I havent commented on johnson referencing the wrong poster maybe?
You commented on the submersible tragedy, in manner that BoJo has labeled as left-wing sneering.
Fuller quote: "JOHNSON: Lefties sneer. But those brave souls on the submarine died in a cause - pushing out the frontiers of human knowledge - that's typically British and that fills me with pride."
No I commented the opposite....I said they were fools and that I suspected that the builder had misled them to the risk. That is not saying they were brave souls or pushing the frontiers of human knowledge. They were misled by a charlatan. How do you figure the two comments are in anyway saying the same thing? If anyone was closer to the Boris statement it was RCS1000
Why has this information only just become public? I'd like to see a system where MP's need to log and evidence hours worked, what they did, and how it was relevant to their role as an MP. Rather like job seekers. And for those details to be scrutinised and then published.
That information is in the public domain. It's easy to find out when someone last made a contribution, or how many votes they have attended:
As for her being on TalkTV, that was hardly a secret.
No it isn't. That's just what someone does in the HofC. I wouldn't care if my MP never spoke there because they were hard at work on constituency surgeries, engaging with community groups and advocating for investment. She doesn't appear to be doing much of any of that. That's the kind of stuff I'd like to see recorded and published.
There are lots of reasons for me to hold my current MP, Chris Walsh, in contempt. I have absolutely no idea what his attendance record is but every day he stays away from Westminster is probably a good day.
Like most I dont differentiate
I hold all of parliament in contempt I hold the justice system in contempt I hold the police in contempt I hold our public services in contempt
I am far from alone in this attitude We have had enough
I think you are dangerously wrong. You need to discriminate, because politicians are not "all the same". There are good MPs, and I would say that there are good MPs in all parties. The point is that if you want good public servants you need to do a minimum amount of work to identify the good guys versus the bad guys. Unless you are prepared to do that then your contempt is simple nihilism.
Unfortunately the Populist far right is nothing except nihilism, and the good guys, even the really good guys, get told that they are worthless far too often.
They problem is not them. Its you.
No not nihilism to give a concrete example....if I am burgalled and just want to make an insurance claim I call the police who will give me a crime number but nothing else....if I want my stuff actually back for whatever reason I don't call the police I call other people. Many take the seem route.
As to mps, I accept there are a few good ones, maybe even more when they first come in but mostly they make out like bandits after they leave parliament. Now either they are pretending well or when they realise what they can make for selling out then most choose to make lots of money, same applies to senior civil servants.
Well, some MPs go on to milk the system, but for every one that might do that there are 10 that do not. I know many MPs that have faced considerable financial hardship after leaving Parliament. It is one reason why I am so hostile to Johnson, who was milking before, during and after his Parliamentary career.
The issue of the breaking of the system is not necessarily the fault of the Police- the insurers are guilty of placing a burden on our public services that they do not pay for.
There is of course no doubt that public services need reform in the UK, but so does the private sector, and pointing fingers won´t solve anything. We need to set a reform agenda, and that means we need to talk across party lines too.
Hard, but once the populist poo is expelled from the system, we will still need to live and work together.
It is time for us to be a bit grown up about the serious problems we face, which is why Johnson should be told to just "go awayayayay" (c. Billy Connolly)
Hang on how do you blame the insurance companies....its the police that actively choose not to investigate burglaries or car break ins....the insurance companies don't come into it. It is the justice system that on the rare occasion they are prosecuted that chooses to let the arseholes out on community service despite 50 previous offences....again nothing to do with the insurance companies
I know damn well if someone breaks into my house and I object and their is a tussle and they get hurt it will be me the police and justice system goes after for it
The system is broken and people are fed up with it and are increasingly taking justice into their own hands and you know tens of ex mps in financial hardship go on then name one
I do not want to embarass people personally, but certainly a well known former Bristol MP, and several MPs in Scotland, who literally ended up in the UBO. Nick Palmer and many others can confirm this.
Police paperwork for insurance claims is surprisingly large, and while it is clear that the Justice system is wildly underfunded, it is not always a matter of money, it is a matter of priorities
Nick went and signed on but its not like he isnt making money within months that is more than most make.
Who cares about the size of police paperwork for insurance claims, if we didn't have to ring them to get a claim number we wouldn't bother they are a passel of useless idiots who chase the easiest arrests as long as they don't need to move their lard asses of an office chair.
Ring up the police, hey I got burglared I have cctv footage...they cut themselves so their is DNA, they left fingerprints on my glass table....response....would you like a crime number sir no further action taken.....misgender someone on twitter and there are 8 arseholes banging on your door
Look, Are you saying that MPs, who ought to be good enough to make a contribution in most aspects of life should not get jobs after they leave Parliament? I should hope they all will, I mean except Mad Nad obviously.
Didn't NP take a pay cut to become NPMP, before he was NPxMP?
Britain doesn’t do capital investment. The culture is against it. Britain has lagged peer economies basically forever on this metric.
I don’t really know why that is. But I wonder if it stems back to Victorian times when frankly it was a more profitable use of capital to invest in Uruguayan mines and Californian railway, and so a weird “tradition” developed in which the home country was just left to fend for itself.
That worked only so long as Britain maintained industrial technology advantage but ever since 1860 it’s been a slow decline, and definitively so since (pick your date) 1918, 1925, or 1979.
It's utterly perplexing to me. Take the recent arguing about mortgages and how to help people. That's only treating the symptom. It's not the cause of the problem. The cause is a massive under supply of housing going back many decades. People in the UK spend too much money for too little crap housing, so that a return to moderate and normal interest rates is crucifying them.
Where is the political party saying "we will build 5 million homes over the next decade to fix the supply problem"? There isn't one, the debate is about tweaks not anyone grasping the nettle to fix the problem.
The UK population will pass 70 million within a couple of years — assuming population statistics are correct which given the Settled Status scheme uptake may not be the case — and we are nailed on for 80 million by 2050, unless something incredible happens to migration*.
We need to build an enormous amount of everything. A building programme like nothing in living memory, probably even surpassing the post-war years.
* Climate change is likely to make the UK even more attractive for migrants, so don't believe under 100,000 a year is plausible, we'll be lucky if we can keep it down to two or three times that.
Of course the UK needs a massive house building programme but you need to overcome two problems in my non expert opinion. Firstly there needs to be at least a suspension or ban on non UK resident house purchasers, even if only new build.
Secondly you need to get past the nimbys. The only way I can think of doing that is to tie development to council funding so each council gets govt financing to encourage building housing and if their targets aren’t met they get penalised financially from their next year’s overall budget so when people living in that council are faced with reduced services making their little nimby paradises less pleasant then they might have to start being less selfish.
Council gets financial help to build, gets given a good argument to crush nimbyism and hopefully unbungs the system.
Worth pointing out yet again that 90% of all housing development planning is passed first time by local councils and a further 5% is passed on appeal.
So the idea that the vast underbuild is due to nimbyism is a myth. Yes nimbyism does of course exist but its power and influence is massively overstated. As long as the gap between planning permissions and builds keeps increasing by around 80 - 100K a year, planning is not the issue.
Except your figures are wrong, and/or irrelevant.
Firstly the percentage passed is largely irrelevant at best, since people only put in applications if they think they'll be passed. So all the potential that could have been built with a different system but no application was put in, is lost and not in your statistics.
Secondly the 90% passed is a misnomer as it seems its the percentage of total applications and not residential construction. For residential developments its only 80%, despite my point above.
Thirdly that 80% is inflated by the larger developers who can work the system better. For minor developments, which as we have discussed umpteen times ought to be able to compete better in a better system its a meagre 75% approved. Despite the fact people are put off from applying in the first place, a quarter of those that do apply are knocked back.
Finally those 75% approvals include a pathetically low 5,300 approvals for just 1 home developments, and 2,200 approved homes [total] for 2 home developments. 7,500 single or two home approvals in a country of 67 million that needs 300k new homes a year is pathetically low and its because of the planning system despite your claims to the contrary.
Not wrong. I get the figures direct from the LGA.
You are clutching at straws because once again your blind hatred of a planning system, of which you continue to show complete ignorance, means you can accept no other reason for the failure to build enough houses.
And by the way one of the representatives from the SME development firms was on Sky the other morning explaining that the main reason for the lack of building was not planning issues (what a surprise) but the difficulty in raising finance. But of course he is just one of the industry experts so what the hell does he know.
You haven't understood the figures if you think residential approvals are 90%, because they're not.
It is 87% in England for the most recent quarter but it is somewhere around the 90% mark in general.
What this doesn't account for is the cases that are withdrawn and then aborted rather than a refusal ever being issued - quite a lot of cases.
As a general point I and many other people have tried to engage with you about planning but you reveal yourself to have a fixed set of beliefs that you keep repeating and which you are not open to being dissuaded from. But it matters little because land use and planning will not be deregulated in the way you want in the near future, because it would be so politically unpopular.
For Residential planning approvals? Are you sure?
From the page you linked to:
Please explain how In the year ending December 2022, 48,700 decisions were made on applications for residential developments, of which 35,600 (73%) were granted = 87% approved?
Full message of Prigozhin "declaring war on the Russian Ministry of Defence:
"PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped.
They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back.
Those, who destroyed today our guys, who destroyed tens, tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers will be punished.
I’m asking: no one resist. Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads.
I’m asking everyone to remain calm, do not succumb to provocations, and remain in their houses. Ideally, those along our way, do not go outside.
After we finished what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland.
Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before.
We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the frontline.
Justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia."
It’s just completely inconsiderate to us who have second mortgages on our houses in Puglia. More war, it boils my piss. This Robert Wagner guy needs to wind his neck in.
wasnt robert wagner the guy in Hart to Hart not sure he bears much responsibility for ukraine
I havent commented on johnson referencing the wrong poster maybe?
You commented on the submersible tragedy, in manner that BoJo has labeled as left-wing sneering.
Fuller quote: "JOHNSON: Lefties sneer. But those brave souls on the submarine died in a cause - pushing out the frontiers of human knowledge - that's typically British and that fills me with pride."
No I commented the opposite....I said they were fools and that I suspected that the builder had misled them to the risk. That is not saying they were brave souls or pushing the frontiers of human knowledge. They were misled by a charlatan. How do you figure the two comments are in anyway saying the same thing? If anyone was closer to the Boris statement it was RCS1000
And BoJo said - or strongly implied at very least - that calling them "fools" was lefty talk.
IF you wish to split hairs, or have a row, fine, I'll retract and say you ARE a lefty, if you want me to.
Full message of Prigozhin "declaring war on the Russian Ministry of Defence:
"PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped.
They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back.
Those, who destroyed today our guys, who destroyed tens, tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers will be punished.
I’m asking: no one resist. Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads.
I’m asking everyone to remain calm, do not succumb to provocations, and remain in their houses. Ideally, those along our way, do not go outside.
After we finished what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland.
Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before.
We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the frontline.
Justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia."
It’s just completely inconsiderate to us who have second mortgages on our houses in Puglia. More war, it boils my piss. This Robert Wagner guy needs to wind his neck in.
wasnt robert wagner the guy in Hart to Hart not sure he bears much responsibility for ukraine
Why has this information only just become public? I'd like to see a system where MP's need to log and evidence hours worked, what they did, and how it was relevant to their role as an MP. Rather like job seekers. And for those details to be scrutinised and then published.
That information is in the public domain. It's easy to find out when someone last made a contribution, or how many votes they have attended:
As for her being on TalkTV, that was hardly a secret.
No it isn't. That's just what someone does in the HofC. I wouldn't care if my MP never spoke there because they were hard at work on constituency surgeries, engaging with community groups and advocating for investment. She doesn't appear to be doing much of any of that. That's the kind of stuff I'd like to see recorded and published.
There are lots of reasons for me to hold my current MP, Chris Walsh, in contempt. I have absolutely no idea what his attendance record is but every day he stays away from Westminster is probably a good day.
Like most I dont differentiate
I hold all of parliament in contempt I hold the justice system in contempt I hold the police in contempt I hold our public services in contempt
I am far from alone in this attitude We have had enough
I think you are dangerously wrong. You need to discriminate, because politicians are not "all the same". There are good MPs, and I would say that there are good MPs in all parties. The point is that if you want good public servants you need to do a minimum amount of work to identify the good guys versus the bad guys. Unless you are prepared to do that then your contempt is simple nihilism.
Unfortunately the Populist far right is nothing except nihilism, and the good guys, even the really good guys, get told that they are worthless far too often.
They problem is not them. Its you.
No not nihilism to give a concrete example....if I am burgalled and just want to make an insurance claim I call the police who will give me a crime number but nothing else....if I want my stuff actually back for whatever reason I don't call the police I call other people. Many take the seem route.
As to mps, I accept there are a few good ones, maybe even more when they first come in but mostly they make out like bandits after they leave parliament. Now either they are pretending well or when they realise what they can make for selling out then most choose to make lots of money, same applies to senior civil servants.
Well, some MPs go on to milk the system, but for every one that might do that there are 10 that do not. I know many MPs that have faced considerable financial hardship after leaving Parliament. It is one reason why I am so hostile to Johnson, who was milking before, during and after his Parliamentary career.
The issue of the breaking of the system is not necessarily the fault of the Police- the insurers are guilty of placing a burden on our public services that they do not pay for.
There is of course no doubt that public services need reform in the UK, but so does the private sector, and pointing fingers won´t solve anything. We need to set a reform agenda, and that means we need to talk across party lines too.
Hard, but once the populist poo is expelled from the system, we will still need to live and work together.
It is time for us to be a bit grown up about the serious problems we face, which is why Johnson should be told to just "go awayayayay" (c. Billy Connolly)
Hang on how do you blame the insurance companies....its the police that actively choose not to investigate burglaries or car break ins....the insurance companies don't come into it. It is the justice system that on the rare occasion they are prosecuted that chooses to let the arseholes out on community service despite 50 previous offences....again nothing to do with the insurance companies
I know damn well if someone breaks into my house and I object and their is a tussle and they get hurt it will be me the police and justice system goes after for it
The system is broken and people are fed up with it and are increasingly taking justice into their own hands and you know tens of ex mps in financial hardship go on then name one
I do not want to embarass people personally, but certainly a well known former Bristol MP, and several MPs in Scotland, who literally ended up in the UBO. Nick Palmer and many others can confirm this.
