Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
Appalling, one reason I am a supporter of the Save the Parish movement which has now elected members to the C of E Synod
From a social and cultural point of view I don't disagree with you.
I had left (both the CoE and Wythall) by the time the church closed its doors in 1986. Friends who wanted a church wedding had to use Tanworth in Arden Church (famous for being both the final resting place of dour rocker Nick Drake and motorcycle legend Mike Hailwood) some 6 or so miles away. People of Hollywood and Wythall had no heritage links to Tanworth in Arden, it was even in a different county. There is a new "church" in Hollywood/Wythall which I have not seen. I am guessing it is a glorified village hall.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
Naturally confident about expressing anything they happen to read, prone to large egos so inclined to see themselves as special and insightful compared to the herd, and confusing their own eloquence for expertise.
Much like internet commentators, but usually better looking and less likely to achieve self reflection from peers laughing at them.
Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
Appalling, one reason I am a supporter of the Save the Parish movement which has now elected members to the C of E Synod
I would've thought you of all people would be delighted to see redundant ecclesiastical relics being transformed into character properties for minted buyers? After all, every chapel conversion that's done up to the nines as if ready for a World of Interiors photoshoot, followed swiftly by an appearance on Escape to the Country valued at £850,000, is another newly created opportunity for the children of the not-at-all meek to inherit a small chunk of the Earth at some point further down the line.
Absolutely not. I don't think many of the Old Rectories should have been sold to private buyers either.
There are plenty of old Manor Houses or Oast Houses or big detached 20th or 21st century properties which can be bought and passed down the family line via private inheritance. Church buildings should be inherited by Church congregations and Vicars and Bishops and Deans
The problem that you have, of course, is that many of these congregations consist of about three octogenarian spinsters who gather to receive communion every third Sunday of the month from a vicar who rotates around a circuit of half-a-dozen parishes. Funding all those piles must be a tremendous headache for the Church Commissioners.
Sell the excess buildings, on the other hand, and:
+The CofE has fewer properties to maintain, and more capital to spend on new vestments and such like - perhaps even a diocesan minibus to transport all fourteen surviving worshippers in the area to a single church to do Jesus stuff together each Sunday? +Much needed new homes are created +We get to see Nicki Chapman show Richard and Moira from Basingstoke around their dream retirement property in Herefordshire as light entertainment on a Tuesday afternoon
I mean, what's not to like?
The C of E was, of course, founded in a huge act of mass Changing Rooms and the conversion of church property to homes, farms, stores, etc. So that would be very much in the tradition of Henry VIII.
Most Roman Catholic churches in England at the Reformation simply became C of E churches, it was mainly the Roman Catholic monasteries that were demolished and the land sold off for other uses
Christ on a bike, Ronaldo hot off his $100s millions from the Saudis, is now shilling for Binance...the under multiple criminal investigations Binance. He surely can't need the money.
Big time Jezza supporter & been a howling shitwit long before coming out as an antivaxxer...reason number 104947472 why we shouldn't take any notice of celebs opinions on politics, life, the universe, just because they are famous.
They are good at acting, nothing more.
Not entirely true - Arnie, for example, was a decent governor, and better elder statesman.
Big time Jezza supporter & been a howling shitwit long before coming out as an antivaxxer...reason number 104947472 why we shouldn't take any notice of celebs opinions on politics, life, the universe, just because they are famous.
They are good at acting, nothing more.
Not sure that is even true. Seems quite a few just play a version of themselves every time...cough cough Hugh Grant.
Bit unfair. Jeremy Thorpe? And although he did play the same 'type' in all those Notting Hill genre films it isn't by all accounts what he's like irl. He's a bit of a misery guts.
Christ on a bike, Ronaldo hot off his $100s millions from the Saudis, is now shilling for Binance...the under multiple criminal investigations Binance. He surely can't need the money.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
1 Wages in the South are only 1.5 times those in the North, average property prices in the South are 2.5 times those in the North and in London 5 times those in the North. So even with a new job on a slightly lower wage you could still buy a property more easily without assistance.
2 With more wfh childcare is less of an issue and by schoolage less of an issue still.
Many will have moved from family and friends in the North and Midlands, Wales and Scotland to the bright lights of London who could easily move back to buy a cheaper property.
If we cut immigration properly of course we wouldn't have population growth needing as much new housing. The average British woman now has just 1.56 children, well below the 2.1 replacement level
On point 1, you are assuming, of course, that there are equal amounts of similar jobs available. There simply aren't many openings for qualified accountants, solicitors and financial advisors around here.
On point 1, you are assuming, of course, that there are equal amounts of similar jobs available. There simply aren't many openings for qualified accountants, solicitors and financial advisors around here.
There are plenty in Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffeld, Edinburgh, Nottingham etc all with house prices about a third on average of those in London
Might be part retaliation for ongoing strike talk? But more likely just scratching around for easy ways to cut costs.
Well yes. You might think a Conservative government would have a concept of supply and demand, though. As for cutting costs. Well. We'll see many more on agency supply.
Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
Appalling, one reason I am a supporter of the Save the Parish movement which has now elected members to the C of E Synod
I would've thought you of all people would be delighted to see redundant ecclesiastical relics being transformed into character properties for minted buyers? After all, every chapel conversion that's done up to the nines as if ready for a World of Interiors photoshoot, followed swiftly by an appearance on Escape to the Country valued at £850,000, is another newly created opportunity for the children of the not-at-all meek to inherit a small chunk of the Earth at some point further down the line.
Absolutely not. I don't think many of the Old Rectories should have been sold to private buyers either.
There are plenty of old Manor Houses or Oast Houses or big detached 20th or 21st century properties which can be bought and passed down the family line via private inheritance. Church buildings should be inherited by Church congregations and Vicars and Bishops and Deans
The problem that you have, of course, is that many of these congregations consist of about three octogenarian spinsters who gather to receive communion every third Sunday of the month from a vicar who rotates around a circuit of half-a-dozen parishes. Funding all those piles must be a tremendous headache for the Church Commissioners.
Sell the excess buildings, on the other hand, and:
+The CofE has fewer properties to maintain, and more capital to spend on new vestments and such like - perhaps even a diocesan minibus to transport all fourteen surviving worshippers in the area to a single church to do Jesus stuff together each Sunday? +Much needed new homes are created +We get to see Nicki Chapman show Richard and Moira from Basingstoke around their dream retirement property in Herefordshire as light entertainment on a Tuesday afternoon
I mean, what's not to like?
We have 50 in our rural congregation and they aren't all pensioners.
The Church has £8 billion in assets, owns much lucrative property it rents out in central London and around the country as one of the UK's biggest landowners and also has many profitable investments in the stock market.
It should have more than enough to keep its churches going even if its congregations fell to just a handful in rural areas each.
At most there is usually only 1 Church of England church per 500-1,000 people and more often 1 per 10,000 people in the local population so it is not as if church property sold for residential accomodation will make much difference to the housing situation anyway (and most of it would be far too expensive for first time buyers). Old Rectories are usually over £1 million each sale price and even converted churches and chapels regularly £500k+to buy
Since when did a good Tory ever care about the affordability of property? Stratospheric prices are to be celebrated. They mean that well-heeled pensioners get to sit on fortunes that make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside, or can be tapped through equity release products to finance a new kitchen and a round the world cruise, and heirs can retire early and enjoy a luxury lifestyle when they inherit. These are your people and the maintenance of their privileges is your raison d'etre.
Besides, if the Church had enough money to maintain its vast estates of hugely expensive listed buildings then individual parishes wouldn't constantly be launching appeals to do up the tower or replace the lead on the roof or whatever, and all those artfully hand painted fundraising progress thermometers wouldn't exist.
On point 1, you are assuming, of course, that there are equal amounts of similar jobs available. There simply aren't many openings for qualified accountants, solicitors and financial advisors around here.
There are plenty in Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffeld, Edinburgh, Nottingham etc all with house prices about a third on average of those in London
More than there are around here, yes. But far fewer than in London. You are merely urging that the problem moves to regional hubs. Plus. Who does the entry level work in London? Somebody has too.
Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
Appalling, one reason I am a supporter of the Save the Parish movement which has now elected members to the C of E Synod
I would've thought you of all people would be delighted to see redundant ecclesiastical relics being transformed into character properties for minted buyers? After all, every chapel conversion that's done up to the nines as if ready for a World of Interiors photoshoot, followed swiftly by an appearance on Escape to the Country valued at £850,000, is another newly created opportunity for the children of the not-at-all meek to inherit a small chunk of the Earth at some point further down the line.
Absolutely not. I don't think many of the Old Rectories should have been sold to private buyers either.
There are plenty of old Manor Houses or Oast Houses or big detached 20th or 21st century properties which can be bought and passed down the family line via private inheritance. Church buildings should be inherited by Church congregations and Vicars and Bishops and Deans
The problem that you have, of course, is that many of these congregations consist of about three octogenarian spinsters who gather to receive communion every third Sunday of the month from a vicar who rotates around a circuit of half-a-dozen parishes. Funding all those piles must be a tremendous headache for the Church Commissioners.
Sell the excess buildings, on the other hand, and:
+The CofE has fewer properties to maintain, and more capital to spend on new vestments and such like - perhaps even a diocesan minibus to transport all fourteen surviving worshippers in the area to a single church to do Jesus stuff together each Sunday? +Much needed new homes are created +We get to see Nicki Chapman show Richard and Moira from Basingstoke around their dream retirement property in Herefordshire as light entertainment on a Tuesday afternoon
I mean, what's not to like?
We have 50 in our rural congregation and they aren't all pensioners.
The Church has £8 billion in assets, owns much lucrative property it rents out in central London and around the country as one of the UK's biggest landowners and also has many profitable investments in the stock market.
It should have more than enough to keep its churches going even if its congregations fell to just a handful in rural areas each.
At most there is usually only 1 Church of England church per 500-1,000 people and more often 1 per 10,000 people in the local population so it is not as if church property sold for residential accomodation will make much difference to the housing situation anyway (and most of it would be far too expensive for first time buyers). Old Rectories are usually over £1 million each sale price and even converted churches and chapels regularly £500k+to buy
Since when did a good Tory ever care about the affordability of property? Stratospheric prices are to be celebrated. They mean that well-heeled pensioners get to sit on fortunes that make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside, or can be tapped through equity release products to finance a new kitchen and a round the world cruise, and heirs can retire early and enjoy a luxury lifestyle when they inherit. These are your people and the maintenance of their privileges is your raison d'etre.
