empty homes' - well, it's unfortunate to see assets unused, but I don't think this is a major part of the housing problem, and to the extent that it is a problem it isn't one without one consistent reason or one consistent solution.
I agree with building more council houses, though that's only part of the solution. We need more private homes too. Again, this is a problem with many causes and without one big solution - though (with apologies for banging on about this) I am keen on experimenting more with public-sector-as-private-developer - enable the public sector to develop the sort of neighbourhoods it wants without necessarily having the inhabitants of those neighbourhoods all as Council house tenants.
I would add the following.
- Force a sell-off/rent reductions of empty High Street properties by imposing strict rules on upkeep of empty properties on commercial property landlords. Either they keep the properties immaculate, sell them off, or reduce the rent. I believe this would go some way to reviving the High Street, and some of these properties would make good dwellings, or owner-occupied shops. - Empower councils to levy council tax on empty plots with planning permission owned by developers, to get them building and prevent land-banking
Tories accused of betraying buy-to-let Britain to win the avocado vote
Party turns its back on loyal supporters in an effort to woo younger voters
Landlords say they are being made scapegoats for years of failed housing policy as new legislation is tipped to drive thousands more to sell up.
Conservatives will hope that the Renters' Reform Bill, which will be introduced to Parliament today, will be a Generation Rent vote-winner.
But it is the latest blow for landlords who have seen returns whittled away in recent years, as tax breaks were taken away from them and interest rates have soared.
A cornerstone of the legislation is the scrapping of Section 21, or ‘no-fault’ evictions, which will make it harder for landlords to remove tenants who refuse to pay rent or trash the property.
A landlord badly managing a single property with 2 tenants is 2 labour voters. A landlord badly managing 5 properties with 2 tenants is 10 labour voters.
So the political ratio for favouring tenants over landlords is obvious....
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
They are not able to buy houses. Private housing estates are seed beds for Tory voters and there are too many lying fallow.
As a former Conservative voter who lies on the Boomer / GenX boundary, I will certainly not be voting for them in the foreseeable future. I regard the current crop as a mixture of fools, populists and English nationalists and none of them have any message that would win my vote.
Unless they have a radical cleaning out in the next 5 or 10 years, I might never vote Conservative ever again.
I am more shocked that you ever voted Conservative than would not vote Conservative again.
I would say you were left of Keir Starmer based on your posts let alone the Tories!
Your precious Tory party has swung so far to the right that Starmer has plenty of political room and as for the Boomers who are pulling up the ladder behind them, I have nothing but utter contempt for them, the greedy b******ds and I say that was someone born in the early 60s so I am not a millennial or GenZ.
In fact, I feel that the Millennials and GenZ are being so used and abused by the Boomers that I will happily vote for anything that wrecks the Boomer complacency and that includes the lickspittle MPs who put the grey vote ahead of the country's needs.
The younger generation deserve better than to be treated as indentured servants serfs!
Bev, They are lazy whingers , always on the outrage bus blaming someone else for their woes. We had no options , no free government cash etc, you had to get out and work and earn your money, government did not pay for a house , etc etc. We also did not have thousands of excuses as to why we were being discriminated against and that was reason why we were losers. It was sink or swim.
But at least we had some ladders available to climb up Malc and I knew plenty of lazy whingers in my teens - my generation was not all upwardly mobile workaholics.
The crime is that the ladders we had have now been removed.
There still seem to be plenty of younger ones with loads of cash and plenty that want it for nothing as well. All you hear is whining and whinging about pensioners. Too many think they are entitled to everything they want nowadays and want it now. I got nothing from nobody throughout my adult life and have had to earn every penny of it. Young ones are greedy , selfish and envious I am afraid.
Jesus. This testimony about the Met arrests before the Coronation is absolutely damning. It turns out the 3 safety volunteers arrested actually work in partnership with the Met and were wearing hi vis vests with the Met name on them.
The Republic protestors were not allowed to contact the police liaison officer they had been working with who could have confirmed they were following the agreed rules.
And yet the Met spokesman can still sit in front of the committee and say the arress and holding for 16 hours was justified.
Fecking lunacy
I wish this was an outlier of the Met Police behaviour, but we all know sadly this typical of their incompetence/arrogance.
