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?
Ive been ignoring the government and dealing with it myself. Why not try it ?
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.
Ah, I see the point now that PENSIONERS are becoming more Boomer-y as everyone retiring now (at state pension age) is a Boomer, but a lot of dying pensioners are in the Silent generation.
However, I read the original post as making the point that the current Conservatives have a hell of a lot invested in a generation which is declining as a share of the voting age population as it's dying at a faster rate than (younger) Gen X and Millenials (and indeed Gen Z who are all the new voters). They are dying slower than the Silent Generation but they have always been a small generation as the name suggests and many of those left are very elderly now.
In a sense, the Conservatives' Boomer problem is that it is and remains a large and important generation (as the name also suggests). But it is changing and, because of the way actuarial death tables work, the change will not just continue but accelerate. So the incentive is to stick with pandering to the Boomers but at the cost of increasingly alienating the Millennials in particular. If it wasn't such a large generation, it would be easier for the Conservatives to pivot away to appeal to younger people.
You could also characterise it as "challenging the narrow perspective and assumptions of the western tradition" which, if the western tradition is *not* to atrophy as a result of being stuck in a half-imagined past, it would benefit from addressing constructively.
Not that there aren't some in and around those movements who *are* trying to destroy it with the help of some powerful non-Western state actors.
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.
Sorry I can't write for toffee was unclear. I meant "Boomer Pensioners" Those born on the last day of Boomership 31Dec1964 will retire between now and 01Jan2032 (the day after their 67th birthday).
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
It is true that I have nothing in common with your preferred political Party. They are the most repellent bunch of self-serving, untalented half-wits that have disgraced Parliament in my lifetime.
Frankly I am amazed that you (or anyone) can stomach supporting such a degenerate bunch.
You could also characterise it as "challenging the narrow perspective and assumptions of the western tradition" which, if the western tradition is *not* to atrophy as a result of being stuck in a half-imagined past, it would benefit from addressing constructively.
Not that there aren't some in and around those movements who *are* trying to destroy it with the help of some powerful non-Western state actors.
That sounds a bit xenophobic. Are non-Western actors supposed to be mere spectators and not challenge the narrow perspective and assumptions of the Western tradition?
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?
Ive been ignoring the government and dealing with it myself. Why not try it ?
I have. But I don't live in a country of just myself.
You could also characterise it as "challenging the narrow perspective and assumptions of the western tradition" which, if the western tradition is *not* to atrophy as a result of being stuck in a half-imagined past, it would benefit from addressing constructively.
Not that there aren't some in and around those movements who *are* trying to destroy it with the help of some powerful non-Western state actors.
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.
I am afraid I disagree with you. Marxism is an entirely Western concept, Marx was from Germany and wrote in London, building on earlier ideas from other Western philosophers like Hegel. You have fallen into the trap of equating Marxism with Soviet Communism. Marxist thought has been part of Western philosophical and political thought since 1945 including among those who were fiercely critical of the Soviet Union. A number of Marxists advised Boris Johnson and he put one of them in the House of Lords, for instance. Similarly, anti-racism has deep roots, right back to the anti-slavery movement which was rooted in nonconformist Christianity. Starkey is simply trying to delegitimise people that he disagrees with politically, and it is grubby, nasty behaviour. Personally I don't agree with the BLM/CRT crowd on everything, but I don't think it is acceptable to try to claim that they are an alien "nonwestern" concept. As a historian Starkey of all people should know that. And of course he does know it.
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.
Sorry I can't write for toffee was unclear. I meant "Boomer Pensioners" Those born on the last day of Boomership 31Dec1964 will retire between now and 01Jan2032 (the day after their 67th birthday).
I keep forgetting the current pension age is 67 (Edit, 66 right now !). I've got it mentally down as 68. Well it's 68 for millennials and some younger Gen Xers..
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.
My daughter now has a PhD in Chemistry and a debt of about £50K which, at the interest rates for repayment, will be a significant burden on her for a large portion of her working life.
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
A pedant notes that if those are explicit aims of BLM then BLM are presumably, contrary to what Starkey says, exactly what they pretend to be.
You're being humourously pedantic, of course, but you're also exactly right. They ARE what they pretend to be. What they are not is what their cheerleaders pretend they are. They are not cheerful racists-are-bad-lets-all-live-in-peace sorts; they are the-west-is-evil-and-must-be-destroyed sorts.
Yougov meanwhile finds 50% of voters think the police were too lenient or got the balance right handling protestors on Coronation Day while 30% think there were too harsh.
More Tory voters think the police were too lenient however, 15% to the 13% who think they were too harsh.
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
From your own figures, 25% to 31% is a bigger bounce for the Tories than the 37% to 41% you claimed as the "biggest this century" earlier. 🤦♂️
There is no possible universe or mathematics in which 2007 was a bigger bounce than 2019. Its just wrong, admit you were wrong for once. 🤦♂️
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.
I am afraid I disagree with you. Marxism is an entirely Western concept, Marx was from Germany and wrote in London, building on earlier ideas from other Western philosophers like Hegel. You have fallen into the trap of equating Marxism with Soviet Communism. Marxist thought has been part of Western philosophical and political thought since 1945 including among those who were fiercely critical of the Soviet Union. A number of Marxists advised Boris Johnson and he put one of them in the House of Lords, for instance. Similarly, anti-racism has deep roots, right back to the anti-slavery movement which was rooted in nonconformist Christianity. Starkey is simply trying to delegitimise people that he disagrees with politically, and it is grubby, nasty behaviour. Personally I don't agree with the BLM/CRT crowd on everything, but I don't think it is acceptable to try to claim that they are an alien "nonwestern" concept. As a historian Starkey of all people should know that. And of course he does know it.
The quote you pasted here doesn't say that. It accuses them of wanting to destroy the legitimacy of what is implied to be the existing order. This is surely an accurate claim about any revolutionary movement.
The Irish have a long history of violence towards immigrants.
See for example all the violence meted out to Anglo-Norman visitors to Ireland in the 12th Century.
As I recall, you English tried much the same thing in the 11th Century but botched the job. No wonder the Scots and Irish had to build your Empire for you....
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.
Sorry I can't write for toffee was unclear. I meant "Boomer Pensioners" Those born on the last day of Boomership 31Dec1964 will retire between now and 01Jan2032 (the day after their 67th birthday).
I keep forgetting the current pension age is 67 (Edit, 66 right now !). I've got it mentally down as 68. Well it's 68 for millennials and some younger Gen Xers..
You do not have to retire at 66 or 67, you can get state pension and not be retired, though I suppose technically a pensioner in teh contexty on here of being evil and despicable for having worked 50 years and made something of yourself by hard graft rather than sticking your hand out..
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.
