Higher rents means higher rental inflation. Workers will need to go on strike for higher pay to pay their rent. Controls on the rental market are leading to baked-in higher inflation.
I've done a fair bit of private renting, and I despair at some of the policies that come out of the left on this. As a renter, I wanted to a vibrant market that would give me a lot of choice at affordable prices with some measure of protection that would stop me being made homeless on a whim. That's about it.
Rent controls coupled with eviction freezes just fucks the whole thing.
The latest policy wheeze - help renters by pushing landlords out of business - hasn't come from the left, though. It is Tory policy.
Stupid question - how are the Government doing that - via the 2016 tax changes and a requirement to improve the energy efficiency of the house?
Asking because neither of those changes are making things easier for renters where supply is down, demand is equal (or higher than before due to population growth) and prices are rising.
What we actually need is for pension funds to actually focus on build to rent...
Any problems with supply are solely due to the fact that construction hasn't kept pace with population. The only answer to that is to build more, but the Government are siding with NIMBYs instead.
If a landlord sells up and exits the market then that doesn't adjust supply and demand net because either the landlord sells to another landlord (so no net change) or they sell to someone who used to be a tenant but is now an owner occupier instead (so 1 fewer supply, 1 fewer demand, no net change).
Build, build, build to boost supply.
This though is not true. The number of houses does not change I agree however the size of rental households is generally larger than owner occupied households so a house moving from rental to owner occupied actually increases the ratio of people looking to rent/houses to rent
That's due to age not rental/ownership primarily.
A retired couple who own their own home, or a widower who owns their own home don't live on their own because they are owner-occupiers.
And a couple with primary school aged kids who rent aren't going to throw their kids out of their home if they buy a property.
It may be due to age but that is irrelevant. You will still have more people chasing fewer properties
Here is a worked example to demonstrate
2,500,000 renters in 1 million homes
sell up half
you now have 1,250,000 displaced renters of which 1,200,000 will be soaked up by now being owner occupiers leaving 50,000 renters extra fighting for the diminished rental pool.
Sorry I dont see age is relevant to this....you have 2.5 renters per home regardless of age and only 2.4 for owner occupied. Owners will also have kids so your point is void. The higher occupancy for rental is more down to HMO's and young adults house sharing than families
Sorry your maths are wrong, age is entirely relevant to this.
You are looking at correlation not causation.
Sell half a million homes, have half a million households who were renting buy them, and the net change is zero.
The higher occupancy for rental is due to families. The age-profile of renters covers those with dependent children more than the age-profile of owner occupiers, so correlation is not causation like you are thinking.
Do you not consider that families with young children would already have bought if they could afford it? They can't so they rent. So yes age is irrelevant
Families with young children used to be able to afford to buy homes at a much higher rate, and if landlords are selling up to owner occupiers as per our scenario we are discussing, then they would be again.
So no, age is not irrelevant. Your statistic on people living per home is completely irrelevant, because that statistics is a correlation to ownership not caused by it. It has causative link to age profile, which correlates to ownership, so ownership correlates to people per home.
Correlation is not causation.
Landlords have been selling up since the Osborne reforms, the rental pool has been diminishing since the Osborne reforms. House prices haven't been going down. Few people rent if they can afford to buy, if they can't afford to buy landlords selling up and reducing the rental pool is not going to help them in the least. Your theory seems predicated on "they could buy but they are just being obstinate and rent"
House prices haven't gone down because supply hasn't kept up with demand. Not enough houses are being built.
Demand goes up by more than supply and prices go up. That's basic economics, not rocket science.
Build more houses.
If landlords sell up and tenants buy the houses, then the former tenant who now has their own home is greatly improved by that situation.
The tenants who still rent aren't helped, but they're not hurt either, since there's fewer homes available to rent, but fewer people seeking to rent too, so no net change.
Build more houses and the supply will go up and prices will go down. Anything else is just fiddling at the edges.
Yes but people that rent aren't going to be buying them is the point. If they could afford to buy then most of them would have already done so. Your assumption that rental properties are going to be magically affordable to those forced to rent now due to lack of choice is wrong.
I rent I would buy if I could, my landlord selling up wouldn't suddenly make it possible for me to buy. Most renters are in that position.
Sorry but who do you think is going to buy if the landlord sells up?
If its a household who were renting, then it takes a competitor seeking to rent out of the equation, demand for rental properties go down accordingly, no net change in supply and demand.
If its an alternative landlord, then they are going to want to let out the property, so no net change in supply and demand.
The house isn't suddenly going to vanish into the ether. It will still be there.
Building more houses raises overall supply. Whether a particular household owns or rents their property does not.
A fair number will be bought as second homes I have no doubt for a start. The simple fact is house prices aren't falling even though landlords have been selling up. Most renters cannot buy or they would have. Your whole premise is built on them suddenly being able to buy a house they already can't afford.
Now if stats had shown falling house prices since Osbornes reforms you might have a point. Stats dont show this so your premise is false.
The rate of selling by landlords is fart in a thunderstorm compared to the undersupply of housing. The demand to buy is increasing (with the population) by six figures a year.
I'm wondering about a perhaps underdiscussed element of housing supply - the Barrett building site I drive past each morning, it well.. hasn't exactly looked chock full of builders recently. I have no idea how long a site should take to complete though.
Higher rents means higher rental inflation. Workers will need to go on strike for higher pay to pay their rent. Controls on the rental market are leading to baked-in higher inflation.
I've done a fair bit of private renting, and I despair at some of the policies that come out of the left on this. As a renter, I wanted to a vibrant market that would give me a lot of choice at affordable prices with some measure of protection that would stop me being made homeless on a whim. That's about it.
Rent controls coupled with eviction freezes just fucks the whole thing.
The latest policy wheeze - help renters by pushing landlords out of business - hasn't come from the left, though. It is Tory policy.
Stupid question - how are the Government doing that - via the 2016 tax changes and a requirement to improve the energy efficiency of the house?
Asking because neither of those changes are making things easier for renters where supply is down, demand is equal (or higher than before due to population growth) and prices are rising.
What we actually need is for pension funds to actually focus on build to rent...
Any problems with supply are solely due to the fact that construction hasn't kept pace with population. The only answer to that is to build more, but the Government are siding with NIMBYs instead.
If a landlord sells up and exits the market then that doesn't adjust supply and demand net because either the landlord sells to another landlord (so no net change) or they sell to someone who used to be a tenant but is now an owner occupier instead (so 1 fewer supply, 1 fewer demand, no net change).
Build, build, build to boost supply.
This though is not true. The number of houses does not change I agree however the size of rental households is generally larger than owner occupied households so a house moving from rental to owner occupied actually increases the ratio of people looking to rent/houses to rent
That's due to age not rental/ownership primarily.
A retired couple who own their own home, or a widower who owns their own home don't live on their own because they are owner-occupiers.
And a couple with primary school aged kids who rent aren't going to throw their kids out of their home if they buy a property.
It may be due to age but that is irrelevant. You will still have more people chasing fewer properties
Here is a worked example to demonstrate
2,500,000 renters in 1 million homes
sell up half
you now have 1,250,000 displaced renters of which 1,200,000 will be soaked up by now being owner occupiers leaving 50,000 renters extra fighting for the diminished rental pool.
Sorry I dont see age is relevant to this....you have 2.5 renters per home regardless of age and only 2.4 for owner occupied. Owners will also have kids so your point is void. The higher occupancy for rental is more down to HMO's and young adults house sharing than families
Sorry your maths are wrong, age is entirely relevant to this.
You are looking at correlation not causation.
Sell half a million homes, have half a million households who were renting buy them, and the net change is zero.
The higher occupancy for rental is due to families. The age-profile of renters covers those with dependent children more than the age-profile of owner occupiers, so correlation is not causation like you are thinking.
Do you not consider that families with young children would already have bought if they could afford it? They can't so they rent. So yes age is irrelevant
Families with young children used to be able to afford to buy homes at a much higher rate, and if landlords are selling up to owner occupiers as per our scenario we are discussing, then they would be again.
So no, age is not irrelevant. Your statistic on people living per home is completely irrelevant, because that statistics is a correlation to ownership not caused by it. It has causative link to age profile, which correlates to ownership, so ownership correlates to people per home.
Correlation is not causation.
Landlords have been selling up since the Osborne reforms, the rental pool has been diminishing since the Osborne reforms. House prices haven't been going down. Few people rent if they can afford to buy, if they can't afford to buy landlords selling up and reducing the rental pool is not going to help them in the least. Your theory seems predicated on "they could buy but they are just being obstinate and rent"
House prices haven't gone down because supply hasn't kept up with demand. Not enough houses are being built.
Demand goes up by more than supply and prices go up. That's basic economics, not rocket science.
Build more houses.
If landlords sell up and tenants buy the houses, then the former tenant who now has their own home is greatly improved by that situation.
The tenants who still rent aren't helped, but they're not hurt either, since there's fewer homes available to rent, but fewer people seeking to rent too, so no net change.
Build more houses and the supply will go up and prices will go down. Anything else is just fiddling at the edges.
Yes but people that rent aren't going to be buying them is the point. If they could afford to buy then most of them would have already done so. Your assumption that rental properties are going to be magically affordable to those forced to rent now due to lack of choice is wrong.
I rent I would buy if I could, my landlord selling up wouldn't suddenly make it possible for me to buy. Most renters are in that position.
Sorry but who do you think is going to buy if the landlord sells up?
If its a household who were renting, then it takes a competitor seeking to rent out of the equation, demand for rental properties go down accordingly, no net change in supply and demand.
If its an alternative landlord, then they are going to want to let out the property, so no net change in supply and demand.
The house isn't suddenly going to vanish into the ether. It will still be there.
Building more houses raises overall supply. Whether a particular household owns or rents their property does not.
A fair number will be bought as second homes I have no doubt for a start. The simple fact is house prices aren't falling even though landlords have been selling up. Most renters cannot buy or they would have. Your whole premise is built on them suddenly being able to buy a house they already can't afford.
Now if stats had shown falling house prices since Osbornes reforms you might have a point. Stats dont show this so your premise is false.
The rate of selling by landlords is fart in a thunderstorm compared to the undersupply of housing. The demand to buy is increasing (with the population) by six figures a year.
I'm wondering about a perhaps underdiscussed element of housing supply - the Barrett building site I drive past each morning, it well.. hasn't exactly looked chock full of builders recently. I have no idea how long a site should take to complete though.
Agree with that. I've seen a lot of developments that take an inordinate amount of time to complete, with little work being evident.
One of the NIMBY objections is the disruption caused by new building. I suspect that quicker completion of projects would help to reduce objections to them. Nobody likes living adjacent to a building site for years.
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power.
See Germany with PR where the AfD now on 19% and Linke has seats in the German Parliament too or Italy with PR where the hard right Meloni is now PM, or Spain with PR where Vox will win significant numbers of seats in the Spanish Parliament next month on current polls or Ireland with PR where SF tops the polls or Sweden with PR where the Sweden Democrats are now second biggest party or New Zealand with PR where New Zealand First have often won MPs.
See also Israel with PR where hard right nationalist and Orthodox Jewish parties have great influence over government. Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany too after using PR to get a foothold in the Reichstag
There are extremist parties elected under FPTP too: see India, Bosnia and even the US. Other countries with PR don’t have significant extremist parties doing well: e.g., South Africa, New Zealand, Malta, Japan.
See also Scotland where the SCons will never get their sweaty little hands on the levers of power.
On current Holyrood polls the SCons will have the balance of power between SNP and Labour and the LDs in 2026
If there has to be an instructive loss of being the governing party for the SNP at Holyrood, I can’t think of a more helpful interregnum than one of SLab being propped up by the SCons. SLab and Anas aren’t that bright, but even I don’t think they would be that self destructively moronic.
On topic: a combination of slightly elevated tactical voting (it's never perfect), stay at homes and possible low vote share means the base is very low, sub 1997 numbers, but I'm don't expect below 100.
The unasked question is 'is it existential'. Let's put some hypothetical markets up.
Party of PM after next change of party (main identified direct legal successors count): At the moment you'd say Labour are 1/50 or tighter on this - no voting system change likely under Con and even if they blow 2024 they are not going back to Corbynism.
Even back during the worst of Corbynism this was probably a 1/20 shot, we have only had a couple of times since PMs existed of non alternation, and all the calls of "Labour are finished" seemed hyperbolic.
So, go forward to 2024 and assume for a minute PM Starmer. How does that look?
The Tories could well take some ideologically narrow and fringe turns, Labour could well look at voting reform and that could spin out parties. And either the right or the centre could be that split. But the voting bloc for a centre right party remains, and it might take a while for proportional politics to fully mature. A lot of ifs, but I'd still have the Tories tighter than 1/12 to be the next party of the PM post Labour.
What this is also highly relevant to is the Sunak the Johnson enabler vs Starmer the Corbyn enabler arguments. The vehicle for power is almost certainly a main party and, also very short odds is that the vehicle for power within a party is current / recent Cab / ShadCab, Corbyn being the exception of course. I avoided voting Labour for 4 years, but I'm glad someone was in the vehicle, because beyond that, had there been no one sensible left in ShadCab, we'd have been looking at 97-10 retreads stewing on the back benches, or RLB types. Future opposition Tories would do well to take note.
Higher rents means higher rental inflation. Workers will need to go on strike for higher pay to pay their rent. Controls on the rental market are leading to baked-in higher inflation.
I've done a fair bit of private renting, and I despair at some of the policies that come out of the left on this. As a renter, I wanted to a vibrant market that would give me a lot of choice at affordable prices with some measure of protection that would stop me being made homeless on a whim. That's about it.
Rent controls coupled with eviction freezes just fucks the whole thing.
The latest policy wheeze - help renters by pushing landlords out of business - hasn't come from the left, though. It is Tory policy.
Stupid question - how are the Government doing that - via the 2016 tax changes and a requirement to improve the energy efficiency of the house?
Asking because neither of those changes are making things easier for renters where supply is down, demand is equal (or higher than before due to population growth) and prices are rising.
What we actually need is for pension funds to actually focus on build to rent...
Any problems with supply are solely due to the fact that construction hasn't kept pace with population. The only answer to that is to build more, but the Government are siding with NIMBYs instead.
If a landlord sells up and exits the market then that doesn't adjust supply and demand net because either the landlord sells to another landlord (so no net change) or they sell to someone who used to be a tenant but is now an owner occupier instead (so 1 fewer supply, 1 fewer demand, no net change).
Build, build, build to boost supply.
This though is not true. The number of houses does not change I agree however the size of rental households is generally larger than owner occupied households so a house moving from rental to owner occupied actually increases the ratio of people looking to rent/houses to rent
That's due to age not rental/ownership primarily.
A retired couple who own their own home, or a widower who owns their own home don't live on their own because they are owner-occupiers.
And a couple with primary school aged kids who rent aren't going to throw their kids out of their home if they buy a property.
It may be due to age but that is irrelevant. You will still have more people chasing fewer properties
Here is a worked example to demonstrate
2,500,000 renters in 1 million homes
sell up half
you now have 1,250,000 displaced renters of which 1,200,000 will be soaked up by now being owner occupiers leaving 50,000 renters extra fighting for the diminished rental pool.
Sorry I dont see age is relevant to this....you have 2.5 renters per home regardless of age and only 2.4 for owner occupied. Owners will also have kids so your point is void. The higher occupancy for rental is more down to HMO's and young adults house sharing than families
Sorry your maths are wrong, age is entirely relevant to this.
You are looking at correlation not causation.
Sell half a million homes, have half a million households who were renting buy them, and the net change is zero.
The higher occupancy for rental is due to families. The age-profile of renters covers those with dependent children more than the age-profile of owner occupiers, so correlation is not causation like you are thinking.
Do you not consider that families with young children would already have bought if they could afford it? They can't so they rent. So yes age is irrelevant
Families with young children used to be able to afford to buy homes at a much higher rate, and if landlords are selling up to owner occupiers as per our scenario we are discussing, then they would be again.
So no, age is not irrelevant. Your statistic on people living per home is completely irrelevant, because that statistics is a correlation to ownership not caused by it. It has causative link to age profile, which correlates to ownership, so ownership correlates to people per home.
Correlation is not causation.
Landlords have been selling up since the Osborne reforms, the rental pool has been diminishing since the Osborne reforms. House prices haven't been going down. Few people rent if they can afford to buy, if they can't afford to buy landlords selling up and reducing the rental pool is not going to help them in the least. Your theory seems predicated on "they could buy but they are just being obstinate and rent"
House prices haven't gone down because supply hasn't kept up with demand. Not enough houses are being built.
Demand goes up by more than supply and prices go up. That's basic economics, not rocket science.
Build more houses.
If landlords sell up and tenants buy the houses, then the former tenant who now has their own home is greatly improved by that situation.
The tenants who still rent aren't helped, but they're not hurt either, since there's fewer homes available to rent, but fewer people seeking to rent too, so no net change.
Build more houses and the supply will go up and prices will go down. Anything else is just fiddling at the edges.
Yes but people that rent aren't going to be buying them is the point. If they could afford to buy then most of them would have already done so. Your assumption that rental properties are going to be magically affordable to those forced to rent now due to lack of choice is wrong.
I rent I would buy if I could, my landlord selling up wouldn't suddenly make it possible for me to buy. Most renters are in that position.
Sorry but who do you think is going to buy if the landlord sells up?
If its a household who were renting, then it takes a competitor seeking to rent out of the equation, demand for rental properties go down accordingly, no net change in supply and demand.
If its an alternative landlord, then they are going to want to let out the property, so no net change in supply and demand.
The house isn't suddenly going to vanish into the ether. It will still be there.
Building more houses raises overall supply. Whether a particular household owns or rents their property does not.
A fair number will be bought as second homes I have no doubt for a start. The simple fact is house prices aren't falling even though landlords have been selling up. Most renters cannot buy or they would have. Your whole premise is built on them suddenly being able to buy a house they already can't afford.
Now if stats had shown falling house prices since Osbornes reforms you might have a point. Stats dont show this so your premise is false.
The rate of selling by landlords is fart in a thunderstorm compared to the undersupply of housing. The demand to buy is increasing (with the population) by six figures a year.
I'm wondering about a perhaps underdiscussed element of housing supply - the Barrett building site I drive past each morning, it well.. hasn't exactly looked chock full of builders recently. I have no idea how long a site should take to complete though.
I think I heard that house prices in Britain are now falling on an annual rate. Seems like it would be obvious that housebuilders will respond by slowing down completions in the hope that they'll make more money selling next year.
This is why the State needs to be a major housebuilder, and/or it needs to be much easier for individuals to buy a plot of land with planning permission and pay a builder to build a single house on it.
The big housebuilders are never going to increase supply of houses in a market where prices are falling. Just as SeanF said in relation to parties and voting systems, why would they act against their own interests to do that?
Average UK house prices increased by 4.1% in the 12 months to March 2023, down from 5.8% in February 2023.
The rate of increase is slowing, its not the same as house prices falling
Of course, if Blair hadn’t won such a big majority in 97, then he would have instituted PR along the lines advocated by Lord Jenkins. It was Prescott who stopped him.
From Labour backbench MPs perspective, Prescott was right.
Labour would only have won 283 MPs with PR in 1997, compared to the 418 Labour MPs elected under FPTP in 1997
Labour will never introduce PR, unless it’s the unavoidable price of a coalition with the Liberals.
And even then LAB would try as hard as possible to water it down to just apply to local elections, and any elected replacement for House of Lords, not for the Commons.
Agreed. I think too few realise the scale of opposition to PR in the party. The Labour Party is a vehicle to win general elections and govern alone, not as lead partner in a rainbow coalition.
Yes, though much less so if it was at local level, because (a) local issues are less partisan but above all (b) many MPs don't much care about local councils. I can see it as a reasonable deal if needed - Labour would protect FPTP at Parliamentary level, LibDems would see it as a useful thin end of the wedge.
Interesting assessment from the Institute for the Study of War of the effect of the flooding on Russian defences on the east bank of the Dnipro.
If the Russians did blow the dam, the lack of coordination on their part is astonishing. But could it have been the Ukrainians after all?
The destruction of the KHPP dam is affecting Russian military positions on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. The flooding has destroyed many Russian first line field fortifications that the Russian military intended to use to defend against Ukrainian attacks. Rapid flooding has likely forced Russian personnel and military equipment in Russian main concentration points in Oleshky and Hola Prystan to withdraw. Russian forces had previously used these positions to shell Kherson City and other settlements on the west (right bank) of Kherson. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces relocated their personnel and military equipment from five to 15 kilometers from the flood zone, which places Russian forces out of artillery range of some settlements on the west (right bank) of the Dnipro River they had been attacking.[6] The flood also destroyed Russian minefields along the coast, with footage showing mines exploding in the flood water.[7] Kherson Oblast Occupation Head Vladimir Saldo, however, claimed that the destruction of the KHPP is beneficial to the Russian defenses because it will complicate Ukrainian advances across the river.[8] Saldo’s assessment of the situation ignores the loss of Russia’s first line of prepared fortifications. The amount of Russian heavy equipment lost in the first 24 hours of flooding is also unclear. https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-7-2023
Why would the Ukrainians do that? It makes zero strategic sense.
It was Russian incompetence and/or willingness to sacrifice assets so it didn’t look like it was them
Yes, it makes no sense for the Ukranians to have done it and what is perhaps more releant, they lack the means. It isn't easy to destroy a modern dam.
The Russians on the ther hand possessed the means and the motive. On the other hand, I wouldn't rule out sheer incompetent mismanagement. We've seen plenty of that in this war.