Besides, if the Church had enough money to maintain its vast estates of hugely expensive listed buildings then individual parishes wouldn't constantly be launching appeals to do up the tower or replace the lead on the roof or whatever, and all those artfully hand painted fundraising progress thermometers wouldn't exist.
As I said, there are plenty of detached houses they can buy which would be much more practical than living in a converted chapel or church.
The Tory Party's historic role is to preserve the established Church of England and its traditions and assets as much as it is to preserve the assets and wealth of the middle classes and landed gentry and the Monarchy. It just added some free market liberals and working class Patriots and ex council home owners onto that coalition in the 20th century.
If the Church of England scrapped church planting and cut spending on diocesan administrators and trendy schemes it would have a lot more money to be put into Parish churches
And a countryside retreat found on the C of E website too (though the locals will insist on burying their grannies in the garden). Seriously, I am a bit startled.
Unfortunately the current evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury and his wing of the Church are more interested in church planting in trendy areas of big cities in living rooms or backrooms of cafes and restaurants or modern halls than preserving the historic Church of England churches. While also combining sometimes as many as 5 or 6 rural churches under 1 Minister.
Hence the more Anglo Catholic wing of the C of E, liberal and conservative, formed Save the Parish and as the likely next Archbishop will be a liberal Catholic on the usual rotation that may slow down some of this sad trend https://savetheparish.com/
Though the obvious liberal catholic, currently Our Man In York was pretty grimly realistic about closing and merging parishes when he was in Chelmsford. You can slice and dice the financial figures in different ways depending on what answer you want to get, but the bottom line is that a lot of parishes are a long way from bringing in enough income to support a parish priest. (A lot of those that do are the fortunate ones that have a church hall that they've been able to let out to a nursery during the week. Five days of reliable rental income for relatively little hassle.) I'm about as keen on smoothie evangelicalism as you are, but they do put their money where their mouths are.
The whole thing is an echo of the ongoing conversation here. It would be great to have more parishes having more clergy. But that depends on persuading churchgoers to pay more (quite a lot more) and on more of them being prepared to live the crazy life of a vicar. And neither of those is popular either.
And yes, there is a hefty and growing pile of assets the church has. But we shouldn't carelessly dip into them to spend on us now, as some would like. A lot of the assets are there to match known liabilities, especially pensions, in another echo of the wider conversation. As for the rest of them- if the church isn't prepared to take a long view of history, who can?
There was the thought that lockdown would result in a big uptick in birthrates, did that actually prove to be true? I would hazard a guess divorce rates went up as well.
Quite the opposite, it caused a massive collapse in birth rates.
Oddly enough telling young, fertile people they can't go out and hook up with other people is not conducive to boosting birth rates. I wonder why?
On point 1, you are assuming, of course, that there are equal amounts of similar jobs available. There simply aren't many openings for qualified accountants, solicitors and financial advisors around here.
There are plenty in Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffeld, Edinburgh, Nottingham etc all with house prices about a third on average of those in London
More than there are around here, yes. But far fewer than in London. You are merely urging that the problem moves to regional hubs. Plus. Who does the entry level work in London? Somebody has too.
It doesn't, as regional hubs are not competing with New York, LA and Silicon Valley and Paris and Frankfurt and Sydney for global talent like London is. So will always be much cheaper.
You can also do entry work in London in your 20s then move North to start a family and buy property in your 30s
Christ on a bike, Ronaldo hot off his $100s millions from the Saudis, is now shilling for Binance...the under multiple criminal investigations Binance. He surely can't need the money.
"He surely can't need the money."
Maybe he put his money in firms like Binance, so now he does?
Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
Appalling, one reason I am a supporter of the Save the Parish movement which has now elected members to the C of E Synod
I would've thought you of all people would be delighted to see redundant ecclesiastical relics being transformed into character properties for minted buyers? After all, every chapel conversion that's done up to the nines as if ready for a World of Interiors photoshoot, followed swiftly by an appearance on Escape to the Country valued at £850,000, is another newly created opportunity for the children of the not-at-all meek to inherit a small chunk of the Earth at some point further down the line.
Absolutely not. I don't think many of the Old Rectories should have been sold to private buyers either.
There are plenty of old Manor Houses or Oast Houses or big detached 20th or 21st century properties which can be bought and passed down the family line via private inheritance. Church buildings should be inherited by Church congregations and Vicars and Bishops and Deans
The problem that you have, of course, is that many of these congregations consist of about three octogenarian spinsters who gather to receive communion every third Sunday of the month from a vicar who rotates around a circuit of half-a-dozen parishes. Funding all those piles must be a tremendous headache for the Church Commissioners.
Sell the excess buildings, on the other hand, and:
+The CofE has fewer properties to maintain, and more capital to spend on new vestments and such like - perhaps even a diocesan minibus to transport all fourteen surviving worshippers in the area to a single church to do Jesus stuff together each Sunday? +Much needed new homes are created +We get to see Nicki Chapman show Richard and Moira from Basingstoke around their dream retirement property in Herefordshire as light entertainment on a Tuesday afternoon
I mean, what's not to like?