Idiotic question from Conservative MP Lee Anderson, who asks Republic leader Graham Smith, who was wrongly detained by the Metropolitan police for sixteen hours during the coronation: "If you embrace democracy so much, why don't you put your placards away and stand for election?" https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1658780054246109184
Why? Corbyn was a republican and lost the 2019 election to the monarchist Tories. Now both Starmer and Sunak want to keep the monarchy. So if Smith really wants to advance his agenda, why doesn't he fill the gap in the market now and set up his own pro Republic party?
One of the most pernicious fallacies about democracy is that it is solely about the ballot box.
Democracy is also about freedom of expression and protest, and free press among other things. It is beside the point that it's not an issue that is ever likely to decide a voter's choice at a general election - Republic campaign on a single issue, and one of the best ways to get that across is through legitimate and legal protest.
No, they are just an annoying distraction. If they really wanted to try and change things they would have some guts and stand candidates for the House of Commons
That's a lunatic statement. Starkey has gone down the rabbit hole. This NatCon loonfest is really something else.
In my opinion, it's hard to look at the aims of either and come to any other conclusion. That's not to say that any footballer or LOTO who cheerfully takes a knee shares those aims, of course.
How can they aim to destroy the legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition when they themselves are entirely a part of that tradition? They combine elements of Marxism and Anti-Racism, both of which have deep roots in Western culture and political thought. It's like saying that Liverpool is aiming to destroy footballing tradition when it tries to beat Manchester United.
That strikes me as quite an odd argument - like saying that Lenin was trying to overthrow the Russian political order because he himself was a product of that order.
They do include elements of Marxism - which may have been born in the west but in no way can really be thought of as part of the political tradition: not being Marxist is pretty much what has defined the west since 1945. And it rather depends what you mean by anti-racism - but there is nothing in western political or cultural tradition that other races should receive preferential tradition to white people. And there is new stuff too which is entirely alien; largely around the feelings-trump-facts sphere. They sit wholly outside the Cartesian tradition of western thought.
Build new council homes, introduce rent caps and end the scourge of empty homes.
We need housing for public good, not private profit.
= Jeremy Corbyn this morning
Rental caps have very mixed results - they tend to create cliff edges in the market
We have a much lower rate of empty homes in the UK than just about anywhere else, not surprisingly given the shortage of housing and the price of property.
What we need much more supply. Doesn't matter if it's multi-million pound penthouses or social housing, because the price of property is driven by supply vs demand, pure and simple. And we need most new supply in locations where it's currently lowest or demand is highest.
In London, for example, there are 34K empty properties. Out of 3.7 million properties.
So literally 99% occupancy.
Britain has more bedrooms per capita than ever before. One problem is that a lot of these bedrooms are empty - my Dad lives in a South London house with five bedrooms and only my step-mother for company.
The only members of either of their extended families who lives more than an hour away is me and my daughter - and we will now never stay with them again when visiting London because they still refuse to let people lock the bathroom doors.
You can't just leave that hanging there! What's the story?
It's an old house, so the locks on the internal doors are old-style key in lock turns a bolt kind of things.
More than a decade ago one of their grandsons, then aged around six, found themselves locked in the toilet and unable to unlock the door. Very upsetting, but didn't quite reach the stage where the small guy had to be rescued by the fire brigade putting a ladder up to the window.
After that, no keys in the locks. None. Not just when he's visiting, but ever. One of the bathroom doors doesn't even latch closed, so I know that when my brother's in-laws are visiting for a few hours they will take it in turns to act as a sentry outside the door. We tried bringing doorstops with us, which is better than nothing, but not really good enough.
The young man (I guess he's a step-nephew?) in question is at university now. I presume that he's locked and unlocked many doors now, and I can't imagine how mortifying it must be to visit his grandmother's house and have to deal with this absurdity. But you try telling a pair of boomers they might be doing something wrong. They just won't listen.
Couldn't you just add a simple bolt lock to the inside of the doors? Less than two quid from Screwies.
This is possibly one of the weirdest family tragedies I have ever read.
I know!
We've tried all the suggestions. There are loads of simple different locks, or you could put the keys on the top of the doorframe, so small children couldn't reach them, or any one of a myriad of other solutions.
Or just put the keys back now that he's an adult. But they just won't listen.
My Dad has given all his children LPA over his affairs in in anticipation of not being able to make decisions for himself - but that's not helping us with the locks issue.