Police paperwork for insurance claims is surprisingly large, and while it is clear that the Justice system is wildly underfunded, it is not always a matter of money, it is a matter of priorities
Nick went and signed on but its not like he isnt making money within months that is more than most make.
Who cares about the size of police paperwork for insurance claims, if we didn't have to ring them to get a claim number we wouldn't bother they are a passel of useless idiots who chase the easiest arrests as long as they don't need to move their lard asses of an office chair.
Ring up the police, hey I got burglared I have cctv footage...they cut themselves so their is DNA, they left fingerprints on my glass table....response....would you like a crime number sir no further action taken.....misgender someone on twitter and there are 8 arseholes banging on your door
Look, Are you saying that MPs, who ought to be good enough to make a contribution in most aspects of life should not get jobs after they leave Parliament? I should hope they all will, I mean except Mad Nad obviously.
Didn't NP take a pay cut to become NPMP, before he was NPxMP?
I never said they should not get jobs after, I merely observed most of them seem to get a lot richer after they leave parliament, same with senior civil servants. I didn't claim all however the facts that there are exceptions does not mean most don't seem to find directorships mysteriously waiting for them
Full message of Prigozhin "declaring war on the Russian Ministry of Defence:
"PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped.
They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back.
Those, who destroyed today our guys, who destroyed tens, tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers will be punished.
I’m asking: no one resist. Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads.
I’m asking everyone to remain calm, do not succumb to provocations, and remain in their houses. Ideally, those along our way, do not go outside.
After we finished what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland.
Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before.
We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the frontline.
Justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia."
Ideally the break-up of Russia would be preferable.
But this is more of a power struggle than a Civil War from the sound of it.
It may seem pat, but this shenanigans reminds me of the Tory Brexit wars. They fought among themselves for years and looked weak and divided. But the remainers didn’t get a look in.
There are no truly liberal voices let alone power blocs in Russia now. Just squabbles among ultra nationalist warlords.
Seeing Barack Obama earnestly repeating Kremlin talking points today should serve as a reminder that so much of what is said about populism is total projection from a discredited political class that still hasn't learned a thing from the last few years.
Not his finest hour and, frankly, with the benefit of hindsight admittedly, he should be accepting that he got this wrong. As did Merkel of course.
There is a thing where any 'take' on the situation in Ukraine other than the correct one gets dismissed as 'pro Putin propoganda'.
If you look at the popularity of Pro Russian parties in Ukraine Obama is correct in that it fell dramatically after 2014, because most of the most strongly Pro Russian areas in Ukraine effectively became part of Russia at this point, thus enabling a new Ukrainian identity to emerge that rejected Russia, and resulting in the response we saw in 2022.
He's not remotely correct, the Ukrainian identity has existed for Centuries, there's nothing new about it.
The areas that Russia invaded were the most strongly pro-Russian, but they were still Ukrainian, still pro-Ukraine and it was still an invasion.
Every single area of Ukraine, including Crimea, had voted to be a part of an independent Ukraine at the last free election.
I don't believe that anyone has actually watched the clip. Obama doesn't deny that Ukraine has a national identity. He says that it changed after 2014 so 2022 was different to 2014. My point is that if you can see this through the decline of pro Russian parties from 2014 onwards.
This is not to say that Obama was right but he is making an valid point.
I have watched the clip - that's why I referenced his talk of the mindsets, which presents it in a way which suggests mindsets cannot be changed. Could they have been? We shall not know, but leaders could have sought to, and some will now reflect they ought to
Full message of Prigozhin "declaring war on the Russian Ministry of Defence:
"PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped.
They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back.
Those, who destroyed today our guys, who destroyed tens, tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers will be punished.
I’m asking: no one resist. Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads.
I’m asking everyone to remain calm, do not succumb to provocations, and remain in their houses. Ideally, those along our way, do not go outside.
After we finished what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland.
Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before.
We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the frontline.
Justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia."
It’s just completely inconsiderate to us who have second mortgages on our houses in Puglia. More war, it boils my piss. This Robert Wagner guy needs to wind his neck in.
wasnt robert wagner the guy in Hart to Hart not sure he bears much responsibility for ukraine
He does, according to some, for the death of Natalie Wood:
I havent commented on johnson referencing the wrong poster maybe?
You commented on the submersible tragedy, in manner that BoJo has labeled as left-wing sneering.
Fuller quote: "JOHNSON: Lefties sneer. But those brave souls on the submarine died in a cause - pushing out the frontiers of human knowledge - that's typically British and that fills me with pride."
No I commented the opposite....I said they were fools and that I suspected that the builder had misled them to the risk. That is not saying they were brave souls or pushing the frontiers of human knowledge. They were misled by a charlatan. How do you figure the two comments are in anyway saying the same thing? If anyone was closer to the Boris statement it was RCS1000
And BoJo said - or strongly implied at very least - that calling them "fools" was lefty talk.
IF you wish to split hairs, or have a row, fine, I'll retract and say you ARE a lefty, if you want me to.
Well Boris is a lefty in any case yet fails to recognise it so I trust his judgement less far than he could be thrown by a quadriplegic
Full message of Prigozhin "declaring war on the Russian Ministry of Defence:
"PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped.
They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back.
Those, who destroyed today our guys, who destroyed tens, tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers will be punished.
I’m asking: no one resist. Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads.
I’m asking everyone to remain calm, do not succumb to provocations, and remain in their houses. Ideally, those along our way, do not go outside.
After we finished what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland.
Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before.
We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the frontline.
Justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia."
It’s just completely inconsiderate to us who have second mortgages on our houses in Puglia. More war, it boils my piss. This Robert Wagner guy needs to wind his neck in.
wasnt robert wagner the guy in Hart to Hart not sure he bears much responsibility for ukraine
This is where you are wrong. Robert Wagner was married to Nathalie Wood who was of Russian and Ukrainian heritage. If he hadn’t taken her out on their boat that night and she hadn’t mysteriously died she would be bringing both sides together over a coke and achieving peace. Like a Russian and Ukrainian “Hart to Hart”.
Full message of Prigozhin "declaring war on the Russian Ministry of Defence:
"PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped.
They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back.
Those, who destroyed today our guys, who destroyed tens, tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers will be punished.
I’m asking: no one resist. Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads.
I’m asking everyone to remain calm, do not succumb to provocations, and remain in their houses. Ideally, those along our way, do not go outside.
After we finished what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland.
Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before.
We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the frontline.
Justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia."
It’s just completely inconsiderate to us who have second mortgages on our houses in Puglia. More war, it boils my piss. This Robert Wagner guy needs to wind his neck in.
wasnt robert wagner the guy in Hart to Hart not sure he bears much responsibility for ukraine
He does, according to some, for the death of Natalie Wood:
Full message of Prigozhin "declaring war on the Russian Ministry of Defence:
"PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped.
They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back.
Those, who destroyed today our guys, who destroyed tens, tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers will be punished.
I’m asking: no one resist. Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads.
I’m asking everyone to remain calm, do not succumb to provocations, and remain in their houses. Ideally, those along our way, do not go outside.
After we finished what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland.
Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before.
We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the frontline.
Justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia."
It’s just completely inconsiderate to us who have second mortgages on our houses in Puglia. More war, it boils my piss. This Robert Wagner guy needs to wind his neck in.
wasnt robert wagner the guy in Hart to Hart not sure he bears much responsibility for ukraine
This is where you are wrong. Robert Wagner was married to Nathalie Wood who was of Russian and Ukrainian heritage. If he hadn’t taken her out on their boat that night and she hadn’t mysteriously died she would be bringing both sides together over a coke and achieving peace. Like a Russian and Ukrainian “Hart to Hart”.
Hush you are just feeding putin lines to justify the invasion
Britain doesn’t do capital investment. The culture is against it. Britain has lagged peer economies basically forever on this metric.
I don’t really know why that is. But I wonder if it stems back to Victorian times when frankly it was a more profitable use of capital to invest in Uruguayan mines and Californian railway, and so a weird “tradition” developed in which the home country was just left to fend for itself.
That worked only so long as Britain maintained industrial technology advantage but ever since 1860 it’s been a slow decline, and definitively so since (pick your date) 1918, 1925, or 1979.
It's utterly perplexing to me. Take the recent arguing about mortgages and how to help people. That's only treating the symptom. It's not the cause of the problem. The cause is a massive under supply of housing going back many decades. People in the UK spend too much money for too little crap housing, so that a return to moderate and normal interest rates is crucifying them.
Where is the political party saying "we will build 5 million homes over the next decade to fix the supply problem"? There isn't one, the debate is about tweaks not anyone grasping the nettle to fix the problem.
The UK population will pass 70 million within a couple of years — assuming population statistics are correct which given the Settled Status scheme uptake may not be the case — and we are nailed on for 80 million by 2050, unless something incredible happens to migration*.
We need to build an enormous amount of everything. A building programme like nothing in living memory, probably even surpassing the post-war years.
* Climate change is likely to make the UK even more attractive for migrants, so don't believe under 100,000 a year is plausible, we'll be lucky if we can keep it down to two or three times that.
Of course the UK needs a massive house building programme but you need to overcome two problems in my non expert opinion. Firstly there needs to be at least a suspension or ban on non UK resident house purchasers, even if only new build.
Secondly you need to get past the nimbys. The only way I can think of doing that is to tie development to council funding so each council gets govt financing to encourage building housing and if their targets aren’t met they get penalised financially from their next year’s overall budget so when people living in that council are faced with reduced services making their little nimby paradises less pleasant then they might have to start being less selfish.
Council gets financial help to build, gets given a good argument to crush nimbyism and hopefully unbungs the system.
Worth pointing out yet again that 90% of all housing development planning is passed first time by local councils and a further 5% is passed on appeal.
So the idea that the vast underbuild is due to nimbyism is a myth. Yes nimbyism does of course exist but its power and influence is massively overstated. As long as the gap between planning permissions and builds keeps increasing by around 80 - 100K a year, planning is not the issue.
Except your figures are wrong, and/or irrelevant.
Firstly the percentage passed is largely irrelevant at best, since people only put in applications if they think they'll be passed. So all the potential that could have been built with a different system but no application was put in, is lost and not in your statistics.
Secondly the 90% passed is a misnomer as it seems its the percentage of total applications and not residential construction. For residential developments its only 80%, despite my point above.
Thirdly that 80% is inflated by the larger developers who can work the system better. For minor developments, which as we have discussed umpteen times ought to be able to compete better in a better system its a meagre 75% approved. Despite the fact people are put off from applying in the first place, a quarter of those that do apply are knocked back.
Finally those 75% approvals include a pathetically low 5,300 approvals for just 1 home developments, and 2,200 approved homes [total] for 2 home developments. 7,500 single or two home approvals in a country of 67 million that needs 300k new homes a year is pathetically low and its because of the planning system despite your claims to the contrary.
Not wrong. I get the figures direct from the LGA.
You are clutching at straws because once again your blind hatred of a planning system, of which you continue to show complete ignorance, means you can accept no other reason for the failure to build enough houses.
And by the way one of the representatives from the SME development firms was on Sky the other morning explaining that the main reason for the lack of building was not planning issues (what a surprise) but the difficulty in raising finance. But of course he is just one of the industry experts so what the hell does he know.
You haven't understood the figures if you think residential approvals are 90%, because they're not.
It is 87% in England for the most recent quarter but it is somewhere around the 90% mark in general.
What this doesn't account for is the cases that are withdrawn and then aborted rather than a refusal ever being issued - quite a lot of cases.
As a general point I and many other people have tried to engage with you about planning but you reveal yourself to have a fixed set of beliefs that you keep repeating and which you are not open to being dissuaded from. But it matters little because land use and planning will not be deregulated in the way you want in the near future, because it would be so politically unpopular.
For Residential planning approvals? Are you sure?
From the page you linked to:
Please explain how In the year ending December 2022, 48,700 decisions were made on applications for residential developments, of which 35,600 (73%) were granted = 87% approved?
It is in the same stats - under part 3.6. I think the figure is that of those applications that are decided - 90% are approved. So only 10% refused. There are other applications that aren't decided. For all the planning applications that are 'made' the number of applications that are approved is lower, because there are a lot that are withdrawn for any number of reasons, could be procedural problems, defective information etc, or because the applicant realised it wasn't going to get approved.
Britain doesn’t do capital investment. The culture is against it. Britain has lagged peer economies basically forever on this metric.
I don’t really know why that is. But I wonder if it stems back to Victorian times when frankly it was a more profitable use of capital to invest in Uruguayan mines and Californian railway, and so a weird “tradition” developed in which the home country was just left to fend for itself.
That worked only so long as Britain maintained industrial technology advantage but ever since 1860 it’s been a slow decline, and definitively so since (pick your date) 1918, 1925, or 1979.
It's utterly perplexing to me. Take the recent arguing about mortgages and how to help people. That's only treating the symptom. It's not the cause of the problem. The cause is a massive under supply of housing going back many decades. People in the UK spend too much money for too little crap housing, so that a return to moderate and normal interest rates is crucifying them.
Where is the political party saying "we will build 5 million homes over the next decade to fix the supply problem"? There isn't one, the debate is about tweaks not anyone grasping the nettle to fix the problem.
The UK population will pass 70 million within a couple of years — assuming population statistics are correct which given the Settled Status scheme uptake may not be the case — and we are nailed on for 80 million by 2050, unless something incredible happens to migration*.
We need to build an enormous amount of everything. A building programme like nothing in living memory, probably even surpassing the post-war years.
* Climate change is likely to make the UK even more attractive for migrants, so don't believe under 100,000 a year is plausible, we'll be lucky if we can keep it down to two or three times that.
Of course the UK needs a massive house building programme but you need to overcome two problems in my non expert opinion. Firstly there needs to be at least a suspension or ban on non UK resident house purchasers, even if only new build.
Secondly you need to get past the nimbys. The only way I can think of doing that is to tie development to council funding so each council gets govt financing to encourage building housing and if their targets aren’t met they get penalised financially from their next year’s overall budget so when people living in that council are faced with reduced services making their little nimby paradises less pleasant then they might have to start being less selfish.
Council gets financial help to build, gets given a good argument to crush nimbyism and hopefully unbungs the system.
Worth pointing out yet again that 90% of all housing development planning is passed first time by local councils and a further 5% is passed on appeal.