We have 50 in our rural congregation and they aren't all pensioners.
The Church has £8 billion in assets, owns much lucrative property it rents out in central London and around the country as one of the UK's biggest landowners and also has many profitable investments in the stock market.
It should have more than enough to keep its churches going even if its congregations fell to just a handful in rural areas each.
At most there is usually only 1 Church of England church per 500-1,000 people and more often 1 per 10,000 people in the local population so it is not as if church property sold for residential accomodation will make much difference to the housing situation anyway (and most of it would be far too expensive for first time buyers). Old Rectories are usually over £1 million each sale price and even converted churches and chapels regularly £500k+to buy
Since when did a good Tory ever care about the affordability of property? Stratospheric prices are to be celebrated. They mean that well-heeled pensioners get to sit on fortunes that make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside, or can be tapped through equity release products to finance a new kitchen and a round the world cruise, and heirs can retire early and enjoy a luxury lifestyle when they inherit. These are your people and the maintenance of their privileges is your raison d'etre.
Besides, if the Church had enough money to maintain its vast estates of hugely expensive listed buildings then individual parishes wouldn't constantly be launching appeals to do up the tower or replace the lead on the roof or whatever, and all those artfully hand painted fundraising progress thermometers wouldn't exist.
As I said, there are plenty of detached houses they can buy which would be much more practical than living in a converted chapel or church.
The Tory Party's historic role is to preserve the established Church of England and its traditions and assets as much as it is to preserve the assets and wealth of the middle classes and landed gentry and the Monarchy.
If the Church of England scrapped church planting and cut spending on diocesan administrators and trendy schemes it would have a lot more money to be put into Parish churches
Re your claim that rectories don't get sold off - surely they should be, in favour of much more modern and practical detached houses which can be run on a vicar's stipend. But perhaps they do things differently in the C of E. I know of one huge 18th century local manse here in Scotland which got sold off for, or repurposed by the C of S as, a social/community home, and the rev got a modern detached house almost next door to the kirkyard.
It's via Wings, so pinch of salt on any commentary is needed given his dislike of the SNP, but apparently the intention is to see a majority of Scottish seats being won by the SNP as a mandate for independence, rather than previously a majority of the electorate backing Indy supporting parties.
If so, then support that stance or not it does indicate a lowering of ambition about the next GE for the party
There was the thought that lockdown would result in a big uptick in birthrates, did that actually prove to be true? I would hazard a guess divorce rates went up as well.
Quite the opposite, it caused a massive collapse in birth rates.
Oddly enough telling young, fertile people they can't go out and hook up with other people is not conducive to boosting birth rates. I wonder why?
You do need a little time to get to the mummy and daddy stage, even before the usual 9 months, so that can't be it for 2021 and 2022.
On point 1, you are assuming, of course, that there are equal amounts of similar jobs available. There simply aren't many openings for qualified accountants, solicitors and financial advisors around here.
There are plenty in Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffeld, Edinburgh, Nottingham etc all with house prices about a third on average of those in London
More than there are around here, yes. But far fewer than in London. You are merely urging that the problem moves to regional hubs. Plus. Who does the entry level work in London? Somebody has too.
It doesn't, as regional hubs are not competing with New York, LA and Silicon Valley and Paris and Frankfurt and Sydney for global talent like London is. So will always be much cheaper.
You can also do entry work in London in your 20s then move North to start a family and buy property in your 30s
Yes but. And this may come as an amazing revelation to you. Not everyone arranges their entire existence around maximising their property wealth.
There was the thought that lockdown would result in a big uptick in birthrates, did that actually prove to be true? I would hazard a guess divorce rates went up as well.
Quite the opposite, it caused a massive collapse in birth rates.
Oddly enough telling young, fertile people they can't go out and hook up with other people is not conducive to boosting birth rates. I wonder why?
Which is an interesting proposition. How many of average conceptions are in established relationships with people living together, vs those to hook ups and fresh relationships, I.e. the ones that were prevented during lockdown.
Big time Jezza supporter & been a howling shitwit long before coming out as an antivaxxer...reason number 104947472 why we shouldn't take any notice of celebs opinions on politics, life, the universe, just because they are famous.
They are good at acting, nothing more.
FFS. Ronald Reagan was bad at politics??? And had you heard what the President of Ukraine did before he was elected?
Seriously…that is idiotic. If you had restricted your ire to simply stating “we should take no more notice of their opinions than anyone else” you’d have a point but why shouldn’t actors be as good as politics as geologists, bus conductors, secretaries, jockeys, etc etc? They can usually deliver a speech at least, and their opinions are worth as much as anyone else’s. Whether you take any notice is up to you.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
Anyone who keeps saying 'the answer to this is to build vast numbers of houses' needs to ask themselves the question 'who builds the houses?, then look in to the actual rate of housing delivery. The private sector has built a similar number of houses each year for half a century, about 150,000, and then they blame the planning system for holding them back, even though the planning system issues about twice as many permissions every year than houses that are completed by developers.
There was the thought that lockdown would result in a big uptick in birthrates, did that actually prove to be true? I would hazard a guess divorce rates went up as well.
Quite the opposite, it caused a massive collapse in birth rates.
Oddly enough telling young, fertile people they can't go out and hook up with other people is not conducive to boosting birth rates. I wonder why?