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
What do you expect when the Boomers have pulled up the ladder behind them and all the Conservatives stand for is taxing working people and ensuring Buy To Let landlords get a secure rental income? And HYUFD's favourite of course, ensuring people who are already well off get a nice inheritance, rather than paying their own costs out of their own money.
Previous generations of Conservatives stood for aspiration and by 40 enough people would be homeowners and shareholders and have a stake in the economy that leads people to vote Conservative to keep that secure.
If all Millenials face is a future of paying for others, and debt and the graduate tax and mounting bills - why vote Conservative?
Unless the Conservatives return to being the party of aspiration they deserve to lose. And I will join my cohort in voting against them.
The biggest Tory poll bounce this century came from Osborne's inheritance tax cut proposals
Completely and factually incorrect.
Nope, true.
Going into the Tory conference of October 2007 Yougov for example had Brown's Labour ahead of Cameron's Tories 40% to 37%.
After Osborne's inheritance tax cut announcement at that conference however the next Yougov had Cameron's Tories on 41% to just 38% for Brown's Labour, forcing Brown to cancel the general election he had planned to give his premership the mandate from the voters he wanted but never got https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2010_United_Kingdom_general_election
And you claim to be a self-professed expert on opinion polls
By your own figures, a 4% bounce in the Tory share, is not remotely close to being the largest Tory bounce this century.
There was far more than just Osborne's speech happening then anyway. The Tories had a very competent Opposition leader in David Cameron. Labour's Gordon Brown was incompetent, had his own bounce that was unwinding and mishandled the situation completely. And the Tories still failed to win a majority at the next election anyway.
Contrast with 2019 as just one counter-example. The Conservatives polled just 17-18% with YouGov on three separate surveys in June 2019 and polled less than 25% in almost every survey in June 2019 by any pollster.
The Conservatives rose from 17-18% to over 30% and kept rising until scoring 45% in Great Britain at the General Election a few months later.
The Conservatives scored 28% higher at the General Election than the 17% they had in June 2019 according to YouGov. That bounce, confirmed with a landslide election victory, utterly dwarfs the bounce that Osborne was not solely responsible for which resulted in a Hung Parliament.
Your claim it is the largest bounce this century is totally preposterous and fallacious.
The final Yougov before Boris was elected Tory leader and May was still leader had the Tories on 25% and Labour on 19%. The next Yougov taken fully after Boris was elected Tory leader and PM had the Tories on 31% and Labour on 21%, so a smaller Labour to Tory swing than after Osborne's IHT announcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2019_United_Kingdom_general_election
Any longer term swing was just Brexit Party protest voters returning home to the Tories once Boris replaced May
This image sums up the existential crisis facing the Conservative Party over the next few decades.
I don't see a single way in which the National Conservatism conference has helped moved the British centre-right any closer to addressing this. In fact, the reverse is true.
They are not able to buy houses. Private housing estates are seed beds for Tory voters and there are too many lying fallow.
As a former Conservative voter who lies on the Boomer / GenX boundary, I will certainly not be voting for them in the foreseeable future. I regard the current crop as a mixture of fools, populists and English nationalists and none of them have any message that would win my vote.
Unless they have a radical cleaning out in the next 5 or 10 years, I might never vote Conservative ever again.
I am more shocked that you ever voted Conservative than would not vote Conservative again.
I would say you were left of Keir Starmer based on your posts let alone the Tories!
Your precious Tory party has swung so far to the right that Starmer has plenty of political room and as for the Boomers who are pulling up the ladder behind them, I have nothing but utter contempt for them, the greedy b******ds and I say that was someone born in the early 60s so I am not a millennial or GenZ.
In fact, I feel that the Millennials and GenZ are being so used and abused by the Boomers that I will happily vote for anything that wrecks the Boomer complacency and that includes the lickspittle MPs who put the grey vote ahead of the country's needs.
The younger generation deserve better than to be treated as indentured servants serfs!
Bev, They are lazy whingers , always on the outrage bus blaming someone else for their woes. We had no options , no free government cash etc, you had to get out and work and earn your money, government did not pay for a house , etc etc. We also did not have thousands of excuses as to why we were being discriminated against and that was reason why we were losers. It was sink or swim.
But at least we had some ladders available to climb up Malc and I knew plenty of lazy whingers in my teens - my generation was not all upwardly mobile workaholics.
The crime is that the ladders we had have now been removed.
Particularly university grants and tuition fees. Which need hard work to make the best of, of course.