So the idea that the vast underbuild is due to nimbyism is a myth. Yes nimbyism does of course exist but its power and influence is massively overstated. As long as the gap between planning permissions and builds keeps increasing by around 80 - 100K a year, planning is not the issue.
Except your figures are wrong, and/or irrelevant.
Firstly the percentage passed is largely irrelevant at best, since people only put in applications if they think they'll be passed. So all the potential that could have been built with a different system but no application was put in, is lost and not in your statistics.
Secondly the 90% passed is a misnomer as it seems its the percentage of total applications and not residential construction. For residential developments its only 80%, despite my point above.
Thirdly that 80% is inflated by the larger developers who can work the system better. For minor developments, which as we have discussed umpteen times ought to be able to compete better in a better system its a meagre 75% approved. Despite the fact people are put off from applying in the first place, a quarter of those that do apply are knocked back.
Finally those 75% approvals include a pathetically low 5,300 approvals for just 1 home developments, and 2,200 approved homes [total] for 2 home developments. 7,500 single or two home approvals in a country of 67 million that needs 300k new homes a year is pathetically low and its because of the planning system despite your claims to the contrary.
Not wrong. I get the figures direct from the LGA.
You are clutching at straws because once again your blind hatred of a planning system, of which you continue to show complete ignorance, means you can accept no other reason for the failure to build enough houses.
And by the way one of the representatives from the SME development firms was on Sky the other morning explaining that the main reason for the lack of building was not planning issues (what a surprise) but the difficulty in raising finance. But of course he is just one of the industry experts so what the hell does he know.
You haven't understood the figures if you think residential approvals are 90%, because they're not.
It is 87% in England for the most recent quarter but it is somewhere around the 90% mark in general.
What this doesn't account for is the cases that are withdrawn and then aborted rather than a refusal ever being issued - quite a lot of cases.
As a general point I and many other people have tried to engage with you about planning but you reveal yourself to have a fixed set of beliefs that you keep repeating and which you are not open to being dissuaded from. But it matters little because land use and planning will not be deregulated in the way you want in the near future, because it would be so politically unpopular.
The main problem with the planning system is the under-resourcing of planning departments. Strangely they extort money out of developers on all sorts of things under s106 but the planning fees are quite reasonable, as an employee of a developer I wish the fees were higher and they would be better resourced.
The poor planning staff are so behind since COVID that many applications are going to appeal for non-determination and this takes resources away from the planners and makes things worse on a vicuous cycle.
s73 modifications (often necessary due to mistakes by third parties) which should take 6 weeks take over a year and by the time you get them the permission is nearly expired and funders are so pedantic that you can't get the funding in time.
I could go on but many planning permissions are never implemented simply because the council is too slow or pedantic and it is better to keep the planning officer happy and avoid going to committee, and then if the conditions make the project unviable at least you can sell the site to someone else who can put in a new application, as one's funds and energy are exhausted.
Let's get rid of planning permission altogether. If you want to build it, you build it.
I’ve got this great design for an internal combustion thermonuclear power station. Every 60 seconds you drop a bomb down the shaft into the cavern. This keeps it nice and hot - you extract heat from the lake of motel rock at the bottom.
The neighbours having been making all kinds of planning objections….
Let's get rid of planning permission altogether. If you want to build it, you build it.
I’ve got this great design for an internal combustion thermonuclear power station. Every 60 seconds you drop a bomb down the shaft into the cavern. This keeps it nice and hot - you extract heat from the lake of motel rock at the bottom.
The neighbours having been making all kinds of planning objections….
If Vodafone wants to build a mast in my garden I'd be very happy with that. But I bet neighbours would reject it because it "causes cancer"
Let's get rid of planning permission altogether. If you want to build it, you build it.
I’ve got this great design for an internal combustion thermonuclear power station. Every 60 seconds you drop a bomb down the shaft into the cavern. This keeps it nice and hot - you extract heat from the lake of motel rock at the bottom.
The neighbours having been making all kinds of planning objections….
If Vodafone wants to build a mast in my garden I'd be very happy with that. But I bet neighbours would reject it because it "causes cancer"
If you are with vodafone it is now wonder you have connection issues
Let's get rid of planning permission altogether. If you want to build it, you build it.
I’ve got this great design for an internal combustion thermonuclear power station. Every 60 seconds you drop a bomb down the shaft into the cavern. This keeps it nice and hot - you extract heat from the lake of motel rock at the bottom.
The neighbours having been making all kinds of planning objections….
If Vodafone wants to build a mast in my garden I'd be very happy with that. But I bet neighbours would reject it because it "causes cancer"
Absolutely.
Let them object to one phone mast and before you know it they will be objecting to factor 3 earthquakes and gigatons of fission products.
Full message of Prigozhin "declaring war on the Russian Ministry of Defence:
"PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped.
They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back.
Those, who destroyed today our guys, who destroyed tens, tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers will be punished.
I’m asking: no one resist. Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads.
I’m asking everyone to remain calm, do not succumb to provocations, and remain in their houses. Ideally, those along our way, do not go outside.
After we finished what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland.
Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before.
We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the frontline.
Justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia."
Ideally the break-up of Russia would be preferable.
But this is more of a power struggle than a Civil War from the sound of it.
As long as I can can have some nuclear weapons from their stockpile. As novelty coffee tables. Obviously.
[looking at the Tomahawks] Tommy Lee Jones: These things are gonna sell like hotcakes! Gary Busey: Absolutely. Tommy Lee Jones: What are you gonna do when you get two hundred million dollars in the bank? Gary Busey: Buy the Presidency!
Let's get rid of planning permission altogether. If you want to build it, you build it.
I’ve got this great design for an internal combustion thermonuclear power station. Every 60 seconds you drop a bomb down the shaft into the cavern. This keeps it nice and hot - you extract heat from the lake of motel rock at the bottom.
The neighbours having been making all kinds of planning objections….
If Vodafone wants to build a mast in my garden I'd be very happy with that. But I bet neighbours would reject it because it "causes cancer"
If you are with vodafone it is now wonder you have connection issues
Vodafone are the most reliable network in London but okay mate
Let's get rid of planning permission altogether. If you want to build it, you build it.
I’ve got this great design for an internal combustion thermonuclear power station. Every 60 seconds you drop a bomb down the shaft into the cavern. This keeps it nice and hot - you extract heat from the lake of motel rock at the bottom.
The neighbours having been making all kinds of planning objections….
If Vodafone wants to build a mast in my garden I'd be very happy with that. But I bet neighbours would reject it because it "causes cancer"
Absolutely.
Let them object to one phone mast and before you know it they will be objecting to factor 3 earthquakes and gigatons of fission products.
Absolutely right. I am glad we're on the same page for once.
Full message of Prigozhin "declaring war on the Russian Ministry of Defence:
"PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped.
They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back.
Those, who destroyed today our guys, who destroyed tens, tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers will be punished.
I’m asking: no one resist. Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads.
I’m asking everyone to remain calm, do not succumb to provocations, and remain in their houses. Ideally, those along our way, do not go outside.
After we finished what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland.
Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before.
We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the frontline.
Justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia."
Ideally the break-up of Russia would be preferable.
But this is more of a power struggle than a Civil War from the sound of it.
As long as I can can have some nuclear weapons from their stockpile. As novelty coffee tables. Obviously.
[looking at the Tomahawks] Tommy Lee Jones: These things are gonna sell like hotcakes! Gary Busey: Absolutely. Tommy Lee Jones: What are you gonna do when you get two hundred million dollars in the bank? Gary Busey: Buy the Presidency!
The Tory Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch has asked Ofsted to carry out a snap inspection of a school because, apparently, she believes a spoof story that a child at the school identifies as a cat.
Britain doesn’t do capital investment. The culture is against it. Britain has lagged peer economies basically forever on this metric.
I don’t really know why that is. But I wonder if it stems back to Victorian times when frankly it was a more profitable use of capital to invest in Uruguayan mines and Californian railway, and so a weird “tradition” developed in which the home country was just left to fend for itself.
That worked only so long as Britain maintained industrial technology advantage but ever since 1860 it’s been a slow decline, and definitively so since (pick your date) 1918, 1925, or 1979.
It's utterly perplexing to me. Take the recent arguing about mortgages and how to help people. That's only treating the symptom. It's not the cause of the problem. The cause is a massive under supply of housing going back many decades. People in the UK spend too much money for too little crap housing, so that a return to moderate and normal interest rates is crucifying them.
Where is the political party saying "we will build 5 million homes over the next decade to fix the supply problem"? There isn't one, the debate is about tweaks not anyone grasping the nettle to fix the problem.
The UK population will pass 70 million within a couple of years — assuming population statistics are correct which given the Settled Status scheme uptake may not be the case — and we are nailed on for 80 million by 2050, unless something incredible happens to migration*.
We need to build an enormous amount of everything. A building programme like nothing in living memory, probably even surpassing the post-war years.
* Climate change is likely to make the UK even more attractive for migrants, so don't believe under 100,000 a year is plausible, we'll be lucky if we can keep it down to two or three times that.
Of course the UK needs a massive house building programme but you need to overcome two problems in my non expert opinion. Firstly there needs to be at least a suspension or ban on non UK resident house purchasers, even if only new build.
Secondly you need to get past the nimbys. The only way I can think of doing that is to tie development to council funding so each council gets govt financing to encourage building housing and if their targets aren’t met they get penalised financially from their next year’s overall budget so when people living in that council are faced with reduced services making their little nimby paradises less pleasant then they might have to start being less selfish.
Council gets financial help to build, gets given a good argument to crush nimbyism and hopefully unbungs the system.
Worth pointing out yet again that 90% of all housing development planning is passed first time by local councils and a further 5% is passed on appeal.
So the idea that the vast underbuild is due to nimbyism is a myth. Yes nimbyism does of course exist but its power and influence is massively overstated. As long as the gap between planning permissions and builds keeps increasing by around 80 - 100K a year, planning is not the issue.
Except your figures are wrong, and/or irrelevant.
Firstly the percentage passed is largely irrelevant at best, since people only put in applications if they think they'll be passed. So all the potential that could have been built with a different system but no application was put in, is lost and not in your statistics.
Secondly the 90% passed is a misnomer as it seems its the percentage of total applications and not residential construction. For residential developments its only 80%, despite my point above.
Thirdly that 80% is inflated by the larger developers who can work the system better. For minor developments, which as we have discussed umpteen times ought to be able to compete better in a better system its a meagre 75% approved. Despite the fact people are put off from applying in the first place, a quarter of those that do apply are knocked back.
Finally those 75% approvals include a pathetically low 5,300 approvals for just 1 home developments, and 2,200 approved homes [total] for 2 home developments. 7,500 single or two home approvals in a country of 67 million that needs 300k new homes a year is pathetically low and its because of the planning system despite your claims to the contrary.
Not wrong. I get the figures direct from the LGA.
You are clutching at straws because once again your blind hatred of a planning system, of which you continue to show complete ignorance, means you can accept no other reason for the failure to build enough houses.
And by the way one of the representatives from the SME development firms was on Sky the other morning explaining that the main reason for the lack of building was not planning issues (what a surprise) but the difficulty in raising finance. But of course he is just one of the industry experts so what the hell does he know.
You haven't understood the figures if you think residential approvals are 90%, because they're not.
It is 87% in England for the most recent quarter but it is somewhere around the 90% mark in general.
What this doesn't account for is the cases that are withdrawn and then aborted rather than a refusal ever being issued - quite a lot of cases.
As a general point I and many other people have tried to engage with you about planning but you reveal yourself to have a fixed set of beliefs that you keep repeating and which you are not open to being dissuaded from. But it matters little because land use and planning will not be deregulated in the way you want in the near future, because it would be so politically unpopular.
For Residential planning approvals? Are you sure?
From the page you linked to:
Please explain how In the year ending December 2022, 48,700 decisions were made on applications for residential developments, of which 35,600 (73%) were granted = 87% approved?
It is in the same stats - under part 3.6. I think the figure is that of those applications that are decided - 90% are approved. So only 10% refused. There are other applications that aren't decided. For all the planning applications that are 'made' the number of applications that are approved is lower, because there are a lot that are withdrawn for any number of reasons, could be procedural problems, defective information etc, or because the applicant realised it wasn't going to get approved.
That stat is not residential though, we're talking residential. Hence the residential figures elsewhere on the page being completely different.
Why has this information only just become public? I'd like to see a system where MP's need to log and evidence hours worked, what they did, and how it was relevant to their role as an MP. Rather like job seekers. And for those details to be scrutinised and then published.
That information is in the public domain. It's easy to find out when someone last made a contribution, or how many votes they have attended:
As for her being on TalkTV, that was hardly a secret.
No it isn't. That's just what someone does in the HofC. I wouldn't care if my MP never spoke there because they were hard at work on constituency surgeries, engaging with community groups and advocating for investment. She doesn't appear to be doing much of any of that. That's the kind of stuff I'd like to see recorded and published.
There are lots of reasons for me to hold my current MP, Chris Walsh, in contempt. I have absolutely no idea what his attendance record is but every day he stays away from Westminster is probably a good day.
Like most I dont differentiate
I hold all of parliament in contempt I hold the justice system in contempt I hold the police in contempt I hold our public services in contempt
I am far from alone in this attitude We have had enough
I think you are dangerously wrong. You need to discriminate, because politicians are not "all the same". There are good MPs, and I would say that there are good MPs in all parties. The point is that if you want good public servants you need to do a minimum amount of work to identify the good guys versus the bad guys. Unless you are prepared to do that then your contempt is simple nihilism.
Unfortunately the Populist far right is nothing except nihilism, and the good guys, even the really good guys, get told that they are worthless far too often.
They problem is not them. Its you.
No not nihilism to give a concrete example....if I am burgalled and just want to make an insurance claim I call the police who will give me a crime number but nothing else....if I want my stuff actually back for whatever reason I don't call the police I call other people. Many take the seem route.
As to mps, I accept there are a few good ones, maybe even more when they first come in but mostly they make out like bandits after they leave parliament. Now either they are pretending well or when they realise what they can make for selling out then most choose to make lots of money, same applies to senior civil servants.
Well, some MPs go on to milk the system, but for every one that might do that there are 10 that do not. I know many MPs that have faced considerable financial hardship after leaving Parliament. It is one reason why I am so hostile to Johnson, who was milking before, during and after his Parliamentary career.