Plus, of course, the Russians had been keeping the sluice gates closed for the last several weeks with the effect that the reservoir was at its maximum and coming over the top of the dam in places. That looks to me like a deliberate policy to maximise the damage that was going to be caused when they blew it.
I suspect that their timing was off and what they wanted to do was to catch the Ukrainian attack on the ground that was going to be flooded, taking out many of these fancy, new, western tanks. They presumably thought that the attack was under way.
They thought the tanks were about to cross the river? Difficult to believe.
The BBC is floating an alternative possibility - that the dam had already been damaged last year, and the Russians deliberately raised to water level in the hope that it would fail. At least that would account for their apparently not knowing exactly when it would happen.
They didn't tell their soldiers that they were being sent to invade Ukraine in February last year. Do we need an explanation for their units on the left bank not knowing the dam was going to be blown?
The Russian government puts a different value on human life vs the West. We find it difficult to compute how they would not look to reposition their troops ahead of that. But the reality is they still have the Tsarist mindset of infantry being pawns that can be expended without a second thought.
This is not to say it was a deliberate decision to sacrifice them so as not to tip off anyone to their plans (which were known in advance anyway). It’s just they didn’t even think about them.
At what point does the supply of Russian soldiers become an issue?
It's been noted that Russia today is very different demographically to the USSR of 1942, when the supply of men was, effectively, infinite. But it still seems a long way to go before conservation of their own troop numbers becomes an issue they feel they need to deal with. My understanding is that they still have a vast army - albeit one they need to have most of doing other things than fighting in Ukraine lest China or anyone else suddenly take a fancy to all that undefended land.
Or do they wake up one day and realise that there are no Russian men of fighting age left?
Higher rents means higher rental inflation. Workers will need to go on strike for higher pay to pay their rent. Controls on the rental market are leading to baked-in higher inflation.
I've done a fair bit of private renting, and I despair at some of the policies that come out of the left on this. As a renter, I wanted to a vibrant market that would give me a lot of choice at affordable prices with some measure of protection that would stop me being made homeless on a whim. That's about it.
Rent controls coupled with eviction freezes just fucks the whole thing.
The latest policy wheeze - help renters by pushing landlords out of business - hasn't come from the left, though. It is Tory policy.
Stupid question - how are the Government doing that - via the 2016 tax changes and a requirement to improve the energy efficiency of the house?
Asking because neither of those changes are making things easier for renters where supply is down, demand is equal (or higher than before due to population growth) and prices are rising.
What we actually need is for pension funds to actually focus on build to rent...
Any problems with supply are solely due to the fact that construction hasn't kept pace with population. The only answer to that is to build more, but the Government are siding with NIMBYs instead.
If a landlord sells up and exits the market then that doesn't adjust supply and demand net because either the landlord sells to another landlord (so no net change) or they sell to someone who used to be a tenant but is now an owner occupier instead (so 1 fewer supply, 1 fewer demand, no net change).
Build, build, build to boost supply.
This though is not true. The number of houses does not change I agree however the size of rental households is generally larger than owner occupied households so a house moving from rental to owner occupied actually increases the ratio of people looking to rent/houses to rent
That's due to age not rental/ownership primarily.
A retired couple who own their own home, or a widower who owns their own home don't live on their own because they are owner-occupiers.
And a couple with primary school aged kids who rent aren't going to throw their kids out of their home if they buy a property.
It may be due to age but that is irrelevant. You will still have more people chasing fewer properties
Here is a worked example to demonstrate
2,500,000 renters in 1 million homes
sell up half
you now have 1,250,000 displaced renters of which 1,200,000 will be soaked up by now being owner occupiers leaving 50,000 renters extra fighting for the diminished rental pool.
Sorry I dont see age is relevant to this....you have 2.5 renters per home regardless of age and only 2.4 for owner occupied. Owners will also have kids so your point is void. The higher occupancy for rental is more down to HMO's and young adults house sharing than families
Sorry your maths are wrong, age is entirely relevant to this.
You are looking at correlation not causation.
Sell half a million homes, have half a million households who were renting buy them, and the net change is zero.
The higher occupancy for rental is due to families. The age-profile of renters covers those with dependent children more than the age-profile of owner occupiers, so correlation is not causation like you are thinking.
Do you not consider that families with young children would already have bought if they could afford it? They can't so they rent. So yes age is irrelevant
Families with young children used to be able to afford to buy homes at a much higher rate, and if landlords are selling up to owner occupiers as per our scenario we are discussing, then they would be again.
So no, age is not irrelevant. Your statistic on people living per home is completely irrelevant, because that statistics is a correlation to ownership not caused by it. It has causative link to age profile, which correlates to ownership, so ownership correlates to people per home.
Correlation is not causation.
Landlords have been selling up since the Osborne reforms, the rental pool has been diminishing since the Osborne reforms. House prices haven't been going down. Few people rent if they can afford to buy, if they can't afford to buy landlords selling up and reducing the rental pool is not going to help them in the least. Your theory seems predicated on "they could buy but they are just being obstinate and rent"
House prices haven't gone down because supply hasn't kept up with demand. Not enough houses are being built.
Demand goes up by more than supply and prices go up. That's basic economics, not rocket science.
Build more houses.
If landlords sell up and tenants buy the houses, then the former tenant who now has their own home is greatly improved by that situation.
The tenants who still rent aren't helped, but they're not hurt either, since there's fewer homes available to rent, but fewer people seeking to rent too, so no net change.
Build more houses and the supply will go up and prices will go down. Anything else is just fiddling at the edges.
Yes but people that rent aren't going to be buying them is the point. If they could afford to buy then most of them would have already done so. Your assumption that rental properties are going to be magically affordable to those forced to rent now due to lack of choice is wrong.
I rent I would buy if I could, my landlord selling up wouldn't suddenly make it possible for me to buy. Most renters are in that position.
Sorry but who do you think is going to buy if the landlord sells up?
If its a household who were renting, then it takes a competitor seeking to rent out of the equation, demand for rental properties go down accordingly, no net change in supply and demand.
If its an alternative landlord, then they are going to want to let out the property, so no net change in supply and demand.
The house isn't suddenly going to vanish into the ether. It will still be there.
Building more houses raises overall supply. Whether a particular household owns or rents their property does not.
A fair number will be bought as second homes I have no doubt for a start. The simple fact is house prices aren't falling even though landlords have been selling up. Most renters cannot buy or they would have. Your whole premise is built on them suddenly being able to buy a house they already can't afford.
Now if stats had shown falling house prices since Osbornes reforms you might have a point. Stats dont show this so your premise is false.
The rate of selling by landlords is fart in a thunderstorm compared to the undersupply of housing. The demand to buy is increasing (with the population) by six figures a year.
I'm wondering about a perhaps underdiscussed element of housing supply - the Barrett building site I drive past each morning, it well.. hasn't exactly looked chock full of builders recently. I have no idea how long a site should take to complete though.
If our planning system wasn't such a mess, then the likes of Barrett wouldn't be able to own the rights to build and have no competition. Anyone who wants to build should be able to, and then if Barrett don't then someone else will and will beat them to the market. Let the invisible hand deal with it.
Though I have to say in my area houses are flying up, on greenfield land, which is fantastic to see. It helps that there are about a dozen or more developments all competing with each other, rather than just one solitary developer. Barrett are down the road, I went with someone else, and there's about eight other developers also putting up their own developments all within walking distance of here.
That's the way it needs to be in far more places. Not pissing about at the edges with a solitary developer, but a whole suite of developments all competing with each other. Competition works.
There's plenty of building going on near me - I calculated if it was repeated nationwide we'd have an extra 10 million houses going up. But there doesn't seem to be happening much recently on the Barrett site so I'm unsure as to whether it's a deliberate go slow.
Interestingly around me the Barratt development is the one that seems to have the least activity too. I wonder if that's a coincidence or not?
Though its quite fenced off so hard to tell, where I live there is a lot of activity happening from our developer and they certainly don't seem to be slowing down but its still always been planned to take another couple of years to finish off the development just from this one developer. But new houses are still coming onto the market each month. My own street is finished now which is nice not to have the builders on this street anymore.
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power........
Not at all, my dear young HY. Why do you think up to 20% of the country would like to see a Corbynite left party and te same for a Farage style Reform party? There is far more danger under the present voting system where is is comparatively easy for extremists to take over the entire party. They took over the Labour Party not so long ago, and the present profile of the Conservative leadership speaks for itself.
If you have strict proportional representation (which would have to be country-wide), then parties can easily split up, so that different shades of opinion are fairly represented. At present, if you are a Conservative supporter, you are forced to vote for the official Conservative candidate - don't you? - whatever sub-set of Conservatism he supports. Or vote for another party, as lots of traditional decent Conservatives did at the recent local elections.
If you have the best form of PR - the Single Transferable Vote in Multi-Member constituencies - a candidate would have to get at least 20% of support in that constituency to get elected. And if there is that amount of support for his position and policies, then those views have a right to be represented.
Up to now, the Conservative Party has benefited from our broken voting system. The appearance of bodies like the one fronted by Carol Vorderman helps to remove some of that distortion, as a look at their recommendations for the recent council elections shows.
I have the impression that now it is the Conservative point of view that is seriously under-represented on my local council. And the Labour point of view too, because there are no Labour councillors at all.
As about 15 to 20% of the country are hard right and 15 to 20% of the country are hard left, only FPTP keeps them voting Tory or Labour.
See the European elections where when we had PR Farage's party won twice, in 2014 and 2019.
Sunak is also not Farage and Starmer is not Corbyn. With PR Farage and Corbyn would still be leading their own parties with lots of MPs in Parliament
Oh dear, young HY! The EU elections were fought on the party list system, based on regions. If you remember, the EU insisted that we should fight EU elections with some system of PR, and the party list system, imposed on us by the then Labour government, was the least proportional one that the Labour Government could get away with. In other words, it was the one where the Party kept greatest control, and individual voters had least say.
I am still awaiting evidence to support your assertion that 20% of the country is hard right and another 20% hard left. If anything, the vast increase in support for the Lib Dems at the recent local elections would suggest that you might be mistaken.
If we had PR the likelihood is Farage's RefUK and the Greens or a Corbynite party would overtake the LDs as the 3rd UK wide party within 5 to 10 years.
In 2015 UKIP won more votes than the LDs even if under FPTP the LDs won more seats than UKIP.
A few local election protest votes for the LDs to try and stop new housing and mend potholes doesn't translate to national elections.
PR may on paper benefit the LDs much more than the Conservatives and Labour but in practice it might hit all 3 of the established parties
No they wouldn't. The thing holding the tiny parties back is the same thing holding the Lib Dems back. In most constituencies, 461 of them, it's Labour and Conservative holding the top two positions. Many people view voting for the third or worse party as a wasted vote, so they feel "forced" into choosing between red and blue.
There's no reason to suppose this would benefit the parties in 4th, 5th and beyond so much more that they would overtake the 3rd placed party.
They thought the tanks were about to cross the river? Difficult to believe.
The BBC is floating an alternative possibility - that the dam had already been damaged last year, and the Russians deliberately raised to water level in the hope that it would fail. At least that would account for their apparently not knowing exactly when it would happen.
Classic Russian disinformation.
Flood Twitter with alternative explanations, amplify those which gain traction and drown out the truth
So far today you’ve given us:
* May be it was the Ukrainians * It was an accident, damaged in fighting don’t you know. But maybe the Russians were just a little bit culpable
What’s next? MH17 hidden in the reservoir and the Ukrainians wanted to drain it to discredit the Russians?
Another example of the tendency of some on PB to go ad hominem if they disagree with something, especially about the war. Are you seriously suggesting that Chris - who has posted nearly 10,000 times without an obvious political agenda - is a Russian stooge?
The fact is that we don't know the cause of the dam collapse for sure, though the balance of evidence so far suggests the Russians. It's awful and much worse things are happening in the war and will continue to happen as long as it lasts. The basic issue remains the war and whether the aim should be a negotiated settlement or a total Ukrainian victory.
The aim should be to free Ukrainian civilians from Russian occupation. Everything the Russians have done points to their complete disregard for the welfare of civilians in areas under their control, and their active persecution of those suspected of not being loyal to Mother Russia.
If that can be achieved through negotiations then great, but otherwise we should be prepared to use other means.
Any negotiation at this moment condemns millions of Ukrainians to a despotic regime. Zelensky cannot do that unless and until all other options are exhausted. And the West understands this is a critical fight for them. The Russian regime must be stopped and pushed back to the pre 2014 borders. That has risks, but to do less rewards their actions.
There were a bunch of comments on Twitter this morning blaming the west for the dam being blown… apparently we didn’t consider the Russian response to us continuing to support Ukraine so it’s all our fault
Higher rents means higher rental inflation. Workers will need to go on strike for higher pay to pay their rent. Controls on the rental market are leading to baked-in higher inflation.
I've done a fair bit of private renting, and I despair at some of the policies that come out of the left on this. As a renter, I wanted to a vibrant market that would give me a lot of choice at affordable prices with some measure of protection that would stop me being made homeless on a whim. That's about it.
Rent controls coupled with eviction freezes just fucks the whole thing.
The latest policy wheeze - help renters by pushing landlords out of business - hasn't come from the left, though. It is Tory policy.
Stupid question - how are the Government doing that - via the 2016 tax changes and a requirement to improve the energy efficiency of the house?
Asking because neither of those changes are making things easier for renters where supply is down, demand is equal (or higher than before due to population growth) and prices are rising.
What we actually need is for pension funds to actually focus on build to rent...
Any problems with supply are solely due to the fact that construction hasn't kept pace with population. The only answer to that is to build more, but the Government are siding with NIMBYs instead.
If a landlord sells up and exits the market then that doesn't adjust supply and demand net because either the landlord sells to another landlord (so no net change) or they sell to someone who used to be a tenant but is now an owner occupier instead (so 1 fewer supply, 1 fewer demand, no net change).
Build, build, build to boost supply.
This though is not true. The number of houses does not change I agree however the size of rental households is generally larger than owner occupied households so a house moving from rental to owner occupied actually increases the ratio of people looking to rent/houses to rent
That's due to age not rental/ownership primarily.
A retired couple who own their own home, or a widower who owns their own home don't live on their own because they are owner-occupiers.
And a couple with primary school aged kids who rent aren't going to throw their kids out of their home if they buy a property.
It may be due to age but that is irrelevant. You will still have more people chasing fewer properties
Here is a worked example to demonstrate
2,500,000 renters in 1 million homes
sell up half
you now have 1,250,000 displaced renters of which 1,200,000 will be soaked up by now being owner occupiers leaving 50,000 renters extra fighting for the diminished rental pool.
Sorry I dont see age is relevant to this....you have 2.5 renters per home regardless of age and only 2.4 for owner occupied. Owners will also have kids so your point is void. The higher occupancy for rental is more down to HMO's and young adults house sharing than families
Sorry your maths are wrong, age is entirely relevant to this.
You are looking at correlation not causation.
Sell half a million homes, have half a million households who were renting buy them, and the net change is zero.
The higher occupancy for rental is due to families. The age-profile of renters covers those with dependent children more than the age-profile of owner occupiers, so correlation is not causation like you are thinking.
Do you not consider that families with young children would already have bought if they could afford it? They can't so they rent. So yes age is irrelevant
Families with young children used to be able to afford to buy homes at a much higher rate, and if landlords are selling up to owner occupiers as per our scenario we are discussing, then they would be again.
So no, age is not irrelevant. Your statistic on people living per home is completely irrelevant, because that statistics is a correlation to ownership not caused by it. It has causative link to age profile, which correlates to ownership, so ownership correlates to people per home.
Correlation is not causation.
Landlords have been selling up since the Osborne reforms, the rental pool has been diminishing since the Osborne reforms. House prices haven't been going down. Few people rent if they can afford to buy, if they can't afford to buy landlords selling up and reducing the rental pool is not going to help them in the least. Your theory seems predicated on "they could buy but they are just being obstinate and rent"
House prices haven't gone down because supply hasn't kept up with demand. Not enough houses are being built.
Demand goes up by more than supply and prices go up. That's basic economics, not rocket science.
Build more houses.
If landlords sell up and tenants buy the houses, then the former tenant who now has their own home is greatly improved by that situation.
The tenants who still rent aren't helped, but they're not hurt either, since there's fewer homes available to rent, but fewer people seeking to rent too, so no net change.
Build more houses and the supply will go up and prices will go down. Anything else is just fiddling at the edges.
Yes but people that rent aren't going to be buying them is the point. If they could afford to buy then most of them would have already done so. Your assumption that rental properties are going to be magically affordable to those forced to rent now due to lack of choice is wrong.
I rent I would buy if I could, my landlord selling up wouldn't suddenly make it possible for me to buy. Most renters are in that position.
Sorry but who do you think is going to buy if the landlord sells up?
If its a household who were renting, then it takes a competitor seeking to rent out of the equation, demand for rental properties go down accordingly, no net change in supply and demand.
If its an alternative landlord, then they are going to want to let out the property, so no net change in supply and demand.
The house isn't suddenly going to vanish into the ether. It will still be there.
Building more houses raises overall supply. Whether a particular household owns or rents their property does not.
A fair number will be bought as second homes I have no doubt for a start. The simple fact is house prices aren't falling even though landlords have been selling up. Most renters cannot buy or they would have. Your whole premise is built on them suddenly being able to buy a house they already can't afford.
Now if stats had shown falling house prices since Osbornes reforms you might have a point. Stats dont show this so your premise is false.
The rate of selling by landlords is fart in a thunderstorm compared to the undersupply of housing. The demand to buy is increasing (with the population) by six figures a year.
I'm wondering about a perhaps underdiscussed element of housing supply - the Barrett building site I drive past each morning, it well.. hasn't exactly looked chock full of builders recently. I have no idea how long a site should take to complete though.
Agree with that. I've seen a lot of developments that take an inordinate amount of time to complete, with little work being evident.
One of the NIMBY objections is the disruption caused by new building. I suspect that quicker completion of projects would help to reduce objections to them. Nobody likes living adjacent to a building site for years.
But that isn't how a sane company works - if a site is quickly sold out you can build it but Builders are incredibly reluctant to complete a development while plots are still being sold.
Higher rents means higher rental inflation. Workers will need to go on strike for higher pay to pay their rent. Controls on the rental market are leading to baked-in higher inflation.
I've done a fair bit of private renting, and I despair at some of the policies that come out of the left on this. As a renter, I wanted to a vibrant market that would give me a lot of choice at affordable prices with some measure of protection that would stop me being made homeless on a whim. That's about it.
Rent controls coupled with eviction freezes just fucks the whole thing.
The latest policy wheeze - help renters by pushing landlords out of business - hasn't come from the left, though. It is Tory policy.
Stupid question - how are the Government doing that - via the 2016 tax changes and a requirement to improve the energy efficiency of the house?
Asking because neither of those changes are making things easier for renters where supply is down, demand is equal (or higher than before due to population growth) and prices are rising.
What we actually need is for pension funds to actually focus on build to rent...
Any problems with supply are solely due to the fact that construction hasn't kept pace with population. The only answer to that is to build more, but the Government are siding with NIMBYs instead.
If a landlord sells up and exits the market then that doesn't adjust supply and demand net because either the landlord sells to another landlord (so no net change) or they sell to someone who used to be a tenant but is now an owner occupier instead (so 1 fewer supply, 1 fewer demand, no net change).
Build, build, build to boost supply.
This though is not true. The number of houses does not change I agree however the size of rental households is generally larger than owner occupied households so a house moving from rental to owner occupied actually increases the ratio of people looking to rent/houses to rent
That's due to age not rental/ownership primarily.
A retired couple who own their own home, or a widower who owns their own home don't live on their own because they are owner-occupiers.
And a couple with primary school aged kids who rent aren't going to throw their kids out of their home if they buy a property.
It may be due to age but that is irrelevant. You will still have more people chasing fewer properties
Here is a worked example to demonstrate
2,500,000 renters in 1 million homes
sell up half
you now have 1,250,000 displaced renters of which 1,200,000 will be soaked up by now being owner occupiers leaving 50,000 renters extra fighting for the diminished rental pool.
Sorry I dont see age is relevant to this....you have 2.5 renters per home regardless of age and only 2.4 for owner occupied. Owners will also have kids so your point is void. The higher occupancy for rental is more down to HMO's and young adults house sharing than families
Sorry your maths are wrong, age is entirely relevant to this.
You are looking at correlation not causation.
Sell half a million homes, have half a million households who were renting buy them, and the net change is zero.
The higher occupancy for rental is due to families. The age-profile of renters covers those with dependent children more than the age-profile of owner occupiers, so correlation is not causation like you are thinking.
Do you not consider that families with young children would already have bought if they could afford it? They can't so they rent. So yes age is irrelevant
Families with young children used to be able to afford to buy homes at a much higher rate, and if landlords are selling up to owner occupiers as per our scenario we are discussing, then they would be again.
So no, age is not irrelevant. Your statistic on people living per home is completely irrelevant, because that statistics is a correlation to ownership not caused by it. It has causative link to age profile, which correlates to ownership, so ownership correlates to people per home.
Correlation is not causation.
Landlords have been selling up since the Osborne reforms, the rental pool has been diminishing since the Osborne reforms. House prices haven't been going down. Few people rent if they can afford to buy, if they can't afford to buy landlords selling up and reducing the rental pool is not going to help them in the least. Your theory seems predicated on "they could buy but they are just being obstinate and rent"
House prices haven't gone down because supply hasn't kept up with demand. Not enough houses are being built.
Demand goes up by more than supply and prices go up. That's basic economics, not rocket science.