I'm not a boomer myself, but my generation benefitted from no tuition fees. OTOH, we did have high unemployment, and far fewer of us went to university.
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.
My daughter now has a PhD in Chemistry and a debt of about £50K which, at the interest rates for repayment, will be a significant burden on her for a large portion of her working life.
And yet the people you want to vote for want to leave that policy in place. My son has an Masters in chemistry and will have paid off his loan in a total of 7 years, its harder on those who havent done STEM degrees as theyll be stuck with this shit debt for much 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
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
From your own figures, 25% to 31% is a bigger bounce for the Tories than the 37% to 41% you claimed as the "biggest this century" earlier. 🤦♂️
There is no possible universe or mathematics in which 2007 was a bigger bounce than 2019. Its just wrong, admit you were wrong for once. 🤦♂️
The swing from Labour to Tory was 3% after Osborne's IHT announcement in 2017 while the swing from Labour to Tory was just 2% when Boris replaced May as Tory leader in 2019
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.
My daughter now has a PhD in Chemistry and a debt of about £50K which, at the interest rates for repayment, will be a significant burden on her for a large portion of her working life.
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.
There are 8 million more properties in France for a similar population, by the way.
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.
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.
I am afraid I disagree with you. Marxism is an entirely Western concept, Marx was from Germany and wrote in London, building on earlier ideas from other Western philosophers like Hegel. You have fallen into the trap of equating Marxism with Soviet Communism. Marxist thought has been part of Western philosophical and political thought since 1945 including among those who were fiercely critical of the Soviet Union. A number of Marxists advised Boris Johnson and he put one of them in the House of Lords, for instance. Similarly, anti-racism has deep roots, right back to the anti-slavery movement which was rooted in nonconformist Christianity. Starkey is simply trying to delegitimise people that he disagrees with politically, and it is grubby, nasty behaviour. Personally I don't agree with the BLM/CRT crowd on everything, but I don't think it is acceptable to try to claim that they are an alien "nonwestern" concept. As a historian Starkey of all people should know that. And of course he does know it.
The quote you pasted here doesn't say that. It accuses them of wanting to destroy the legitimacy of what is implied to be the existing order. This is surely an accurate claim about any revolutionary movement.
I didn't post the quotation, I just commented on it. It said that BLM/CRT want to destroy the legitimacy of the Western political and philosophical tradition, which I pointed out was an absurd statement because they themselves are a part of that same tradition.
Yet latest Leger poll of Conservatives 33% to Liberals 32% is almost identical to the 2021 Canadian election result of Conservatives 33.7% and Liberals 32.6%. Main difference is Poilievre has squeezed Bernier's populist PPC party from 5% in 2021 to just 2% now and won back rightwingers to the Conservatives but at the expense of losing a few centrist voters who voted for O'Toole back to Trudeau's Liberals
I'm not sure why you're quoting an individual poll when the site I linked to specifically takes an average of the latest polls, which we know is a more accurate way of assessing the situation.
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
From your own figures, 25% to 31% is a bigger bounce for the Tories than the 37% to 41% you claimed as the "biggest this century" earlier. 🤦♂️
There is no possible universe or mathematics in which 2007 was a bigger bounce than 2019. Its just wrong, admit you were wrong for once. 🤦♂️
The swing from Labour to Tory was 3% after Osborne's IHT announcement in 2017 while the swing from Labour to Tory was just 2% when Boris replaced May as Tory leader in 2019
Bounce for the Tories is measured by the Tory share, not Labour share. +6 is bigger than +4
If you meant swing, there have been bigger swings this century than 3% too.
Your claim is just wrong as a matter of fact and record.
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.
I'm not a boomer myself, but my generation benefitted from no tuition fees. OTOH, we did have high unemployment, and far fewer of us went to university.
In our day ( Im 62 ) the deal was go to Uni and youll be the high tax payers of the future. Fair enough Ive been a high tax payer most of my life,
Now its tax students for getting an education several times over - once on a loan, then on higher income and then to pay the write offs for a loan book that wont pay back in full.
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.
A big deterrent to letting out property is the expense and difficulty of evicting a problem tenant. You are looking at at a timescale of 6-9 months, and legal costs of £6000 or so. At the same time, you're receiving no rent, unless the tenant is getting Housing Benefit, when you can apply to the Council to pay it directly.
That leaves the letting market to those who will use ... extra-legal means to recover 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.
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.
I am afraid I disagree with you. Marxism is an entirely Western concept, Marx was from Germany and wrote in London, building on earlier ideas from other Western philosophers like Hegel. You have fallen into the trap of equating Marxism with Soviet Communism. Marxist thought has been part of Western philosophical and political thought since 1945 including among those who were fiercely critical of the Soviet Union. A number of Marxists advised Boris Johnson and he put one of them in the House of Lords, for instance. Similarly, anti-racism has deep roots, right back to the anti-slavery movement which was rooted in nonconformist Christianity. Starkey is simply trying to delegitimise people that he disagrees with politically, and it is grubby, nasty behaviour. Personally I don't agree with the BLM/CRT crowd on everything, but I don't think it is acceptable to try to claim that they are an alien "nonwestern" concept. As a historian Starkey of all people should know that. And of course he does know it.
CRT/BLM is not a nice fluffy 'all races are equal' movement. And the fact that Boris Johnson had Susan Michie advising him doesn't mean Marxism is all fine and mainstream in the west!
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.
The standard solution to this is something like this -
On the inside, you have a knob to close the rack bolt. On the outside you have a slot, so in an emergency, a screwdriver or even a penny can be used to open the door.
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.
Ah, I see the point now that PENSIONERS are becoming more Boomer-y as everyone retiring now (at state pension age) is a Boomer, but a lot of dying pensioners are in the Silent generation.
However, I read the original post as making the point that the current Conservatives have a hell of a lot invested in a generation which is declining as a share of the voting age population as it's dying at a faster rate than (younger) Gen X and Millenials (and indeed Gen Z who are all the new voters). They are dying slower than the Silent Generation but they have always been a small generation as the name suggests and many of those left are very elderly now.
In a sense, the Conservatives' Boomer problem is that it is and remains a large and important generation (as the name also suggests). But it is changing and, because of the way actuarial death tables work, the change will not just continue but accelerate. So the incentive is to stick with pandering to the Boomers but at the cost of increasingly alienating the Millennials in particular. If it wasn't such a large generation, it would be easier for the Conservatives to pivot away to appeal to younger people.
Assuming that the Tories lose the next election it will be a problem that to a large extent Labour will solve for them.
I expect Labour in government to be a lot more popular among older voters*, and that younger voters will become rapidly disillusioned - there's not much sign of Labour making the sort of radical changes that would upend the current situation in the housing market, for example.
This will create a large change in the age profile of Tory voters before the Tories do anything themselves.