The issue of the breaking of the system is not necessarily the fault of the Police- the insurers are guilty of placing a burden on our public services that they do not pay for.
There is of course no doubt that public services need reform in the UK, but so does the private sector, and pointing fingers won´t solve anything. We need to set a reform agenda, and that means we need to talk across party lines too.
Hard, but once the populist poo is expelled from the system, we will still need to live and work together.
It is time for us to be a bit grown up about the serious problems we face, which is why Johnson should be told to just "go awayayayay" (c. Billy Connolly)
Hang on how do you blame the insurance companies....its the police that actively choose not to investigate burglaries or car break ins....the insurance companies don't come into it. It is the justice system that on the rare occasion they are prosecuted that chooses to let the arseholes out on community service despite 50 previous offences....again nothing to do with the insurance companies
I know damn well if someone breaks into my house and I object and their is a tussle and they get hurt it will be me the police and justice system goes after for it
The system is broken and people are fed up with it and are increasingly taking justice into their own hands and you know tens of ex mps in financial hardship go on then name one
I do not want to embarass people personally, but certainly a well known former Bristol MP, and several MPs in Scotland, who literally ended up in the UBO. Nick Palmer and many others can confirm this.
Police paperwork for insurance claims is surprisingly large, and while it is clear that the Justice system is wildly underfunded, it is not always a matter of money, it is a matter of priorities
Nick went and signed on but its not like he isnt making money within months that is more than most make.
Who cares about the size of police paperwork for insurance claims, if we didn't have to ring them to get a claim number we wouldn't bother they are a passel of useless idiots who chase the easiest arrests as long as they don't need to move their lard asses of an office chair.
Ring up the police, hey I got burglared I have cctv footage...they cut themselves so their is DNA, they left fingerprints on my glass table....response....would you like a crime number sir no further action taken.....misgender someone on twitter and there are 8 arseholes banging on your door
Look, Are you saying that MPs, who ought to be good enough to make a contribution in most aspects of life should not get jobs after they leave Parliament? I should hope they all will, I mean except Mad Nad obviously.
Didn't NP take a pay cut to become NPMP, before he was NPxMP?
I do not want to embarass people personally, but certainly a well known former Bristol MP, and several MPs in Scotland, who literally ended up in the UBO. Nick Palmer and many others can confirm this.
Police paperwork for insurance claims is surprisingly large, and while it is clear that the Justice system is wildly underfunded, it is not always a matter of money, it is a matter of priorities
Full message of Prigozhin "declaring war on the Russian Ministry of Defence:
"PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped.
They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back.
Those, who destroyed today our guys, who destroyed tens, tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers will be punished.
I’m asking: no one resist. Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads.
I’m asking everyone to remain calm, do not succumb to provocations, and remain in their houses. Ideally, those along our way, do not go outside.
After we finished what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland.
Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before.
We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the frontline.
Justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia."
Prigozhin sounds as though he's sh*tfaced on samogon.
In any case, he's not sending a column to Moscow.
He's saying the idea that Kiev was about to attack massively in the Donbas in February 2022 doesn't stand up, and that Putin should have negotiated with Zelensky. He possibly wants to reprise the growling general Alexander Lebed's performance which helped bring an end to the first Chechen war.
I won't be surprised if Prigozhin gets offed. It's unlikely he's got FSB support given how he's undermining soldiers' morale.
There are some outside Russia who jump for joy at the thought of another Russian civil war.
It’s equally possible that he’s doing so at the behest of Putin - “Putin was deceived” - potentially providing cover, and scapegoats, if the dictator should decide to cut and run.
Somewhat interestingly, alt-right/pro-russia telegram is alight with news that Putin has 'been moved to a secure location' and various rumours of anti-Wagner attacks.
But as with everything just now - who knows what's pantomime and what's real.
Let's get rid of planning permission altogether. If you want to build it, you build it.
I’ve got this great design for an internal combustion thermonuclear power station. Every 60 seconds you drop a bomb down the shaft into the cavern. This keeps it nice and hot - you extract heat from the lake of motel rock at the bottom.
The neighbours having been making all kinds of planning objections….
If Vodafone wants to build a mast in my garden I'd be very happy with that. But I bet neighbours would reject it because it "causes cancer"
Absolutely.
Let them object to one phone mast and before you know it they will be objecting to factor 3 earthquakes and gigatons of fission products.
Absolutely right. I am glad we're on the same page for once.
Well apparently not seeing as you seem to have issues, in slough only one I ever had connection issues with was vodafone and that is only just outside the m25
I havent commented on johnson referencing the wrong poster maybe?
You commented on the submersible tragedy, in manner that BoJo has labeled as left-wing sneering.
Fuller quote: "JOHNSON: Lefties sneer. But those brave souls on the submarine died in a cause - pushing out the frontiers of human knowledge - that's typically British and that fills me with pride."
I wonder if there's a recklessly dangerous frontier pushing project he could embark upon? It would fill me with pride that's for sure.
Britain doesn’t do capital investment. The culture is against it. Britain has lagged peer economies basically forever on this metric.
I don’t really know why that is. But I wonder if it stems back to Victorian times when frankly it was a more profitable use of capital to invest in Uruguayan mines and Californian railway, and so a weird “tradition” developed in which the home country was just left to fend for itself.
That worked only so long as Britain maintained industrial technology advantage but ever since 1860 it’s been a slow decline, and definitively so since (pick your date) 1918, 1925, or 1979.
It's utterly perplexing to me. Take the recent arguing about mortgages and how to help people. That's only treating the symptom. It's not the cause of the problem. The cause is a massive under supply of housing going back many decades. People in the UK spend too much money for too little crap housing, so that a return to moderate and normal interest rates is crucifying them.
Where is the political party saying "we will build 5 million homes over the next decade to fix the supply problem"? There isn't one, the debate is about tweaks not anyone grasping the nettle to fix the problem.
The UK population will pass 70 million within a couple of years — assuming population statistics are correct which given the Settled Status scheme uptake may not be the case — and we are nailed on for 80 million by 2050, unless something incredible happens to migration*.
We need to build an enormous amount of everything. A building programme like nothing in living memory, probably even surpassing the post-war years.
* Climate change is likely to make the UK even more attractive for migrants, so don't believe under 100,000 a year is plausible, we'll be lucky if we can keep it down to two or three times that.
Of course the UK needs a massive house building programme but you need to overcome two problems in my non expert opinion. Firstly there needs to be at least a suspension or ban on non UK resident house purchasers, even if only new build.
Secondly you need to get past the nimbys. The only way I can think of doing that is to tie development to council funding so each council gets govt financing to encourage building housing and if their targets aren’t met they get penalised financially from their next year’s overall budget so when people living in that council are faced with reduced services making their little nimby paradises less pleasant then they might have to start being less selfish.
Council gets financial help to build, gets given a good argument to crush nimbyism and hopefully unbungs the system.
Worth pointing out yet again that 90% of all housing development planning is passed first time by local councils and a further 5% is passed on appeal.
So the idea that the vast underbuild is due to nimbyism is a myth. Yes nimbyism does of course exist but its power and influence is massively overstated. As long as the gap between planning permissions and builds keeps increasing by around 80 - 100K a year, planning is not the issue.
Except your figures are wrong, and/or irrelevant.
Firstly the percentage passed is largely irrelevant at best, since people only put in applications if they think they'll be passed. So all the potential that could have been built with a different system but no application was put in, is lost and not in your statistics.
Secondly the 90% passed is a misnomer as it seems its the percentage of total applications and not residential construction. For residential developments its only 80%, despite my point above.
Thirdly that 80% is inflated by the larger developers who can work the system better. For minor developments, which as we have discussed umpteen times ought to be able to compete better in a better system its a meagre 75% approved. Despite the fact people are put off from applying in the first place, a quarter of those that do apply are knocked back.
Finally those 75% approvals include a pathetically low 5,300 approvals for just 1 home developments, and 2,200 approved homes [total] for 2 home developments. 7,500 single or two home approvals in a country of 67 million that needs 300k new homes a year is pathetically low and its because of the planning system despite your claims to the contrary.
Not wrong. I get the figures direct from the LGA.
You are clutching at straws because once again your blind hatred of a planning system, of which you continue to show complete ignorance, means you can accept no other reason for the failure to build enough houses.
And by the way one of the representatives from the SME development firms was on Sky the other morning explaining that the main reason for the lack of building was not planning issues (what a surprise) but the difficulty in raising finance. But of course he is just one of the industry experts so what the hell does he know.
You haven't understood the figures if you think residential approvals are 90%, because they're not.
It is 87% in England for the most recent quarter but it is somewhere around the 90% mark in general.
What this doesn't account for is the cases that are withdrawn and then aborted rather than a refusal ever being issued - quite a lot of cases.
As a general point I and many other people have tried to engage with you about planning but you reveal yourself to have a fixed set of beliefs that you keep repeating and which you are not open to being dissuaded from. But it matters little because land use and planning will not be deregulated in the way you want in the near future, because it would be so politically unpopular.
The main problem with the planning system is the under-resourcing of planning departments. Strangely they extort money out of developers on all sorts of things under s106 but the planning fees are quite reasonable, as an employee of a developer I wish the fees were higher and they would be better resourced.
The poor planning staff are so behind since COVID that many applications are going to appeal for non-determination and this takes resources away from the planners and makes things worse on a vicuous cycle.
s73 modifications (often necessary due to mistakes by third parties) which should take 6 weeks take over a year and by the time you get them the permission is nearly expired and funders are so pedantic that you can't get the funding in time.
I could go on but many planning permissions are never implemented simply because the council is too slow or pedantic and it is better to keep the planning officer happy and avoid going to committee, and then if the conditions make the project unviable at least you can sell the site to someone else who can put in a new application, as one's funds and energy are exhausted.
This is about right. Somehow developers keep going but it is unbearable for them as the process is so uncertain. There are a lot of people getting badly burned.
The point about under resourcing of planning departments is true but even if they had lots more money and staff the problems wouldn't go away. They are ultimately rooted in how complex the government has made the planning system. It isn't functioning beyond a very basic level in terms of turning decisions out and they keep putting new demands on it (fire safety is the latest) without resources to pay for it.
Britain doesn’t do capital investment. The culture is against it. Britain has lagged peer economies basically forever on this metric.
I don’t really know why that is. But I wonder if it stems back to Victorian times when frankly it was a more profitable use of capital to invest in Uruguayan mines and Californian railway, and so a weird “tradition” developed in which the home country was just left to fend for itself.
That worked only so long as Britain maintained industrial technology advantage but ever since 1860 it’s been a slow decline, and definitively so since (pick your date) 1918, 1925, or 1979.
It's utterly perplexing to me. Take the recent arguing about mortgages and how to help people. That's only treating the symptom. It's not the cause of the problem. The cause is a massive under supply of housing going back many decades. People in the UK spend too much money for too little crap housing, so that a return to moderate and normal interest rates is crucifying them.
Where is the political party saying "we will build 5 million homes over the next decade to fix the supply problem"? There isn't one, the debate is about tweaks not anyone grasping the nettle to fix the problem.
The UK population will pass 70 million within a couple of years — assuming population statistics are correct which given the Settled Status scheme uptake may not be the case — and we are nailed on for 80 million by 2050, unless something incredible happens to migration*.
We need to build an enormous amount of everything. A building programme like nothing in living memory, probably even surpassing the post-war years.
* Climate change is likely to make the UK even more attractive for migrants, so don't believe under 100,000 a year is plausible, we'll be lucky if we can keep it down to two or three times that.
Of course the UK needs a massive house building programme but you need to overcome two problems in my non expert opinion. Firstly there needs to be at least a suspension or ban on non UK resident house purchasers, even if only new build.
Secondly you need to get past the nimbys. The only way I can think of doing that is to tie development to council funding so each council gets govt financing to encourage building housing and if their targets aren’t met they get penalised financially from their next year’s overall budget so when people living in that council are faced with reduced services making their little nimby paradises less pleasant then they might have to start being less selfish.
Council gets financial help to build, gets given a good argument to crush nimbyism and hopefully unbungs the system.
Worth pointing out yet again that 90% of all housing development planning is passed first time by local councils and a further 5% is passed on appeal.
So the idea that the vast underbuild is due to nimbyism is a myth. Yes nimbyism does of course exist but its power and influence is massively overstated. As long as the gap between planning permissions and builds keeps increasing by around 80 - 100K a year, planning is not the issue.
Except your figures are wrong, and/or irrelevant.
Firstly the percentage passed is largely irrelevant at best, since people only put in applications if they think they'll be passed. So all the potential that could have been built with a different system but no application was put in, is lost and not in your statistics.
Secondly the 90% passed is a misnomer as it seems its the percentage of total applications and not residential construction. For residential developments its only 80%, despite my point above.
Thirdly that 80% is inflated by the larger developers who can work the system better. For minor developments, which as we have discussed umpteen times ought to be able to compete better in a better system its a meagre 75% approved. Despite the fact people are put off from applying in the first place, a quarter of those that do apply are knocked back.
Finally those 75% approvals include a pathetically low 5,300 approvals for just 1 home developments, and 2,200 approved homes [total] for 2 home developments. 7,500 single or two home approvals in a country of 67 million that needs 300k new homes a year is pathetically low and its because of the planning system despite your claims to the contrary.
Not wrong. I get the figures direct from the LGA.
You are clutching at straws because once again your blind hatred of a planning system, of which you continue to show complete ignorance, means you can accept no other reason for the failure to build enough houses.
And by the way one of the representatives from the SME development firms was on Sky the other morning explaining that the main reason for the lack of building was not planning issues (what a surprise) but the difficulty in raising finance. But of course he is just one of the industry experts so what the hell does he know.
You haven't understood the figures if you think residential approvals are 90%, because they're not.
It is 87% in England for the most recent quarter but it is somewhere around the 90% mark in general.
What this doesn't account for is the cases that are withdrawn and then aborted rather than a refusal ever being issued - quite a lot of cases.
As a general point I and many other people have tried to engage with you about planning but you reveal yourself to have a fixed set of beliefs that you keep repeating and which you are not open to being dissuaded from. But it matters little because land use and planning will not be deregulated in the way you want in the near future, because it would be so politically unpopular.