You do need a little time to get to the mummy and daddy stage, even before the usual 9 months, so that can't be it for 2021 and 2022.
Eh? Why do you?
A woman can meet someone in a club and be a mother eight and a half months later.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
Anyone who keeps saying 'the answer to this is to build vast numbers of houses' needs to ask themselves the question 'who builds the houses?, then look in to the actual rate of housing delivery. The private sector has built a similar number of houses each year for half a century, about 150,000, and then they blame the planning system for holding them back, even though the planning system issues about twice as many permissions every year than houses that are completed by developers.
Hmm, presumably the rate of council house building has varied rather more!
And a countryside retreat found on the C of E website too (though the locals will insist on burying their grannies in the garden). Seriously, I am a bit startled.
Unfortunately the current evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury and his wing of the Church are more interested in church planting in trendy areas of big cities in living rooms or backrooms of cafes and restaurants or modern halls than preserving the historic Church of England churches. While also combining sometimes as many as 5 or 6 rural churches under 1 Minister.
Hence the more Anglo Catholic wing of the C of E, liberal and conservative, formed Save the Parish and as the likely next Archbishop will be a liberal Catholic on the usual rotation that may slow down some of this sad trend https://savetheparish.com/
Though the obvious liberal catholic, currently Our Man In York was pretty grimly realistic about closing and merging parishes when he was in Chelmsford. You can slice and dice the financial figures in different ways depending on what answer you want to get, but the bottom line is that a lot of parishes are a long way from bringing in enough income to support a parish priest. (A lot of those that do are the fortunate ones that have a church hall that they've been able to let out to a nursery during the week. Five days of reliable rental income for relatively little hassle.) I'm about as keen on smoothie evangelicalism as you are, but they do put their money where their mouths are.
The whole thing is an echo of the ongoing conversation here. It would be great to have more parishes having more clergy. But that depends on persuading churchgoers to pay more (quite a lot more) and on more of them being prepared to live the crazy life of a vicar. And neither of those is popular either.
And yes, there is a hefty and growing pile of assets the church has. But we shouldn't carelessly dip into them to spend on us now, as some would like. A lot of the assets are there to match known liabilities, especially pensions, in another echo of the wider conversation. As for the rest of them- if the church isn't prepared to take a long view of history, who can?
He is still more supportive of the Parish system than Welby is.
Evangelical churches have bigger congregations on average as they don't have the assets and investments of the C of E and so need to raise more funds from their congregations.
The C of E is one of the biggest landlords in the UK, has lots of stock market investments (more than enough to cover pensions and beyond) and plenty which could be put into Parishes regardless of congregation size.
One advantage of being a Vicar is you get a house mortgage and rent free, particularly beneficial in the current climate, even if you only get a very average salary you also get a reasonable pension.
So if you haven't got millionaire parents who can buy you a property in your 30s mortgage free and find the rent too much on your income, why not consider theological college?
There was the thought that lockdown would result in a big uptick in birthrates, did that actually prove to be true? I would hazard a guess divorce rates went up as well.
Quite the opposite, it caused a massive collapse in birth rates.
Oddly enough telling young, fertile people they can't go out and hook up with other people is not conducive to boosting birth rates. I wonder why?
You do need a little time to get to the mummy and daddy stage, even before the usual 9 months, so that can't be it for 2021 and 2022.
Eh? Why do you?
A woman can meet someone in a club and be a mother eight and a half months later.
Sure, but she would quite like time to be sure daddy will still be around nine months later, at the very least. Or may be we have different experiences ...? [Edit: that last was a joke, not to be taken personally.]
Big time Jezza supporter & been a howling shitwit long before coming out as an antivaxxer...reason number 104947472 why we shouldn't take any notice of celebs opinions on politics, life, the universe, just because they are famous.
They are good at acting, nothing more.
FFS. Ronald Reagan was bad at politics??? And had you heard what the President of Ukraine did before he was elected?
Seriously…that is idiotic. If you had restricted your ire to simply stating “we should take no more notice of their opinions than anyone else” you’d have a point but why shouldn’t actors be as good as politics as geologists, bus conductors, secretaries, jockeys, etc etc? They can usually deliver a speech at least, and their opinions are worth as much as anyone else’s. Whether you take any notice is up to you.
No generalisation is meant to apply to every person in a group. I think given the context of the comment thread being that their opinions get more notice than they deserve because they are famous, that it was clear the 'they' here is targeting the kind of ill informed, confident but clueless stereotype, usually spouting off bog standard cliches or conspiracies, rather than that no actor anywhere has ever had a decent thought.
Christ on a bike, Ronaldo hot off his $100s millions from the Saudis, is now shilling for Binance...the under multiple criminal investigations Binance. He surely can't need the money.
I doubt Ronald’s himself cares or really is overly aware, his agent however is very aware of his 10% on each deal and he will definitely want his money.
Big time Jezza supporter & been a howling shitwit long before coming out as an antivaxxer...reason number 104947472 why we shouldn't take any notice of celebs opinions on politics, life, the universe, just because they are famous.
They are good at acting, nothing more.
Not entirely true - Arnie, for example, was a decent governor, and better elder statesman.
And the late, great Glenda Jackson was brilliant at acting and pretty good at politics.