Build more houses.
If landlords sell up and tenants buy the houses, then the former tenant who now has their own home is greatly improved by that situation.
The tenants who still rent aren't helped, but they're not hurt either, since there's fewer homes available to rent, but fewer people seeking to rent too, so no net change.
Build more houses and the supply will go up and prices will go down. Anything else is just fiddling at the edges.
Yes but people that rent aren't going to be buying them is the point. If they could afford to buy then most of them would have already done so. Your assumption that rental properties are going to be magically affordable to those forced to rent now due to lack of choice is wrong.
I rent I would buy if I could, my landlord selling up wouldn't suddenly make it possible for me to buy. Most renters are in that position.
Sorry but who do you think is going to buy if the landlord sells up?
If its a household who were renting, then it takes a competitor seeking to rent out of the equation, demand for rental properties go down accordingly, no net change in supply and demand.
If its an alternative landlord, then they are going to want to let out the property, so no net change in supply and demand.
The house isn't suddenly going to vanish into the ether. It will still be there.
Building more houses raises overall supply. Whether a particular household owns or rents their property does not.
A fair number will be bought as second homes I have no doubt for a start. The simple fact is house prices aren't falling even though landlords have been selling up. Most renters cannot buy or they would have. Your whole premise is built on them suddenly being able to buy a house they already can't afford.
Now if stats had shown falling house prices since Osbornes reforms you might have a point. Stats dont show this so your premise is false.
The rate of selling by landlords is fart in a thunderstorm compared to the undersupply of housing. The demand to buy is increasing (with the population) by six figures a year.
I'm wondering about a perhaps underdiscussed element of housing supply - the Barrett building site I drive past each morning, it well.. hasn't exactly looked chock full of builders recently. I have no idea how long a site should take to complete though.
Agree with that. I've seen a lot of developments that take an inordinate amount of time to complete, with little work being evident.
One of the NIMBY objections is the disruption caused by new building. I suspect that quicker completion of projects would help to reduce objections to them. Nobody likes living adjacent to a building site for years.
I suspect that over the next five years, the example of the rebuilding of Ukraine will put us to shame on that front.
Higher rents means higher rental inflation. Workers will need to go on strike for higher pay to pay their rent. Controls on the rental market are leading to baked-in higher inflation.
I've done a fair bit of private renting, and I despair at some of the policies that come out of the left on this. As a renter, I wanted to a vibrant market that would give me a lot of choice at affordable prices with some measure of protection that would stop me being made homeless on a whim. That's about it.
Rent controls coupled with eviction freezes just fucks the whole thing.
The latest policy wheeze - help renters by pushing landlords out of business - hasn't come from the left, though. It is Tory policy.
Stupid question - how are the Government doing that - via the 2016 tax changes and a requirement to improve the energy efficiency of the house?
Asking because neither of those changes are making things easier for renters where supply is down, demand is equal (or higher than before due to population growth) and prices are rising.
What we actually need is for pension funds to actually focus on build to rent...
Any problems with supply are solely due to the fact that construction hasn't kept pace with population. The only answer to that is to build more, but the Government are siding with NIMBYs instead.
If a landlord sells up and exits the market then that doesn't adjust supply and demand net because either the landlord sells to another landlord (so no net change) or they sell to someone who used to be a tenant but is now an owner occupier instead (so 1 fewer supply, 1 fewer demand, no net change).
Build, build, build to boost supply.
This though is not true. The number of houses does not change I agree however the size of rental households is generally larger than owner occupied households so a house moving from rental to owner occupied actually increases the ratio of people looking to rent/houses to rent
That's due to age not rental/ownership primarily.
A retired couple who own their own home, or a widower who owns their own home don't live on their own because they are owner-occupiers.
And a couple with primary school aged kids who rent aren't going to throw their kids out of their home if they buy a property.
It may be due to age but that is irrelevant. You will still have more people chasing fewer properties
Here is a worked example to demonstrate
2,500,000 renters in 1 million homes
sell up half
you now have 1,250,000 displaced renters of which 1,200,000 will be soaked up by now being owner occupiers leaving 50,000 renters extra fighting for the diminished rental pool.
Sorry I dont see age is relevant to this....you have 2.5 renters per home regardless of age and only 2.4 for owner occupied. Owners will also have kids so your point is void. The higher occupancy for rental is more down to HMO's and young adults house sharing than families
Sorry your maths are wrong, age is entirely relevant to this.
You are looking at correlation not causation.
Sell half a million homes, have half a million households who were renting buy them, and the net change is zero.
The higher occupancy for rental is due to families. The age-profile of renters covers those with dependent children more than the age-profile of owner occupiers, so correlation is not causation like you are thinking.
Do you not consider that families with young children would already have bought if they could afford it? They can't so they rent. So yes age is irrelevant
Families with young children used to be able to afford to buy homes at a much higher rate, and if landlords are selling up to owner occupiers as per our scenario we are discussing, then they would be again.
So no, age is not irrelevant. Your statistic on people living per home is completely irrelevant, because that statistics is a correlation to ownership not caused by it. It has causative link to age profile, which correlates to ownership, so ownership correlates to people per home.
Correlation is not causation.
Landlords have been selling up since the Osborne reforms, the rental pool has been diminishing since the Osborne reforms. House prices haven't been going down. Few people rent if they can afford to buy, if they can't afford to buy landlords selling up and reducing the rental pool is not going to help them in the least. Your theory seems predicated on "they could buy but they are just being obstinate and rent"
House prices haven't gone down because supply hasn't kept up with demand. Not enough houses are being built.
Demand goes up by more than supply and prices go up. That's basic economics, not rocket science.
Build more houses.
If landlords sell up and tenants buy the houses, then the former tenant who now has their own home is greatly improved by that situation.
The tenants who still rent aren't helped, but they're not hurt either, since there's fewer homes available to rent, but fewer people seeking to rent too, so no net change.
Build more houses and the supply will go up and prices will go down. Anything else is just fiddling at the edges.
Yes but people that rent aren't going to be buying them is the point. If they could afford to buy then most of them would have already done so. Your assumption that rental properties are going to be magically affordable to those forced to rent now due to lack of choice is wrong.
I rent I would buy if I could, my landlord selling up wouldn't suddenly make it possible for me to buy. Most renters are in that position.
Sorry but who do you think is going to buy if the landlord sells up?
If its a household who were renting, then it takes a competitor seeking to rent out of the equation, demand for rental properties go down accordingly, no net change in supply and demand.
If its an alternative landlord, then they are going to want to let out the property, so no net change in supply and demand.
The house isn't suddenly going to vanish into the ether. It will still be there.
Building more houses raises overall supply. Whether a particular household owns or rents their property does not.
A fair number will be bought as second homes I have no doubt for a start. The simple fact is house prices aren't falling even though landlords have been selling up. Most renters cannot buy or they would have. Your whole premise is built on them suddenly being able to buy a house they already can't afford.
Now if stats had shown falling house prices since Osbornes reforms you might have a point. Stats dont show this so your premise is false.
The rate of selling by landlords is fart in a thunderstorm compared to the undersupply of housing. The demand to buy is increasing (with the population) by six figures a year.
I'm wondering about a perhaps underdiscussed element of housing supply - the Barrett building site I drive past each morning, it well.. hasn't exactly looked chock full of builders recently. I have no idea how long a site should take to complete though.
Agree with that. I've seen a lot of developments that take an inordinate amount of time to complete, with little work being evident.
One of the NIMBY objections is the disruption caused by new building. I suspect that quicker completion of projects would help to reduce objections to them. Nobody likes living adjacent to a building site for years.
But that isn't how a sane company works - if a site is quickly sold out you can build it but Builders are incredibly reluctant to complete a development while plots are still being sold.
Which is because there isn't enough competition.
Liberate the planning system and if a builder is too slow at building then people will buy from a competitor instead.
We have plenty of skilled tradespeople in this country who could be building homes. There's no reason why any one developer should be able to affect prices without the threat of competition staying their hand, the only reason they can is because the big developers can work within the planning constraints which cuts out competition from smaller firms.
Interesting assessment from the Institute for the Study of War of the effect of the flooding on Russian defences on the east bank of the Dnipro.
If the Russians did blow the dam, the lack of coordination on their part is astonishing. But could it have been the Ukrainians after all?
The destruction of the KHPP dam is affecting Russian military positions on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. The flooding has destroyed many Russian first line field fortifications that the Russian military intended to use to defend against Ukrainian attacks. Rapid flooding has likely forced Russian personnel and military equipment in Russian main concentration points in Oleshky and Hola Prystan to withdraw. Russian forces had previously used these positions to shell Kherson City and other settlements on the west (right bank) of Kherson. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces relocated their personnel and military equipment from five to 15 kilometers from the flood zone, which places Russian forces out of artillery range of some settlements on the west (right bank) of the Dnipro River they had been attacking.[6] The flood also destroyed Russian minefields along the coast, with footage showing mines exploding in the flood water.[7] Kherson Oblast Occupation Head Vladimir Saldo, however, claimed that the destruction of the KHPP is beneficial to the Russian defenses because it will complicate Ukrainian advances across the river.[8] Saldo’s assessment of the situation ignores the loss of Russia’s first line of prepared fortifications. The amount of Russian heavy equipment lost in the first 24 hours of flooding is also unclear. https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-7-2023
Why would the Ukrainians do that? It makes zero strategic sense.
It was Russian incompetence and/or willingness to sacrifice assets so it didn’t look like it was them
Yes, it makes no sense for the Ukranians to have done it and what is perhaps more releant, they lack the means. It isn't easy to destroy a modern dam.
The Russians on the ther hand possessed the means and the motive. On the other hand, I wouldn't rule out sheer incompetent mismanagement. We've seen plenty of that in this war.
Plus, of course, the Russians had been keeping the sluice gates closed for the last several weeks with the effect that the reservoir was at its maximum and coming over the top of the dam in places. That looks to me like a deliberate policy to maximise the damage that was going to be caused when they blew it.
I suspect that their timing was off and what they wanted to do was to catch the Ukrainian attack on the ground that was going to be flooded, taking out many of these fancy, new, western tanks. They presumably thought that the attack was under way.
They thought the tanks were about to cross the river? Difficult to believe.
The BBC is floating an alternative possibility - that the dam had already been damaged last year, and the Russians deliberately raised to water level in the hope that it would fail. At least that would account for their apparently not knowing exactly when it would happen.
They didn't tell their soldiers that they were being sent to invade Ukraine in February last year. Do we need an explanation for their units on the left bank not knowing the dam was going to be blown?
The Russian government puts a different value on human life vs the West. We find it difficult to compute how they would not look to reposition their troops ahead of that. But the reality is they still have the Tsarist mindset of infantry being pawns that can be expended without a second thought.
This is not to say it was a deliberate decision to sacrifice them so as not to tip off anyone to their plans (which were known in advance anyway). It’s just they didn’t even think about them.
This is the bunch who
1) didn’t tell soldiers they were going to Ukraine 2) didn’t train conscripts 3) told conscripts to buy their own kit. 4) did ammo resupply on the basis of who the unit commander knows.
They thought the tanks were about to cross the river? Difficult to believe.
The BBC is floating an alternative possibility - that the dam had already been damaged last year, and the Russians deliberately raised to water level in the hope that it would fail. At least that would account for their apparently not knowing exactly when it would happen.
Classic Russian disinformation.
Flood Twitter with alternative explanations, amplify those which gain traction and drown out the truth
So far today you’ve given us:
* May be it was the Ukrainians * It was an accident, damaged in fighting don’t you know. But maybe the Russians were just a little bit culpable
What’s next? MH17 hidden in the reservoir and the Ukrainians wanted to drain it to discredit the Russians?
Another example of the tendency of some on PB to go ad hominem if they disagree with something, especially about the war. Are you seriously suggesting that Chris - who has posted nearly 10,000 times without an obvious political agenda - is a Russian stooge?
The fact is that we don't know the cause of the dam collapse for sure, though the balance of evidence so far suggests the Russians. It's awful and much worse things are happening in the war and will continue to happen as long as it lasts. The basic issue remains the war and whether the aim should be a negotiated settlement or a total Ukrainian victory.
The aim should be to free Ukrainian civilians from Russian occupation. Everything the Russians have done points to their complete disregard for the welfare of civilians in areas under their control, and their active persecution of those suspected of not being loyal to Mother Russia.
If that can be achieved through negotiations then great, but otherwise we should be prepared to use other means.
Any negotiation at this moment condemns millions of Ukrainians to a despotic regime. Zelensky cannot do that unless and until all other options are exhausted. And the West understands this is a critical fight for them. The Russian regime must be stopped and pushed back to the pre 2014 borders. That has risks, but to do less rewards their actions.
There were a bunch of comments on Twitter this morning blaming the west for the dam being blown… apparently we didn’t consider the Russian response to us continuing to support Ukraine so it’s all our fault
My worry is that the tepid Western response to the dam destruction will convince the Russians that they can destroy the Zaporizhzhia NPP if/when they are forced to retreat from that area.
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power........
Not at all, my dear young HY. Why do you think up to 20% of the country would like to see a Corbynite left party and te same for a Farage style Reform party? There is far more danger under the present voting system where is is comparatively easy for extremists to take over the entire party. They took over the Labour Party not so long ago, and the present profile of the Conservative leadership speaks for itself.
If you have strict proportional representation (which would have to be country-wide), then parties can easily split up, so that different shades of opinion are fairly represented. At present, if you are a Conservative supporter, you are forced to vote for the official Conservative candidate - don't you? - whatever sub-set of Conservatism he supports. Or vote for another party, as lots of traditional decent Conservatives did at the recent local elections.
If you have the best form of PR - the Single Transferable Vote in Multi-Member constituencies - a candidate would have to get at least 20% of support in that constituency to get elected. And if there is that amount of support for his position and policies, then those views have a right to be represented.
Up to now, the Conservative Party has benefited from our broken voting system. The appearance of bodies like the one fronted by Carol Vorderman helps to remove some of that distortion, as a look at their recommendations for the recent council elections shows.
I have the impression that now it is the Conservative point of view that is seriously under-represented on my local council. And the Labour point of view too, because there are no Labour councillors at all.
As about 15 to 20% of the country are hard right and 15 to 20% of the country are hard left, only FPTP keeps them voting Tory or Labour.
See the European elections where when we had PR Farage's party won twice, in 2014 and 2019.
Sunak is also not Farage and Starmer is not Corbyn. With PR Farage and Corbyn would still be leading their own parties with lots of MPs in Parliament
Oh dear, young HY! The EU elections were fought on the party list system, based on regions. If you remember, the EU insisted that we should fight EU elections with some system of PR, and the party list system, imposed on us by the then Labour government, was the least proportional one that the Labour Government could get away with. In other words, it was the one where the Party kept greatest control, and individual voters had least say.
I am still awaiting evidence to support your assertion that 20% of the country is hard right and another 20% hard left. If anything, the vast increase in support for the Lib Dems at the recent local elections would suggest that you might be mistaken.
If we had PR the likelihood is Farage's RefUK and the Greens or a Corbynite party would overtake the LDs as the 3rd UK wide party within 5 to 10 years.
In 2015 UKIP won more votes than the LDs even if under FPTP the LDs won more seats than UKIP.
A few local election protest votes for the LDs to try and stop new housing and mend potholes doesn't translate to national elections.
PR may on paper benefit the LDs much more than the Conservatives and Labour but in practice it might hit all 3 of the established parties
No they wouldn't. The thing holding the tiny parties back is the same thing holding the Lib Dems back. In most constituencies, 461 of them, it's Labour and Conservative holding the top two positions. Many people view voting for the third or worse party as a wasted vote, so they feel "forced" into choosing between red and blue.
There's no reason to suppose this would benefit the parties in 4th, 5th and beyond so much more that they would overtake the 3rd placed party.
The experience of the Lib Dems in Scotland and Wales is not promising for their prospects following use of PR at Westminster.
Interesting assessment from the Institute for the Study of War of the effect of the flooding on Russian defences on the east bank of the Dnipro.
If the Russians did blow the dam, the lack of coordination on their part is astonishing. But could it have been the Ukrainians after all?
The destruction of the KHPP dam is affecting Russian military positions on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. The flooding has destroyed many Russian first line field fortifications that the Russian military intended to use to defend against Ukrainian attacks. Rapid flooding has likely forced Russian personnel and military equipment in Russian main concentration points in Oleshky and Hola Prystan to withdraw. Russian forces had previously used these positions to shell Kherson City and other settlements on the west (right bank) of Kherson. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces relocated their personnel and military equipment from five to 15 kilometers from the flood zone, which places Russian forces out of artillery range of some settlements on the west (right bank) of the Dnipro River they had been attacking.[6] The flood also destroyed Russian minefields along the coast, with footage showing mines exploding in the flood water.[7] Kherson Oblast Occupation Head Vladimir Saldo, however, claimed that the destruction of the KHPP is beneficial to the Russian defenses because it will complicate Ukrainian advances across the river.[8] Saldo’s assessment of the situation ignores the loss of Russia’s first line of prepared fortifications. The amount of Russian heavy equipment lost in the first 24 hours of flooding is also unclear. https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-7-2023
Why would the Ukrainians do that? It makes zero strategic sense.
It was Russian incompetence and/or willingness to sacrifice assets so it didn’t look like it was them
Yes, it makes no sense for the Ukranians to have done it and what is perhaps more releant, they lack the means. It isn't easy to destroy a modern dam.
The Russians on the ther hand possessed the means and the motive. On the other hand, I wouldn't rule out sheer incompetent mismanagement. We've seen plenty of that in this war.
Plus, of course, the Russians had been keeping the sluice gates closed for the last several weeks with the effect that the reservoir was at its maximum and coming over the top of the dam in places. That looks to me like a deliberate policy to maximise the damage that was going to be caused when they blew it.
I suspect that their timing was off and what they wanted to do was to catch the Ukrainian attack on the ground that was going to be flooded, taking out many of these fancy, new, western tanks. They presumably thought that the attack was under way.
They thought the tanks were about to cross the river? Difficult to believe.
The BBC is floating an alternative possibility - that the dam had already been damaged last year, and the Russians deliberately raised to water level in the hope that it would fail. At least that would account for their apparently not knowing exactly when it would happen.
They didn't tell their soldiers that they were being sent to invade Ukraine in February last year. Do we need an explanation for their units on the left bank not knowing the dam was going to be blown?
The Russian government puts a different value on human life vs the West. We find it difficult to compute how they would not look to reposition their troops ahead of that. But the reality is they still have the Tsarist mindset of infantry being pawns that can be expended without a second thought.
This is not to say it was a deliberate decision to sacrifice them so as not to tip off anyone to their plans (which were known in advance anyway). It’s just they didn’t even think about them.
At what point does the supply of Russian soldiers become an issue?
It's been noted that Russia today is very different demographically to the USSR of 1942, when the supply of men was, effectively, infinite. But it still seems a long way to go before conservation of their own troop numbers becomes an issue they feel they need to deal with. My understanding is that they still have a vast army - albeit one they need to have most of doing other things than fighting in Ukraine lest China or anyone else suddenly take a fancy to all that undefended land.
Or do they wake up one day and realise that there are no Russian men of fighting age left?
A bigger issue is training and equipping. A horde of men with an AK and one magazine isn’t that useful.
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
Interesting assessment from the Institute for the Study of War of the effect of the flooding on Russian defences on the east bank of the Dnipro.
If the Russians did blow the dam, the lack of coordination on their part is astonishing. But could it have been the Ukrainians after all?
The destruction of the KHPP dam is affecting Russian military positions on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. The flooding has destroyed many Russian first line field fortifications that the Russian military intended to use to defend against Ukrainian attacks. Rapid flooding has likely forced Russian personnel and military equipment in Russian main concentration points in Oleshky and Hola Prystan to withdraw. Russian forces had previously used these positions to shell Kherson City and other settlements on the west (right bank) of Kherson. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces relocated their personnel and military equipment from five to 15 kilometers from the flood zone, which places Russian forces out of artillery range of some settlements on the west (right bank) of the Dnipro River they had been attacking.[6] The flood also destroyed Russian minefields along the coast, with footage showing mines exploding in the flood water.[7] Kherson Oblast Occupation Head Vladimir Saldo, however, claimed that the destruction of the KHPP is beneficial to the Russian defenses because it will complicate Ukrainian advances across the river.[8] Saldo’s assessment of the situation ignores the loss of Russia’s first line of prepared fortifications. The amount of Russian heavy equipment lost in the first 24 hours of flooding is also unclear. https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-7-2023
Why would the Ukrainians do that? It makes zero strategic sense.
It was Russian incompetence and/or willingness to sacrifice assets so it didn’t look like it was them
Yes, it makes no sense for the Ukranians to have done it and what is perhaps more releant, they lack the means. It isn't easy to destroy a modern dam.
The Russians on the ther hand possessed the means and the motive. On the other hand, I wouldn't rule out sheer incompetent mismanagement. We've seen plenty of that in this war.
Plus, of course, the Russians had been keeping the sluice gates closed for the last several weeks with the effect that the reservoir was at its maximum and coming over the top of the dam in places. That looks to me like a deliberate policy to maximise the damage that was going to be caused when they blew it.
I suspect that their timing was off and what they wanted to do was to catch the Ukrainian attack on the ground that was going to be flooded, taking out many of these fancy, new, western tanks. They presumably thought that the attack was under way.
They thought the tanks were about to cross the river? Difficult to believe.
The BBC is floating an alternative possibility - that the dam had already been damaged last year, and the Russians deliberately raised to water level in the hope that it would fail. At least that would account for their apparently not knowing exactly when it would happen.