* We look at the bias of older voters to vote Tory and we assume that this is a Conservative bias in this age group, rather than a conservative bias. Older voters may have become more inclined to vote for the incumbent government, which would explain why the bias with increasing age was at a minimum in 2010.
Unfortunately, even if Labour form the next government, it will take until the GE after that to test this hypothesis.
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
Because if no-one fights them from the Conservative side, the Conservatives will lose. It isn't 2012 any more. The world has got a lot weirder because the left have been fighting a culture war while the right have been declining to do so.
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.
A big deterrent to letting out property is the expense and difficulty of evicting a problem tenant. You are looking at at a timescale of 6-9 months, and legal costs of £6000 or so. At the same time, you're receiving no rent, unless the tenant is getting Housing Benefit, when you can apply to the Council to pay it directly.
That leaves the letting market to those who will use ... extra-legal means to recover property.
It should be made easier to evict a genuine problem tenant, but for those who are not problem tenants getting their whole lives upended with a notice to move through no fault of their own with just 2 months notice (not 6 to 9 months) is not remotely OK.
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
It isn't just the American culture wars, Meloni is fighting against the woke left in Italy too, as is Le Pen and Les Republicains in France as are Law and Justice in Poland, as are Nationalist movements in the Nordic nations and Austria, as are Vox and the PP in Spain as is Poilievre in Canada, as are the Coalition under Dutton in Australia and as is Netanyahu in Israel.
The culture wars are taking place now across the western world
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
From your own figures, 25% to 31% is a bigger bounce for the Tories than the 37% to 41% you claimed as the "biggest this century" earlier. 🤦♂️
There is no possible universe or mathematics in which 2007 was a bigger bounce than 2019. Its just wrong, admit you were wrong for once. 🤦♂️
The swing from Labour to Tory was 3% after Osborne's IHT announcement in 2017 while the swing from Labour to Tory was just 2% when Boris replaced May as Tory leader in 2019
Bounce for the Tories is measured by the Tory share, not Labour share. +6 is bigger than +4
If you meant swing, there have been bigger swings this century than 3% too.
Your claim is just wrong as a matter of fact and record.
There hasn't been a bigger swing this century than October 2007 from Labour to Tory from 1 poll to the next this century
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
It's an analogue party in a digital age.
The members are quite frankly pining for a world that never existed and will never exist and the Tory Party is pandering to them.
Take WFH, they view it as skiving, not realising it boosts productivity when you're not spending 3 hours a day commuting.
It's great for mental health, for example, you can work with your kids sat on your lap, or you can take a 20 min break just to spend time with your family.
Take me this morning, I woke up at 6 this morning, started my breakfast at 6.30 in front of my work laptop, so it gives you so much latitude.
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
Because if no-one fights them from the Conservative side, the Conservatives will lose. It isn't 2012 any more. The world has got a lot weirder because the left have been fighting a culture war while the right have been declining to do so.
Trump has been fighting a culture war, as have the Brexiters.
Some parts, but definitely not all of the Left, have been, too.
Yet latest Leger poll of Conservatives 33% to Liberals 32% is almost identical to the 2021 Canadian election result of Conservatives 33.7% and Liberals 32.6%. Main difference is Poilievre has squeezed Bernier's populist PPC party from 5% in 2021 to just 2% now and won back rightwingers to the Conservatives but at the expense of losing a few centrist voters who voted for O'Toole back to Trudeau's Liberals
I'm not sure why you're quoting an individual poll when the site I linked to specifically takes an average of the latest polls, which we know is a more accurate way of assessing the situation.
They show a mixed picture too. Leger was pretty much spot on in 2021, its final poll Conservatives 33% and Liberals 32%. Indeed many pollsters had O'Toole's Tories as high as 37% in summer 2021 but were wrong in the end.
The fact is there has been no significant change since
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.
The standard solution to this is something like this -
On the inside, you have a knob to close the rack bolt. On the outside you have a slot, so in an emergency, a screwdriver or even a penny can be used to open the door.
Would you like to try suggesting this to my Dad?
(And if I can't be there to watch, would you record the experience?)
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
A pedant notes that if those are explicit aims of BLM then BLM are presumably, contrary to what Starkey says, exactly what they pretend to be.
You're being humourously pedantic, of course, but you're also exactly right. They ARE what they pretend to be. What they are not is what their cheerleaders pretend they are. They are not cheerful racists-are-bad-lets-all-live-in-peace sorts; they are the-west-is-evil-and-must-be-destroyed sorts.
As others have noted, BLM is a slogan and a (very) wide movement. Some of the self-proclaimed leaders are nutters, sure, but that's mischaracterising many of those who have sympathy with the slogan - as you also acknowledge elsewhere.
It's no more valid than suggesting that the Conservative Party is against our way of life because some members therein are committed to tearing up our right to protest, our established human rights laws etc. It's less valid, in fact, as the Conservative Party is a formal membership organisation from which those who diverge to far from the wider views of the movement can be ejected. BLM is not such a formal movement. Perhaps a better comparison is to suggest that Caroline Lucas is a loony because she shares some beliefs with some members of JSO or XR.
I'd be happy to take the knee, but there's no way I'd donate money to 'BLM' because of the loony component.
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.
My daughter now has a PhD in Chemistry and a debt of about £50K which, at the interest rates for repayment, will be a significant burden on her for a large portion of her working life.
And yet the people you want to vote for want to leave that policy in place. My son has an Masters in chemistry and will have paid off his loan in a total of 7 years, its harder on those who havent done STEM degrees as theyll be stuck with this shit debt for much longer.
So who should I vote for Mr Wisdom? Vote Tory because none of the others are any better?
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
It's an analogue party in a digital age.
The members are quite frankly pining for a world that never existed and will never exist and the Tory Party is pandering to them.
Take WFH, they view it as skiving, not realising it boosts productivity when you're not spending 3 hours a day commuting.
It's great for mental health, for example, you can work with your kids sat on your lap, or you can take a 20 min break just to spend time with your family.
Take me this morning, I woke up at 6 this morning, started my breakfast at 6.30 in front of my work laptop, so it gives you so much latitude.
The work gets done quicker.
THat's great until your cleaner wants to work from home.
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
They have naff all useful to say about business productivity, public transport, housing, healthcare, defence, law and order, climate change, education, or any of the other things that might make the country a better place to live, so instead they go off on some weird tangent that only appeals to nutters.
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
That was the overwhelming sense I got looking at those speakers at the conference yesterday. It all seemed somewhat exotic, and foreign. Like someone had taken the instruction manual for how to be an American right winger and not bothered to translate it.
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
It's an analogue party in a digital age.
The members are quite frankly pining for a world that never existed and will never exist and the Tory Party is pandering to them.