The main problem with the planning system is the under-resourcing of planning departments. Strangely they extort money out of developers on all sorts of things under s106 but the planning fees are quite reasonable, as an employee of a developer I wish the fees were higher and they would be better resourced.
The poor planning staff are so behind since COVID that many applications are going to appeal for non-determination and this takes resources away from the planners and makes things worse on a vicuous cycle.
s73 modifications (often necessary due to mistakes by third parties) which should take 6 weeks take over a year and by the time you get them the permission is nearly expired and funders are so pedantic that you can't get the funding in time.
I could go on but many planning permissions are never implemented simply because the council is too slow or pedantic and it is better to keep the planning officer happy and avoid going to committee, and then if the conditions make the project unviable at least you can sell the site to someone else who can put in a new application, as one's funds and energy are exhausted.
This is about right. Somehow developers keep going but it is unbearable for them as the process is so uncertain. There are a lot of people getting badly burned.
The point about under resourcing of planning departments is true but even if they had lots more money and staff the problems wouldn't go away. They are ultimately rooted in how complex the government has made the planning system. It isn't functioning beyond a very basic level in terms of turning decisions out and they keep putting new demands on it (fire safety is the latest) without resources to pay for it.
But for the past nearly 15 years we've had a government committed to tearing up red tape. I think you must be thinking of some other country.
Britain doesn’t do capital investment. The culture is against it. Britain has lagged peer economies basically forever on this metric.
I don’t really know why that is. But I wonder if it stems back to Victorian times when frankly it was a more profitable use of capital to invest in Uruguayan mines and Californian railway, and so a weird “tradition” developed in which the home country was just left to fend for itself.
That worked only so long as Britain maintained industrial technology advantage but ever since 1860 it’s been a slow decline, and definitively so since (pick your date) 1918, 1925, or 1979.
It's utterly perplexing to me. Take the recent arguing about mortgages and how to help people. That's only treating the symptom. It's not the cause of the problem. The cause is a massive under supply of housing going back many decades. People in the UK spend too much money for too little crap housing, so that a return to moderate and normal interest rates is crucifying them.
Where is the political party saying "we will build 5 million homes over the next decade to fix the supply problem"? There isn't one, the debate is about tweaks not anyone grasping the nettle to fix the problem.
The UK population will pass 70 million within a couple of years — assuming population statistics are correct which given the Settled Status scheme uptake may not be the case — and we are nailed on for 80 million by 2050, unless something incredible happens to migration*.
We need to build an enormous amount of everything. A building programme like nothing in living memory, probably even surpassing the post-war years.
* Climate change is likely to make the UK even more attractive for migrants, so don't believe under 100,000 a year is plausible, we'll be lucky if we can keep it down to two or three times that.
Of course the UK needs a massive house building programme but you need to overcome two problems in my non expert opinion. Firstly there needs to be at least a suspension or ban on non UK resident house purchasers, even if only new build.
Secondly you need to get past the nimbys. The only way I can think of doing that is to tie development to council funding so each council gets govt financing to encourage building housing and if their targets aren’t met they get penalised financially from their next year’s overall budget so when people living in that council are faced with reduced services making their little nimby paradises less pleasant then they might have to start being less selfish.
Council gets financial help to build, gets given a good argument to crush nimbyism and hopefully unbungs the system.
Worth pointing out yet again that 90% of all housing development planning is passed first time by local councils and a further 5% is passed on appeal.
So the idea that the vast underbuild is due to nimbyism is a myth. Yes nimbyism does of course exist but its power and influence is massively overstated. As long as the gap between planning permissions and builds keeps increasing by around 80 - 100K a year, planning is not the issue.
Except your figures are wrong, and/or irrelevant.
Firstly the percentage passed is largely irrelevant at best, since people only put in applications if they think they'll be passed. So all the potential that could have been built with a different system but no application was put in, is lost and not in your statistics.
Secondly the 90% passed is a misnomer as it seems its the percentage of total applications and not residential construction. For residential developments its only 80%, despite my point above.
Thirdly that 80% is inflated by the larger developers who can work the system better. For minor developments, which as we have discussed umpteen times ought to be able to compete better in a better system its a meagre 75% approved. Despite the fact people are put off from applying in the first place, a quarter of those that do apply are knocked back.
Finally those 75% approvals include a pathetically low 5,300 approvals for just 1 home developments, and 2,200 approved homes [total] for 2 home developments. 7,500 single or two home approvals in a country of 67 million that needs 300k new homes a year is pathetically low and its because of the planning system despite your claims to the contrary.
Not wrong. I get the figures direct from the LGA.
You are clutching at straws because once again your blind hatred of a planning system, of which you continue to show complete ignorance, means you can accept no other reason for the failure to build enough houses.
And by the way one of the representatives from the SME development firms was on Sky the other morning explaining that the main reason for the lack of building was not planning issues (what a surprise) but the difficulty in raising finance. But of course he is just one of the industry experts so what the hell does he know.
You haven't understood the figures if you think residential approvals are 90%, because they're not.
It is 87% in England for the most recent quarter but it is somewhere around the 90% mark in general.
What this doesn't account for is the cases that are withdrawn and then aborted rather than a refusal ever being issued - quite a lot of cases.
As a general point I and many other people have tried to engage with you about planning but you reveal yourself to have a fixed set of beliefs that you keep repeating and which you are not open to being dissuaded from. But it matters little because land use and planning will not be deregulated in the way you want in the near future, because it would be so politically unpopular.
The main problem with the planning system is the under-resourcing of planning departments. Strangely they extort money out of developers on all sorts of things under s106 but the planning fees are quite reasonable, as an employee of a developer I wish the fees were higher and they would be better resourced.
The poor planning staff are so behind since COVID that many applications are going to appeal for non-determination and this takes resources away from the planners and makes things worse on a vicuous cycle.
s73 modifications (often necessary due to mistakes by third parties) which should take 6 weeks take over a year and by the time you get them the permission is nearly expired and funders are so pedantic that you can't get the funding in time.
I could go on but many planning permissions are never implemented simply because the council is too slow or pedantic and it is better to keep the planning officer happy and avoid going to committee, and then if the conditions make the project unviable at least you can sell the site to someone else who can put in a new application, as one's funds and energy are exhausted.
This is about right. Somehow developers keep going but it is unbearable for them as the process is so uncertain. There are a lot of people getting badly burned.
The point about under resourcing of planning departments is true but even if they had lots more money and staff the problems wouldn't go away. They are ultimately rooted in how complex the government has made the planning system. It isn't functioning beyond a very basic level in terms of turning decisions out and they keep putting new demands on it (fire safety is the latest) without resources to pay for it.
Absolutely, this is the point I keep making - large planning firms with landbanks can keep going through this process. Other firms can't and don't, which is why we have an effective oligopoly.
The system does not work. The fact that 73% of residential applications may be approved doesn't change that.
Full message of Prigozhin "declaring war on the Russian Ministry of Defence:
"PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped.
They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back.
Those, who destroyed today our guys, who destroyed tens, tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers will be punished.
I’m asking: no one resist. Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads.
I’m asking everyone to remain calm, do not succumb to provocations, and remain in their houses. Ideally, those along our way, do not go outside.
After we finished what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland.
Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before.
We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the frontline.
Justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia."
Prigozhin sounds as though he's sh*tfaced on samogon.
In any case, he's not sending a column to Moscow.
He's saying the idea that Kiev was about to attack massively in the Donbas in February 2022 doesn't stand up, and that Putin should have negotiated with Zelensky. He possibly wants to reprise the growling general Alexander Lebed's performance which helped bring an end to the first Chechen war.
I won't be surprised if Prigozhin gets offed. It's unlikely he's got FSB support given how he's undermining soldiers' morale.
There are some outside Russia who jump for joy at the thought of another Russian civil war.
It’s equally possible that he’s doing so at the behest of Putin - “Putin was deceived” - potentially providing cover, and scapegoats, if the dictator should decide to cut and run.
Countdown till someone announces its a CIA funded colour revolution. The “crimson blood coloured fash-on-fash revolution”.
Let's get rid of planning permission altogether. If you want to build it, you build it.
I’ve got this great design for an internal combustion thermonuclear power station. Every 60 seconds you drop a bomb down the shaft into the cavern. This keeps it nice and hot - you extract heat from the lake of motel rock at the bottom.
The neighbours having been making all kinds of planning objections….
Well it would likely interfere with their 5G signal.
46C in parts of Texas at the moment, with high humidity as well
Having recently experienced this in Bangkok (think we hit 44C?) I can only empathise. It’s horrible. You feel like you’re dying. If you stay too long outside without shade and water you do die, very quickly
Imagine if the aircon breaks down?
OR if the power goes out? For days. Which is happening in parts of Texas and also Oklahoma.
In part due to ridiculous management of inadequate power grid (and visa versa).
And consider workers who must work outside and/or without a/c to do their jobs. Last Tuesday in Dallas, with temps over 100F, a USPS letter carrier collapsed and subsequently died, possibly from heat stroke or similar.
Can vividly remember one summer, when I was down in Louisiana and staying with relatives. Who'd contracted to have their roof repaired. Crew showed up and did just that . . . in blazing sun with temp in shade in 90s and humidity about 80%.
Me, myself and I once worked for a summer in aluminium plant outside New Orleans, in similar weather. With added twist that temps at the "pots" where molten aluminum was being refined were about 140F. In addition to water fountains about every 20 feet, the company had salt tablet dispensers.
Used 'em both, frequently. And during working hours would piss nary a drop!
I think Prigozhin has been watching The Death of Stalin and gone full General Zhukov.
You laugh, but. He probably has. They’ve all watched it.
Stranger things have happened but this could be Putin’s “off ramp” as NigelB alluded to earlier. He was lied to etc etc and resets things in the Kremlin and re war. A bit humiliating for Putin but possibly a better option for him than losing militarily in time.
"The leftovers of Wagners on the outskirts of Bakhmut opened fire on the regular roads of the Russian Federation.
Our assault brigades see everything, systematic strikes are now being carried out on the positions of the Russians.
You would hear the radio broadcast of these *** now.
The impression is that part of the Russian regular troops are killing their own, and it seems that part of the military is supporting Prigozhin. While it is not clear what is finally happening, it is a bloodbath"
The main problem with the planning system is the under-resourcing of planning departments. Strangely they extort money out of developers on all sorts of things under s106 but the planning fees are quite reasonable, as an employee of a developer I wish the fees were higher and they would be better resourced.
The poor planning staff are so behind since COVID that many applications are going to appeal for non-determination and this takes resources away from the planners and makes things worse on a vicuous cycle.
s73 modifications (often necessary due to mistakes by third parties) which should take 6 weeks take over a year and by the time you get them the permission is nearly expired and funders are so pedantic that you can't get the funding in time.
I could go on but many planning permissions are never implemented simply because the council is too slow or pedantic and it is better to keep the planning officer happy and avoid going to committee, and then if the conditions make the project unviable at least you can sell the site to someone else who can put in a new application, as one's funds and energy are exhausted.
This is about right. Somehow developers keep going but it is unbearable for them as the process is so uncertain. There are a lot of people getting badly burned.
The point about under resourcing of planning departments is true but even if they had lots more money and staff the problems wouldn't go away. They are ultimately rooted in how complex the government has made the planning system. It isn't functioning beyond a very basic level in terms of turning decisions out and they keep putting new demands on it (fire safety is the latest) without resources to pay for it.
One of the other big areas of planning department works is unauthorised builds which are often reported by neighbours and need proper investigation.
In my part of the world, that's usually about turning structures into dwellings. These can be back garden sheds or buildings and can also be buildings whose original intention (and approved planning status) was as storage but which have been turned into unlicensed private rental properties by unscrupulous landlords. Very often they try to keep these dwellings below the radar in terms of paying council tax so the Council needs to crack down on these unauthorised dwellings.
There's also HMOs where up to 20 people live and where for example the electrical circuitry can't cope with the demand or load and represents a fire hazard.
Let's get rid of planning permission altogether. If you want to build it, you build it.
I used to believe that. Then I saw Basingstoke. They ruined it.
I remember a story I was told when I worked in comms. Engineer had been working on a mast and had his arms wrapped round it to fiddle with some cables. And then someone powered the mast on.
"Full body cancer" was the phrase I heard.
Possibly just a "Scare the young'uns" anecdote. But it's not a phrase I like to revisit.
Really good video by Jake Broe. He is, I'm afraid, very much taking the idea of Russia blowing the NPP seriously. The likely fallout would reach Nato countries Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania. He suggests this would be the trigger for limited Nato involvement in the war.
What I don't understand is that it has been made clear that Russia using nuclear weapons would have 'catastrophic consequences' for them. And yet on the issue of blowing up an enormous nuclear power plant which would be far worse than a single tactical nuke all we get is silence in public. Please to god I hope some sort of message is being conveyed privately.
The claim of 90% of planning requests being approved is made by looking at planning approvals for householder developments, such as lofts, extensions and conservatories. This makes up the majority of planning requests and unlike residential permissions, these actually are 90% approved.
So if you want to get a conservatory, you have a 90% approval rate.
If you want to build a house, you have a 73% approval rate.
The fact that people already with houses can get conservatories added to their home easily doesn't resolve the housing crisis. Unsurprisingly.
Britain doesn’t do capital investment. The culture is against it. Britain has lagged peer economies basically forever on this metric.
I don’t really know why that is. But I wonder if it stems back to Victorian times when frankly it was a more profitable use of capital to invest in Uruguayan mines and Californian railway, and so a weird “tradition” developed in which the home country was just left to fend for itself.
That worked only so long as Britain maintained industrial technology advantage but ever since 1860 it’s been a slow decline, and definitively so since (pick your date) 1918, 1925, or 1979.
It's utterly perplexing to me. Take the recent arguing about mortgages and how to help people. That's only treating the symptom. It's not the cause of the problem. The cause is a massive under supply of housing going back many decades. People in the UK spend too much money for too little crap housing, so that a return to moderate and normal interest rates is crucifying them.
Where is the political party saying "we will build 5 million homes over the next decade to fix the supply problem"? There isn't one, the debate is about tweaks not anyone grasping the nettle to fix the problem.
The UK population will pass 70 million within a couple of years — assuming population statistics are correct which given the Settled Status scheme uptake may not be the case — and we are nailed on for 80 million by 2050, unless something incredible happens to migration*.