They didn't tell their soldiers that they were being sent to invade Ukraine in February last year. Do we need an explanation for their units on the left bank not knowing the dam was going to be blown?
The Russian government puts a different value on human life vs the West. We find it difficult to compute how they would not look to reposition their troops ahead of that. But the reality is they still have the Tsarist mindset of infantry being pawns that can be expended without a second thought.
This is not to say it was a deliberate decision to sacrifice them so as not to tip off anyone to their plans (which were known in advance anyway). It’s just they didn’t even think about them.
This is the bunch who
1) didn’t tell soldiers they were going to Ukraine 2) didn’t train conscripts 3) told conscripts to buy their own kit. 4) did ammo resupply on the basis of who the unit commander knows.
5) Illegally occupy 150,000 sq. km. of territory in Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia (by contrast, the Israeli occupied territories cover only 7,000 sq. km.)
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power........
Not at all, my dear young HY. Why do you think up to 20% of the country would like to see a Corbynite left party and te same for a Farage style Reform party? There is far more danger under the present voting system where is is comparatively easy for extremists to take over the entire party. They took over the Labour Party not so long ago, and the present profile of the Conservative leadership speaks for itself.
If you have strict proportional representation (which would have to be country-wide), then parties can easily split up, so that different shades of opinion are fairly represented. At present, if you are a Conservative supporter, you are forced to vote for the official Conservative candidate - don't you? - whatever sub-set of Conservatism he supports. Or vote for another party, as lots of traditional decent Conservatives did at the recent local elections.
If you have the best form of PR - the Single Transferable Vote in Multi-Member constituencies - a candidate would have to get at least 20% of support in that constituency to get elected. And if there is that amount of support for his position and policies, then those views have a right to be represented.
Up to now, the Conservative Party has benefited from our broken voting system. The appearance of bodies like the one fronted by Carol Vorderman helps to remove some of that distortion, as a look at their recommendations for the recent council elections shows.
I have the impression that now it is the Conservative point of view that is seriously under-represented on my local council. And the Labour point of view too, because there are no Labour councillors at all.
As about 15 to 20% of the country are hard right and 15 to 20% of the country are hard left, only FPTP keeps them voting Tory or Labour.
See the European elections where when we had PR Farage's party won twice, in 2014 and 2019.
Sunak is also not Farage and Starmer is not Corbyn. With PR Farage and Corbyn would still be leading their own parties with lots of MPs in Parliament
Oh dear, young HY! The EU elections were fought on the party list system, based on regions. If you remember, the EU insisted that we should fight EU elections with some system of PR, and the party list system, imposed on us by the then Labour government, was the least proportional one that the Labour Government could get away with. In other words, it was the one where the Party kept greatest control, and individual voters had least say.
I am still awaiting evidence to support your assertion that 20% of the country is hard right and another 20% hard left. If anything, the vast increase in support for the Lib Dems at the recent local elections would suggest that you might be mistaken.
If we had PR the likelihood is Farage's RefUK and the Greens or a Corbynite party would overtake the LDs as the 3rd UK wide party within 5 to 10 years.
In 2015 UKIP won more votes than the LDs even if under FPTP the LDs won more seats than UKIP.
A few local election protest votes for the LDs to try and stop new housing and mend potholes doesn't translate to national elections.
PR may on paper benefit the LDs much more than the Conservatives and Labour but in practice it might hit all 3 of the established parties
No they wouldn't. The thing holding the tiny parties back is the same thing holding the Lib Dems back. In most constituencies, 461 of them, it's Labour and Conservative holding the top two positions. Many people view voting for the third or worse party as a wasted vote, so they feel "forced" into choosing between red and blue.
There's no reason to suppose this would benefit the parties in 4th, 5th and beyond so much more that they would overtake the 3rd placed party.
Of course there is, for starters in plenty of constituencies the Lib Dems are the alternative to the incumbent. Then in many constituencies where the Lib Dems aren't even top two they still falsely portray themselves as the alternative.
FPTP massively assists the Lib Dems over smaller competitor parties.
The experience of PR where it is used is to see much more churn in who the third party is, with the former third party being relegated or even eliminated altogether quite frequently. Having a consistent third party in PR nations is rather unusual.
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power........
Not at all, my dear young HY. Why do you think up to 20% of the country would like to see a Corbynite left party and te same for a Farage style Reform party? There is far more danger under the present voting system where is is comparatively easy for extremists to take over the entire party. They took over the Labour Party not so long ago, and the present profile of the Conservative leadership speaks for itself.
If you have strict proportional representation (which would have to be country-wide), then parties can easily split up, so that different shades of opinion are fairly represented. At present, if you are a Conservative supporter, you are forced to vote for the official Conservative candidate - don't you? - whatever sub-set of Conservatism he supports. Or vote for another party, as lots of traditional decent Conservatives did at the recent local elections.
If you have the best form of PR - the Single Transferable Vote in Multi-Member constituencies - a candidate would have to get at least 20% of support in that constituency to get elected. And if there is that amount of support for his position and policies, then those views have a right to be represented.
Up to now, the Conservative Party has benefited from our broken voting system. The appearance of bodies like the one fronted by Carol Vorderman helps to remove some of that distortion, as a look at their recommendations for the recent council elections shows.
I have the impression that now it is the Conservative point of view that is seriously under-represented on my local council. And the Labour point of view too, because there are no Labour councillors at all.
As about 15 to 20% of the country are hard right and 15 to 20% of the country are hard left, only FPTP keeps them voting Tory or Labour.
See the European elections where when we had PR Farage's party won twice, in 2014 and 2019.
Sunak is also not Farage and Starmer is not Corbyn. With PR Farage and Corbyn would still be leading their own parties with lots of MPs in Parliament
Oh dear, young HY! The EU elections were fought on the party list system, based on regions. If you remember, the EU insisted that we should fight EU elections with some system of PR, and the party list system, imposed on us by the then Labour government, was the least proportional one that the Labour Government could get away with. In other words, it was the one where the Party kept greatest control, and individual voters had least say.
I am still awaiting evidence to support your assertion that 20% of the country is hard right and another 20% hard left. If anything, the vast increase in support for the Lib Dems at the recent local elections would suggest that you might be mistaken.
If we had PR the likelihood is Farage's RefUK and the Greens or a Corbynite party would overtake the LDs as the 3rd UK wide party within 5 to 10 years.
In 2015 UKIP won more votes than the LDs even if under FPTP the LDs won more seats than UKIP.
A few local election protest votes for the LDs to try and stop new housing and mend potholes doesn't translate to national elections.
PR may on paper benefit the LDs much more than the Conservatives and Labour but in practice it might hit all 3 of the established parties
No they wouldn't. The thing holding the tiny parties back is the same thing holding the Lib Dems back. In most constituencies, 461 of them, it's Labour and Conservative holding the top two positions. Many people view voting for the third or worse party as a wasted vote, so they feel "forced" into choosing between red and blue.
There's no reason to suppose this would benefit the parties in 4th, 5th and beyond so much more that they would overtake the 3rd placed party.
See what has happened to liberal parties on the continent with PR. In Spain Citizens have collapsed to an asterisk behind the far right Vox and hard left Podemos, in Germany the FDP have been overtaken by the AfD now as well as the Greens, in Sweden the nationalist Sweden Democrats and the Left party have both now overtaken the Liberals on seats too.
Interesting assessment from the Institute for the Study of War of the effect of the flooding on Russian defences on the east bank of the Dnipro.
If the Russians did blow the dam, the lack of coordination on their part is astonishing. But could it have been the Ukrainians after all?
The destruction of the KHPP dam is affecting Russian military positions on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. The flooding has destroyed many Russian first line field fortifications that the Russian military intended to use to defend against Ukrainian attacks. Rapid flooding has likely forced Russian personnel and military equipment in Russian main concentration points in Oleshky and Hola Prystan to withdraw. Russian forces had previously used these positions to shell Kherson City and other settlements on the west (right bank) of Kherson. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces relocated their personnel and military equipment from five to 15 kilometers from the flood zone, which places Russian forces out of artillery range of some settlements on the west (right bank) of the Dnipro River they had been attacking.[6] The flood also destroyed Russian minefields along the coast, with footage showing mines exploding in the flood water.[7] Kherson Oblast Occupation Head Vladimir Saldo, however, claimed that the destruction of the KHPP is beneficial to the Russian defenses because it will complicate Ukrainian advances across the river.[8] Saldo’s assessment of the situation ignores the loss of Russia’s first line of prepared fortifications. The amount of Russian heavy equipment lost in the first 24 hours of flooding is also unclear. https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-7-2023
Why would the Ukrainians do that? It makes zero strategic sense.
It was Russian incompetence and/or willingness to sacrifice assets so it didn’t look like it was them
Yes, it makes no sense for the Ukranians to have done it and what is perhaps more releant, they lack the means. It isn't easy to destroy a modern dam.
The Russians on the ther hand possessed the means and the motive. On the other hand, I wouldn't rule out sheer incompetent mismanagement. We've seen plenty of that in this war.
Plus, of course, the Russians had been keeping the sluice gates closed for the last several weeks with the effect that the reservoir was at its maximum and coming over the top of the dam in places. That looks to me like a deliberate policy to maximise the damage that was going to be caused when they blew it.
I suspect that their timing was off and what they wanted to do was to catch the Ukrainian attack on the ground that was going to be flooded, taking out many of these fancy, new, western tanks. They presumably thought that the attack was under way.
They thought the tanks were about to cross the river? Difficult to believe.
The BBC is floating an alternative possibility - that the dam had already been damaged last year, and the Russians deliberately raised to water level in the hope that it would fail. At least that would account for their apparently not knowing exactly when it would happen.
They didn't tell their soldiers that they were being sent to invade Ukraine in February last year. Do we need an explanation for their units on the left bank not knowing the dam was going to be blown?
The Russian government puts a different value on human life vs the West. We find it difficult to compute how they would not look to reposition their troops ahead of that. But the reality is they still have the Tsarist mindset of infantry being pawns that can be expended without a second thought.
This is not to say it was a deliberate decision to sacrifice them so as not to tip off anyone to their plans (which were known in advance anyway). It’s just they didn’t even think about them.
At what point does the supply of Russian soldiers become an issue?
It's been noted that Russia today is very different demographically to the USSR of 1942, when the supply of men was, effectively, infinite. But it still seems a long way to go before conservation of their own troop numbers becomes an issue they feel they need to deal with. My understanding is that they still have a vast army - albeit one they need to have most of doing other things than fighting in Ukraine lest China or anyone else suddenly take a fancy to all that undefended land.
Or do they wake up one day and realise that there are no Russian men of fighting age left?
A bigger issue is training and equipping. A horde of men with an AK and one magazine isn’t that useful.
Unfortunately we are seeing China supply more equipment to Russia, small step by small step.
The Focaldata poll may or may not predict the overall result of a general election but it produces some bizarre constituency results. So for example it has Labour winning North Devon, Eastbourne, and Montgomery. It also appears to have Don't Knows winning 2 seats - Aberdeenshire North and Moray East!
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power.
See Germany with PR where the AfD now on 19% and Linke has seats in the German Parliament too or Italy with PR where the hard right Meloni is now PM, or Spain with PR where Vox will win significant numbers of seats in the Spanish Parliament next month on current polls or Ireland with PR where SF tops the polls or Sweden with PR where the Sweden Democrats are now second biggest party or New Zealand with PR where New Zealand First have often won MPs.
See also Israel with PR where hard right nationalist and Orthodox Jewish parties have great influence over government. Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany too after using PR to get a foothold in the Reichstag
There are extremist parties elected under FPTP too: see India, Bosnia and even the US. Other countries with PR don’t have significant extremist parties doing well: e.g., South Africa, New Zealand, Malta, Japan.
See also Scotland where the SCons will never get their sweaty little hands on the levers of power.
On current Holyrood polls the SCons will have the balance of power between SNP and Labour and the LDs in 2026
If there has to be an instructive loss of being the governing party for the SNP at Holyrood, I can’t think of a more helpful interregnum than one of SLab being propped up by the SCons. SLab and Anas aren’t that bright, but even I don’t think they would be that self destructively moronic.
In 2007 of course the SCons propped up the SNP minority government of Salmond, if Yousaf ruled out indyref2 for the next Parliament then Ross might even keep him as FM if the SNP won most MSPs but not a majority (even with the Greens)
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
To be worried about your estate paying IHT, you need to tick three boxes.
Old enough to hear the Grim Reaper in the vicinity. Wealthy enough to be liable for IHT. Reluctant to loose your grip on control of your money, even after you die.
Interesting assessment from the Institute for the Study of War of the effect of the flooding on Russian defences on the east bank of the Dnipro.
If the Russians did blow the dam, the lack of coordination on their part is astonishing. But could it have been the Ukrainians after all?
The destruction of the KHPP dam is affecting Russian military positions on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. The flooding has destroyed many Russian first line field fortifications that the Russian military intended to use to defend against Ukrainian attacks. Rapid flooding has likely forced Russian personnel and military equipment in Russian main concentration points in Oleshky and Hola Prystan to withdraw. Russian forces had previously used these positions to shell Kherson City and other settlements on the west (right bank) of Kherson. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces relocated their personnel and military equipment from five to 15 kilometers from the flood zone, which places Russian forces out of artillery range of some settlements on the west (right bank) of the Dnipro River they had been attacking.[6] The flood also destroyed Russian minefields along the coast, with footage showing mines exploding in the flood water.[7] Kherson Oblast Occupation Head Vladimir Saldo, however, claimed that the destruction of the KHPP is beneficial to the Russian defenses because it will complicate Ukrainian advances across the river.[8] Saldo’s assessment of the situation ignores the loss of Russia’s first line of prepared fortifications. The amount of Russian heavy equipment lost in the first 24 hours of flooding is also unclear. https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-7-2023
Why would the Ukrainians do that? It makes zero strategic sense.
It was Russian incompetence and/or willingness to sacrifice assets so it didn’t look like it was them
Yes, it makes no sense for the Ukranians to have done it and what is perhaps more releant, they lack the means. It isn't easy to destroy a modern dam.
The Russians on the ther hand possessed the means and the motive. On the other hand, I wouldn't rule out sheer incompetent mismanagement. We've seen plenty of that in this war.
Plus, of course, the Russians had been keeping the sluice gates closed for the last several weeks with the effect that the reservoir was at its maximum and coming over the top of the dam in places. That looks to me like a deliberate policy to maximise the damage that was going to be caused when they blew it.
I suspect that their timing was off and what they wanted to do was to catch the Ukrainian attack on the ground that was going to be flooded, taking out many of these fancy, new, western tanks. They presumably thought that the attack was under way.
They thought the tanks were about to cross the river? Difficult to believe.
The BBC is floating an alternative possibility - that the dam had already been damaged last year, and the Russians deliberately raised to water level in the hope that it would fail. At least that would account for their apparently not knowing exactly when it would happen.
They didn't tell their soldiers that they were being sent to invade Ukraine in February last year. Do we need an explanation for their units on the left bank not knowing the dam was going to be blown?
The Russian government puts a different value on human life vs the West. We find it difficult to compute how they would not look to reposition their troops ahead of that. But the reality is they still have the Tsarist mindset of infantry being pawns that can be expended without a second thought.
This is not to say it was a deliberate decision to sacrifice them so as not to tip off anyone to their plans (which were known in advance anyway). It’s just they didn’t even think about them.
At what point does the supply of Russian soldiers become an issue?
It's been noted that Russia today is very different demographically to the USSR of 1942, when the supply of men was, effectively, infinite. But it still seems a long way to go before conservation of their own troop numbers becomes an issue they feel they need to deal with. My understanding is that they still have a vast army - albeit one they need to have most of doing other things than fighting in Ukraine lest China or anyone else suddenly take a fancy to all that undefended land.
Or do they wake up one day and realise that there are no Russian men of fighting age left?
A bigger issue is training and equipping. A horde of men with an AK and one magazine isn’t that useful.
The one with the rifle shoots! The one without, follows him! When the one with the rifle gets killed, the one who is following picks up the rifle and shoots!
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
Current Telegraph bees are:
Inheritance tax - which it appears to be fighting a solo campaign on. House prices - where it is making the baffling assumption that everyone celebrates higher house prices and laments lower ones. Working from home - which is clearly something of a direct threat to the Telegraph's commercial success.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
I assume that is voting LD nationally? You are a million miles from the ulta Nimby local council LDs
Interesting assessment from the Institute for the Study of War of the effect of the flooding on Russian defences on the east bank of the Dnipro.
If the Russians did blow the dam, the lack of coordination on their part is astonishing. But could it have been the Ukrainians after all?
The destruction of the KHPP dam is affecting Russian military positions on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. The flooding has destroyed many Russian first line field fortifications that the Russian military intended to use to defend against Ukrainian attacks. Rapid flooding has likely forced Russian personnel and military equipment in Russian main concentration points in Oleshky and Hola Prystan to withdraw. Russian forces had previously used these positions to shell Kherson City and other settlements on the west (right bank) of Kherson. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces relocated their personnel and military equipment from five to 15 kilometers from the flood zone, which places Russian forces out of artillery range of some settlements on the west (right bank) of the Dnipro River they had been attacking.[6] The flood also destroyed Russian minefields along the coast, with footage showing mines exploding in the flood water.[7] Kherson Oblast Occupation Head Vladimir Saldo, however, claimed that the destruction of the KHPP is beneficial to the Russian defenses because it will complicate Ukrainian advances across the river.[8] Saldo’s assessment of the situation ignores the loss of Russia’s first line of prepared fortifications. The amount of Russian heavy equipment lost in the first 24 hours of flooding is also unclear. https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-7-2023
Why would the Ukrainians do that? It makes zero strategic sense.
It was Russian incompetence and/or willingness to sacrifice assets so it didn’t look like it was them
Yes, it makes no sense for the Ukranians to have done it and what is perhaps more releant, they lack the means. It isn't easy to destroy a modern dam.
The Russians on the ther hand possessed the means and the motive. On the other hand, I wouldn't rule out sheer incompetent mismanagement. We've seen plenty of that in this war.
Plus, of course, the Russians had been keeping the sluice gates closed for the last several weeks with the effect that the reservoir was at its maximum and coming over the top of the dam in places. That looks to me like a deliberate policy to maximise the damage that was going to be caused when they blew it.
I suspect that their timing was off and what they wanted to do was to catch the Ukrainian attack on the ground that was going to be flooded, taking out many of these fancy, new, western tanks. They presumably thought that the attack was under way.
They thought the tanks were about to cross the river? Difficult to believe.
The BBC is floating an alternative possibility - that the dam had already been damaged last year, and the Russians deliberately raised to water level in the hope that it would fail. At least that would account for their apparently not knowing exactly when it would happen.
They didn't tell their soldiers that they were being sent to invade Ukraine in February last year. Do we need an explanation for their units on the left bank not knowing the dam was going to be blown?
The Russian government puts a different value on human life vs the West. We find it difficult to compute how they would not look to reposition their troops ahead of that. But the reality is they still have the Tsarist mindset of infantry being pawns that can be expended without a second thought.
This is not to say it was a deliberate decision to sacrifice them so as not to tip off anyone to their plans (which were known in advance anyway). It’s just they didn’t even think about them.
At what point does the supply of Russian soldiers become an issue?
It's been noted that Russia today is very different demographically to the USSR of 1942, when the supply of men was, effectively, infinite. But it still seems a long way to go before conservation of their own troop numbers becomes an issue they feel they need to deal with. My understanding is that they still have a vast army - albeit one they need to have most of doing other things than fighting in Ukraine lest China or anyone else suddenly take a fancy to all that undefended land.
Or do they wake up one day and realise that there are no Russian men of fighting age left?
A bigger issue is training and equipping. A horde of men with an AK and one magazine isn’t that useful.
Which is sadly what many of the conscripts sent to Ukraine have been given. Doesn’t take too many body bags coming home, or survivors with stories, before morale starts to drop.
Huge numbers of Russians, mostly the relatively well-off, have already left the country to avoid being recruited.
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
Current Telegraph bees are:
Inheritance tax - which it appears to be fighting a solo campaign on. House prices - where it is making the baffling assumption that everyone celebrates higher house prices and laments lower ones. Working from home - which is clearly something of a direct threat to the Telegraph's commercial success.
I wouldn't have thought that working from home would have much of an impact on the Telegraph's bottom line.
Its hard to imagine that much of the Telegraph's demographic is of working age.
Interesting assessment from the Institute for the Study of War of the effect of the flooding on Russian defences on the east bank of the Dnipro.
If the Russians did blow the dam, the lack of coordination on their part is astonishing. But could it have been the Ukrainians after all?
The destruction of the KHPP dam is affecting Russian military positions on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. The flooding has destroyed many Russian first line field fortifications that the Russian military intended to use to defend against Ukrainian attacks. Rapid flooding has likely forced Russian personnel and military equipment in Russian main concentration points in Oleshky and Hola Prystan to withdraw. Russian forces had previously used these positions to shell Kherson City and other settlements on the west (right bank) of Kherson. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces relocated their personnel and military equipment from five to 15 kilometers from the flood zone, which places Russian forces out of artillery range of some settlements on the west (right bank) of the Dnipro River they had been attacking.[6] The flood also destroyed Russian minefields along the coast, with footage showing mines exploding in the flood water.[7] Kherson Oblast Occupation Head Vladimir Saldo, however, claimed that the destruction of the KHPP is beneficial to the Russian defenses because it will complicate Ukrainian advances across the river.[8] Saldo’s assessment of the situation ignores the loss of Russia’s first line of prepared fortifications. The amount of Russian heavy equipment lost in the first 24 hours of flooding is also unclear. https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-7-2023
Why would the Ukrainians do that? It makes zero strategic sense.