There was the thought that lockdown would result in a big uptick in birthrates, did that actually prove to be true? I would hazard a guess divorce rates went up as well.
Quite the opposite, it caused a massive collapse in birth rates.
Oddly enough telling young, fertile people they can't go out and hook up with other people is not conducive to boosting birth rates. I wonder why?
You do need a little time to get to the mummy and daddy stage, even before the usual 9 months, so that can't be it for 2021 and 2022.
Eh? Why do you?
A woman can meet someone in a club and be a mother eight and a half months later.
Sure, but she would quite like time to be sure daddy will still be around nine months later, at the very least. Or may be we have different experiences ...? [Edit: that last was a joke, not to be taken personally.]
I was married to my wife before we had kids, but I know it's not the same for everyone. And even those who do get married before having kids, it's not always married 9 months before they have kids. Many people get married quite quickly, about 5 to 6 months before they have kids.
Lockdown prevented all those style of pregnancies from occurring.
Big time Jezza supporter & been a howling shitwit long before coming out as an antivaxxer...reason number 104947472 why we shouldn't take any notice of celebs opinions on politics, life, the universe, just because they are famous.
They are good at acting, nothing more.
Not entirely true - Arnie, for example, was a decent governor, and better elder statesman.
And the late, great Glenda Jackson was brilliant at acting and pretty good at politics.
And then there was Ronald Reagan of course. And Zelensky.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
1 Wages in the South are only 1.5 times those in the North, average property prices in the South are 2.5 times those in the North and in London 5 times those in the North. So even with a new job on a slightly lower wage you could still buy a property more easily without assistance.
2 With more wfh childcare is less of an issue and by schoolage less of an issue still.
Many will have moved from family and friends in the North and Midlands, Wales and Scotland to the bright lights of London who could easily move back to buy a cheaper property.
If we cut immigration properly of course we wouldn't have population growth needing as much new housing. The average British woman now has just 1.56 children, well below the 2.1 replacement level
The kind of mobility you describe will help some people, but needless to say not everyone who is priced out of the market in well-to-do areas has the option simply to up sticks (and indeed, if enough of them do then you simply cause the silly high prices to migrate and start pricing more people out in the areas where the escapees are moving to. Exhibit A: Cornwall.)
Ultimately there's no long-term solution that does not involve building, and building, and building, until supply catches up with demand and wages start to rise faster than house prices.
And don't make me laugh about restricting immigration. Somebody needs to pay the taxes to keep all those pensions in payment and stop the NHS completely collapsing into a pile of rubble, and no-one is going to ask the minted shire Tory vote to shell out themselves. That means feeding large numbers of new workers into the demographic Ponzi scheme to stop the whole thing from falling over. Besides which, whilst there's significant opposition to boat people migration, most of the electorate doesn't care how many Ukrainian refugees, Hongkongers, students, or workers in general who've been invited to do a job, end up coming over here. One thing Brexit did achieve, by shutting out hand car washers, coffee shop baristas and other forms of speculative casual migration from the EU, is to kill mass movement of labour stone dead as a public concern.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
Anyone who keeps saying 'the answer to this is to build vast numbers of houses' needs to ask themselves the question 'who builds the houses?, then look in to the actual rate of housing delivery. The private sector has built a similar number of houses each year for half a century, about 150,000, and then they blame the planning system for holding them back, even though the planning system issues about twice as many permissions every year than houses that are completed by developers.
Hmm, presumably the rate of council house building has varied rather more!
Yeah that is the big variable and the reason for the decline in overall housebuilding in the late 70's. But even if Council house building is restarted at scale then we would run straight in to capacity issues. Shortages of materials, skilled labour etc. What we are seeing at the moment is the Modern Method of Construction house factories which were supposedly the solution to this closing down or going in to administration. There are technical questions about whether MMC works but also obviously the fact is also that the market for new build houses is not strong at the moment because of high interest rates and declining prices. Those who think that we can simulatneously build millions more houses and that the prices will decline at the same time need to explain how this would work in practice.
There was the thought that lockdown would result in a big uptick in birthrates, did that actually prove to be true? I would hazard a guess divorce rates went up as well.
Quite the opposite, it caused a massive collapse in birth rates.
Oddly enough telling young, fertile people they can't go out and hook up with other people is not conducive to boosting birth rates. I wonder why?
You do need a little time to get to the mummy and daddy stage, even before the usual 9 months, so that can't be it for 2021 and 2022.
Eh? Why do you?
A woman can meet someone in a club and be a mother eight and a half months later.
Sure, but she would quite like time to be sure daddy will still be around nine months later, at the very least. Or may be we have different experiences ...? [Edit: that last was a joke, not to be taken personally.]
I was married to my wife before we had kids, but I know it's not the same for everyone. And even those who do get married before having kids, it's not always married 9 months before they have kids. Many people get married quite quickly, about 5 to 6 months before they have kids.
Lockdown prevented all those style of pregnancies from occurring.
Simply put we need to promote having less kids. There are already far too many in the world. What we also need to do however is to work out how to function with a falling population.
Regardless of what the people think that say lets encourage people to have more kids the truth is writ large worldwide. People are increasingly having less kids as education for women rises and they dont need to have 8 kids in the hope that 1 or 2 survive.