We need to build an enormous amount of everything. A building programme like nothing in living memory, probably even surpassing the post-war years.
* Climate change is likely to make the UK even more attractive for migrants, so don't believe under 100,000 a year is plausible, we'll be lucky if we can keep it down to two or three times that.
Of course the UK needs a massive house building programme but you need to overcome two problems in my non expert opinion. Firstly there needs to be at least a suspension or ban on non UK resident house purchasers, even if only new build.
Secondly you need to get past the nimbys. The only way I can think of doing that is to tie development to council funding so each council gets govt financing to encourage building housing and if their targets aren’t met they get penalised financially from their next year’s overall budget so when people living in that council are faced with reduced services making their little nimby paradises less pleasant then they might have to start being less selfish.
Council gets financial help to build, gets given a good argument to crush nimbyism and hopefully unbungs the system.
Worth pointing out yet again that 90% of all housing development planning is passed first time by local councils and a further 5% is passed on appeal.
So the idea that the vast underbuild is due to nimbyism is a myth. Yes nimbyism does of course exist but its power and influence is massively overstated. As long as the gap between planning permissions and builds keeps increasing by around 80 - 100K a year, planning is not the issue.
Except your figures are wrong, and/or irrelevant.
Firstly the percentage passed is largely irrelevant at best, since people only put in applications if they think they'll be passed. So all the potential that could have been built with a different system but no application was put in, is lost and not in your statistics.
Secondly the 90% passed is a misnomer as it seems its the percentage of total applications and not residential construction. For residential developments its only 80%, despite my point above.
Thirdly that 80% is inflated by the larger developers who can work the system better. For minor developments, which as we have discussed umpteen times ought to be able to compete better in a better system its a meagre 75% approved. Despite the fact people are put off from applying in the first place, a quarter of those that do apply are knocked back.
Finally those 75% approvals include a pathetically low 5,300 approvals for just 1 home developments, and 2,200 approved homes [total] for 2 home developments. 7,500 single or two home approvals in a country of 67 million that needs 300k new homes a year is pathetically low and its because of the planning system despite your claims to the contrary.
Not wrong. I get the figures direct from the LGA.
You are clutching at straws because once again your blind hatred of a planning system, of which you continue to show complete ignorance, means you can accept no other reason for the failure to build enough houses.
And by the way one of the representatives from the SME development firms was on Sky the other morning explaining that the main reason for the lack of building was not planning issues (what a surprise) but the difficulty in raising finance. But of course he is just one of the industry experts so what the hell does he know.
You haven't understood the figures if you think residential approvals are 90%, because they're not.
It is 87% in England for the most recent quarter but it is somewhere around the 90% mark in general.
What this doesn't account for is the cases that are withdrawn and then aborted rather than a refusal ever being issued - quite a lot of cases.
As a general point I and many other people have tried to engage with you about planning but you reveal yourself to have a fixed set of beliefs that you keep repeating and which you are not open to being dissuaded from. But it matters little because land use and planning will not be deregulated in the way you want in the near future, because it would be so politically unpopular.
For Residential planning approvals? Are you sure?
From the page you linked to:
Please explain how In the year ending December 2022, 48,700 decisions were made on applications for residential developments, of which 35,600 (73%) were granted = 87% approved?
It is in the same stats - under part 3.6. I think the figure is that of those applications that are decided - 90% are approved. So only 10% refused. There are other applications that aren't decided. For all the planning applications that are 'made' the number of applications that are approved is lower, because there are a lot that are withdrawn for any number of reasons, could be procedural problems, defective information etc, or because the applicant realised it wasn't going to get approved.
That stat is not residential though, we're talking residential. Hence the residential figures elsewhere on the page being completely different.
Fair enough, I missed the point that you are talking about residential approvals only, ie construction of new housing. Even then, I don't think the 72% figure is that bad given that there are large swathes of the country where there is a presumption against any new development.
Britain doesn’t do capital investment. The culture is against it. Britain has lagged peer economies basically forever on this metric.
I don’t really know why that is. But I wonder if it stems back to Victorian times when frankly it was a more profitable use of capital to invest in Uruguayan mines and Californian railway, and so a weird “tradition” developed in which the home country was just left to fend for itself.
That worked only so long as Britain maintained industrial technology advantage but ever since 1860 it’s been a slow decline, and definitively so since (pick your date) 1918, 1925, or 1979.
It's utterly perplexing to me. Take the recent arguing about mortgages and how to help people. That's only treating the symptom. It's not the cause of the problem. The cause is a massive under supply of housing going back many decades. People in the UK spend too much money for too little crap housing, so that a return to moderate and normal interest rates is crucifying them.
Where is the political party saying "we will build 5 million homes over the next decade to fix the supply problem"? There isn't one, the debate is about tweaks not anyone grasping the nettle to fix the problem.
The UK population will pass 70 million within a couple of years — assuming population statistics are correct which given the Settled Status scheme uptake may not be the case — and we are nailed on for 80 million by 2050, unless something incredible happens to migration*.
We need to build an enormous amount of everything. A building programme like nothing in living memory, probably even surpassing the post-war years.
* Climate change is likely to make the UK even more attractive for migrants, so don't believe under 100,000 a year is plausible, we'll be lucky if we can keep it down to two or three times that.
Of course the UK needs a massive house building programme but you need to overcome two problems in my non expert opinion. Firstly there needs to be at least a suspension or ban on non UK resident house purchasers, even if only new build.
Secondly you need to get past the nimbys. The only way I can think of doing that is to tie development to council funding so each council gets govt financing to encourage building housing and if their targets aren’t met they get penalised financially from their next year’s overall budget so when people living in that council are faced with reduced services making their little nimby paradises less pleasant then they might have to start being less selfish.
Council gets financial help to build, gets given a good argument to crush nimbyism and hopefully unbungs the system.
Worth pointing out yet again that 90% of all housing development planning is passed first time by local councils and a further 5% is passed on appeal.
So the idea that the vast underbuild is due to nimbyism is a myth. Yes nimbyism does of course exist but its power and influence is massively overstated. As long as the gap between planning permissions and builds keeps increasing by around 80 - 100K a year, planning is not the issue.
Except your figures are wrong, and/or irrelevant.
Firstly the percentage passed is largely irrelevant at best, since people only put in applications if they think they'll be passed. So all the potential that could have been built with a different system but no application was put in, is lost and not in your statistics.
Secondly the 90% passed is a misnomer as it seems its the percentage of total applications and not residential construction. For residential developments its only 80%, despite my point above.
Thirdly that 80% is inflated by the larger developers who can work the system better. For minor developments, which as we have discussed umpteen times ought to be able to compete better in a better system its a meagre 75% approved. Despite the fact people are put off from applying in the first place, a quarter of those that do apply are knocked back.
Finally those 75% approvals include a pathetically low 5,300 approvals for just 1 home developments, and 2,200 approved homes [total] for 2 home developments. 7,500 single or two home approvals in a country of 67 million that needs 300k new homes a year is pathetically low and its because of the planning system despite your claims to the contrary.
Not wrong. I get the figures direct from the LGA.
You are clutching at straws because once again your blind hatred of a planning system, of which you continue to show complete ignorance, means you can accept no other reason for the failure to build enough houses.
And by the way one of the representatives from the SME development firms was on Sky the other morning explaining that the main reason for the lack of building was not planning issues (what a surprise) but the difficulty in raising finance. But of course he is just one of the industry experts so what the hell does he know.
You haven't understood the figures if you think residential approvals are 90%, because they're not.
It is 87% in England for the most recent quarter but it is somewhere around the 90% mark in general.
What this doesn't account for is the cases that are withdrawn and then aborted rather than a refusal ever being issued - quite a lot of cases.
As a general point I and many other people have tried to engage with you about planning but you reveal yourself to have a fixed set of beliefs that you keep repeating and which you are not open to being dissuaded from. But it matters little because land use and planning will not be deregulated in the way you want in the near future, because it would be so politically unpopular.
For Residential planning approvals? Are you sure?
From the page you linked to:
Please explain how In the year ending December 2022, 48,700 decisions were made on applications for residential developments, of which 35,600 (73%) were granted = 87% approved?
It is in the same stats - under part 3.6. I think the figure is that of those applications that are decided - 90% are approved. So only 10% refused. There are other applications that aren't decided. For all the planning applications that are 'made' the number of applications that are approved is lower, because there are a lot that are withdrawn for any number of reasons, could be procedural problems, defective information etc, or because the applicant realised it wasn't going to get approved.
That stat is not residential though, we're talking residential. Hence the residential figures elsewhere on the page being completely different.
Fair enough, I missed the point that you are talking about residential approvals only, ie construction of new housing. Even then, I don't think the 72% figure is that bad given that there are large swathes of the country where there is a presumption against any new development.
72% of those actually submitted is appalling, considering that many that could have been built with a more liberal system simply never bothered to put in the application.
There's a selection bias at play here, only those who think they would be approved apply and even then more than a quarter are rejected.
Britain doesn’t do capital investment. The culture is against it. Britain has lagged peer economies basically forever on this metric.
I don’t really know why that is. But I wonder if it stems back to Victorian times when frankly it was a more profitable use of capital to invest in Uruguayan mines and Californian railway, and so a weird “tradition” developed in which the home country was just left to fend for itself.
That worked only so long as Britain maintained industrial technology advantage but ever since 1860 it’s been a slow decline, and definitively so since (pick your date) 1918, 1925, or 1979.
It's utterly perplexing to me. Take the recent arguing about mortgages and how to help people. That's only treating the symptom. It's not the cause of the problem. The cause is a massive under supply of housing going back many decades. People in the UK spend too much money for too little crap housing, so that a return to moderate and normal interest rates is crucifying them.
Where is the political party saying "we will build 5 million homes over the next decade to fix the supply problem"? There isn't one, the debate is about tweaks not anyone grasping the nettle to fix the problem.
The UK population will pass 70 million within a couple of years — assuming population statistics are correct which given the Settled Status scheme uptake may not be the case — and we are nailed on for 80 million by 2050, unless something incredible happens to migration*.
We need to build an enormous amount of everything. A building programme like nothing in living memory, probably even surpassing the post-war years.
* Climate change is likely to make the UK even more attractive for migrants, so don't believe under 100,000 a year is plausible, we'll be lucky if we can keep it down to two or three times that.
Of course the UK needs a massive house building programme but you need to overcome two problems in my non expert opinion. Firstly there needs to be at least a suspension or ban on non UK resident house purchasers, even if only new build.
Secondly you need to get past the nimbys. The only way I can think of doing that is to tie development to council funding so each council gets govt financing to encourage building housing and if their targets aren’t met they get penalised financially from their next year’s overall budget so when people living in that council are faced with reduced services making their little nimby paradises less pleasant then they might have to start being less selfish.
Council gets financial help to build, gets given a good argument to crush nimbyism and hopefully unbungs the system.
Worth pointing out yet again that 90% of all housing development planning is passed first time by local councils and a further 5% is passed on appeal.
So the idea that the vast underbuild is due to nimbyism is a myth. Yes nimbyism does of course exist but its power and influence is massively overstated. As long as the gap between planning permissions and builds keeps increasing by around 80 - 100K a year, planning is not the issue.
Except your figures are wrong, and/or irrelevant.
Firstly the percentage passed is largely irrelevant at best, since people only put in applications if they think they'll be passed. So all the potential that could have been built with a different system but no application was put in, is lost and not in your statistics.
Secondly the 90% passed is a misnomer as it seems its the percentage of total applications and not residential construction. For residential developments its only 80%, despite my point above.
Thirdly that 80% is inflated by the larger developers who can work the system better. For minor developments, which as we have discussed umpteen times ought to be able to compete better in a better system its a meagre 75% approved. Despite the fact people are put off from applying in the first place, a quarter of those that do apply are knocked back.
Finally those 75% approvals include a pathetically low 5,300 approvals for just 1 home developments, and 2,200 approved homes [total] for 2 home developments. 7,500 single or two home approvals in a country of 67 million that needs 300k new homes a year is pathetically low and its because of the planning system despite your claims to the contrary.
Not wrong. I get the figures direct from the LGA.
You are clutching at straws because once again your blind hatred of a planning system, of which you continue to show complete ignorance, means you can accept no other reason for the failure to build enough houses.
And by the way one of the representatives from the SME development firms was on Sky the other morning explaining that the main reason for the lack of building was not planning issues (what a surprise) but the difficulty in raising finance. But of course he is just one of the industry experts so what the hell does he know.
You haven't understood the figures if you think residential approvals are 90%, because they're not.
It is 87% in England for the most recent quarter but it is somewhere around the 90% mark in general.
What this doesn't account for is the cases that are withdrawn and then aborted rather than a refusal ever being issued - quite a lot of cases.
As a general point I and many other people have tried to engage with you about planning but you reveal yourself to have a fixed set of beliefs that you keep repeating and which you are not open to being dissuaded from. But it matters little because land use and planning will not be deregulated in the way you want in the near future, because it would be so politically unpopular.
The main problem with the planning system is the under-resourcing of planning departments. Strangely they extort money out of developers on all sorts of things under s106 but the planning fees are quite reasonable, as an employee of a developer I wish the fees were higher and they would be better resourced.
The poor planning staff are so behind since COVID that many applications are going to appeal for non-determination and this takes resources away from the planners and makes things worse on a vicuous cycle.
s73 modifications (often necessary due to mistakes by third parties) which should take 6 weeks take over a year and by the time you get them the permission is nearly expired and funders are so pedantic that you can't get the funding in time.
I could go on but many planning permissions are never implemented simply because the council is too slow or pedantic and it is better to keep the planning officer happy and avoid going to committee, and then if the conditions make the project unviable at least you can sell the site to someone else who can put in a new application, as one's funds and energy are exhausted.
This is about right. Somehow developers keep going but it is unbearable for them as the process is so uncertain. There are a lot of people getting badly burned.
The point about under resourcing of planning departments is true but even if they had lots more money and staff the problems wouldn't go away. They are ultimately rooted in how complex the government has made the planning system. It isn't functioning beyond a very basic level in terms of turning decisions out and they keep putting new demands on it (fire safety is the latest) without resources to pay for it.
But for the past nearly 15 years we've had a government committed to tearing up red tape. I think you must be thinking of some other country.
"❗️Putin has been informed about the situation around Prigozhin, all the necessary measures are being taken" Peskov said.