It was Russian incompetence and/or willingness to sacrifice assets so it didn’t look like it was them
Yes, it makes no sense for the Ukranians to have done it and what is perhaps more releant, they lack the means. It isn't easy to destroy a modern dam.
The Russians on the ther hand possessed the means and the motive. On the other hand, I wouldn't rule out sheer incompetent mismanagement. We've seen plenty of that in this war.
Plus, of course, the Russians had been keeping the sluice gates closed for the last several weeks with the effect that the reservoir was at its maximum and coming over the top of the dam in places. That looks to me like a deliberate policy to maximise the damage that was going to be caused when they blew it.
I suspect that their timing was off and what they wanted to do was to catch the Ukrainian attack on the ground that was going to be flooded, taking out many of these fancy, new, western tanks. They presumably thought that the attack was under way.
They thought the tanks were about to cross the river? Difficult to believe.
The BBC is floating an alternative possibility - that the dam had already been damaged last year, and the Russians deliberately raised to water level in the hope that it would fail. At least that would account for their apparently not knowing exactly when it would happen.
They didn't tell their soldiers that they were being sent to invade Ukraine in February last year. Do we need an explanation for their units on the left bank not knowing the dam was going to be blown?
The Russian government puts a different value on human life vs the West. We find it difficult to compute how they would not look to reposition their troops ahead of that. But the reality is they still have the Tsarist mindset of infantry being pawns that can be expended without a second thought.
This is not to say it was a deliberate decision to sacrifice them so as not to tip off anyone to their plans (which were known in advance anyway). It’s just they didn’t even think about them.
At what point does the supply of Russian soldiers become an issue?
It's been noted that Russia today is very different demographically to the USSR of 1942, when the supply of men was, effectively, infinite. But it still seems a long way to go before conservation of their own troop numbers becomes an issue they feel they need to deal with. My understanding is that they still have a vast army - albeit one they need to have most of doing other things than fighting in Ukraine lest China or anyone else suddenly take a fancy to all that undefended land.
Or do they wake up one day and realise that there are no Russian men of fighting age left?
A bigger issue is training and equipping. A horde of men with an AK and one magazine isn’t that useful.
Unfortunately we are seeing China supply more equipment to Russia, small step by small step.
If China are not dissuaded from continuing this, then they could help Russia equip a large number of future conscripts.
Supplying military equipment to Chechnya isn't necessarily what the Russian state would want at the moment. There are signs that China is preparing for the post-Putin era, which in a different way is something that we should be concerned about.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
I assume that is voting LD nationally? You are a million miles from the ulta Nimby local council LDs
At the local elections I was curious to see whether the LDs would be NIMBY or not, so I read their leaflet before deciding who to vote for. There was not a hint of NIMBYism in it.
Had there been, I would have spoilt my ballot. Since they weren't, I lent them my vote.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
Or they're deluding into thinking it hurts them and led by wishful thinking that its the only thing holding them back.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
I would say that's a pretty muddled article, speaking personally. There are the two separate issues of woke as "political correctness gawn mad" and a catch-all for reactionary bores, and then genuine or specific issues to do with modern identity politics, but that article is a mess.
It quickly veers off into generalised Fox-talking points about "Cultural Marxism". and by the end we're even on to Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, which are the classic conspiracist tropes.
The problem is the lack of a reasonable centre space, to discuss some of the issues connected with modern "woke", without lapsing either into saloon-bar boredom about the "modern world today", or conspiracist twaddle.
Both right and left are to blame for this, and sadly that article is not that space,
I got as far as the list of taboos and, given the nonsense there, couldn't gind the motivation to continue.
There was a time (I think, I seem to remember...) when the conspiracist loons were mostly found on the left, now there's some serious competition.
ETA: @Taz - given you're not a loon (on posts I've seen, at least) I'm genuinely interested in what you think are the 'fair points' to be pulled from this
Basically a couple of things. The civil service openly being hostile to respective Home Secretaries policies, the targetting of farming also the banning of certain products.
As to whether or not institutions have been ‘captured’ by the likes of Stonewall remains to be seen however they are certainly influential.
I think the flaw with this article and line of thinking is to take a couple of controversial issues and extrapolate that into something rather sinister which I think it isn’t.
as you say, the rest of it is conspiracy theorist nonsense. WEF, 15 minute cities, GB News presenters and so on.
Thanks. I've read again in the light of your comments and see that those are in there, buried among the rest. I'm not convinced by any, but they are at least debatable points: - no mention of May being targetted as HS, for example - her policies were probably as un-woke as the others, maybe more so than Raab's, but she was competent(ish) or appeared so until Brexit - the farming thing is too vague for me to make a judgement (are we talking about pricing? animal welfare? pesticide restrictions?) - if banning of products refers to ICE cars and gas boilers then I think it's fine to set a notional time limit to focus manufacturers' minds (if your main product might become illegal, you'd better really research the alternatives). I'd prefer a tax regime that takes into account the CO2 (etc) externalities rather than an outright ban, but I'm fairly relaxed (as an ICE driver still and gas boiler owner) about it
It's true, I think, that too many organisations for social an environmental responsibility look to just pick up an 'approved' badge from a charity (which is also a nice earner for charities) rather than taking a deep hard look at what they're doing. I remember colleagues in marine science taking a dim view of the MSC approved labelling on fish, arguing that it was just a bit of greenwashing rather than anything substantial. The similarly initialled MCS took a quite different view on sustainability of various products.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
Or they're deluding into thinking it hurts them and led by wishful thinking that its the only thing holding them back.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
PR would benefit them in the short term but not necessarily in the longer term. If that's what you're saying, I agree.
Quite extraordinary FT article on Tory donor, Brexit supporter and advertisement for the values passed on by our great public schools Crispin Odey.
Crispin Odey is indeed odious. Although in a different era, as often mentioned by some in the Guardian, Attlee, Foot, Orwell, and the noblesse oblige of the older Tory Wets were all advertisements for the public school ethos, too.
The key toxicity in recent decades has been the combination of aggressive Thatcherism and traditional privilege in the atmosphere at some of these schools, as many have observed. This was the atmosphere that Boris and Mogg grew up in in the '80s.
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power........
Not at all, my dear young HY. Why do you think up to 20% of the country would like to see a Corbynite left party and te same for a Farage style Reform party? There is far more danger under the present voting system where is is comparatively easy for extremists to take over the entire party. They took over the Labour Party not so long ago, and the present profile of the Conservative leadership speaks for itself.
If you have strict proportional representation (which would have to be country-wide), then parties can easily split up, so that different shades of opinion are fairly represented. At present, if you are a Conservative supporter, you are forced to vote for the official Conservative candidate - don't you? - whatever sub-set of Conservatism he supports. Or vote for another party, as lots of traditional decent Conservatives did at the recent local elections.
If you have the best form of PR - the Single Transferable Vote in Multi-Member constituencies - a candidate would have to get at least 20% of support in that constituency to get elected. And if there is that amount of support for his position and policies, then those views have a right to be represented.
Up to now, the Conservative Party has benefited from our broken voting system. The appearance of bodies like the one fronted by Carol Vorderman helps to remove some of that distortion, as a look at their recommendations for the recent council elections shows.
I have the impression that now it is the Conservative point of view that is seriously under-represented on my local council. And the Labour point of view too, because there are no Labour councillors at all.
As about 15 to 20% of the country are hard right and 15 to 20% of the country are hard left, only FPTP keeps them voting Tory or Labour.
See the European elections where when we had PR Farage's party won twice, in 2014 and 2019.
Sunak is also not Farage and Starmer is not Corbyn. With PR Farage and Corbyn would still be leading their own parties with lots of MPs in Parliament
Oh dear, young HY! The EU elections were fought on the party list system, based on regions. If you remember, the EU insisted that we should fight EU elections with some system of PR, and the party list system, imposed on us by the then Labour government, was the least proportional one that the Labour Government could get away with. In other words, it was the one where the Party kept greatest control, and individual voters had least say.
I am still awaiting evidence to support your assertion that 20% of the country is hard right and another 20% hard left. If anything, the vast increase in support for the Lib Dems at the recent local elections would suggest that you might be mistaken.
If we had PR the likelihood is Farage's RefUK and the Greens or a Corbynite party would overtake the LDs as the 3rd UK wide party within 5 to 10 years.
In 2015 UKIP won more votes than the LDs even if under FPTP the LDs won more seats than UKIP.
A few local election protest votes for the LDs to try and stop new housing and mend potholes doesn't translate to national elections.
PR may on paper benefit the LDs much more than the Conservatives and Labour but in practice it might hit all 3 of the established parties
No they wouldn't. The thing holding the tiny parties back is the same thing holding the Lib Dems back. In most constituencies, 461 of them, it's Labour and Conservative holding the top two positions. Many people view voting for the third or worse party as a wasted vote, so they feel "forced" into choosing between red and blue.
There's no reason to suppose this would benefit the parties in 4th, 5th and beyond so much more that they would overtake the 3rd placed party.
See what has happened to liberal parties on the continent with PR. In Spain Citizens have collapsed to an asterisk behind the far right Vox and hard left Podemos, in Germany the FDP have been overtaken by the AfD now as well as the Greens, in Sweden the nationalist Sweden Democrats and the Left party have both now overtaken the Liberals on seats too.
You are, again, cherrypicking to try to create some grand narrative, as if countries don’t have different political systems and traditions. I just don’t think it’s that predictable what would happen with a change in the electoral system in the UK. It depends on way too many factors, as it depends on many different factors in Spain, Germany etc.
Some counter-examples are the liberal Estonian Reform Party winning most seats and gaining seats in March’s election. The liberal FijiFirst won in their election last December. The Freedom Movement came from nowhere to win the Slovenian election in April ‘22. The Progressive Party were the big gainers of the 2021 Icelandic election.
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
Current Telegraph bees are:
Inheritance tax - which it appears to be fighting a solo campaign on. House prices - where it is making the baffling assumption that everyone celebrates higher house prices and laments lower ones. Working from home - which is clearly something of a direct threat to the Telegraph's commercial success.
I wouldn't have thought that working from home would have much of an impact on the Telegraph's bottom line.
Its hard to imagine that much of the Telegraph's demographic is of working age.
It’s to rile that demographic up isn’t it: “I never got the chance to work from home and I had to go into the office every day when I worked, so everyone else should too.” The ‘you don’t know how lucky you have it’ crowd.
EDIT: this despite the fact an office job for at least some of that working person’s career was pre-internet and email and therefore immediately less stressful. My first boss used to love to regale me with stories of working through the post in tray, moving things into the out tray, making some phone calls and being on their merry way when everything for the day was done: that’s far from the average office experience nowadays.
Quite extraordinary FT article on Tory donor, Brexit supporter and advertisement for the values passed on by our great public schools Crispin Odey.
Crispin Odey is indeed odious. Although in a different era, as often mentioned by some on the Guardian, Attlee, Foot, Orwell, and the noblesse oblige of the older Tory Wets were all advertisements for the public school ethos, too.
The key toxity in recent decades has been the combination of Thatcherism and traditional privilege in the atmosphere at some of these schools, as many have observed. This was the atmosphere that Boris and Mogg grew up in in the '80s.
Odey of course a friend and backer of both of the latter. This is the real "Blob".
Quite extraordinary FT article on Tory donor, Brexit supporter and advertisement for the values passed on by our great public schools Crispin Odey.
Crispin Odey is indeed odious. Although in a different era, as often mentioned by some on the Guardian, Attlee, Foot, Orwell, and the noblesse oblige of the older Tory Wets were all advertisements for the public school ethos, too.
The key toxity in recent decades has been the combination of aggreessive Thatcherism and traditional privilege in the atmosphere at some of these schools, as many have observed. This was the atmosphere that Boris and Mogg grew up in in the '80s.
Odey even has contempt for his deceased father, telling the Evening Standard 'He says of his father: “He was always short of money so one spent one’s life giving him handouts. He was a wastrel from beginning to end.” He adds, perhaps a little savagely: “And wastrels always need helping.”
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
Current Telegraph bees are:
Inheritance tax - which it appears to be fighting a solo campaign on. House prices - where it is making the baffling assumption that everyone celebrates higher house prices and laments lower ones. Working from home - which is clearly something of a direct threat to the Telegraph's commercial success.
Also, the number of people registered as long term sick - the implication being many of them are fraudsters.
They thought the tanks were about to cross the river? Difficult to believe.
The BBC is floating an alternative possibility - that the dam had already been damaged last year, and the Russians deliberately raised to water level in the hope that it would fail. At least that would account for their apparently not knowing exactly when it would happen.
Classic Russian disinformation.
Flood Twitter with alternative explanations, amplify those which gain traction and drown out the truth
So far today you’ve given us:
* May be it was the Ukrainians * It was an accident, damaged in fighting don’t you know. But maybe the Russians were just a little bit culpable
What’s next? MH17 hidden in the reservoir and the Ukrainians wanted to drain it to discredit the Russians?
Another example of the tendency of some on PB to go ad hominem if they disagree with something, especially about the war. Are you seriously suggesting that Chris - who has posted nearly 10,000 times without an obvious political agenda - is a Russian stooge?
The fact is that we don't know the cause of the dam collapse for sure, though the balance of evidence so far suggests the Russians. It's awful and much worse things are happening in the war and will continue to happen as long as it lasts. The basic issue remains the war and whether the aim should be a negotiated settlement or a total Ukrainian victory.
The aim should be to free Ukrainian civilians from Russian occupation. Everything the Russians have done points to their complete disregard for the welfare of civilians in areas under their control, and their active persecution of those suspected of not being loyal to Mother Russia.
If that can be achieved through negotiations then great, but otherwise we should be prepared to use other means.
Any negotiation at this moment condemns millions of Ukrainians to a despotic regime. Zelensky cannot do that unless and until all other options are exhausted. And the West understands this is a critical fight for them. The Russian regime must be stopped and pushed back to the pre 2014 borders. That has risks, but to do less rewards their actions.
There were a bunch of comments on Twitter this morning blaming the west for the dam being blown… apparently we didn’t consider the Russian response to us continuing to support Ukraine so it’s all our fault
Insanity.
As you say only if options are exhausted will Ukraine pause, and we certainly should try to ensure they are not exhausted
If up against SKS its quite a bit higher than that
Lab High is about 350
Under SKS well under 300 i reckon
A few years ago our student intake to the first year of our course dropped markedly (number of complex reasons, currently back to boom conditions). It meant that the first time I gave that cohort a lecture I walked into a half empty lecture theatre and did a double take - thinking 'where are the rest?'. I then recalled that that was indeed ALL of them (around 90 down from 140).
I think the Tories are heading for this after the election. They will gather at the house of commons and look around, thinking 'where are the rest', before the reality hits.
I don't subscribe to the wipeout fantasies of young/old (delete as appropriate) @Heathener, but I think they could be around 200 MP's. Pretty sure the Lib Dems will benefit and bounce back into the 20s or 30s and Labour will romp home.
And then all the shrill voices on twitter etc will see the politics is the art of the possible and all the hopes and dreams (and fantasies) will be me with the crunching juggernaut of reality.
Starmer and Labour don't have the answers folks. But its their turn to 'not have the answer'.
Quite extraordinary FT article on Tory donor, Brexit supporter and advertisement for the values passed on by our great public schools Crispin Odey.
Crispin Odey is indeed odious. Although in a different era, as often mentioned by some on the Guardian, Attlee, Foot, Orwell, and the noblesse oblige of the older Tory Wets were all advertisements for the public school ethos, too.
The key toxity in recent decades has been the combination of aggreessive Thatcherism and traditional privilege in the atmosphere at some of these schools, as many have observed. This was the atmosphere that Boris and Mogg grew up in in the '80s.
Odey even has contempt for his deceased father, telling the Evening Standard 'He says of his father: “He was always short of money so one spent one’s life giving him handouts. He was a wastrel from beginning to end.” He adds, perhaps a little savagely: “And wastrels always need helping.”
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
Current Telegraph bees are:
Inheritance tax - which it appears to be fighting a solo campaign on. House prices - where it is making the baffling assumption that everyone celebrates higher house prices and laments lower ones. Working from home - which is clearly something of a direct threat to the Telegraph's commercial success.
I wouldn't have thought that working from home would have much of an impact on the Telegraph's bottom line.
Its hard to imagine that much of the Telegraph's demographic is of working age.
It’s to rile that demographic up isn’t it: “I never got the chance to work from home and I had to go into the office every day when I worked, so everyone else should too.” The ‘you don’t know how lucky you have it’ crowd.
EDIT: this despite the fact an office job for at least some of that working person’s career was pre-internet and email and therefore immediately less stressful. My first boss used to love to regale me with stories of working through the post in tray, moving things into the out tray, making some phone calls and being on their merry way when everything for the day was done: that’s far from the average office experience nowadays.
+1 - today is fix priority 1 issue for the business while other people randomly throw more work my way via Teams.
Sadly I can't close Teams because we are also using it to discuss the priority 1 issue.
I cannot describe my hatred for Teams when people are in crisis mode...
Quite extraordinary FT article on Tory donor, Brexit supporter and advertisement for the values passed on by our great public schools Crispin Odey.
Crispin Odey is indeed odious. Although in a different era, as often mentioned by some on the Guardian, Attlee, Foot, Orwell, and the noblesse oblige of the older Tory Wets were all advertisements for the public school ethos, too.
The key toxity in recent decades has been the combination of aggreessive Thatcherism and traditional privilege in the atmosphere at some of these schools, as many have observed. This was the atmosphere that Boris and Mogg grew up in in the '80s.
Odey even has contempt for his deceased father, telling the Evening Standard 'He says of his father: “He was always short of money so one spent one’s life giving him handouts. He was a wastrel from beginning to end.” He adds, perhaps a little savagely: “And wastrels always need helping.”
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
Or they're deluding into thinking it hurts them and led by wishful thinking that its the only thing holding them back.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
It's the only thing holding together the Labour and Conservative parties in their current forms.
And @bigjohnowls, for example, would be much happier in a party made for him.
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power.
See Germany with PR where the AfD now on 19% and Linke has seats in the German Parliament too or Italy with PR where the hard right Meloni is now PM, or Spain with PR where Vox will win significant numbers of seats in the Spanish Parliament next month on current polls or Ireland with PR where SF tops the polls or Sweden with PR where the Sweden Democrats are now second biggest party or New Zealand with PR where New Zealand First have often won MPs.
See also Israel with PR where hard right nationalist and Orthodox Jewish parties have great influence over government. Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany too after using PR to get a foothold in the Reichstag
There are extremist parties elected under FPTP too: see India, Bosnia and even the US. Other countries with PR don’t have significant extremist parties doing well: e.g., South Africa, New Zealand, Malta, Japan.
See also Scotland where the SCons will never get their sweaty little hands on the levers of power.
On current Holyrood polls the SCons will have the balance of power between SNP and Labour and the LDs in 2026
If there has to be an instructive loss of being the governing party for the SNP at Holyrood, I can’t think of a more helpful interregnum than one of SLab being propped up by the SCons. SLab and Anas aren’t that bright, but even I don’t think they would be that self destructively moronic.
In 2007 of course the SCons propped up the SNP minority government of Salmond, if Yousaf ruled out indyref2 for the next Parliament then Ross might even keep him as FM if the SNP won most MSPs but not a majority (even with the Greens)
"propped up" - didn't block the budget if paid off by specific items, which varied from party to party an d budget to budget.
Labour were notoriously self-destructive by voting against all SNP proposals, even those originated by Labour ...
2007: the Tories were paid off by keeping police numbers uip - ironically far more than the Tories did in rUK. That was a whole order of magnitude easier than what you are postilating.
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
To be worried about your estate paying IHT, you need to tick three boxes.
Old enough to hear the Grim Reaper in the vicinity. Wealthy enough to be liable for IHT. Reluctant to loose your grip on control of your money, even after you die.
Basically Telegraph core demographic.
I've spent the last few months sorting my late mother's estate. While the basic IHT allowance is £325k, you get another £175k if leaving a house to your kids, and there's the same allowance again passed on from my father, who died a few years ago. So that's a total of a million pound allowance before any IHT would have been due, which doesn't seem unduly harsh.
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
To be worried about your estate paying IHT, you need to tick three boxes.
Old enough to hear the Grim Reaper in the vicinity. Wealthy enough to be liable for IHT. Reluctant to loose your grip on control of your money, even after you die.
Basically Telegraph core demographic.
I've spent the last few months sorting my late mother's estate. While the basic IHT allowance is £325k, you get another £175k if leaving a house to your kids, and there's the same allowance again passed on from my father, who died a few years ago. So that's a total of a million pound allowance before any IHT would have been due, which doesn't seem unduly harsh.
Could the split between housing and non housing assets discourage downsizing ?
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power.
See Germany with PR where the AfD now on 19% and Linke has seats in the German Parliament too or Italy with PR where the hard right Meloni is now PM, or Spain with PR where Vox will win significant numbers of seats in the Spanish Parliament next month on current polls or Ireland with PR where SF tops the polls or Sweden with PR where the Sweden Democrats are now second biggest party or New Zealand with PR where New Zealand First have often won MPs.
See also Israel with PR where hard right nationalist and Orthodox Jewish parties have great influence over government. Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany too after using PR to get a foothold in the Reichstag
There are extremist parties elected under FPTP too: see India, Bosnia and even the US. Other countries with PR don’t have significant extremist parties doing well: e.g., South Africa, New Zealand, Malta, Japan.