Instead of campaigning for more kids instead campaign to get governements worldwide to work out how we deal with it
Big time Jezza supporter & been a howling shitwit long before coming out as an antivaxxer...reason number 104947472 why we shouldn't take any notice of celebs opinions on politics, life, the universe, just because they are famous.
They are good at acting, nothing more.
Not sure that is even true. Seems quite a few just play a version of themselves every time...cough cough Hugh Grant.
Bit unfair. Jeremy Thorpe? And although he did play the same 'type' in all those Notting Hill genre films it isn't by all accounts what he's like irl. He's a bit of a misery guts.
Emma Thompson always seems to be cast in the role of Emma Thompson.
Meanwhile, and hard on the heels of the Times article (and others referring to the same source) on lab leak, the declassified Intelligence Community report has been published:
Remember that the story was that intelligence sources had actually determined that a virus from the Mojiang mines was genetically modified at WIV in part of a bioweapons programme before being accidentally released and three WIV staff came down with covid in late 2019 and this was "the smoking gun"?
Pretty much all of that is the opposite of what's actually come out of them. Less a smoking gun, more a scorched banana.
And
The report does say that some bits are classified to protect sources but that the classified bits agree with the unclassified bits. While it could be contended that "oh, China are lying about the seronegativity, because of course they would," that would require that the IC didn't get any independent corroboration, and that China decided to keep the people who accidentally leaked it on at the same jobs and let them keep publishing, despite the enormous damage caused.
This all doesn't mean that it WASN'T a lab leak. Just that the purported evidence was non-existent. I still keep that possibility open, even if it's considerably lower than a zoonotic spillover - it's just that there's no evidence to support it other than the lab being there (and if it was not genetically engineered, any lab with coronavirus specimens would be just as coincidental, and those exist in most large Chinese cities, anyway - and a zoonotic spillover would need to get superspread repeatedly to make the leap stick, so a large city somewhere that illegal live wildlife is in close proximity to humans would be necessary).
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
1 Wages in the South are only 1.5 times those in the North, average property prices in the South are 2.5 times those in the North and in London 5 times those in the North. So even with a new job on a slightly lower wage you could still buy a property more easily without assistance.
2 With more wfh childcare is less of an issue and by schoolage less of an issue still.
Many will have moved from family and friends in the North and Midlands, Wales and Scotland to the bright lights of London who could easily move back to buy a cheaper property.
If we cut immigration properly of course we wouldn't have population growth needing as much new housing. The average British woman now has just 1.56 children, well below the 2.1 replacement level
1.56 children. Another example of Mean differing from Mode.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
1 Wages in the South are only 1.5 times those in the North, average property prices in the South are 2.5 times those in the North and in London 5 times those in the North. So even with a new job on a slightly lower wage you could still buy a property more easily without assistance.
2 With more wfh childcare is less of an issue and by schoolage less of an issue still.
Many will have moved from family and friends in the North and Midlands, Wales and Scotland to the bright lights of London who could easily move back to buy a cheaper property.
If we cut immigration properly of course we wouldn't have population growth needing as much new housing. The average British woman now has just 1.56 children, well below the 2.1 replacement level
The kind of mobility you describe will help some people, but needless to say not everyone who is priced out of the market in well-to-do areas has the option simply to up sticks (and indeed, if enough of them do then you simply cause the silly high prices to migrate and start pricing more people out in the areas where the escapees are moving to. Exhibit A: Cornwall.)
Ultimately there's no long-term solution that does not involve building, and building, and building, until supply catches up with demand and wages start to rise faster than house prices.
And don't make me laugh about restricting immigration. Somebody needs to pay the taxes to keep all those pensions in payment and stop the NHS completely collapsing into a pile of rubble, and no-one is going to ask the minted shire Tory vote to shell out themselves. That means feeding large numbers of new workers into the demographic Ponzi scheme to stop the whole thing from falling over. Besides which, whilst there's significant opposition to boat people migration, most of the electorate doesn't care how many Ukrainian refugees, Hongkongers, students, or workers in general who've been invited to do a job, end up coming over here. One thing Brexit did achieve, by shutting out hand car washers, coffee shop baristas and other forms of speculative casual migration from the EU, is to kill mass movement of labour stone dead as a public concern.
Average wages are likely never going to rise faster than average house prices rise now, even if you destroyed all the greenbelt with new housing.
AI if anything will exacerbate that, hollowing out middle income jobs and expanding low paid insecure jobs on a worst case scenario.
The only reason our population is rising is immigration, our birthrate is falling, we should at least cut it so our population levels stabilise
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
Anyone who keeps saying 'the answer to this is to build vast numbers of houses' needs to ask themselves the question 'who builds the houses?, then look in to the actual rate of housing delivery. The private sector has built a similar number of houses each year for half a century, about 150,000, and then they blame the planning system for holding them back, even though the planning system issues about twice as many permissions every year than houses that are completed by developers.
The state. It will have to, to get us out of this shit - though that won't be a quick or easy process. It'd probably take the first Parliament of a mass housebuilding programme just to plan a swathe of new towns and suburbs, and to recruit and train additional construction workers to help to deliver them.