Take WFH, they view it as skiving, not realising it boosts productivity when you're not spending 3 hours a day commuting.
It's great for mental health, for example, you can work with your kids sat on your lap, or you can take a 20 min break just to spend time with your family.
Take me this morning, I woke up at 6 this morning, started my breakfast at 6.30 in front of my work laptop, so it gives you so much latitude.
The work gets done quicker.
THat's great until your cleaner wants to work from home.
Our cleaner loves coming to our house.
My mother always cooks some awesome food for the cleaner, she said it was the worst thing about lockdown, that she missed out on 18 months of quality food.
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.
A big deterrent to letting out property is the expense and difficulty of evicting a problem tenant. You are looking at at a timescale of 6-9 months, and legal costs of £6000 or so. At the same time, you're receiving no rent, unless the tenant is getting Housing Benefit, when you can apply to the Council to pay it directly.
That leaves the letting market to those who will use ... extra-legal means to recover property.
It should be made easier to evict a genuine problem tenant, but for those who are not problem tenants getting their whole lives upended with a notice to move through no fault of their own with just 2 months notice (not 6 to 9 months) is not remotely OK.
In practice, no landlord would legally get possession in two months, if the tenants stood their ground.
There has to be some means of landlord and tenant being able to agree a short term letting and the landlord getting possession at the end of it, without much fuss. People working on fixed term contracts in distant parts of the country need short term lets.
On the analogue in a digital age, which us older people love to use, don't forget, as I mentioned, that younger people tend to love analogue things - photography, records, cassettes 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.
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.
My daughter now has a PhD in Chemistry and a debt of about £50K which, at the interest rates for repayment, will be a significant burden on her for a large portion of her working life.
Congratulations. What is the one thing your daughter knows that no-one else does (unless they read her thesis, of course)?
Your daughter's debt would not be a debt if they changed a de facto graduate tax into an actual graduate tax, but George Osborne refused to countenance new taxes so she is where she is. Jeremy Hunt should look again, and take away a reason for graduates to vote for the other lot.
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.
My daughter now has a PhD in Chemistry and a debt of about £50K which, at the interest rates for repayment, will be a significant burden on her for a large portion of her working life.
And yet the people you want to vote for want to leave that policy in place. My son has an Masters in chemistry and will have paid off his loan in a total of 7 years, its harder on those who havent done STEM degrees as theyll be stuck with this shit debt for much longer.
So who should I vote for Mr Wisdom? Vote Tory because none of the others are any better?
I did the same as you in 2019 and didnt vote as theyre all useless prior to that I spoilt my vote. I ignore government and set my own agenda it's all you can do.
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
They have naff all useful to say about business productivity, public transport, housing, healthcare, defence, law and order, climate change, education, or any of the other things that might make the country a better place to live, so instead they go off on some weird tangent that only appeals to nutters.
It's the right wing equivalent of banging on about Palestine. Actually it's worse than that, because the ill treatment of Palestinians isn't made up. Many of the things they were railing against this week were fictional, or only happen on the extreme fringes of university campuses in America.
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
From your own figures, 25% to 31% is a bigger bounce for the Tories than the 37% to 41% you claimed as the "biggest this century" earlier. 🤦♂️
There is no possible universe or mathematics in which 2007 was a bigger bounce than 2019. Its just wrong, admit you were wrong for once. 🤦♂️
The swing from Labour to Tory was 3% after Osborne's IHT announcement in 2017 while the swing from Labour to Tory was just 2% when Boris replaced May as Tory leader in 2019
Bounce for the Tories is measured by the Tory share, not Labour share. +6 is bigger than +4
If you meant swing, there have been bigger swings this century than 3% too.
Your claim is just wrong as a matter of fact and record.
There hasn't been a bigger swing this century than October 2007 from Labour to Tory from 1 poll to the next this century
Yes there has.
Comres July 2019 Conservative 25, Labour 28 (Labour lead by 3) August 2019 Conservative 31, Labour 27 (Tory lead by 4)
3.5% swing from poll to poll is bigger than your claimed 3% "biggest this century" swing.
See also Deltapoll 2019 (3.5% bigger than your 3%)
How about Kantar? Went in 2019 from a 9% Labour lead in one poll to a 14% Tory lead in the next poll. Does that beat your 3%? 🙄
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
It's an analogue party in a digital age.
The members are quite frankly pining for a world that never existed and will never exist and the Tory Party is pandering to them.
Take WFH, they view it as skiving, not realising it boosts productivity when you're not spending 3 hours a day commuting.
It's great for mental health, for example, you can work with your kids sat on your lap, or you can take a 20 min break just to spend time with your family.
Take me this morning, I woke up at 6 this morning, started my breakfast at 6.30 in front of my work laptop, so it gives you so much latitude.
The work gets done quicker.
THat's great until your cleaner wants to work from home.
Our cleaner loves coming to our house.
My mother always cooks some awesome food for the cleaner, she said it was the worst thing about lockdown, that she missed out on 18 months of quality food.
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
It's an analogue party in a digital age.
The members are quite frankly pining for a world that never existed and will never exist and the Tory Party is pandering to them.
Take WFH, they view it as skiving, not realising it boosts productivity when you're not spending 3 hours a day commuting.
It's great for mental health, for example, you can work with your kids sat on your lap, or you can take a 20 min break just to spend time with your family.
Take me this morning, I woke up at 6 this morning, started my breakfast at 6.30 in front of my work laptop, so it gives you so much latitude.
The work gets done quicker.
THat's great until your cleaner wants to work from home.
Our cleaner loves coming to our house.
My mother always cooks some awesome food for the cleaner, she said it was the worst thing about lockdown, that she missed out on 18 months of quality food.
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.
My daughter now has a PhD in Chemistry and a debt of about £50K which, at the interest rates for repayment, will be a significant burden on her for a large portion of her working life.
And yet the people you want to vote for want to leave that policy in place. My son has an Masters in chemistry and will have paid off his loan in a total of 7 years, its harder on those who havent done STEM degrees as theyll be stuck with this shit debt for much longer.
So who should I vote for Mr Wisdom? Vote Tory because none of the others are any better?
I did the same as you in 2019 and didnt vote as theyre all useless prior to that I spoilt my vote. I ignore government and set my own agenda it's all you can do.
The Libertarian approach? Not for me. I will be voting in the next election for whatever non-Tory candidate I feel has the best chance.
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
It's an analogue party in a digital age.
The members are quite frankly pining for a world that never existed and will never exist and the Tory Party is pandering to them.
Take WFH, they view it as skiving, not realising it boosts productivity when you're not spending 3 hours a day commuting.
It's great for mental health, for example, you can work with your kids sat on your lap, or you can take a 20 min break just to spend time with your family.