See also Scotland where the SCons will never get their sweaty little hands on the levers of power.
On current Holyrood polls the SCons will have the balance of power between SNP and Labour and the LDs in 2026
If there has to be an instructive loss of being the governing party for the SNP at Holyrood, I can’t think of a more helpful interregnum than one of SLab being propped up by the SCons. SLab and Anas aren’t that bright, but even I don’t think they would be that self destructively moronic.
In 2007 of course the SCons propped up the SNP minority government of Salmond, if Yousaf ruled out indyref2 for the next Parliament then Ross might even keep him as FM if the SNP won most MSPs but not a majority (even with the Greens)
The propping up in 2007 was minimal, Salmond became FM with the support of the Greens not Aunty Annabelle. It even included (along with other Unionist parties) imposing the Edinburgh trams on the SNP very much against their will. Besides those were more pragmatic times, the chances of Ross and his crew voting for Yousaf are precisely zero.
I would much enjoy the bright new morning of Labour getting rid of the Tories being complimented by SLab coming to power on the basis of an arrangement with the SCons. Some SLD involvement would be the icing on the cake.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
Or they're deluding into thinking it hurts them and led by wishful thinking that its the only thing holding them back.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
It's the only thing holding together the Labour and Conservative parties in their current forms.
And @bigjohnowls, for example, would be much happier in a party made for him.
But is it a bad thing the parties are being held together?
Politics isn't about purity and making people happy though, its about messy compromises.
FPTP means that Labour and the Tories if they're serious about governing have to make those compromises before the election and tell the public some home truths and let the public decide how they're going to vote. Which compromises are acceptable and which aren't.
PR means you can say whatever you want knowing full well you're never getting a majority to deliver it, then throw it all in the bin after the votes have been counted.
I'd rather some honesty and compromises are made before the election than after it.
People like HYUFD might be very happy to have a "purer" Conservative party solely for old fashioned Tories like him, rather than liberals like myself. But in this country in general for the Conservatives to win then leaders like Cameron etc need to attract votes from people who aren't pure Tories like HYUFD and instead appeal to right wing liberals like myself to give the Tories our votes too in order for them to have enough votes cast for them to win.
Under PR he'd get a purer Tory party in theory, but the second the votes are cast the compromises will be made. But the compromises being made after the votes are cast is too little, too late, to have an informed decision. Rather than politicians like Cameron or Starmer or Blair making compromises and extending their appeal beyond their core vote before the election too.
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
Current Telegraph bees are:
Inheritance tax - which it appears to be fighting a solo campaign on. House prices - where it is making the baffling assumption that everyone celebrates higher house prices and laments lower ones. Working from home - which is clearly something of a direct threat to the Telegraph's commercial success.
I wouldn't have thought that working from home would have much of an impact on the Telegraph's bottom line.
Its hard to imagine that much of the Telegraph's demographic is of working age.
It’s to rile that demographic up isn’t it: “I never got the chance to work from home and I had to go into the office every day when I worked, so everyone else should too.” The ‘you don’t know how lucky you have it’ crowd.
EDIT: this despite the fact an office job for at least some of that working person’s career was pre-internet and email and therefore immediately less stressful. My first boss used to love to regale me with stories of working through the post in tray, moving things into the out tray, making some phone calls and being on their merry way when everything for the day was done: that’s far from the average office experience nowadays.
+1 - today is fix priority 1 issue for the business while other people randomly throw more work my way via Teams.
Sadly I can't close Teams because we are also using it to discuss the priority 1 issue.
I cannot describe my hatred for Teams when people are in crisis mode...
The few times I have actually got Teams to work have made me glad that I can't usually do that.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
Or they're deluding into thinking it hurts them and led by wishful thinking that its the only thing holding them back.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
It's the only thing holding together the Labour and Conservative parties in their current forms.
And @bigjohnowls, for example, would be much happier in a party made for him.
But is it a bad thing the parties are being held together?
Politics isn't about purity and making people happy though, its about messy compromises.
FPTP means that Labour and the Tories if they're serious about governing have to make those compromises before the election and tell the public some home truths...
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
To be worried about your estate paying IHT, you need to tick three boxes.
Old enough to hear the Grim Reaper in the vicinity. Wealthy enough to be liable for IHT. Reluctant to loose your grip on control of your money, even after you die.
Basically Telegraph core demographic.
I've spent the last few months sorting my late mother's estate. While the basic IHT allowance is £325k, you get another £175k if leaving a house to your kids, and there's the same allowance again passed on from my father, who died a few years ago. So that's a total of a million pound allowance before any IHT would have been due, which doesn't seem unduly harsh.
Could the split between housing and non housing assets discourage downsizing ?
Also, and though I accept this is a niche concern for today's octo and nonagenarians passing on do parents need to be married to pass on the double allowance to their kids ?
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
Or they're deluding into thinking it hurts them and led by wishful thinking that its the only thing holding them back.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
It's the only thing holding together the Labour and Conservative parties in their current forms.
And @bigjohnowls, for example, would be much happier in a party made for him.
But is it a bad thing the parties are being held together?
Politics isn't about purity and making people happy though, its about messy compromises.
FPTP means that Labour and the Tories if they're serious about governing have to make those compromises before the election and tell the public some home truths...
LOL. Couldn't get past that bit.
Its true though.
Parties that win majorities in this country do so by extending their reach beyond their core vote.
I'm reasonably confident now that the Tories are going to lose the next election, and they're going to lose it because they're no longer serious about governing and Sunak is retreating into a core vote strategy appealing to would-be Tory Councillors like HYUFD.
That may make a purer Tory party that keeps HYUFD happy. But its a recipe for losing an election, and deserving to lose an election.
Quite extraordinary FT article on Tory donor, Brexit supporter and advertisement for the values passed on by our great public schools Crispin Odey.
Crispin Odey is indeed odious. Although in a different era, as often mentioned by some on the Guardian, Attlee, Foot, Orwell, and the noblesse oblige of the older Tory Wets were all advertisements for the public school ethos, too.
The key toxity in recent decades has been the combination of aggreessive Thatcherism and traditional privilege in the atmosphere at some of these schools, as many have observed. This was the atmosphere that Boris and Mogg grew up in in the '80s.
Odey even has contempt for his deceased father, telling the Evening Standard 'He says of his father: “He was always short of money so one spent one’s life giving him handouts. He was a wastrel from beginning to end.” He adds, perhaps a little savagely: “And wastrels always need helping.”
The West really needs to stop letting in young male refugees from hotbeds of terrorism. Host them in camps in the region. We shouldn't have to put innocent people at risk due to arbitrary beneficiaries of charity.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
Or they're deluding into thinking it hurts them and led by wishful thinking that its the only thing holding them back.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
It's the only thing holding together the Labour and Conservative parties in their current forms.
And @bigjohnowls, for example, would be much happier in a party made for him.
But is it a bad thing the parties are being held together?
Politics isn't about purity and making people happy though, its about messy compromises.
FPTP means that Labour and the Tories if they're serious about governing have to make those compromises before the election and tell the public some home truths...
LOL. Couldn't get past that bit.
Its true though.
Parties that win majorities in this country do so by extending their reach beyond their core vote.
I'm reasonably confident now that the Tories are going to lose the next election, and they're going to lose it because they're no longer serious about governing and Sunak is retreating into a core vote strategy appealing to would-be Tory Councillors like HYUFD.
That may make a purer Tory party that keeps HYUFD happy. But its a recipe for losing an election, and deserving to lose an election.
Parties don't reach beyond their core vote by telling voters home truths, but by telling their party members home truths - that a little of what they want is better than none.
This is the same discussion a party would need to have after an election when contemplating entering a coalition. The question is whether the electorate should influence those discussions beforehand, or afterwards.
I think the electorate have more freedom of action if they get to vote first. They can then give their judgement on the choices made at the next election.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
Or they're deluding into thinking it hurts them and led by wishful thinking that its the only thing holding them back.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
It's the only thing holding together the Labour and Conservative parties in their current forms.
And @bigjohnowls, for example, would be much happier in a party made for him.
But is it a bad thing the parties are being held together?
Politics isn't about purity and making people happy though, its about messy compromises.
FPTP means that Labour and the Tories if they're serious about governing have to make those compromises before the election and tell the public some home truths...
LOL. Couldn't get past that bit.
Its true though.
Parties that win majorities in this country do so by extending their reach beyond their core vote.
I'm reasonably confident now that the Tories are going to lose the next election, and they're going to lose it because they're no longer serious about governing and Sunak is retreating into a core vote strategy appealing to would-be Tory Councillors like HYUFD.
That may make a purer Tory party that keeps HYUFD happy. But its a recipe for losing an election, and deserving to lose an election.
When you are on 25% of the vote, you aren't going to win regardless. Your best approach is to shore up 30-35% for a foundation for the next election.
Of course, Sunak is also doing things AUKUS, CPTPP, the NI agreement, etc which show he is serious about governing.
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
Current Telegraph bees are:
Inheritance tax - which it appears to be fighting a solo campaign on. House prices - where it is making the baffling assumption that everyone celebrates higher house prices and laments lower ones. Working from home - which is clearly something of a direct threat to the Telegraph's commercial success.
I wouldn't have thought that working from home would have much of an impact on the Telegraph's bottom line.
Its hard to imagine that much of the Telegraph's demographic is of working age.
It’s to rile that demographic up isn’t it: “I never got the chance to work from home and I had to go into the office every day when I worked, so everyone else should too.” The ‘you don’t know how lucky you have it’ crowd.
EDIT: this despite the fact an office job for at least some of that working person’s career was pre-internet and email and therefore immediately less stressful. My first boss used to love to regale me with stories of working through the post in tray, moving things into the out tray, making some phone calls and being on their merry way when everything for the day was done: that’s far from the average office experience nowadays.
+1 - today is fix priority 1 issue for the business while other people randomly throw more work my way via Teams.
Sadly I can't close Teams because we are also using it to discuss the priority 1 issue.
I cannot describe my hatred for Teams when people are in crisis mode...
The few times I have actually got Teams to work have made me glad that I can't usually do that.
Works ok for us mostly, but now we have competing streams of info - some via email, some via Teams.
The West really needs to stop letting in young male refugees from hotbeds of terrorism. Host them in camps in the region. We shouldn't have to put innocent people at risk due to arbitrary beneficiaries of charity.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
Or they're deluding into thinking it hurts them and led by wishful thinking that its the only thing holding them back.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
It's the only thing holding together the Labour and Conservative parties in their current forms.
And @bigjohnowls, for example, would be much happier in a party made for him.
But is it a bad thing the parties are being held together?
Politics isn't about purity and making people happy though, its about messy compromises.
FPTP means that Labour and the Tories if they're serious about governing have to make those compromises before the election and tell the public some home truths...
LOL. Couldn't get past that bit.
Its true though.
Parties that win majorities in this country do so by extending their reach beyond their core vote.
I'm reasonably confident now that the Tories are going to lose the next election, and they're going to lose it because they're no longer serious about governing and Sunak is retreating into a core vote strategy appealing to would-be Tory Councillors like HYUFD.
That may make a purer Tory party that keeps HYUFD happy. But its a recipe for losing an election, and deserving to lose an election.
Parties don't reach beyond their core vote by telling voters home truths, but by telling their party members home truths - that a little of what they want is better than none.
This is the same discussion a party would need to have after an election when contemplating entering a coalition. The question is whether the electorate should influence those discussions beforehand, or afterwards.
I think the electorate have more freedom of action if they get to vote first. They can then give their judgement on the choices made at the next election.
That's a distinction without a difference.
Telling their party members home truths is telling voters home truths, since their members are voters.
Simply telling your voters what they want to hear, while other parties tell their voters what they want to hear, when both of you know that you have no ability or intention to deliver that and will compromise the second votes have been cast, is simply dishonesty.
As I love said before, NZ is a good example to look at to try to find the predict what PR Britain might look like.
There would be a period of volatility, perhaps 10-15 years, during which both voters and MPs try to figure out how to use the system. Expect lots of little parties, and mini-cleggmanias.
You’d then settle down into something like:
Tories 30-40% Labour 30-40% Right wing party 5-10% LDs 5-10% Greens 5-10% Nationalists 5% Corbynistas <5%
At times, the right wing party would hit up to 20% when Con voters are disaffected. Something similar would happen on the left, with the Greens and the Corbynistas the recipients.
Two clear electoral blocs would emerge, with the LDs and sometimes nationalists, swinging between the two.
The West really needs to stop letting in young male refugees from hotbeds of terrorism. Host them in camps in the region. We shouldn't have to put innocent people at risk due to arbitrary beneficiaries of charity.
By the same argument you could implement a curfew on all young men aged 16-26 and massively reduce violent crime.
But collective preventative punishment is frowned upon outside of schools.
But young male citizens should have a right to liberty to live their lives. Syrian refugees should have a right to be free from persecution, but shouldn't have an automatic right to live in the West.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
Or they're deluding into thinking it hurts them and led by wishful thinking that its the only thing holding them back.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
It's the only thing holding together the Labour and Conservative parties in their current forms.
And @bigjohnowls, for example, would be much happier in a party made for him.
But is it a bad thing the parties are being held together?
Politics isn't about purity and making people happy though, its about messy compromises.
FPTP means that Labour and the Tories if they're serious about governing have to make those compromises before the election and tell the public some home truths...
LOL. Couldn't get past that bit.
Its true though.
Parties that win majorities in this country do so by extending their reach beyond their core vote.
I'm reasonably confident now that the Tories are going to lose the next election, and they're going to lose it because they're no longer serious about governing and Sunak is retreating into a core vote strategy appealing to would-be Tory Councillors like HYUFD.
That may make a purer Tory party that keeps HYUFD happy. But its a recipe for losing an election, and deserving to lose an election.
Parties don't reach beyond their core vote by telling voters home truths, but by telling their party members home truths - that a little of what they want is better than none.
This is the same discussion a party would need to have after an election when contemplating entering a coalition. The question is whether the electorate should influence those discussions beforehand, or afterwards.
I think the electorate have more freedom of action if they get to vote first. They can then give their judgement on the choices made at the next election.
That's a distinction without a difference.
Telling their party members home truths is telling voters home truths, since their members are voters.
Simply telling your voters what they want to hear, while other parties tell their voters what they want to hear, when both of you know that you have no ability or intention to deliver that and will compromise the second votes have been cast, is simply dishonesty.
It's not a distinction without a difference, because the home truths are different.
The politicians are not prepared to tell the truth about the desperate situation Britain is in, and the hard work that would be required to fix it, because they don't trust the voters to vote for it.
Blandishments and pretending that there are easy sources of money to fix things is the message from both sides.
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
To be worried about your estate paying IHT, you need to tick three boxes.
Old enough to hear the Grim Reaper in the vicinity. Wealthy enough to be liable for IHT. Reluctant to loose your grip on control of your money, even after you die.
Basically Telegraph core demographic.
I've spent the last few months sorting my late mother's estate. While the basic IHT allowance is £325k, you get another £175k if leaving a house to your kids, and there's the same allowance again passed on from my father, who died a few years ago. So that's a total of a million pound allowance before any IHT would have been due, which doesn't seem unduly harsh.
Could the split between housing and non housing assets discourage downsizing ?
I don't think so, since the size of the residence nil-rate band doesn't depend on the value of the property that is left. But it could be tough on your beneficiaries if you have sizeable non-property assets to pass on but die while living in rental accommodation.
The West really needs to stop letting in young male refugees from hotbeds of terrorism. Host them in camps in the region. We shouldn't have to put innocent people at risk due to arbitrary beneficiaries of charity.
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
To be worried about your estate paying IHT, you need to tick three boxes.
Old enough to hear the Grim Reaper in the vicinity. Wealthy enough to be liable for IHT. Reluctant to loose your grip on control of your money, even after you die.
Basically Telegraph core demographic.
I've spent the last few months sorting my late mother's estate. While the basic IHT allowance is £325k, you get another £175k if leaving a house to your kids, and there's the same allowance again passed on from my father, who died a few years ago. So that's a total of a million pound allowance before any IHT would have been due, which doesn't seem unduly harsh.
Could the split between housing and non housing assets discourage downsizing ?
I don't think so, since the size of the residence nil-rate band doesn't depend on the value of the property that is left. But it could be tough on your beneficiaries if you have sizeable non-property assets to pass on but die while living in rental accommodation.
Yes it seems weird that selling up and renting later in life is penalised compared to having equity tied up in your own property.
His first response was to demand that Republicans turn their focus — as they have for much of the last five years — on defending him at all costs, to the detriment of anything that better serves their interests (to say nothing of the interests of their constituents).
..But this indictment — if it indeed gets filed in the next two weeks or so — may come too early for Trump.
That’s because, as I laid out here, there’s still plenty of time in the GOP primary for other Republicans to take advantage of Trump’s legal woes. Republicans seem to be sensing this opportunity. Chris Christie kicked off his undoubtedly doomed presidential race by focusing on Trump’s epic corruption. Mike Pence kicked off his equally doomed presidential run by emphasizing that he did his duty on January 6, unlike Trump...
Note also the description of recent events in Congress, where the debt ceiling deal has rendered a visible breach between the MAGA members and the more rational Republicans.
Of course, for now, it remains only a theory. ...If Trump weren’t indicted until September or October — still a realistic timeline for January 6, particularly if interim charges must occur first — Trump might have had an opportunity to seal the GOP primary and force the GOP to defend whatever crimes he gets charged with, to own and normalize those crimes as their own, as the GOP has chosen to do for the past six years.
But at the moment, there are hints of a mood change..
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
To be worried about your estate paying IHT, you need to tick three boxes.
Old enough to hear the Grim Reaper in the vicinity. Wealthy enough to be liable for IHT. Reluctant to loose your grip on control of your money, even after you die.
Basically Telegraph core demographic.
I've spent the last few months sorting my late mother's estate. While the basic IHT allowance is £325k, you get another £175k if leaving a house to your kids, and there's the same allowance again passed on from my father, who died a few years ago. So that's a total of a million pound allowance before any IHT would have been due, which doesn't seem unduly harsh.
Could the split between housing and non housing assets discourage downsizing ?
I don't think so, since the size of the residence nil-rate band doesn't depend on the value of the property that is left. But it could be tough on your beneficiaries if you have sizeable non-property assets to pass on but die while living in rental accommodation.
Yes it seems weird that selling up and renting later in life is penalised compared to having equity tied up in your own property.
Generally pensioners have a lower income and less ability to increase their income. It's a substantial advantage to them to own their own house and not have to worry about rent or mortgage payments.
In future decades Britain's is going to see an increasing number of pensioners reliant on the private rental sector, and those pensioners will find life increasingly difficult in the face of increasing rents and a lack of security of tenure.
We are in the early stages of the Ukrainian counter offensive and so far as one can tell the mood on their side is positive. However I'm not sure we have a convincing answer to the ZNPP issue. No-one can deny the likelihood of scorched earth tactics being part of Russia's likely approach to retreating. A major nuclear incident there would be a calamity. I don't think a Chernobyl style meltdown is likely because the plant is more modern. But if a major explosion was to take place on the inside of the plant? The depravity that has been displayed by the Russian military means that nothing ought to shock us.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
Or they're deluding into thinking it hurts them and led by wishful thinking that its the only thing holding them back.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
It's the only thing holding together the Labour and Conservative parties in their current forms.
And @bigjohnowls, for example, would be much happier in a party made for him.
But is it a bad thing the parties are being held together?
Politics isn't about purity and making people happy though, its about messy compromises.
FPTP means that Labour and the Tories if they're serious about governing have to make those compromises before the election and tell the public some home truths...
LOL. Couldn't get past that bit.
Its true though.
Parties that win majorities in this country do so by extending their reach beyond their core vote.
I'm reasonably confident now that the Tories are going to lose the next election, and they're going to lose it because they're no longer serious about governing and Sunak is retreating into a core vote strategy appealing to would-be Tory Councillors like HYUFD.
That may make a purer Tory party that keeps HYUFD happy. But its a recipe for losing an election, and deserving to lose an election.
Parties don't reach beyond their core vote by telling voters home truths, but by telling their party members home truths - that a little of what they want is better than none.
This is the same discussion a party would need to have after an election when contemplating entering a coalition. The question is whether the electorate should influence those discussions beforehand, or afterwards.
I think the electorate have more freedom of action if they get to vote first. They can then give their judgement on the choices made at the next election.
That's a distinction without a difference.
Telling their party members home truths is telling voters home truths, since their members are voters.
Simply telling your voters what they want to hear, while other parties tell their voters what they want to hear, when both of you know that you have no ability or intention to deliver that and will compromise the second votes have been cast, is simply dishonesty.
It's not a distinction without a difference, because the home truths are different.
The politicians are not prepared to tell the truth about the desperate situation Britain is in, and the hard work that would be required to fix it, because they don't trust the voters to vote for it.
Blandishments and pretending that there are easy sources of money to fix things is the message from both sides.
Every party everywhere in every country has elements of blandishments and pretence, that's not unique to Britain.
But at least in the UK our parties are required to accept some compromises before the election and give the voters a reasonably informed decision before they cast their votes rather than waiting until its too late and then doing so.
His first response was to demand that Republicans turn their focus — as they have for much of the last five years — on defending him at all costs, to the detriment of anything that better serves their interests (to say nothing of the interests of their constituents).
..But this indictment — if it indeed gets filed in the next two weeks or so — may come too early for Trump.