That's a lunatic statement. Starkey has gone down the rabbit hole. This NatCon loonfest is really something else.
In my opinion, it's hard to look at the aims of either and come to any other conclusion. That's not to say that any footballer or LOTO who cheerfully takes a knee shares those aims, of course.
How can they aim to destroy the legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition when they themselves are entirely a part of that tradition? They combine elements of Marxism and Anti-Racism, both of which have deep roots in Western culture and political thought. It's like saying that Liverpool is aiming to destroy footballing tradition when it tries to beat Manchester United.
And instead of fannying about on stage talking bollocks about shit I don't give a fuck about, how about doing something about my energy bills and food prices?
That's a lunatic statement. Starkey has gone down the rabbit hole. This NatCon loonfest is really something else.
Starkey is entirely right
The explicit aims of BLM are the destruction of the nuclear family, the villainisation of whiteness, etc
He’s just telling the truth. Hard facts
As it's a decentralised organisation, that appears confused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter#Structure_and_organization ...The loose structure of Black Lives Matter has contributed to confusion in the press and among activists, as actions or statements from chapters or individuals are sometimes attributed to "Black Lives Matter" as a whole. Matt Pearce, writing for the Los Angeles Times, commented that "the words could be serving as a political rallying cry or referring to the activist organization. Or it could be the fuzzily applied label used to describe a wide range of protests and conversations focused on racial inequality."
Can you point us to their explicit policy of destroying the nuclear family ? (Whoever 'they' might be in this case.)
Comments
The DB pensions went first, then tuition fees and loans came in, and finally the housing ladder got pulled up.
I had to incur university debt in NZ, and although it was not massive, I didn’t pay it off until my 30s. It’s very hard to pay down debt when you’re earning a starter wage.
I pretty much didn’t take holidays in my 20s.
I managed to get onto the housing ladder in 2010, but had I been even a few years younger I wouldn’t have been able to secure what I did.
The US destroyed FBI dossiers on Lord Mountbatten at the request of the British Government after the discovery of a wartime file accusing the royal of being a paedophile, his biographer has claimed.
Writing for The Mail's new Royals section, Andrew Lownie expanded on his 2019 discovery of a Second World War-era file which contained the claim that the Earl was a 'homosexual with a lusting for young boys'.
When he made a request to the FBI for other files the agency held on Mountbatten, he was told they had been destroyed 'after you asked for them'.
Dr Lownie, the author of The Mountbattens: their Lives & Loves, claimed this had been 'clearly' carried out at the 'request of the British Government'.
The historian also lamented the 'absurd' difficulty faced by biographers in getting access to royal archives in the UK after finding that files on King Edward VIII and his American wife Wallis Simpson were 'mysteriously' withdrawn from public view.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12089825/US-authorities-destroyed-dossiers-Lord-Mountbatten-request-UK-Government-historian-claims.html?ito=social-twitter_mailonline
It may be annoying, and it may be worth doing something about, for it has turned some pockets of London into dead-zones, but as a serious factor in the broader housing market it is not relevant.
Unless they have a radical cleaning out in the next 5 or 10 years, I might never vote Conservative ever again.
Take the French village where I am an evil second home owner. Half the houses are permanently empty. Of the rest, probably half are second homes. Mainly of Parisians, but there’s also me, and a Luxembourgeois family.
Second home ownership in Britain is very low by European standards. In Italy it’s something mad like 50% of families owning a second home. And just about every one of my Finnish colleagues has a cabin in the woods for summer.
Personally I've never seen the appeal; it's enough keeping on top of one gaff never mind two.
The severe shortage of empty homes at the minute means that any slum landlord or developer with run down houses, or small boxy developments, knows they'll have a tenant/buyer because there's no alternative.
In a healthy economy anyone holding run-down or inadequate homes should be incapable of letting them out or selling them, except perhaps at a heavy discount being sold for refurbishment.
At the moment people can buy a property, neglect it and know they can let it out to someone who will pay their mortgage for them, as there is no alternative. There should be an alternative and any parasite doing that (and not all landlords are parasites, but these are) should be left having to pay their mortgage out of their own pocket as they have nobody wanting to rent the property.
It certainly has that effect for me, more so than arriving on a holiday somewhere new. I compartmentalise holidays in a different way. They are exciting, exotic, travel broadening the mind. Not necessarily relaxation per se.
https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1658780054246109184
I would say you were left of Keir Starmer based on your posts let alone the Tories!