Take me this morning, I woke up at 6 this morning, started my breakfast at 6.30 in front of my work laptop, so it gives you so much latitude.
The work gets done quicker.
THat's great until your cleaner wants to work from home.
Our cleaner loves coming to our house.
My mother always cooks some awesome food for the cleaner, she said it was the worst thing about lockdown, that she missed out on 18 months of quality food.
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
It's an analogue party in a digital age.
The members are quite frankly pining for a world that never existed and will never exist and the Tory Party is pandering to them.
Take WFH, they view it as skiving, not realising it boosts productivity when you're not spending 3 hours a day commuting.
It's great for mental health, for example, you can work with your kids sat on your lap, or you can take a 20 min break just to spend time with your family.
Take me this morning, I woke up at 6 this morning, started my breakfast at 6.30 in front of my work laptop, so it gives you so much latitude.
The work gets done quicker.
THat's great until your cleaner wants to work from home.
Our cleaner loves coming to our house.
My mother always cooks some awesome food for the cleaner, she said it was the worst thing about lockdown, that she missed out on 18 months of quality food.
So when does she actually get round to cleaning ?
She doesn't. That's why she employs a cleaner.
So the cleaner employs a cleaner while she goes to TSE's mum's pop up restaurant ? Sounds a cracking deal.
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.
My daughter now has a PhD in Chemistry and a debt of about £50K which, at the interest rates for repayment, will be a significant burden on her for a large portion of her working life.
Congratulations. What is the one thing your daughter knows that no-one else does (unless they read her thesis, of course)?
Your daughter's debt would not be a debt if they changed a de facto graduate tax into an actual graduate tax, but George Osborne refused to countenance new taxes so she is where she is. Jeremy Hunt should look again, and take away a reason for graduates to vote for the other lot.
Apparently she is quite up on metallo-organic ligand chemistry... or something....
I do Physics and Maths, not the playing with glassware stuff
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
It's an analogue party in a digital age.
The members are quite frankly pining for a world that never existed and will never exist and the Tory Party is pandering to them.
Take WFH, they view it as skiving, not realising it boosts productivity when you're not spending 3 hours a day commuting.
It's great for mental health, for example, you can work with your kids sat on your lap, or you can take a 20 min break just to spend time with your family.
Take me this morning, I woke up at 6 this morning, started my breakfast at 6.30 in front of my work laptop, so it gives you so much latitude.
The work gets done quicker.
THat's great until your cleaner wants to work from home.
Our cleaner loves coming to our house.
My mother always cooks some awesome food for the cleaner, she said it was the worst thing about lockdown, that she missed out on 18 months of quality food.
So when does she actually get round to cleaning ?
She doesn't. That's why she employs a cleaner.
So the cleaner employs a cleaner while she goes to TSE's mum's pop up restaurant ? Sounds a cracking deal.
And TSE gets a free cook and cleaner if I've followed correctly, which is just as well because he is going to be sacked as soon as employers realise the kids on his lap while he WFH do not have security clearance.
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.
A big deterrent to letting out property is the expense and difficulty of evicting a problem tenant. You are looking at at a timescale of 6-9 months, and legal costs of £6000 or so. At the same time, you're receiving no rent, unless the tenant is getting Housing Benefit, when you can apply to the Council to pay it directly.
That leaves the letting market to those who will use ... extra-legal means to recover property.
It should be made easier to evict a genuine problem tenant, but for those who are not problem tenants getting their whole lives upended with a notice to move through no fault of their own with just 2 months notice (not 6 to 9 months) is not remotely OK.
In practice, no landlord would legally get possession in two months, if the tenants stood their ground.
There has to be some means of landlord and tenant being able to agree a short term letting and the landlord getting possession at the end of it, without much fuss. People working on fixed term contracts in distant parts of the country need short term lets.
If the tenants refused to move out even after they'd been told they legally have to and chose to take it to court instead? Not remotely good enough, people shouldn't have to squat illegally in a property in order to have a roof over their head.
Section 21 doesn't apply at the end of a contract, it applies during it too. Someone can be living in a home for years, renew their contract annually, pay all their bills, and still be served a Section 21 notice and be given notice to leave their home through no fault of their own even during their contract period.
You couldn't sack someone under contract like that, it'd be against the law, so why on Earth should you be able to make a family homeless who have a contract for their home and have committed no faults?
"Some of the self-driving car’s problems cannot be solved by technological breakthroughs. For instance, since there is no human operator to blame, the liability for a car that causes an accident rests entirely with the decisions encoded into the hardware by the manufacturer. This has led to what the author and transport commentator Christian Wolmar calls the ‘Holborn problem’. When pedestrians spill en masse on to the streets, as they do outside London’s Holborn station at 5pm every Friday evening, this stops AVs in their tracks. Since the computer can’t be programmed to drive towards a crowd of humans, without potentially bankrupting the manufacturer in a subsequent lawsuit, it simply halts. Traffic behind the vehicle also halts and very soon, the city is gridlocked."
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.
My daughter now has a PhD in Chemistry and a debt of about £50K which, at the interest rates for repayment, will be a significant burden on her for a large portion of her working life.
And yet the people you want to vote for want to leave that policy in place. My son has an Masters in chemistry and will have paid off his loan in a total of 7 years, its harder on those who havent done STEM degrees as theyll be stuck with this shit debt for much longer.
So who should I vote for Mr Wisdom? Vote Tory because none of the others are any better?
I did the same as you in 2019 and didnt vote as theyre all useless prior to that I spoilt my vote. I ignore government and set my own agenda it's all you can do.
The Libertarian approach? Not for me. I will be voting in the next election for whatever non-Tory candidate I feel has the best chance.
The present mob must be removed.
Im a realist not a libertarian. I believe the government should do a few things ( public administration, defence, economy etc. ) well and not keeping passing laws for the sake of it. Any new lot will simply pass more laws and screw up some different things.
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
From your own figures, 25% to 31% is a bigger bounce for the Tories than the 37% to 41% you claimed as the "biggest this century" earlier. 🤦♂️
There is no possible universe or mathematics in which 2007 was a bigger bounce than 2019. Its just wrong, admit you were wrong for once. 🤦♂️
The swing from Labour to Tory was 3% after Osborne's IHT announcement in 2017 while the swing from Labour to Tory was just 2% when Boris replaced May as Tory leader in 2019
Bounce for the Tories is measured by the Tory share, not Labour share. +6 is bigger than +4
If you meant swing, there have been bigger swings this century than 3% too.
Your claim is just wrong as a matter of fact and record.
There hasn't been a bigger swing this century than October 2007 from Labour to Tory from 1 poll to the next this century
Yes there has.