These Russians are such walking cliches with their purges, “necessary measures” and overwrought ways of saying “we fucked up, and it’s his fault over there”.
Britain doesn’t do capital investment. The culture is against it. Britain has lagged peer economies basically forever on this metric.
I don’t really know why that is. But I wonder if it stems back to Victorian times when frankly it was a more profitable use of capital to invest in Uruguayan mines and Californian railway, and so a weird “tradition” developed in which the home country was just left to fend for itself.
That worked only so long as Britain maintained industrial technology advantage but ever since 1860 it’s been a slow decline, and definitively so since (pick your date) 1918, 1925, or 1979.
It's utterly perplexing to me. Take the recent arguing about mortgages and how to help people. That's only treating the symptom. It's not the cause of the problem. The cause is a massive under supply of housing going back many decades. People in the UK spend too much money for too little crap housing, so that a return to moderate and normal interest rates is crucifying them.
Where is the political party saying "we will build 5 million homes over the next decade to fix the supply problem"? There isn't one, the debate is about tweaks not anyone grasping the nettle to fix the problem.
The UK population will pass 70 million within a couple of years — assuming population statistics are correct which given the Settled Status scheme uptake may not be the case — and we are nailed on for 80 million by 2050, unless something incredible happens to migration*.
We need to build an enormous amount of everything. A building programme like nothing in living memory, probably even surpassing the post-war years.
* Climate change is likely to make the UK even more attractive for migrants, so don't believe under 100,000 a year is plausible, we'll be lucky if we can keep it down to two or three times that.
Of course the UK needs a massive house building programme but you need to overcome two problems in my non expert opinion. Firstly there needs to be at least a suspension or ban on non UK resident house purchasers, even if only new build.
Secondly you need to get past the nimbys. The only way I can think of doing that is to tie development to council funding so each council gets govt financing to encourage building housing and if their targets aren’t met they get penalised financially from their next year’s overall budget so when people living in that council are faced with reduced services making their little nimby paradises less pleasant then they might have to start being less selfish.
Council gets financial help to build, gets given a good argument to crush nimbyism and hopefully unbungs the system.
Worth pointing out yet again that 90% of all housing development planning is passed first time by local councils and a further 5% is passed on appeal.
So the idea that the vast underbuild is due to nimbyism is a myth. Yes nimbyism does of course exist but its power and influence is massively overstated. As long as the gap between planning permissions and builds keeps increasing by around 80 - 100K a year, planning is not the issue.
Except your figures are wrong, and/or irrelevant.
Firstly the percentage passed is largely irrelevant at best, since people only put in applications if they think they'll be passed. So all the potential that could have been built with a different system but no application was put in, is lost and not in your statistics.
Secondly the 90% passed is a misnomer as it seems its the percentage of total applications and not residential construction. For residential developments its only 80%, despite my point above.
Thirdly that 80% is inflated by the larger developers who can work the system better. For minor developments, which as we have discussed umpteen times ought to be able to compete better in a better system its a meagre 75% approved. Despite the fact people are put off from applying in the first place, a quarter of those that do apply are knocked back.
Finally those 75% approvals include a pathetically low 5,300 approvals for just 1 home developments, and 2,200 approved homes [total] for 2 home developments. 7,500 single or two home approvals in a country of 67 million that needs 300k new homes a year is pathetically low and its because of the planning system despite your claims to the contrary.
Not wrong. I get the figures direct from the LGA.
You are clutching at straws because once again your blind hatred of a planning system, of which you continue to show complete ignorance, means you can accept no other reason for the failure to build enough houses.
And by the way one of the representatives from the SME development firms was on Sky the other morning explaining that the main reason for the lack of building was not planning issues (what a surprise) but the difficulty in raising finance. But of course he is just one of the industry experts so what the hell does he know.
You haven't understood the figures if you think residential approvals are 90%, because they're not.
It is 87% in England for the most recent quarter but it is somewhere around the 90% mark in general.
What this doesn't account for is the cases that are withdrawn and then aborted rather than a refusal ever being issued - quite a lot of cases.
As a general point I and many other people have tried to engage with you about planning but you reveal yourself to have a fixed set of beliefs that you keep repeating and which you are not open to being dissuaded from. But it matters little because land use and planning will not be deregulated in the way you want in the near future, because it would be so politically unpopular.
For Residential planning approvals? Are you sure?
From the page you linked to:
Please explain how In the year ending December 2022, 48,700 decisions were made on applications for residential developments, of which 35,600 (73%) were granted = 87% approved?
It is in the same stats - under part 3.6. I think the figure is that of those applications that are decided - 90% are approved. So only 10% refused. There are other applications that aren't decided. For all the planning applications that are 'made' the number of applications that are approved is lower, because there are a lot that are withdrawn for any number of reasons, could be procedural problems, defective information etc, or because the applicant realised it wasn't going to get approved.
That stat is not residential though, we're talking residential. Hence the residential figures elsewhere on the page being completely different.
Fair enough, I missed the point that you are talking about residential approvals only, ie construction of new housing. Even then, I don't think the 72% figure is that bad given that there are large swathes of the country where there is a presumption against any new development.
72% of those actually submitted is appalling, considering that many that could have been built with a more liberal system simply never bothered to put in the application.
There's a selection bias at play here, only those who think they would be approved apply and even then more than a quarter are rejected.
Thanks for the fair enough remark.
But why do people apply? I'd guess that on a lot of occasions it is about trying to realise the development value in land, rather than an intention to build. This is probably why housing delivery lags behind permissions granted.
I am not aware of any other country our population density having the system you desire. It would lead to the countryside being built on in a massively inefficient and unsustainable way.
I think Prigozhin has been watching The Death of Stalin and gone full General Zhukov.
You laugh, but. He probably has. They’ve all watched it.
Should have watched Game of Thrones. "When you play the Game of Thrones, either you win, or you die."
I don't think Prigozhin is going to win.
Putin isn't winning either.
GoT Spoiler Warning: Of course in Game of Thrones the original occupant of the throne and every single claimant to the throne ended up deceased. And the throne went instead to a crippled boy whom nobody had considered relevant. Be good if the same happens in Russia.
I think Prigozhin has been watching The Death of Stalin and gone full General Zhukov.
You laugh, but. He probably has. They’ve all watched it.
Should have watched Game of Thrones. "When you play the Game of Thrones, either you win, or you die."
I don't think Prigozhin is going to win.
I’m not sure about that. I think enough people in Russia, especially at the top, know this is a giant clusterfuck with no way out apart from defeat militarily (or more likely stalemate) or chaos and civil war. If enough people say he’s right and the Russian MOd and security services lied for made up reasons they can still save a little face.
Prigozhin being the big voice and stopping things puts him in a position of being , to the US for example, “ someone we can do business with”.
He gets Kudos, wealth and power but he’s a Russian nationalist but whatever you think of that I reckon he’s also a pragmatist who likes his soldiers in theory and also sees the main chance.
For the west they don’t need Russia to descend into chaos because you don’t want those nukes dispersed.
Will be interesting to see if any noises from the Chechens because if they suddenly toe the Prigozhin line it’s all over for the current Russian military establishment who will carry a very painful life ending can.
Full message of Prigozhin "declaring war on the Russian Ministry of Defence:
"PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped.
They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back.
Those, who destroyed today our guys, who destroyed tens, tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers will be punished.
I’m asking: no one resist. Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads.
I’m asking everyone to remain calm, do not succumb to provocations, and remain in their houses. Ideally, those along our way, do not go outside.
After we finished what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland.
Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before.
We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the frontline.
Justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia."
It’s just completely inconsiderate to us who have second mortgages on our houses in Puglia. More war, it boils my piss. This Robert Wagner guy needs to wind his neck in.
wasnt robert wagner the guy in Hart to Hart not sure he bears much responsibility for ukraine
He does, according to some, for the death of Natalie Wood:
Mr Johnson's discussion of submarine design and safety engineering.
An expert in going down in places he shouldn’t and the resulting fallout.
On further scrutiny, I see that HYUFD has, unsurprisingly, already cited this, presumably approvingly. No wonder he was so frantic to deny any scope for criticism, even when posters weren't actually criticising the submariners.
Britain doesn’t do capital investment. The culture is against it. Britain has lagged peer economies basically forever on this metric.
I don’t really know why that is. But I wonder if it stems back to Victorian times when frankly it was a more profitable use of capital to invest in Uruguayan mines and Californian railway, and so a weird “tradition” developed in which the home country was just left to fend for itself.
That worked only so long as Britain maintained industrial technology advantage but ever since 1860 it’s been a slow decline, and definitively so since (pick your date) 1918, 1925, or 1979.
It's utterly perplexing to me. Take the recent arguing about mortgages and how to help people. That's only treating the symptom. It's not the cause of the problem. The cause is a massive under supply of housing going back many decades. People in the UK spend too much money for too little crap housing, so that a return to moderate and normal interest rates is crucifying them.
Where is the political party saying "we will build 5 million homes over the next decade to fix the supply problem"? There isn't one, the debate is about tweaks not anyone grasping the nettle to fix the problem.
The UK population will pass 70 million within a couple of years — assuming population statistics are correct which given the Settled Status scheme uptake may not be the case — and we are nailed on for 80 million by 2050, unless something incredible happens to migration*.
We need to build an enormous amount of everything. A building programme like nothing in living memory, probably even surpassing the post-war years.
* Climate change is likely to make the UK even more attractive for migrants, so don't believe under 100,000 a year is plausible, we'll be lucky if we can keep it down to two or three times that.
Of course the UK needs a massive house building programme but you need to overcome two problems in my non expert opinion. Firstly there needs to be at least a suspension or ban on non UK resident house purchasers, even if only new build.
Secondly you need to get past the nimbys. The only way I can think of doing that is to tie development to council funding so each council gets govt financing to encourage building housing and if their targets aren’t met they get penalised financially from their next year’s overall budget so when people living in that council are faced with reduced services making their little nimby paradises less pleasant then they might have to start being less selfish.
Council gets financial help to build, gets given a good argument to crush nimbyism and hopefully unbungs the system.
Worth pointing out yet again that 90% of all housing development planning is passed first time by local councils and a further 5% is passed on appeal.
So the idea that the vast underbuild is due to nimbyism is a myth. Yes nimbyism does of course exist but its power and influence is massively overstated. As long as the gap between planning permissions and builds keeps increasing by around 80 - 100K a year, planning is not the issue.
Except your figures are wrong, and/or irrelevant.
Firstly the percentage passed is largely irrelevant at best, since people only put in applications if they think they'll be passed. So all the potential that could have been built with a different system but no application was put in, is lost and not in your statistics.
Secondly the 90% passed is a misnomer as it seems its the percentage of total applications and not residential construction. For residential developments its only 80%, despite my point above.
Thirdly that 80% is inflated by the larger developers who can work the system better. For minor developments, which as we have discussed umpteen times ought to be able to compete better in a better system its a meagre 75% approved. Despite the fact people are put off from applying in the first place, a quarter of those that do apply are knocked back.
Finally those 75% approvals include a pathetically low 5,300 approvals for just 1 home developments, and 2,200 approved homes [total] for 2 home developments. 7,500 single or two home approvals in a country of 67 million that needs 300k new homes a year is pathetically low and its because of the planning system despite your claims to the contrary.
Not wrong. I get the figures direct from the LGA.
You are clutching at straws because once again your blind hatred of a planning system, of which you continue to show complete ignorance, means you can accept no other reason for the failure to build enough houses.
And by the way one of the representatives from the SME development firms was on Sky the other morning explaining that the main reason for the lack of building was not planning issues (what a surprise) but the difficulty in raising finance. But of course he is just one of the industry experts so what the hell does he know.
You haven't understood the figures if you think residential approvals are 90%, because they're not.
It is 87% in England for the most recent quarter but it is somewhere around the 90% mark in general.
What this doesn't account for is the cases that are withdrawn and then aborted rather than a refusal ever being issued - quite a lot of cases.
As a general point I and many other people have tried to engage with you about planning but you reveal yourself to have a fixed set of beliefs that you keep repeating and which you are not open to being dissuaded from. But it matters little because land use and planning will not be deregulated in the way you want in the near future, because it would be so politically unpopular.
For Residential planning approvals? Are you sure?
From the page you linked to:
Please explain how In the year ending December 2022, 48,700 decisions were made on applications for residential developments, of which 35,600 (73%) were granted = 87% approved?
It is in the same stats - under part 3.6. I think the figure is that of those applications that are decided - 90% are approved. So only 10% refused. There are other applications that aren't decided. For all the planning applications that are 'made' the number of applications that are approved is lower, because there are a lot that are withdrawn for any number of reasons, could be procedural problems, defective information etc, or because the applicant realised it wasn't going to get approved.
That stat is not residential though, we're talking residential. Hence the residential figures elsewhere on the page being completely different.
Fair enough, I missed the point that you are talking about residential approvals only, ie construction of new housing. Even then, I don't think the 72% figure is that bad given that there are large swathes of the country where there is a presumption against any new development.
72% of those actually submitted is appalling, considering that many that could have been built with a more liberal system simply never bothered to put in the application.
There's a selection bias at play here, only those who think they would be approved apply and even then more than a quarter are rejected.
Thanks for the fair enough remark.
But why do people apply? I'd guess that on a lot of occasions it is about trying to realise the development value in land, rather than an intention to build. This is probably why housing delivery lags behind permissions granted.
I am not aware of any other country our population density having the system you desire. It would lead to the countryside being built on in a massively inefficient and unsustainable way.
Japan has the system I desire and is as densely populated as us.
They have a sensible, clear and unambiguous zonal planning system that NIMBYs do not get a say in, with building regs, so if someone wants to build a house they can buy land in a residential zone and simply and easily build within that zone to the building regs. Neighbours in Japan do not get to object or get any input at all in what other people do with their own land.
As a result the city of Tokyo alone has had more homes built in a year than the entirety of England combined. Tokyo's population is growing fast due to people moving to the city, but house prices aren't.
Headed back towards Trussland. Selby will show us if it really is going this badly for the Tories. Remember Labour hasn't had a swing big enough to take a seat like that in any BE yet.
Mr Johnson's discussion of submarine design and safety engineering.
Are these dreary columns about Johnson's fridge and the Titan catastrophe the sort of cutting, thrusting political commentary Dacre (which autocorrects as "sacred") thought he was paying for?