That’s because, as I laid out here, there’s still plenty of time in the GOP primary for other Republicans to take advantage of Trump’s legal woes. Republicans seem to be sensing this opportunity. Chris Christie kicked off his undoubtedly doomed presidential race by focusing on Trump’s epic corruption. Mike Pence kicked off his equally doomed presidential run by emphasizing that he did his duty on January 6, unlike Trump...
Note also the description of recent events in Congress, where the debt ceiling deal has rendered a visible breach between the MAGA members and the more rational Republicans.
Of course, for now, it remains only a theory. ...If Trump weren’t indicted until September or October — still a realistic timeline for January 6, particularly if interim charges must occur first — Trump might have had an opportunity to seal the GOP primary and force the GOP to defend whatever crimes he gets charged with, to own and normalize those crimes as their own, as the GOP has chosen to do for the past six years.
But at the moment, there are hints of a mood change..
Are Chris Christie and Pence definitely doomed if Trump falls. DeSantis won't necessarily benefit most - and he looks like a really flawed candidate anyway, possibly beaten up by Mickey Mouse.
One final thing, it’s not obvious to me at all that PR solves any real woes as outlined by @RochdalePioneers earlier.
I think it gives different issues. With FPTP we have big coalition parties held together by the prospect of power, but always underneath the crust are the the factions.
In PR the horse trading starts after the result. It would be a shift for UK voters. There would be the issue of manifesto 'promises' being traded away and the acrimony after (see tuition fees).
The biggest issue that I believe we have is the short term nature of parliaments, leading to a very poor culture of big infrastructure building. Parties like to have delivered clear and obvious results in time to campaign for the next election (40 new hospitals!). Clearly increasing the interval between elections may not be the answer, but something needs to be done if the country is ever to get big infrastructure being built.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
Or they're deluding into thinking it hurts them and led by wishful thinking that its the only thing holding them back.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
It's the only thing holding together the Labour and Conservative parties in their current forms.
And @bigjohnowls, for example, would be much happier in a party made for him.
But is it a bad thing the parties are being held together?
Politics isn't about purity and making people happy though, its about messy compromises.
FPTP means that Labour and the Tories if they're serious about governing have to make those compromises before the election and tell the public some home truths...
LOL. Couldn't get past that bit.
Its true though.
Parties that win majorities in this country do so by extending their reach beyond their core vote.
I'm reasonably confident now that the Tories are going to lose the next election, and they're going to lose it because they're no longer serious about governing and Sunak is retreating into a core vote strategy appealing to would-be Tory Councillors like HYUFD.
That may make a purer Tory party that keeps HYUFD happy. But its a recipe for losing an election, and deserving to lose an election.
You are a libertarian who voted for Brexit and wants to concrete all over the greenbelt, I voted Remain and want to protect our greenbelt and focus new affordable homes on brownbelt land and urban high rise first.
The idea that I am the extremist and you are the ultra centrist on everything, is of course, absurd
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power.
See Germany with PR where the AfD now on 19% and Linke has seats in the German Parliament too or Italy with PR where the hard right Meloni is now PM, or Spain with PR where Vox will win significant numbers of seats in the Spanish Parliament next month on current polls or Ireland with PR where SF tops the polls or Sweden with PR where the Sweden Democrats are now second biggest party or New Zealand with PR where New Zealand First have often won MPs.
See also Israel with PR where hard right nationalist and Orthodox Jewish parties have great influence over government. Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany too after using PR to get a foothold in the Reichstag
There are extremist parties elected under FPTP too: see India, Bosnia and even the US. Other countries with PR don’t have significant extremist parties doing well: e.g., South Africa, New Zealand, Malta, Japan.
See also Scotland where the SCons will never get their sweaty little hands on the levers of power.
On current Holyrood polls the SCons will have the balance of power between SNP and Labour and the LDs in 2026
If there has to be an instructive loss of being the governing party for the SNP at Holyrood, I can’t think of a more helpful interregnum than one of SLab being propped up by the SCons. SLab and Anas aren’t that bright, but even I don’t think they would be that self destructively moronic.
In 2007 of course the SCons propped up the SNP minority government of Salmond, if Yousaf ruled out indyref2 for the next Parliament then Ross might even keep him as FM if the SNP won most MSPs but not a majority (even with the Greens)
The propping up in 2007 was minimal, Salmond became FM with the support of the Greens not Aunty Annabelle. It even included (along with other Unionist parties) imposing the Edinburgh trams on the SNP very much against their will. Besides those were more pragmatic times, the chances of Ross and his crew voting for Yousaf are precisely zero.
I would much enjoy the bright new morning of Labour getting rid of the Tories being complimented by SLab coming to power on the basis of an arrangement with the SCons. Some SLD involvement would be the icing on the cake.
If SLab and LD have more MSPs than the SNP, then Sarwar could equally become FM without SCon support, however like Salmond in 2007 he would need SCon support to get legislation through
His first response was to demand that Republicans turn their focus — as they have for much of the last five years — on defending him at all costs, to the detriment of anything that better serves their interests (to say nothing of the interests of their constituents).
..But this indictment — if it indeed gets filed in the next two weeks or so — may come too early for Trump.
That’s because, as I laid out here, there’s still plenty of time in the GOP primary for other Republicans to take advantage of Trump’s legal woes. Republicans seem to be sensing this opportunity. Chris Christie kicked off his undoubtedly doomed presidential race by focusing on Trump’s epic corruption. Mike Pence kicked off his equally doomed presidential run by emphasizing that he did his duty on January 6, unlike Trump...
Note also the description of recent events in Congress, where the debt ceiling deal has rendered a visible breach between the MAGA members and the more rational Republicans.
Of course, for now, it remains only a theory. ...If Trump weren’t indicted until September or October — still a realistic timeline for January 6, particularly if interim charges must occur first — Trump might have had an opportunity to seal the GOP primary and force the GOP to defend whatever crimes he gets charged with, to own and normalize those crimes as their own, as the GOP has chosen to do for the past six years.
But at the moment, there are hints of a mood change..
Are Chris Christie and Pence definitely doomed if Trump falls. DeSantis won't necessarily benefit most - and he looks like a really flawed candidate anyway, possibly beaten up by Mickey Mouse.
Pence is, I think; he is a charisma free zone, without any USP other than his peculiarly dogmatic version of Christianity. And it would be something of a miracle for Christie to make much headway, too. Entering the contest avowedly to go to war with Trump is to be applauded - but probably won't be by his party.
Haley, perhaps, has a slightly greater chance. You could make a case for her current odds of around 40/1 being quite good value.
In the 2013 election the FDP under PR won no seats at all, while at the time the Lib Dems were in government in the UK.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
If FPTP actually helps the LDs they are being rather noble in having its abolition as a core objective.
Or they're deluding into thinking it hurts them and led by wishful thinking that its the only thing holding them back.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
It's the only thing holding together the Labour and Conservative parties in their current forms.
And @bigjohnowls, for example, would be much happier in a party made for him.
But is it a bad thing the parties are being held together?
Politics isn't about purity and making people happy though, its about messy compromises.
FPTP means that Labour and the Tories if they're serious about governing have to make those compromises before the election and tell the public some home truths...
LOL. Couldn't get past that bit.
Its true though.
Parties that win majorities in this country do so by extending their reach beyond their core vote.
I'm reasonably confident now that the Tories are going to lose the next election, and they're going to lose it because they're no longer serious about governing and Sunak is retreating into a core vote strategy appealing to would-be Tory Councillors like HYUFD.
That may make a purer Tory party that keeps HYUFD happy. But its a recipe for losing an election, and deserving to lose an election.
You are a libertarian who voted for Brexit and wants to concrete all over the greenbelt, I voted Remain and want to protect our greenbelt and focus new affordable homes on brownbelt land and urban high rise first.
The idea that I am the extremist and you are the ultra centrist on everything, is of course, absurd
I don't want to concrete all over the greenbelt. I don't think there's any demand for such, if we did that at our current density of housing we'd have enough houses for about a billion people and I don't think there's any demand for that whatsoever.
I've suggested a small amount of greenbelt land ought to be built on, because there's been a vast growth in our countries population, so there simply isn't enough brownbelt land to use.
I don't see you volunteering to go live in a high rise, why should anyone else have that as the only option before them?
The West really needs to stop letting in young male refugees from hotbeds of terrorism. Host them in camps in the region. We shouldn't have to put innocent people at risk due to arbitrary beneficiaries of charity.
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power.
See Germany with PR where the AfD now on 19% and Linke has seats in the German Parliament too or Italy with PR where the hard right Meloni is now PM, or Spain with PR where Vox will win significant numbers of seats in the Spanish Parliament next month on current polls or Ireland with PR where SF tops the polls or Sweden with PR where the Sweden Democrats are now second biggest party or New Zealand with PR where New Zealand First have often won MPs.
See also Israel with PR where hard right nationalist and Orthodox Jewish parties have great influence over government. Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany too after using PR to get a foothold in the Reichstag
There are extremist parties elected under FPTP too: see India, Bosnia and even the US. Other countries with PR don’t have significant extremist parties doing well: e.g., South Africa, New Zealand, Malta, Japan.
See also Scotland where the SCons will never get their sweaty little hands on the levers of power.
On current Holyrood polls the SCons will have the balance of power between SNP and Labour and the LDs in 2026
If there has to be an instructive loss of being the governing party for the SNP at Holyrood, I can’t think of a more helpful interregnum than one of SLab being propped up by the SCons. SLab and Anas aren’t that bright, but even I don’t think they would be that self destructively moronic.
In 2007 of course the SCons propped up the SNP minority government of Salmond, if Yousaf ruled out indyref2 for the next Parliament then Ross might even keep him as FM if the SNP won most MSPs but not a majority (even with the Greens)
The propping up in 2007 was minimal, Salmond became FM with the support of the Greens not Aunty Annabelle. It even included (along with other Unionist parties) imposing the Edinburgh trams on the SNP very much against their will. Besides those were more pragmatic times, the chances of Ross and his crew voting for Yousaf are precisely zero.
I would much enjoy the bright new morning of Labour getting rid of the Tories being complimented by SLab coming to power on the basis of an arrangement with the SCons. Some SLD involvement would be the icing on the cake.
If SLab and LD have more MSPs than the SNP, then Sarwar could equally become FM without SCon support, however like Salmond in 2007 he would need SCon support to get legislation through
If my great-great-890-times-great-grandfather had been a dolphin, I could be eating ultra-fresh sashimi right now.
‘I’d rather stay in Communist China than return to inheritance tax Britain’ Prohibitively high death taxes are blocking British expats from returning home
"His estate, divided across property, stocks, and shares, will certainly incur a hefty inheritance tax bill.
“We have three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal,” he says.
“I’ve put as much of it in my wife’s name as possible but my worry is that because I am male and older, I will die before she does.”
Mr Mosely says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain if she is widowed. He says: “By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years, and then she’ll be subject to inheritance tax.”
In the meantime, Mr Mosely says he is miserable. Beijing has lost its appeal now that he is retired – and he wants to live out the rest of his years in Kent, where he and his wife own a house."
So, give it away and stop whining.
Sounds to me like he's weighed up his options and chosen his preferred one, I don't get the complaint.
The Telegraphs seems to have a bee in its bonnet about inheritance tax currently.
It s ‘so what’ story.
To be worried about your estate paying IHT, you need to tick three boxes.
Old enough to hear the Grim Reaper in the vicinity. Wealthy enough to be liable for IHT. Reluctant to loose your grip on control of your money, even after you die.
Basically Telegraph core demographic.
I've spent the last few months sorting my late mother's estate. While the basic IHT allowance is £325k, you get another £175k if leaving a house to your kids, and there's the same allowance again passed on from my father, who died a few years ago. So that's a total of a million pound allowance before any IHT would have been due, which doesn't seem unduly harsh.
Could the split between housing and non housing assets discourage downsizing ?
I don't think so, since the size of the residence nil-rate band doesn't depend on the value of the property that is left. But it could be tough on your beneficiaries if you have sizeable non-property assets to pass on but die while living in rental accommodation.
Yes it seems weird that selling up and renting later in life is penalised compared to having equity tied up in your own property.
Generally pensioners have a lower income and less ability to increase their income. It's a substantial advantage to them to own their own house and not have to worry about rent or mortgage payments.
In future decades Britain's is going to see an increasing number of pensioners reliant on the private rental sector, and those pensioners will find life increasingly difficult in the face of increasing rents and a lack of security of tenure.
HMG will need to bring back the workhouse. I can't see the current Tory party bringing back almshouses, favourably as theu are regarded.
The West really needs to stop letting in young male refugees from hotbeds of terrorism. Host them in camps in the region. We shouldn't have to put innocent people at risk due to arbitrary beneficiaries of charity.
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power.
See Germany with PR where the AfD now on 19% and Linke has seats in the German Parliament too or Italy with PR where the hard right Meloni is now PM, or Spain with PR where Vox will win significant numbers of seats in the Spanish Parliament next month on current polls or Ireland with PR where SF tops the polls or Sweden with PR where the Sweden Democrats are now second biggest party or New Zealand with PR where New Zealand First have often won MPs.
See also Israel with PR where hard right nationalist and Orthodox Jewish parties have great influence over government. Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany too after using PR to get a foothold in the Reichstag
There are extremist parties elected under FPTP too: see India, Bosnia and even the US. Other countries with PR don’t have significant extremist parties doing well: e.g., South Africa, New Zealand, Malta, Japan.
See also Scotland where the SCons will never get their sweaty little hands on the levers of power.
On current Holyrood polls the SCons will have the balance of power between SNP and Labour and the LDs in 2026
If there has to be an instructive loss of being the governing party for the SNP at Holyrood, I can’t think of a more helpful interregnum than one of SLab being propped up by the SCons. SLab and Anas aren’t that bright, but even I don’t think they would be that self destructively moronic.
In 2007 of course the SCons propped up the SNP minority government of Salmond, if Yousaf ruled out indyref2 for the next Parliament then Ross might even keep him as FM if the SNP won most MSPs but not a majority (even with the Greens)
The propping up in 2007 was minimal, Salmond became FM with the support of the Greens not Aunty Annabelle. It even included (along with other Unionist parties) imposing the Edinburgh trams on the SNP very much against their will. Besides those were more pragmatic times, the chances of Ross and his crew voting for Yousaf are precisely zero.
I would much enjoy the bright new morning of Labour getting rid of the Tories being complimented by SLab coming to power on the basis of an arrangement with the SCons. Some SLD involvement would be the icing on the cake.
If SLab and LD have more MSPs than the SNP, then Sarwar could equally become FM without SCon support, however like Salmond in 2007 he would need SCon support to get legislation through
If my great-great-890-times-great-grandfather had been a dolphin, I could be eating ultra-fresh sashimi right now.
Wouldn't SLAB and LD need more MSPs than both the SNP and Greens in any case?
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power.
See Germany with PR where the AfD now on 19% and Linke has seats in the German Parliament too or Italy with PR where the hard right Meloni is now PM, or Spain with PR where Vox will win significant numbers of seats in the Spanish Parliament next month on current polls or Ireland with PR where SF tops the polls or Sweden with PR where the Sweden Democrats are now second biggest party or New Zealand with PR where New Zealand First have often won MPs.
See also Israel with PR where hard right nationalist and Orthodox Jewish parties have great influence over government. Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany too after using PR to get a foothold in the Reichstag
There are extremist parties elected under FPTP too: see India, Bosnia and even the US. Other countries with PR don’t have significant extremist parties doing well: e.g., South Africa, New Zealand, Malta, Japan.
See also Scotland where the SCons will never get their sweaty little hands on the levers of power.
On current Holyrood polls the SCons will have the balance of power between SNP and Labour and the LDs in 2026
If there has to be an instructive loss of being the governing party for the SNP at Holyrood, I can’t think of a more helpful interregnum than one of SLab being propped up by the SCons. SLab and Anas aren’t that bright, but even I don’t think they would be that self destructively moronic.
In 2007 of course the SCons propped up the SNP minority government of Salmond, if Yousaf ruled out indyref2 for the next Parliament then Ross might even keep him as FM if the SNP won most MSPs but not a majority (even with the Greens)
The propping up in 2007 was minimal, Salmond became FM with the support of the Greens not Aunty Annabelle. It even included (along with other Unionist parties) imposing the Edinburgh trams on the SNP very much against their will. Besides those were more pragmatic times, the chances of Ross and his crew voting for Yousaf are precisely zero.
I would much enjoy the bright new morning of Labour getting rid of the Tories being complimented by SLab coming to power on the basis of an arrangement with the SCons. Some SLD involvement would be the icing on the cake.
If SLab and LD have more MSPs than the SNP, then Sarwar could equally become FM without SCon support, however like Salmond in 2007 he would need SCon support to get legislation through
If I could be washed up on a desert island with Michelle O'Neill... Oh, well! Not happening!
Higher rents means higher rental inflation. Workers will need to go on strike for higher pay to pay their rent. Controls on the rental market are leading to baked-in higher inflation.
I've done a fair bit of private renting, and I despair at some of the policies that come out of the left on this. As a renter, I wanted to a vibrant market that would give me a lot of choice at affordable prices with some measure of protection that would stop me being made homeless on a whim. That's about it.
Rent controls coupled with eviction freezes just fucks the whole thing.
The latest policy wheeze - help renters by pushing landlords out of business - hasn't come from the left, though. It is Tory policy.
Stupid question - how are the Government doing that - via the 2016 tax changes and a requirement to improve the energy efficiency of the house?
Asking because neither of those changes are making things easier for renters where supply is down, demand is equal (or higher than before due to population growth) and prices are rising.
What we actually need is for pension funds to actually focus on build to rent...
Any problems with supply are solely due to the fact that construction hasn't kept pace with population. The only answer to that is to build more, but the Government are siding with NIMBYs instead.
If a landlord sells up and exits the market then that doesn't adjust supply and demand net because either the landlord sells to another landlord (so no net change) or they sell to someone who used to be a tenant but is now an owner occupier instead (so 1 fewer supply, 1 fewer demand, no net change).
Build, build, build to boost supply.
This though is not true. The number of houses does not change I agree however the size of rental households is generally larger than owner occupied households so a house moving from rental to owner occupied actually increases the ratio of people looking to rent/houses to rent
That's due to age not rental/ownership primarily.
A retired couple who own their own home, or a widower who owns their own home don't live on their own because they are owner-occupiers.
And a couple with primary school aged kids who rent aren't going to throw their kids out of their home if they buy a property.
It may be due to age but that is irrelevant. You will still have more people chasing fewer properties
Here is a worked example to demonstrate
2,500,000 renters in 1 million homes
sell up half
you now have 1,250,000 displaced renters of which 1,200,000 will be soaked up by now being owner occupiers leaving 50,000 renters extra fighting for the diminished rental pool.
Sorry I dont see age is relevant to this....you have 2.5 renters per home regardless of age and only 2.4 for owner occupied. Owners will also have kids so your point is void. The higher occupancy for rental is more down to HMO's and young adults house sharing than families
Sorry your maths are wrong, age is entirely relevant to this.
You are looking at correlation not causation.
Sell half a million homes, have half a million households who were renting buy them, and the net change is zero.
The higher occupancy for rental is due to families. The age-profile of renters covers those with dependent children more than the age-profile of owner occupiers, so correlation is not causation like you are thinking.
Do you not consider that families with young children would already have bought if they could afford it? They can't so they rent. So yes age is irrelevant
Families with young children used to be able to afford to buy homes at a much higher rate, and if landlords are selling up to owner occupiers as per our scenario we are discussing, then they would be again.
So no, age is not irrelevant. Your statistic on people living per home is completely irrelevant, because that statistics is a correlation to ownership not caused by it. It has causative link to age profile, which correlates to ownership, so ownership correlates to people per home.
Correlation is not causation.
Landlords have been selling up since the Osborne reforms, the rental pool has been diminishing since the Osborne reforms. House prices haven't been going down. Few people rent if they can afford to buy, if they can't afford to buy landlords selling up and reducing the rental pool is not going to help them in the least. Your theory seems predicated on "they could buy but they are just being obstinate and rent"
House prices haven't gone down because supply hasn't kept up with demand. Not enough houses are being built.
Demand goes up by more than supply and prices go up. That's basic economics, not rocket science.
Build more houses.
If landlords sell up and tenants buy the houses, then the former tenant who now has their own home is greatly improved by that situation.
The tenants who still rent aren't helped, but they're not hurt either, since there's fewer homes available to rent, but fewer people seeking to rent too, so no net change.
Build more houses and the supply will go up and prices will go down. Anything else is just fiddling at the edges.
Yes but people that rent aren't going to be buying them is the point. If they could afford to buy then most of them would have already done so. Your assumption that rental properties are going to be magically affordable to those forced to rent now due to lack of choice is wrong.
I rent I would buy if I could, my landlord selling up wouldn't suddenly make it possible for me to buy. Most renters are in that position.
Sorry but who do you think is going to buy if the landlord sells up?
If its a household who were renting, then it takes a competitor seeking to rent out of the equation, demand for rental properties go down accordingly, no net change in supply and demand.
If its an alternative landlord, then they are going to want to let out the property, so no net change in supply and demand.
The house isn't suddenly going to vanish into the ether. It will still be there.
Building more houses raises overall supply. Whether a particular household owns or rents their property does not.
A fair number will be bought as second homes I have no doubt for a start. The simple fact is house prices aren't falling even though landlords have been selling up. Most renters cannot buy or they would have. Your whole premise is built on them suddenly being able to buy a house they already can't afford.
Now if stats had shown falling house prices since Osbornes reforms you might have a point. Stats dont show this so your premise is false.
The rate of selling by landlords is fart in a thunderstorm compared to the undersupply of housing. The demand to buy is increasing (with the population) by six figures a year.