Comres July 2019 Conservative 25, Labour 28 (Labour lead by 3) August 2019 Conservative 31, Labour 27 (Tory lead by 4)
3.5% swing from poll to poll is bigger than your claimed 3% "biggest this century" swing.
See also Deltapoll 2019 (3.5% bigger than your 3%)
How about Kantar? Went in 2019 from a 9% Labour lead in one poll to a 14% Tory lead in the next poll. Does that beat your 3%? 🙄
If you want to play that game the final Comres before the 2007 Tory conference had a Labour lead of 3%, the next Comres after Osborne's IHT announcement had a Tory lead of 9% ie a swing of 6%, so bigger than the 3.5% of 2019.
So every pollster polling in 2007 and 2019 says I was right
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.
That's 'long term empty', so the real figure will be higher. That's self-reported, so the real figure will be higher.
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.
My daughter now has a PhD in Chemistry and a debt of about £50K which, at the interest rates for repayment, will be a significant burden on her for a large portion of her working life.
Congratulations. What is the one thing your daughter knows that no-one else does (unless they read her thesis, of course)?
Your daughter's debt would not be a debt if they changed a de facto graduate tax into an actual graduate tax, but George Osborne refused to countenance new taxes so she is where she is. Jeremy Hunt should look again, and take away a reason for graduates to vote for the other lot.
Well it wouldn't be a debt, but she'd be paying more tax. It's not obvious she'd be any better off (though of course details to be determined). In effect, the current arrangements amount to something like a 9% tax on income for graduates once you get to a certain level of income (though obviously this then goes down if income increases). I think. Something like that, anyway. The point is, students these days have a much more straitened life to look forward to than their predecessors.
"Some of the self-driving car’s problems cannot be solved by technological breakthroughs. For instance, since there is no human operator to blame, the liability for a car that causes an accident rests entirely with the decisions encoded into the hardware by the manufacturer. This has led to what the author and transport commentator Christian Wolmar calls the ‘Holborn problem’. When pedestrians spill en masse on to the streets, as they do outside London’s Holborn station at 5pm every Friday evening, this stops AVs in their tracks. Since the computer can’t be programmed to drive towards a crowd of humans, without potentially bankrupting the manufacturer in a subsequent lawsuit, it simply halts. Traffic behind the vehicle also halts and very soon, the city is gridlocked."
Why oh why oh why did Rishi allow his MPs to attend this NatCon thing? The ammo it will provide to his enemies will be vast and for no benefit whatsoever that I can see. Foolish.
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
Build new council homes - but rent caps solve a short term issue while creating a way bigger long term one.
If you want to increase supply quickly ban Short term lets of houses that were built for residential purposes (i.e. have historically had a council tax rating).
And make it much easier for individuals to do their own new-builds and extensions. Rather than the current dichotomy of zero development or large scale developers because they're the only ones with the deep pockets to navigate the planning system.
You only need deep pockets for a largescale development. Big developers block the system by buying up land as soon as - or often, before - it comes on the market.
Yougov meanwhile finds 50% of voters think the police were too lenient or got the balance right handling protestors on Coronation Day while 30% think there were too harsh.
More Tory voters think the police were too lenient however, 15% to the 13% who think they were too harsh.
Why oh why oh why did Rishi allow his MPs to attend this NatCon thing? The ammo it will provide to his enemies will be vast and for no benefit whatsoever that I can see. Foolish.
"Some of the self-driving car’s problems cannot be solved by technological breakthroughs. For instance, since there is no human operator to blame, the liability for a car that causes an accident rests entirely with the decisions encoded into the hardware by the manufacturer. This has led to what the author and transport commentator Christian Wolmar calls the ‘Holborn problem’. When pedestrians spill en masse on to the streets, as they do outside London’s Holborn station at 5pm every Friday evening, this stops AVs in their tracks. Since the computer can’t be programmed to drive towards a crowd of humans, without potentially bankrupting the manufacturer in a subsequent lawsuit, it simply halts. Traffic behind the vehicle also halts and very soon, the city is gridlocked."
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.
My daughter now has a PhD in Chemistry and a debt of about £50K which, at the interest rates for repayment, will be a significant burden on her for a large portion of her working life.
Congratulations. What is the one thing your daughter knows that no-one else does (unless they read her thesis, of course)?
Your daughter's debt would not be a debt if they changed a de facto graduate tax into an actual graduate tax, but George Osborne refused to countenance new taxes so she is where she is. Jeremy Hunt should look again, and take away a reason for graduates to vote for the other lot.
Well it wouldn't be a debt, but she'd be paying more tax. It's not obvious she'd be any better off (though of course details to be determined). In effect, the current arrangements amount to something like a 9% tax on income for graduates once you get to a certain level of income (though obviously this then goes down if income increases). I think. Something like that, anyway. The point is, students these days have a much more straitened life to look forward to than their predecessors.
Yes but forget accountancy and look at the psychology of it. People accept paying taxes, whereas a debt can be seriously demotivating, especially for those who cannot afford to pay it off. There are lots of graduates with debts they will never pay off but who still have it hanging over them as a reminder not to vote Conservative. George Osborne was wrong politically as well as economically.
Why oh why oh why did Rishi allow his MPs to attend this NatCon thing? The ammo it will provide to his enemies will be vast and for no benefit whatsoever that I can see. Foolish.
You actually think voters are following this ?
You actually think the Opposition will miss the chance to spread it about?
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.
Thanks.
After I saw your earlier comment I had a quick google, and found something suggesting that in America before about 1960, bathrooms didn't have locks at all. If it was unoccupied, the door was left open, and if you found the door closed, you assumed it was occupied and knocked in extremis. No idea how widespread that was.
Why oh why oh why did Rishi allow his MPs to attend this NatCon thing? The ammo it will provide to his enemies will be vast and for no benefit whatsoever that I can see. Foolish.
You actually think voters are following this ?
You actually think the Opposition will miss the chance to spread it about?
Thats their job, but Phil and Holly will trump anything the spin doctors do
"Some of the self-driving car’s problems cannot be solved by technological breakthroughs. For instance, since there is no human operator to blame, the liability for a car that causes an accident rests entirely with the decisions encoded into the hardware by the manufacturer. This has led to what the author and transport commentator Christian Wolmar calls the ‘Holborn problem’. When pedestrians spill en masse on to the streets, as they do outside London’s Holborn station at 5pm every Friday evening, this stops AVs in their tracks. Since the computer can’t be programmed to drive towards a crowd of humans, without potentially bankrupting the manufacturer in a subsequent lawsuit, it simply halts. Traffic behind the vehicle also halts and very soon, the city is gridlocked."
Interesting that advocating driverless cars now makes you a member of the dreaded Spiked 'liberal elite', along with Remainers and trans-rights activists. Leon take note.