Mr Johnson's discussion of submarine design and safety engineering.
Are these dreary columns about Johnson's fridge and the Titan catastrophe the sort of cutting, thrusting political commentary Dacre (which autocorrects as "sacred") thought he was paying for?
Early days yet. But IIRC Mr Johnson still has a Churchill biography to write (or has that been scrubbed?). Till then, such things as the existential [edit] connectivity of Wilfred's Lego Duplo raiway layout might be tempting fodder.
It's going to be interesting to see whether Kadyrov says anything. Despite what he's said before, my guess is he will stick with Putin.
Two questions:
1) If Prigozhin has to run, where might he run to? Going west ain't going to look good at all. The guy is in trouble.
2) If we had to choose one of the following as most likely to be a US or NATO plant, or at least substantially US or NATO-owned, who would we choose? Putin, Shoygu, Prigozhin.
Mr Johnson's discussion of submarine design and safety engineering.
Are these dreary columns about Johnson's fridge and the Titan catastrophe the sort of cutting, thrusting political commentary Dacre (which autocorrects as "sacred") thought he was paying for?
Next week it’s going to be about the perils of trying to let down a female, scouse ex-nurse, admirer by making outlandish promises that any rational human would know are bollocks and then trying to assure her it was everyone else’s fault and you would never treat a woman badly. Honest.
Mr Johnson's discussion of submarine design and safety engineering.
Are these dreary columns about Johnson's fridge and the Titan catastrophe the sort of cutting, thrusting political commentary Dacre (which autocorrects as "sacred") thought he was paying for?
Next week it’s going to be about the perils of trying to let down a female, scouse ex-nurse, admirer by making outlandish promises that any rational human would know are bollocks and then trying to assure her it was everyone else’s fault and you would never treat a woman badly. Honest.
When you two have finished whingeing about what's in the media...
It's going to be interesting to see whether Kadyrov says anything. Despite what he's said before, my guess is he will stick with Putin.
Two questions:
1) If Prigozhin has to run, where might he run to? Going west ain't going to look good at all. The guy is in trouble.
2) If we had to choose one of the following as most likely to be a US or NATO plant, or at least substantially US or NATO-owned, who would we choose? Putin, Shoygu, Prigozhin.
Putin.
His record of strengthening and empowering NATO while making Russia look weak, ineffectual and generally useless can't possibly be an accident.
I think Prigozhin has been watching The Death of Stalin and gone full General Zhukov.
I’m off to represent the entire Red army at the buffet
I have got to watch that again. It was brilliant, Zhukov was my favourite character.
That’s largely because Jason Isaacs is great actor,
Prigozhin looks more like Steve Buscemi.
I haven't watched that, but Zhukov and Moskalenko arresting Beria in the Kremlin was...memorable.
But was Beria a British asset? Some believe he may well have been. Recruited in the Caucasus back in 1918 and helped Britain out in the Germany negotiations after WW2, so the story goes.
Mr Johnson's discussion of submarine design and safety engineering.
Are these dreary columns about Johnson's fridge and the Titan catastrophe the sort of cutting, thrusting political commentary Dacre (which autocorrects as "sacred") thought he was paying for?
Next week it’s going to be about the perils of trying to let down a female, scouse ex-nurse, admirer by making outlandish promises that any rational human would know are bollocks and then trying to assure her it was everyone else’s fault and you would never treat a woman badly. Honest.
When you two have finished whingeing about what's in the media...
What? What do we do when we dual handedly finish whingeing about what’s in the media? Guidance please.
I think Prigozhin has been watching The Death of Stalin and gone full General Zhukov.
You laugh, but. He probably has. They’ve all watched it.
Should have watched Game of Thrones. "When you play the Game of Thrones, either you win, or you die."
I don't think Prigozhin is going to win.
It's hard to believe up to now at least that he has not had the official nod from his master to have digs at the army command, but it's also hard to believe the latest stuff would be something they would accept. Perhaps he simply has gone bonkers.
Igor Girkin, a former commander in Russia's military who frequently criticizes how Putin is conducting the Ukraine war, said "a coup attempt is underway."
"If this isn't a fake [which it can be], the military coup has started," Girkin wrote on Telegram. "But if it isn't a fake, then the situation with the face-off between MoD and Wagner is out of control and needs immediate involvement by the president. If we still have him at all..."
Igor Girkin, a former commander in Russia's military who frequently criticizes how Putin is conducting the Ukraine war, said "a coup attempt is underway."
"If this isn't a fake [which it can be], the military coup has started," Girkin wrote on Telegram. "But if it isn't a fake, then the situation with the face-off between MoD and Wagner is out of control and needs immediate involvement by the president. If we still have him at all..."
Headed back towards Trussland. Selby will show us if it really is going this badly for the Tories. Remember Labour hasn't had a swing big enough to take a seat like that in any BE yet.
LLG 68% is the highest this Parliament. Truly remarkable polling because Refuk is only on 2%.
Igor Girkin, a former commander in Russia's military who frequently criticizes how Putin is conducting the Ukraine war, said "a coup attempt is underway."
"If this isn't a fake [which it can be], the military coup has started," Girkin wrote on Telegram. "But if it isn't a fake, then the situation with the face-off between MoD and Wagner is out of control and needs immediate involvement by the president. If we still have him at all..."
I think Prigozhin has been watching The Death of Stalin and gone full General Zhukov.
You laugh, but. He probably has. They’ve all watched it.
Should have watched Game of Thrones. "When you play the Game of Thrones, either you win, or you die."
I don't think Prigozhin is going to win.
I think this is more like Tukhashevsky´s fall. Very brutal times ahead in Russia.
… Tukhachevsky's confession, which survives in the archives, is dappled with a brown spray that was later found to be blood-spattered by a body in motion...
It’s far less controlled than that, I think ? Stalin’s Terror was a pitiless exercise of pure power; this seems less deliberate chaos.
Igor Girkin, a former commander in Russia's military who frequently criticizes how Putin is conducting the Ukraine war, said "a coup attempt is underway."
"If this isn't a fake [which it can be], the military coup has started," Girkin wrote on Telegram. "But if it isn't a fake, then the situation with the face-off between MoD and Wagner is out of control and needs immediate involvement by the president. If we still have him at all..."
Comments
From the page you linked to:
Please explain how In the year ending December 2022, 48,700 decisions were made on applications for residential developments, of which 35,600 (73%) were granted = 87% approved?
IF you wish to split hairs, or have a row, fine, I'll retract and say you ARE a lefty, if you want me to.
There are no truly liberal voices let alone power blocs in Russia now. Just squabbles among ultra nationalist warlords.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wagner#Death_of_Natalie_Wood
I think the figure is that of those applications that are decided - 90% are approved. So only 10% refused. There are other applications that aren't decided.
For all the planning applications that are 'made' the number of applications that are approved is lower, because there are a lot that are withdrawn for any number of reasons, could be procedural problems, defective information etc, or because the applicant realised it wasn't going to get approved.
The poor planning staff are so behind since COVID that many applications are going to appeal for non-determination and this takes resources away from the planners and makes things worse on a vicuous cycle.
s73 modifications (often necessary due to mistakes by third parties) which should take 6 weeks take over a year and by the time you get them the permission is nearly expired and funders are so pedantic that you can't get the funding in time.
I could go on but many planning permissions are never implemented simply because the council is too slow or pedantic and it is better to keep the planning officer happy and avoid going to committee, and then if the conditions make the project unviable at least you can sell the site to someone else who can put in a new application, as one's funds and energy are exhausted.
The neighbours having been making all kinds of planning objections….
Let them object to one phone mast and before you know it they will be objecting to factor 3 earthquakes and gigatons of fission products.
Tommy Lee Jones: These things are gonna sell like hotcakes!
Gary Busey: Absolutely.
Tommy Lee Jones: What are you gonna do when you get two hundred million dollars in the bank?
Gary Busey: Buy the Presidency!
The Tory Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch has asked Ofsted to carry out a snap inspection of a school because, apparently, she believes a spoof story that a child at the school identifies as a cat.
This MP has risen to Cabinet rank.
Kemi is moron.
But as with everything just now - who knows what's pantomime and what's real.
Been there, done that.
The point about under resourcing of planning departments is true but even if they had lots more money and staff the problems wouldn't go away. They are ultimately rooted in how complex the government has made the planning system. It isn't functioning beyond a very basic level in terms of turning decisions out and they keep putting new demands on it (fire safety is the latest) without resources to pay for it.
The system does not work. The fact that 73% of residential applications may be approved doesn't change that.
In part due to ridiculous management of inadequate power grid (and visa versa).
And consider workers who must work outside and/or without a/c to do their jobs. Last Tuesday in Dallas, with temps over 100F, a USPS letter carrier collapsed and subsequently died, possibly from heat stroke or similar.
Can vividly remember one summer, when I was down in Louisiana and staying with relatives. Who'd contracted to have their roof repaired. Crew showed up and did just that . . . in blazing sun with temp in shade in 90s and humidity about 80%.
Me, myself and I once worked for a summer in aluminium plant outside New Orleans, in similar weather. With added twist that temps at the "pots" where molten aluminum was being refined were about 140F. In addition to water fountains about every 20 feet, the company had salt tablet dispensers.
Used 'em both, frequently. And during working hours would piss nary a drop!
"The leftovers of Wagners on the outskirts of Bakhmut opened fire on the regular roads of the Russian Federation.
Our assault brigades see everything, systematic strikes are now being carried out on the positions of the Russians.
You would hear the radio broadcast of these *** now.
The impression is that part of the Russian regular troops are killing their own, and it seems that part of the military is supporting Prigozhin. While it is not clear what is finally happening, it is a bloodbath"
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1672329674729373696
In my part of the world, that's usually about turning structures into dwellings. These can be back garden sheds or buildings and can also be buildings whose original intention (and approved planning status) was as storage but which have been turned into unlicensed private rental properties by unscrupulous landlords. Very often they try to keep these dwellings below the radar in terms of paying council tax so the Council needs to crack down on these unauthorised dwellings.
There's also HMOs where up to 20 people live and where for example the electrical circuitry can't cope with the demand or load and represents a fire hazard.
"Full body cancer" was the phrase I heard.
Possibly just a "Scare the young'uns" anecdote. But it's not a phrase I like to revisit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5zsSpCfQas
What I don't understand is that it has been made clear that Russia using nuclear weapons would have 'catastrophic consequences' for them. And yet on the issue of blowing up an enormous nuclear power plant which would be far worse than a single tactical nuke all we get is silence in public. Please to god I hope some sort of message is being conveyed privately.
So if you want to get a conservatory, you have a 90% approval rate.
If you want to build a house, you have a 73% approval rate.
The fact that people already with houses can get conservatories added to their home easily doesn't resolve the housing crisis. Unsurprisingly.
There's a selection bias at play here, only those who think they would be approved apply and even then more than a quarter are rejected.
Thanks for the fair enough remark.
"❗️Putin has been informed about the situation around Prigozhin, all the necessary measures are being taken" Peskov said.
Now’s the time to attack, Ukraine.
I don't think Prigozhin is going to win.
I am not aware of any other country our population density having the system you desire. It would lead to the countryside being built on in a massively inefficient and unsustainable way.
Westminster Voting Intention:
LAB: 47% (+3)
CON: 25% (-3)
LDM: 13% (=)
GRN: 8% (+2)
SNP: 4% (=)
RFM: 2% (=)
Via @IpsosUK, 14-20 Jun.
Changes w/ 10-16 May.
SKS fans explain, please?
GoT Spoiler Warning: Of course in Game of Thrones the original occupant of the throne and every single claimant to the throne ended up deceased. And the throne went instead to a crippled boy whom nobody had considered relevant. Be good if the same happens in Russia.
Prigozhin being the big voice and stopping things puts him in a position of being , to the US for example, “ someone we can do business with”.
He gets Kudos, wealth and power but he’s a Russian nationalist but whatever you think of that I reckon he’s also a pragmatist who likes his soldiers in theory and also sees the main chance.
For the west they don’t need Russia to descend into chaos because you don’t want those nukes dispersed.
Will be interesting to see if any noises from the Chechens because if they suddenly toe the Prigozhin line it’s all over for the current Russian military establishment who will carry a very painful life ending can.
😬😬
Natalie Wood.
Hat and coat.
Mr Johnson's discussion of submarine design and safety engineering.
Labour's share remains at 45% or higher (irrespective of the incredulity of some on here).
The gap remains therefore 18-20%.
They have a sensible, clear and unambiguous zonal planning system that NIMBYs do not get a say in, with building regs, so if someone wants to build a house they can buy land in a residential zone and simply and easily build within that zone to the building regs. Neighbours in Japan do not get to object or get any input at all in what other people do with their own land.
As a result the city of Tokyo alone has had more homes built in a year than the entirety of England combined. Tokyo's population is growing fast due to people moving to the city, but house prices aren't.
https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c60
https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-death-of-stalin
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66005256
Prigozhin may soon be an ex-Prigozhin, I reckon.
It's going to be interesting to see whether Kadyrov says anything. Despite what he's said before, my guess is he will stick with Putin.
Two questions:
1) If Prigozhin has to run, where might he run to? Going west ain't going to look good at all. The guy is in trouble.
2) If we had to choose one of the following as most likely to be a US or NATO plant, or at least substantially US or NATO-owned, who would we choose? Putin, Shoygu, Prigozhin.
Prigozhin looks more like Steve Buscemi.
His record of strengthening and empowering NATO while making Russia look weak, ineffectual and generally useless can't possibly be an accident.
But was Beria a British asset? Some believe he may well have been. Recruited in the Caucasus back in 1918 and helped Britain out in the Germany negotiations after WW2, so the story goes.
"If this isn't a fake [which it can be], the military coup has started," Girkin wrote on Telegram. "But if it isn't a fake, then the situation with the face-off between MoD and Wagner is out of control and needs immediate involvement by the president. If we still have him at all..."
https://www.newsweek.com/wagner-leader-declares-war-russian-military-after-alleged-attack-1808765
"Your fookin' face".
It’s far less controlled than that, I think ?
Stalin’s Terror was a pitiless exercise of pure power; this seems less deliberate chaos.
1) It is a coup and they take each other out;
2) They don't blow up Zaporizhia on the way.