More than a decade ago one of their grandsons, then aged around six, found themselves locked in the toilet and unable to unlock the door. Very upsetting, but didn't quite reach the stage where the small guy had to be rescued by the fire brigade putting a ladder up to the window.
After that, no keys in the locks. None. Not just when he's visiting, but ever. One of the bathroom doors doesn't even latch closed, so I know that when my brother's in-laws are visiting for a few hours they will take it in turns to act as a sentry outside the door. We tried bringing doorstops with us, which is better than nothing, but not really good enough.
The young man (I guess he's a step-nephew?) in question is at university now. I presume that he's locked and unlocked many doors now, and I can't imagine how mortifying it must be to visit his grandmother's house and have to deal with this absurdity. But you try telling a pair of boomers they might be doing something wrong. They just won't listen.
There is no reason at the moment for younger groups (perhaps those under 90) to vote Tory, as recent actual experience has been devoid of principle and competence.
The Conservatives haven't won that age group of 18 to 40 year olds since Cameron in 2010 but have won 3 general elections since. The Republicans haven't won that age group since Bush in 2000 but have won 2 presidential elections since and multiple midterms.
It is 40 to 60 year olds that decide elections, yes ideally more 30 to 40 year olds will get on the property ladder and become conservative but they lean Labour unless the Conservatives are well in front nationally anyway
'The scourge of empty homes' - well, it's unfortunate to see assets unused, but I don't think this is a major part of the housing problem, and to the extent that it is a problem it isn't one without one consistent reason or one consistent solution.
I agree with building more council houses, though that's only part of the solution. We need more private homes too. Again, this is a problem with many causes and without one big solution - though (with apologies for banging on about this) I am keen on experimenting more with public-sector-as-private-developer - enable the public sector to develop the sort of neighbourhoods it wants without necessarily having the inhabitants of those neighbourhoods all as Council house tenants.
We need some Thatcherite deregulation of the housing market. And abolish Central or Council control and planning.
https://www.screwfix.com/p/straight-door-bolt-polished-chrome-51mm/92261?kpid=92261&ds_rl=1244072&gclid=CjwKCAjw9pGjBhB-EiwAa5jl3AIpmeq0sVjqSHL6hEciWJYfNiemQynFRUPMKNFR6h4I47vz3ZdL6hoC99AQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
This is possibly one of the weirdest family tragedies I have ever read.
Going into the Tory conference of October 2007 Yougov for example had Brown's Labour ahead of Cameron's Tories 40% to 37%.
After Osborne's inheritance tax cut announcement at that conference however the next Yougov had Cameron's Tories on 41% to just 38% for Brown's Labour, forcing Brown to cancel the general election he had planned to give his premership the mandate from the voters he wanted but never got
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2010_United_Kingdom_general_election
In fact, I feel that the Millennials and GenZ are being so used and abused by the Boomers that I will happily vote for anything that wrecks the Boomer complacency and that includes the lickspittle MPs who put the grey vote ahead of the country's needs.
The younger generation deserve better than to be treated as indentured servants serfs!
And on that note, wishing a good May afternoon to all !
By your own figures, a 4% bounce in the Tory share, is not remotely close to being the largest Tory bounce this century.
There was far more than just Osborne's speech happening then anyway. The Tories had a very competent Opposition leader in David Cameron. Labour's Gordon Brown was incompetent, had his own bounce that was unwinding and mishandled the situation completely. And the Tories still failed to win a majority at the next election anyway.
Contrast with 2019 as just one counter-example. The Conservatives polled just 17-18% with YouGov on three separate surveys in June 2019 and polled less than 25% in almost every survey in June 2019 by any pollster.
The Conservatives rose from 17-18% to over 30% and kept rising until scoring 45% in Great Britain at the General Election a few months later.
The Conservatives scored 28% higher at the General Election than the 17% they had in June 2019 according to YouGov. That bounce, confirmed with a landslide election victory, utterly dwarfs the bounce that Osborne was not solely responsible for which resulted in a Hung Parliament.
Your claim it is the largest bounce this century is totally preposterous and fallacious.
They're an attempt at destroying the entire legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition.'
-David Starkey at #NatConUK
https://twitter.com/NatConTalk/status/1658748986247860224?s=20
Democracy is also about freedom of expression and protest, and free press among other things. It is beside the point that it's not an issue that is ever likely to decide a voter's choice at a general election - Republic campaign on a single issue, and one of the best ways to get that across is through legitimate and legal protest.