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
They have naff all useful to say about business productivity, public transport, housing, healthcare, defence, law and order, climate change, education, or any of the other things that might make the country a better place to live, so instead they go off on some weird tangent that only appeals to nutters.
The right-wing/conservative movement needs dragging into the 21st century.
As it is its utterly lost in the past, as that is it's client base. Pensioners who want to keep what they have, and big business.
There is a way back, but it needs need ideas and a reformat.
Why oh why oh why did Rishi allow his MPs to attend this NatCon thing? The ammo it will provide to his enemies will be vast and for no benefit whatsoever that I can see. Foolish.
Well he's not running a dictatorship and people have the right to their views and opinions, however he should have drawn the link at cabinet ministers like Sue-Ellen and Gove attending...
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
It's an analogue party in a digital age.
The members are quite frankly pining for a world that never existed and will never exist and the Tory Party is pandering to them.
Take WFH, they view it as skiving, not realising it boosts productivity when you're not spending 3 hours a day commuting.
It's great for mental health, for example, you can work with your kids sat on your lap, or you can take a 20 min break just to spend time with your family.
Take me this morning, I woke up at 6 this morning, started my breakfast at 6.30 in front of my work laptop, so it gives you so much latitude.
The work gets done quicker.
THat's great until your cleaner wants to work from home.
Our cleaner loves coming to our house.
My mother always cooks some awesome food for the cleaner, she said it was the worst thing about lockdown, that she missed out on 18 months of quality food.
So when does she actually get round to cleaning ?
She doesn't. That's why she employs a cleaner.
So the cleaner employs a cleaner while she goes to TSE's mum's pop up restaurant ? Sounds a cracking deal.
And TSE gets a free cook and cleaner if I've followed correctly, which is just as well because he is going to be sacked as soon as employers realise the kids on his lap while he WFH do not have security clearance.
Which is why I insisted the spiders on the windows get DV level clearance. Let alone the children.
On Topic: Of the three by elections I agree with OGH that Labour takes Reading West and Lib-Dems probably take Mid-Bedfordshire (unless Cons come with with a really good candidate)
The most interesting seat might be Dumfries and Galloway which Labour held from 2005 to 2015. If Labour could snatch that rather than the SNP it would be a sign of Labour on their way back in Scotland...
Why oh why oh why did Rishi allow his MPs to attend this NatCon thing? The ammo it will provide to his enemies will be vast and for no benefit whatsoever that I can see. Foolish.
You actually think voters are following this ?
Exactly not seen or heard a word from it and I am sure majority of the population will be the same.
Why oh why oh why did Rishi allow his MPs to attend this NatCon thing? The ammo it will provide to his enemies will be vast and for no benefit whatsoever that I can see. Foolish.
You actually think voters are following this ?
Exactly not seen or heard a word from it and I am sure majority of the population will be the same.
Anyhoo hows the world Malc. I see your employer still wants to sack eveyone
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
It's an analogue party in a digital age.
The members are quite frankly pining for a world that never existed and will never exist and the Tory Party is pandering to them.
Take WFH, they view it as skiving, not realising it boosts productivity when you're not spending 3 hours a day commuting.
It's great for mental health, for example, you can work with your kids sat on your lap, or you can take a 20 min break just to spend time with your family.
Take me this morning, I woke up at 6 this morning, started my breakfast at 6.30 in front of my work laptop, so it gives you so much latitude.
The work gets done quicker.
THat's great until your cleaner wants to work from home.
Our cleaner loves coming to our house.
My mother always cooks some awesome food for the cleaner, she said it was the worst thing about lockdown, that she missed out on 18 months of quality food.
So when does she actually get round to cleaning ?
She doesn't. That's why she employs a cleaner.
So the cleaner employs a cleaner while she goes to TSE's mum's pop up restaurant ? Sounds a cracking deal.
And TSE gets a free cook and cleaner if I've followed correctly, which is just as well because he is going to be sacked as soon as employers realise the kids on his lap while he WFH do not have security clearance.
Which is why I insisted the spiders on the windows get DV level clearance. Let alone the children.
It's why I move heaven and earth to keep development and actual production data separate - because the last thing I want is access to production data on the system I'm working on...
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.
Nah… they just don’t want to admit they’ve lost the keys…
Why oh why oh why did Rishi allow his MPs to attend this NatCon thing? The ammo it will provide to his enemies will be vast and for no benefit whatsoever that I can see. Foolish.
Currently RefUK are polling about 5%-8%, if he can squeeze some of that Sunak's Tories will be clearly back over 30%. Most current Tory voters will agree with the NatCon speeches too anyway
I don’t understand why British Conservatives seem so intent on fighting the American culture wars.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
They have naff all useful to say about business productivity, public transport, housing, healthcare, defence, law and order, climate change, education, or any of the other things that might make the country a better place to live, so instead they go off on some weird tangent that only appeals to nutters.
The right-wing/conservative movement needs dragging into the 21st century.
As it is its utterly lost in the past, as that is it's client base. Pensioners who want to keep what they have, and big business.
There is a way back, but it needs need ideas and a reformat.
I agree with you, but as I've been at pains to point out, Boomer Pensioners form a rich seam of votes that can still be productively mined for one or two decades to come. When you consider that our Conservative ruling classes are either independently wealthy or have high-paying jobs that are not dependent on the economy (eg lawyers or journalists), they don't even have to look after big business any more.
As long as the Conservatives appeal to the high and low aspirations of the elderly, they can let the UK become a jobless, factoryless desert of indentured serviture and still win. That's why they can afford to indulge the Culture Wars of the US: they don't have any pressing economic problems to distract them.
"This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians and two NYPD (New York Police Department) officers."
Comments
However, I read the original post as making the point that the current Conservatives have a hell of a lot invested in a generation which is declining as a share of the voting age population as it's dying at a faster rate than (younger) Gen X and Millenials (and indeed Gen Z who are all the new voters). They are dying slower than the Silent Generation but they have always been a small generation as the name suggests and many of those left are very elderly now.
In a sense, the Conservatives' Boomer problem is that it is and remains a large and important generation (as the name also suggests). But it is changing and, because of the way actuarial death tables work, the change will not just continue but accelerate. So the incentive is to stick with pandering to the Boomers but at the cost of increasingly alienating the Millennials in particular. If it wasn't such a large generation, it would be easier for the Conservatives to pivot away to appeal to younger people.
Not that there aren't some in and around those movements who *are* trying to destroy it with the help of some powerful non-Western state actors.
can't write for toffeewas unclear. I meant "Boomer Pensioners" Those born on the last day of Boomership 31Dec1964 will retire between now and 01Jan2032 (the day after their 67th birthday).Frankly I am amazed that you (or anyone) can stomach supporting such a degenerate bunch.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rishi-sunak-boris-johnson-by-election-lords-b2340373.html
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65619384
Yougov meanwhile finds 50% of voters think the police were too lenient or got the balance right handling protestors on Coronation Day while 30% think there were too harsh.