I'm wondering about a perhaps underdiscussed element of housing supply - the Barrett building site I drive past each morning, it well.. hasn't exactly looked chock full of builders recently. I have no idea how long a site should take to complete though.
I think I heard that house prices in Britain are now falling on an annual rate. Seems like it would be obvious that housebuilders will respond by slowing down completions in the hope that they'll make more money selling next year.
This is why the State needs to be a major housebuilder, and/or it needs to be much easier for individuals to buy a plot of land with planning permission and pay a builder to build a single house on it.
The big housebuilders are never going to increase supply of houses in a market where prices are falling. Just as SeanF said in relation to parties and voting systems, why would they act against their own interests to do that?
Average UK house prices increased by 4.1% in the 12 months to March 2023, down from 5.8% in February 2023.
The rate of increase is slowing, its not the same as house prices falling
There's clearly a huge desire to get the Conservatives out.
But what do all the people desperate for a Labour Government want it to actually do? And what is Starmer actually planning to do?
Starmer has said he's not going to raise taxes significantly and he's told the Shadow Cabinet not to make any spending promises.
So if he isn't going to spend any money, what is he actually going to do?
He seems to be heading for a Gordon Brown scenario - desperate to get into power but with no tangible plans to actually do anything once he gets there.
So the public will almost certainly get their wish to get the Conservatives out - only for Starmer to come in and do precisely nothing - effectively continuing with existing policies.
The only change will be that the existing policies will have new branding and of course the rhetoric will be different.
What do I want it to do?
Well, Government to stop handing out lucrative contracts and appointments to its mates.
I'd like it to stop telling barefaced lies to the public, and to Parliament.
I'd like it to put more of the burden of paying for public services on those that can afford it rather than those that can't.
I'd like it to act with some integrity, domestically and internationally, so that some public faith in politicians is restored.
I'd like it to restore good trading relations with our natural trading partners, notably the EU.
That would do for starters. Anything else would be a bonus.
This is what I don't get about remaining Tories. This government- and with it the Conservative Party - is openly corrupt. That is not a conservative thing to support.
And I'm not just talking about financial corruption into the BILLIONS of our money grifted to their spiv friends and patrons. I also refer to the corruption of facts. Lying to parliament is a Bad Thing with a very rapid and swift penalty. Utterly corrupted by the Tories who don't just lie, but try to insist their lie is the truth no matter how egregious that claim is.
That is also not a conservative thing to support. True conservatives surely need to save the soul of their party, because at the moment they are the anti-Conservatives. Is there no level of filth that some people are prepared to swim in? And for what - to defend a party whose policies they largely oppose and whose principles are a mockery of what they hold dear?
I can see an awful lot of Tory voters - true lifelong conservatives - trying to save the soul of the party by killing the anti-Tories at the coming election. Kill it with electoral fire. And then you can have your party back.
Your last paragraph relies on two things, that the rump of remaining Tories are the sensible ones - unlikely, and that if they get wiped out that they learn the right lessons.
My concern is that a large defeat will leave those in solid seats, the Bill Cash and Edward Leigh’s of the world running the show who have learned nothing and not remotely adapted to the modern world.
They will also come to the wrong conclusion that they lost because they were “too centrist” and so lurch to bonkers. This will further destroy the Tories as a going concern for a long long time like the Liberals.
The best situation for Tories (short of an unlikely victory) is a modest defeat where the evidence to them is clear that despite all the shit over the last few years and the damage to their standing they managed to get close with Sunak and a more centrist approach with nods to the right and so replacing him with crazy isn’t the answer.
It’s also not great for the country to have parties in power with whopping majorities unless they actually have a decent plan how to fix things - either you get bad decisions that are un-opposable due to the majority or you get complacency such as under Blair where a huge majority, where he could have changed the face of the country, is wasted because they are too worried about the next election and losing the broad church that got them that majority and so don’t want to do anything to scare the horses so you end up with stagnation.
Sane people in Labour managed to save the party from me and BJO, so the Tories can at least try.
As I posted before, I expect that electoral and constitutional reform will be an inevitable big agenda item in the next parliament. Which means that the restored Tory party may not need distinguished psychopaths like Sir Edward Leigh - they could form their own party.
And PR also guarantees Farage's Reform UK and a new Corbynite left party 15-20% of the seats in the House of Commons each, so far from removing the hard right and hard left, PR just increases their power.
See Germany with PR where the AfD now on 19% and Linke has seats in the German Parliament too or Italy with PR where the hard right Meloni is now PM, or Spain with PR where Vox will win significant numbers of seats in the Spanish Parliament next month on current polls or Ireland with PR where SF tops the polls or Sweden with PR where the Sweden Democrats are now second biggest party or New Zealand with PR where New Zealand First have often won MPs.
See also Israel with PR where hard right nationalist and Orthodox Jewish parties have great influence over government. Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany too after using PR to get a foothold in the Reichstag
There are extremist parties elected under FPTP too: see India, Bosnia and even the US. Other countries with PR don’t have significant extremist parties doing well: e.g., South Africa, New Zealand, Malta, Japan.
See also Scotland where the SCons will never get their sweaty little hands on the levers of power.
On current Holyrood polls the SCons will have the balance of power between SNP and Labour and the LDs in 2026
If there has to be an instructive loss of being the governing party for the SNP at Holyrood, I can’t think of a more helpful interregnum than one of SLab being propped up by the SCons. SLab and Anas aren’t that bright, but even I don’t think they would be that self destructively moronic.
In 2007 of course the SCons propped up the SNP minority government of Salmond, if Yousaf ruled out indyref2 for the next Parliament then Ross might even keep him as FM if the SNP won most MSPs but not a majority (even with the Greens)
The propping up in 2007 was minimal, Salmond became FM with the support of the Greens not Aunty Annabelle. It even included (along with other Unionist parties) imposing the Edinburgh trams on the SNP very much against their will. Besides those were more pragmatic times, the chances of Ross and his crew voting for Yousaf are precisely zero.
I would much enjoy the bright new morning of Labour getting rid of the Tories being complimented by SLab coming to power on the basis of an arrangement with the SCons. Some SLD involvement would be the icing on the cake.
If SLab and LD have more MSPs than the SNP, then Sarwar could equally become FM without SCon support, however like Salmond in 2007 he would need SCon support to get legislation through
The more interesting scenario is where (Lab + LD) < (SNP + Green), but the Tories give Unionists a majority.
Then Labour would need explicit Tory support to form a government. What price would the Tories all for in such a scenario, and how much damage would that price do to Labour at the subsequent election?
Comments
One of the NIMBY objections is the disruption caused by new building. I suspect that quicker completion of projects would help to reduce objections to them. Nobody likes living adjacent to a building site for years.
The unasked question is 'is it existential'. Let's put some hypothetical markets up.
Party of PM after next change of party (main identified direct legal successors count):
At the moment you'd say Labour are 1/50 or tighter on this - no voting system change likely under Con and even if they blow 2024 they are not going back to Corbynism.
Even back during the worst of Corbynism this was probably a 1/20 shot, we have only had a couple of times since PMs existed of non alternation, and all the calls of "Labour are finished" seemed hyperbolic.
So, go forward to 2024 and assume for a minute PM Starmer. How does that look?
The Tories could well take some ideologically narrow and fringe turns, Labour could well look at voting reform and that could spin out parties. And either the right or the centre could be that split. But the voting bloc for a centre right party remains, and it might take a while for proportional politics to fully mature. A lot of ifs, but I'd still have the Tories tighter than 1/12 to be the next party of the PM post Labour.
What this is also highly relevant to is the Sunak the Johnson enabler vs Starmer the Corbyn enabler arguments. The vehicle for power is almost certainly a main party and, also very short odds is that the vehicle for power within a party is current / recent Cab / ShadCab, Corbyn being the exception of course. I avoided voting Labour for 4 years, but I'm glad someone was in the vehicle, because beyond that, had there been no one sensible left in ShadCab, we'd have been looking at 97-10 retreads stewing on the back benches, or RLB types. Future opposition Tories would do well to take note.
"Price of average home in May was 1% lower than in same month last year, according to Halifax figures"
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jun/07/uk-house-prices-halifax-data-may
Also, normally prices will be falling for several months, month-on-month, before the annual rate turns negative.
It's been noted that Russia today is very different demographically to the USSR of 1942, when the supply of men was, effectively, infinite. But it still seems a long way to go before conservation of their own troop numbers becomes an issue they feel they need to deal with. My understanding is that they still have a vast army - albeit one they need to have most of doing other things than fighting in Ukraine lest China or anyone else suddenly take a fancy to all that undefended land.
Or do they wake up one day and realise that there are no Russian men of fighting age left?
Interestingly around me the Barratt development is the one that seems to have the least activity too. I wonder if that's a coincidence or not?
Though its quite fenced off so hard to tell, where I live there is a lot of activity happening from our developer and they certainly don't seem to be slowing down but its still always been planned to take another couple of years to finish off the development just from this one developer. But new houses are still coming onto the market each month. My own street is finished now which is nice not to have the builders on this street anymore.
There's no reason to suppose this would benefit the parties in 4th, 5th and beyond so much more that they would overtake the 3rd placed party.
There were a bunch of comments on Twitter this morning blaming the west for the dam being blown… apparently we didn’t consider the Russian response to us continuing to support Ukraine so it’s all our fault
Liberate the planning system and if a builder is too slow at building then people will buy from a competitor instead.
We have plenty of skilled tradespeople in this country who could be building homes. There's no reason why any one developer should be able to affect prices without the threat of competition staying their hand, the only reason they can is because the big developers can work within the planning constraints which cuts out competition from smaller firms.
1) didn’t tell soldiers they were going to Ukraine
2) didn’t train conscripts
3) told conscripts to buy their own kit.
4) did ammo resupply on the basis of who the unit commander knows.
It s ‘so what’ story.
FPTP massively assists the Lib Dems over smaller competitor parties.
The experience of PR where it is used is to see much more churn in who the third party is, with the former third party being relegated or even eliminated altogether quite frequently. Having a consistent third party in PR nations is rather unusual.
https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1666441410306768899
If China are not dissuaded from continuing this, then they could help Russia equip a large number of future conscripts.
Even at the 2015 election the Lib Dems won more seats than the FDP had.
The idea that FPTP is the only thing holding the Lib Dems back is a joke, a comfort blanket used by Lib Dem supporters. The thing holding the Lib Dems back is that people don't want to vote for them.
And I say that as someone who is currently voting for them.
Old enough to hear the Grim Reaper in the vicinity.
Wealthy enough to be liable for IHT.
Reluctant to loose your grip on control of your money, even after you die.
Basically Telegraph core demographic.
Inheritance tax - which it appears to be fighting a solo campaign on.
House prices - where it is making the baffling assumption that everyone celebrates higher house prices and laments lower ones.
Working from home - which is clearly something of a direct threat to the Telegraph's commercial success.
Huge numbers of Russians, mostly the relatively well-off, have already left the country to avoid being recruited.
Its hard to imagine that much of the Telegraph's demographic is of working age.
Had there been, I would have spoilt my ballot. Since they weren't, I lent them my vote.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, is an apt saying.
- no mention of May being targetted as HS, for example - her policies were probably as un-woke as the others, maybe more so than Raab's, but she was competent(ish) or appeared so until Brexit
- the farming thing is too vague for me to make a judgement (are we talking about pricing? animal welfare? pesticide restrictions?)
- if banning of products refers to ICE cars and gas boilers then I think it's fine to set a notional time limit to focus manufacturers' minds (if your main product might become illegal, you'd better really research the alternatives). I'd prefer a tax regime that takes into account the CO2 (etc) externalities rather than an outright ban, but I'm fairly relaxed (as an ICE driver still and gas boiler owner) about it
It's true, I think, that too many organisations for social an environmental responsibility look to just pick up an 'approved' badge from a charity (which is also a nice earner for charities) rather than taking a deep hard look at what they're doing. I remember colleagues in marine science taking a dim view of the MSC approved labelling on fish, arguing that it was just a bit of greenwashing rather than anything substantial. The similarly initialled MCS took a quite different view on sustainability of various products.
The key toxicity in recent decades has been the combination of aggressive Thatcherism and traditional privilege in the atmosphere at some of these schools, as many have observed. This was the atmosphere that Boris and Mogg grew up in in the '80s.
I think the Tory floor is 250
If up against SKS its quite a bit higher than that
Lab High is about 350
Under SKS well under 300 i reckon
Some counter-examples are the liberal Estonian Reform Party winning most seats and gaining seats in March’s election. The liberal FijiFirst won in their election last December. The Freedom Movement came from nowhere to win the Slovenian election in April ‘22. The Progressive Party were the big gainers of the 2021 Icelandic election.
EDIT: this despite the fact an office job for at least some of that working person’s career was pre-internet and email and therefore immediately less stressful. My first boss used to love to regale me with stories of working through the post in tray, moving things into the out tray, making some phone calls and being on their merry way when everything for the day was done: that’s far from the average office experience nowadays.
https://www.bfmtv.com/police-justice/enfants-blesses-a-annecy-ce-que-l-on-sait-de-l-attaque-au-couteau_AV-202306080448.html
Of his grandfather 'He also rebelled against his grandfather, “a formidable bully” who insisted that Odey go to the Bar, but he changed his mind while training to be a barrister. “My grandfather disliked the City and he wasn’t used to being countermanded, so he got annoyed.” The final insult: “He left me nothing in his will but an empty suitcase.”
https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/crispin-odey-david-cameron-is-not-a-leader-doesn-t-understand-power-and-doesn-t-use-it-8335027.html
As you say only if options are exhausted will Ukraine pause, and we certainly should try to ensure they are not exhausted
I think the Tories are heading for this after the election. They will gather at the house of commons and look around, thinking 'where are the rest', before the reality hits.
I don't subscribe to the wipeout fantasies of young/old (delete as appropriate) @Heathener, but I think they could be around 200 MP's. Pretty sure the Lib Dems will benefit and bounce back into the 20s or 30s and Labour will romp home.
And then all the shrill voices on twitter etc will see the politics is the art of the possible and all the hopes and dreams (and fantasies) will be me with the crunching juggernaut of reality.
Starmer and Labour don't have the answers folks. But its their turn to 'not have the answer'.
Sadly I can't close Teams because we are also using it to discuss the priority 1 issue.
I cannot describe my hatred for Teams when people are in crisis mode...
And @bigjohnowls, for example, would be much happier in a party made for him.
Labour were notoriously self-destructive by voting against all SNP proposals, even those originated by Labour ...
2007: the Tories were paid off by keeping police numbers uip - ironically far more than the Tories did in rUK. That was a whole order of magnitude easier than what you are postilating.
I would much enjoy the bright new morning of Labour getting rid of the Tories being complimented by SLab coming to power on the basis of an arrangement with the SCons. Some SLD involvement would be the icing on the cake.
Politics isn't about purity and making people happy though, its about messy compromises.
FPTP means that Labour and the Tories if they're serious about governing have to make those compromises before the election and tell the public some home truths and let the public decide how they're going to vote. Which compromises are acceptable and which aren't.
PR means you can say whatever you want knowing full well you're never getting a majority to deliver it, then throw it all in the bin after the votes have been counted.
I'd rather some honesty and compromises are made before the election than after it.
People like HYUFD might be very happy to have a "purer" Conservative party solely for old fashioned Tories like him, rather than liberals like myself. But in this country in general for the Conservatives to win then leaders like Cameron etc need to attract votes from people who aren't pure Tories like HYUFD and instead appeal to right wing liberals like myself to give the Tories our votes too in order for them to have enough votes cast for them to win.
Under PR he'd get a purer Tory party in theory, but the second the votes are cast the compromises will be made. But the compromises being made after the votes are cast is too little, too late, to have an informed decision. Rather than politicians like Cameron or Starmer or Blair making compromises and extending their appeal beyond their core vote before the election too.
Couldn't get past that bit.
Parties that win majorities in this country do so by extending their reach beyond their core vote.
I'm reasonably confident now that the Tories are going to lose the next election, and they're going to lose it because they're no longer serious about governing and Sunak is retreating into a core vote strategy appealing to would-be Tory Councillors like HYUFD.
That may make a purer Tory party that keeps HYUFD happy. But its a recipe for losing an election, and deserving to lose an election.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/65843586
This is the same discussion a party would need to have after an election when contemplating entering a coalition. The question is whether the electorate should influence those discussions beforehand, or afterwards.
I think the electorate have more freedom of action if they get to vote first. They can then give their judgement on the choices made at the next election.
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1666758333427073024
Russians are shelling Kherson's center and riverside areas, local Telegram channels report
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1666768020016975874
Of course, Sunak is also doing things AUKUS, CPTPP, the NI agreement, etc which show he is serious about governing.
But collective preventative punishment is frowned upon outside of schools.
Telling their party members home truths is telling voters home truths, since their members are voters.
Simply telling your voters what they want to hear, while other parties tell their voters what they want to hear, when both of you know that you have no ability or intention to deliver that and will compromise the second votes have been cast, is simply dishonesty.
There would be a period of volatility, perhaps 10-15 years, during which both voters and MPs try to figure out how to use the system. Expect lots of little parties, and mini-cleggmanias.
You’d then settle down into something like:
Tories 30-40%
Labour 30-40%
Right wing party 5-10%
LDs 5-10%
Greens 5-10%
Nationalists 5%
Corbynistas <5%
At times, the right wing party would hit up to 20% when Con voters are disaffected. Something similar would happen on the left, with the Greens and the Corbynistas the recipients.
Two clear electoral blocs would emerge, with the LDs and sometimes nationalists, swinging between the two.
The politicians are not prepared to tell the truth about the desperate situation Britain is in, and the hard work that would be required to fix it, because they don't trust the voters to vote for it.
Blandishments and pretending that there are easy sources of money to fix things is the message from both sides.
'Open door for Ukraine refugees could lead to ‘devastating’ terror attack on UK, Tory minister claims'
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ukrainian-refugees-terror-attack-suella-braverman-b2038899.html
This article makes a pretty decent case.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/06/08/this-indictment-will-likely-come-too-early-for-trump-to-consolidate-the-party/
...Trump’s first response to the first public confirmation that he will soon be charged was not, as it turned out, to bellow, “Lock him up!” or even reconsider his past obstruction, but instead demand that the insurrectionists in Congress do something.
His first response was to demand that Republicans turn their focus — as they have for much of the last five years — on defending him at all costs, to the detriment of anything that better serves their interests (to say nothing of the interests of their constituents).
..But this indictment — if it indeed gets filed in the next two weeks or so — may come too early for Trump.
That’s because, as I laid out here, there’s still plenty of time in the GOP primary for other Republicans to take advantage of Trump’s legal woes. Republicans seem to be sensing this opportunity. Chris Christie kicked off his undoubtedly doomed presidential race by focusing on Trump’s epic corruption. Mike Pence kicked off his equally doomed presidential run by emphasizing that he did his duty on January 6, unlike Trump...
Note also the description of recent events in Congress, where the debt ceiling deal has rendered a visible breach between the MAGA members and the more rational Republicans.
Of course, for now, it remains only a theory.
...If Trump weren’t indicted until September or October — still a realistic timeline for January 6, particularly if interim charges must occur first — Trump might have had an opportunity to seal the GOP primary and force the GOP to defend whatever crimes he gets charged with, to own and normalize those crimes as their own, as the GOP has chosen to do for the past six years.
But at the moment, there are hints of a mood change..
In future decades Britain's is going to see an increasing number of pensioners reliant on the private rental sector, and those pensioners will find life increasingly difficult in the face of increasing rents and a lack of security of tenure.
We are in the early stages of the Ukrainian counter offensive and so far as one can tell the mood on their side is positive. However I'm not sure we have a convincing answer to the ZNPP issue. No-one can deny the likelihood of scorched earth tactics being part of Russia's likely approach to retreating. A major nuclear incident there would be a calamity. I don't think a Chernobyl style meltdown is likely because the plant is more modern. But if a major explosion was to take place on the inside of the plant? The depravity that has been displayed by the Russian military means that nothing ought to shock us.
I hope our leaders are fully on top of this.
But at least in the UK our parties are required to accept some compromises before the election and give the voters a reasonably informed decision before they cast their votes rather than waiting until its too late and then doing so.
DeSantis won't necessarily benefit most - and he looks like a really flawed candidate anyway, possibly beaten up by Mickey Mouse.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/rural-oregon-movement-join-greater-idaho-gains-traction-vote-12th-county
In PR the horse trading starts after the result. It would be a shift for UK voters. There would be the issue of manifesto 'promises' being traded away and the acrimony after (see tuition fees).
The biggest issue that I believe we have is the short term nature of parliaments, leading to a very poor culture of big infrastructure building. Parties like to have delivered clear and obvious results in time to campaign for the next election (40 new hospitals!). Clearly increasing the interval between elections may not be the answer, but something needs to be done if the country is ever to get big infrastructure being built.
The idea that I am the extremist and you are the ultra centrist on everything, is of course, absurd
Haley, perhaps, has a slightly greater chance. You could make a case for her current odds of around 40/1 being quite good value.
I've suggested a small amount of greenbelt land ought to be built on, because there's been a vast growth in our countries population, so there simply isn't enough brownbelt land to use.
I don't see you volunteering to go live in a high rise, why should anyone else have that as the only option before them?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/22/affordable-and-stress-free-how-almshouses-are-the-unsung-heroes-of-uk-social-housing
Then Labour would need explicit Tory support to form a government. What price would the Tories all for in such a scenario, and how much damage would that price do to Labour at the subsequent election?