Tories accused of betraying buy-to-let Britain to win the avocado vote
Party turns its back on loyal supporters in an effort to woo younger voters
Landlords say they are being made scapegoats for years of failed housing policy as new legislation is tipped to drive thousands more to sell up.
Conservatives will hope that the Renters' Reform Bill, which will be introduced to Parliament today, will be a Generation Rent vote-winner.
But it is the latest blow for landlords who have seen returns whittled away in recent years, as tax breaks were taken away from them and interest rates have soared.
A cornerstone of the legislation is the scrapping of Section 21, or ‘no-fault’ evictions, which will make it harder for landlords to remove tenants who refuse to pay rent or trash the property.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/buy-to-let/tories-buy-to-let-generation-rent/
That's not to say that any footballer or LOTO who cheerfully takes a knee shares those aims, of course.
Its an obsolete technology replaced by LCDs anyway. 🤷♂️
As such it was completely irrelevant.
Added to that, it appears to imply that the right to protest is something which holds no importance whatsoever for the idiotic thug.
Boomers (and indeed all the other generations in the graph) aren't being replaced at all any more at all as they have all come of age (indeed they'd done so by the early 1980s in the case of Boomers).
So they are all dying off, albeit quite slowly in the case of Gen X and Millennials as they are still young to middle aged.
At least they aren't talking about repatriation of darkies.
Yet.
Average age of each "generation"
87* Silent
68.5 Boomer
51 X
35 Millenial
19 Z
5.5 Alpha
*Average silent gener probably a little younger due to mortality in 90s.
The explicit aims of BLM are the destruction of the nuclear family, the villainisation of whiteness, etc
He’s just telling the truth. Hard facts
The crime is that the ladders we had have now been removed.
Maybe the correct answer is 'historian'?
I don’t know about BLM, but, yes, much of “critical race theory” is driven by a desire to delegitimise the Western liberal tradition and it’s accompanying historical narrative.
- Force a sell-off/rent reductions of empty High Street properties by imposing strict rules on upkeep of empty properties on commercial property landlords. Either they keep the properties immaculate, sell them off, or reduce the rent. I believe this would go some way to reviving the High Street, and some of these properties would make good dwellings, or owner-occupied shops.
- Empower councils to levy council tax on empty plots with planning permission owned by developers, to get them building and prevent land-banking
https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/ian-odoherty-torching-of-asylum-seekers-tents-a-new-low-for-ireland-and-it-could-get-worse-before-it-gets-better/a1319072311.html
A landlord badly managing 5 properties with 2 tenants is 10 labour voters.
So the political ratio for favouring tenants over landlords is obvious....
Is that their concern, schools can only afford CRT and not OLED?
See for example all the violence meted out to Anglo-Norman visitors to Ireland in the 12th Century.
They do include elements of Marxism - which may have been born in the west but in no way can really be thought of as part of the political tradition: not being Marxist is pretty much what has defined the west since 1945. And it rather depends what you mean by anti-racism - but there is nothing in western political or cultural tradition that other races should receive preferential tradition to white people.
And there is new stuff too which is entirely alien; largely around the feelings-trump-facts sphere. They sit wholly outside the Cartesian tradition of western thought.
We've tried all the suggestions. There are loads of simple different locks, or you could put the keys on the top of the doorframe, so small children couldn't reach them, or any one of a myriad of other solutions.
Or just put the keys back now that he's an adult. But they just won't listen.
My Dad has given all his children LPA over his affairs in in anticipation of not being able to make decisions for himself - but that's not helping us with the locks issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2019_United_Kingdom_general_election
Any longer term swing was just Brexit Party protest voters returning home to the Tories once Boris replaced May
solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant as the saying goes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter#Structure_and_organization
...The loose structure of Black Lives Matter has contributed to confusion in the press and among activists, as actions or statements from chapters or individuals are sometimes attributed to "Black Lives Matter" as a whole. Matt Pearce, writing for the Los Angeles Times, commented that "the words could be serving as a political rallying cry or referring to the activist organization. Or it could be the fuzzily applied label used to describe a wide range of protests and conversations focused on racial inequality."
Can you point us to their explicit policy of destroying the nuclear family ?
(Whoever 'they' might be in this case.)