More Tory voters think the police were too lenient however, 15% to the 13% who think they were too harsh.
52% of Labour voters though think the police were too harsh
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2023/05/11/britons-tend-think-police-struck-right-balance-cor
There is no possible universe or mathematics in which 2007 was a bigger bounce than 2019. Its just wrong, admit you were wrong for once. 🤦♂️
If you meant swing, there have been bigger swings this century than 3% too.
Your claim is just wrong as a matter of fact and record.
Now its tax students for getting an education several times over - once on a loan, then on higher income and then to pay the write offs for a loan book that wont pay back in full.
It sucks and needs scrapped.
These Americans don’t have anything to teach us.
That leaves the letting market to those who will use ... extra-legal means to recover property.
And the fact that Boris Johnson had Susan Michie advising him doesn't mean Marxism is all fine and mainstream in the west!
https://www.tbks.co.uk/bathroom-bolts/marcus-turn-release-with-standard-knob/
On the inside, you have a knob to close the rack bolt. On the outside you have a slot, so in an emergency, a screwdriver or even a penny can be used to open the door.
I expect Labour in government to be a lot more popular among older voters*, and that younger voters will become rapidly disillusioned - there's not much sign of Labour making the sort of radical changes that would upend the current situation in the housing market, for example.
This will create a large change in the age profile of Tory voters before the Tories do anything themselves.
* We look at the bias of older voters to vote Tory and we assume that this is a Conservative bias in this age group, rather than a conservative bias. Older voters may have become more inclined to vote for the incumbent government, which would explain why the bias with increasing age was at a minimum in 2010.
Unfortunately, even if Labour form the next government, it will take until the GE after that to test this hypothesis.
The culture wars are taking place now across the western world
The members are quite frankly pining for a world that never existed and will never exist and the Tory Party is pandering to them.
Take WFH, they view it as skiving, not realising it boosts productivity when you're not spending 3 hours a day commuting.
It's great for mental health, for example, you can work with your kids sat on your lap, or you can take a 20 min break just to spend time with your family.
Take me this morning, I woke up at 6 this morning, started my breakfast at 6.30 in front of my work laptop, so it gives you so much latitude.
The work gets done quicker.
Some parts, but definitely not all of the Left, have been, too.
The fact is there has been no significant change since
(And if I can't be there to watch, would you record the experience?)
It's no more valid than suggesting that the Conservative Party is against our way of life because some members therein are committed to tearing up our right to protest, our established human rights laws etc. It's less valid, in fact, as the Conservative Party is a formal membership organisation from which those who diverge to far from the wider views of the movement can be ejected. BLM is not such a formal movement. Perhaps a better comparison is to suggest that Caroline Lucas is a loony because she shares some beliefs with some members of JSO or XR.
I'd be happy to take the knee, but there's no way I'd donate money to 'BLM' because of the loony component.
My mother always cooks some awesome food for the cleaner, she said it was the worst thing about lockdown, that she missed out on 18 months of quality food.
There has to be some means of landlord and tenant being able to agree a short term letting and the landlord getting possession at the end of it, without much fuss. People working on fixed term contracts in distant parts of the country need short term lets.
New film cameras, coming, for instance :
https://kosmofoto.com/2023/03/pentax-intend-to-make-manual-winding-compact-film-camera/
Your daughter's debt would not be a debt if they changed a de facto graduate tax into an actual graduate tax, but George Osborne refused to countenance new taxes so she is where she is. Jeremy Hunt should look again, and take away a reason for graduates to vote for the other lot.
Comres
July 2019 Conservative 25, Labour 28 (Labour lead by 3)
August 2019 Conservative 31, Labour 27 (Tory lead by 4)
3.5% swing from poll to poll is bigger than your claimed 3% "biggest this century" swing.
See also Deltapoll 2019 (3.5% bigger than your 3%)
How about Kantar? Went in 2019 from a 9% Labour lead in one poll to a 14% Tory lead in the next poll. Does that beat your 3%? 🙄
The present mob must be removed.
I do Physics and Maths, not the playing with glassware stuff
But I am incredibly proud of her
Section 21 doesn't apply at the end of a contract, it applies during it too. Someone can be living in a home for years, renew their contract annually, pay all their bills, and still be served a Section 21 notice and be given notice to leave their home through no fault of their own even during their contract period.
You couldn't sack someone under contract like that, it'd be against the law, so why on Earth should you be able to make a family homeless who have a contract for their home and have committed no faults?
"Some of the self-driving car’s problems cannot be solved by technological breakthroughs. For instance, since there is no human operator to blame, the liability for a car that causes an accident rests entirely with the decisions encoded into the hardware by the manufacturer. This has led to what the author and transport commentator Christian Wolmar calls the ‘Holborn problem’. When pedestrians spill en masse on to the streets, as they do outside London’s Holborn station at 5pm every Friday evening, this stops AVs in their tracks. Since the computer can’t be programmed to drive towards a crowd of humans, without potentially bankrupting the manufacturer in a subsequent lawsuit, it simply halts. Traffic behind the vehicle also halts and very soon, the city is gridlocked."
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/05/17/the-grand-folly-of-self-driving-cars/
So every pollster polling in 2007 and 2019 says I was right
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2010_United_Kingdom_general_election
That's self-reported, so the real figure will be higher.
In effect, the current arrangements amount to something like a 9% tax on income for graduates once you get to a certain level of income (though obviously this then goes down if income increases). I think. Something like that, anyway.
The point is, students these days have a much more straitened life to look forward to than their predecessors.
There is only ever going to be one winner in such a contest.
After I saw your earlier comment I had a quick google, and found something suggesting that in America before about 1960, bathrooms didn't have locks at all. If it was unoccupied, the door was left open, and if you found the door closed, you assumed it was occupied and knocked in extremis. No idea how widespread that was.
As it is its utterly lost in the past, as that is it's client base. Pensioners who want to keep what they have, and big business.
There is a way back, but it needs need ideas and a reformat.
Good afternoon PB
The most interesting seat might be Dumfries and Galloway which Labour held from 2005 to 2015. If Labour could snatch that rather than the SNP it would be a sign of Labour on their way back in Scotland...
Harry and Meghan having fun with the papparazzi in NYC
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65625886
They are fine, it seems, but WTAF
https://twitter.com/thetimes/status/1658846882284687360?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
As long as the Conservatives appeal to the high and low aspirations of the elderly, they can let the UK become a jobless, factoryless desert of indentured serviture and still win. That's why they can afford to indulge the Culture Wars of the US: they don't have any pressing economic problems to distract them.
???!!