IIRC the last year of mass council house completions was, perhaps unsurprisingly, 1979 - and the country has failed to build as many residential properties in any single year since then. The failure to replace the social rented housing flogged off in the 80s, and, by extension, to build enough homes for our growing population ever since, is at the root of the structural socio-economic problems that we now face.
Meanwhile, and hard on the heels of the Times article (and others referring to the same source) on lab leak, the declassified Intelligence Community report has been published:
Remember that the story was that intelligence sources had actually determined that a virus from the Mojiang mines was genetically modified at WIV in part of a bioweapons programme before being accidentally released and three WIV staff came down with covid in late 2019 and this was "the smoking gun"?
Pretty much all of that is the opposite of what's actually come out of them. Less a smoking gun, more a scorched banana.
And
The report does say that some bits are classified to protect sources but that the classified bits agree with the unclassified bits. While it could be contended that "oh, China are lying about the seronegativity, because of course they would," that would require that the IC didn't get any independent corroboration, and that China decided to keep the people who accidentally leaked it on at the same jobs and let them keep publishing, despite the enormous damage caused.
This all doesn't mean that it WASN'T a lab leak. Just that the purported evidence was non-existent. I still keep that possibility open, even if it's considerably lower than a zoonotic spillover - it's just that there's no evidence to support it other than the lab being there (and if it was not genetically engineered, any lab with coronavirus specimens would be just as coincidental, and those exist in most large Chinese cities, anyway - and a zoonotic spillover would need to get superspread repeatedly to make the leap stick, so a large city somewhere that illegal live wildlife is in close proximity to humans would be necessary).
How dare you come on here with a reasoned argument backed up with evidence? Does the memory of @eadric mean nothing round here anymore?
Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
Appalling, one reason I am a supporter of the Save the Parish movement which has now elected members to the C of E Synod
I would've thought you of all people would be delighted to see redundant ecclesiastical relics being transformed into character properties for minted buyers? After all, every chapel conversion that's done up to the nines as if ready for a World of Interiors photoshoot, followed swiftly by an appearance on Escape to the Country valued at £850,000, is another newly created opportunity for the children of the not-at-all meek to inherit a small chunk of the Earth at some point further down the line.
Absolutely not. I don't think many of the Old Rectories should have been sold to private buyers either.
There are plenty of old Manor Houses or Oast Houses or big detached 20th or 21st century properties which can be bought and passed down the family line via private inheritance. Church buildings should be inherited by Church congregations and Vicars and Bishops and Deans
The problem that you have, of course, is that many of these congregations consist of about three octogenarian spinsters who gather to receive communion every third Sunday of the month from a vicar who rotates around a circuit of half-a-dozen parishes. Funding all those piles must be a tremendous headache for the Church Commissioners.
Sell the excess buildings, on the other hand, and:
+The CofE has fewer properties to maintain, and more capital to spend on new vestments and such like - perhaps even a diocesan minibus to transport all fourteen surviving worshippers in the area to a single church to do Jesus stuff together each Sunday? +Much needed new homes are created +We get to see Nicki Chapman show Richard and Moira from Basingstoke around their dream retirement property in Herefordshire as light entertainment on a Tuesday afternoon
I mean, what's not to like?
We have 50 in our rural congregation and they aren't all pensioners.
The Church has £8 billion in assets, owns much lucrative property it rents out in central London and around the country as one of the UK's biggest landowners and also has many profitable investments in the stock market.
It should have more than enough to keep its churches going even if its congregations fell to just a handful in rural areas each.
At most there is usually only 1 Church of England church per 500-1,000 people and more often 1 per 10,000 people in the local population so it is not as if church property sold for residential accomodation will make much difference to the housing situation anyway (and most of it would be far too expensive for first time buyers). Old Rectories are usually over £1 million each sale price and even converted churches and chapels regularly £500k+to buy
Since when did a good Tory ever care about the affordability of property? Stratospheric prices are to be celebrated. They mean that well-heeled pensioners get to sit on fortunes that make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside, or can be tapped through equity release products to finance a new kitchen and a round the world cruise, and heirs can retire early and enjoy a luxury lifestyle when they inherit. These are your people and the maintenance of their privileges is your raison d'etre.
Besides, if the Church had enough money to maintain its vast estates of hugely expensive listed buildings then individual parishes wouldn't constantly be launching appeals to do up the tower or replace the lead on the roof or whatever, and all those artfully hand painted fundraising progress thermometers wouldn't exist.
As I said, there are plenty of detached houses they can buy which would be much more practical than living in a converted chapel or church.
The Tory Party's historic role is to preserve the established Church of England and its traditions and assets as much as it is to preserve the assets and wealth of the middle classes and landed gentry and the Monarchy.
If the Church of England scrapped church planting and cut spending on diocesan administrators and trendy schemes it would have a lot more money to be put into Parish churches
Re your claim that rectories don't get sold off - surely they should be, in favour of much more modern and practical detached houses which can be run on a vicar's stipend. But perhaps they do things differently in the C of E. I know of one huge 18th century local manse here in Scotland which got sold off for, or repurposed by the C of S as, a social/community home, and the rev ot a modern detached house almost next door to the kirkyard.
They almost all have been. That is the whole point.
Almost all the original large 18th and 19th century Georgian and Victorian old rectories are now owned by rich investment bankers, corporate lawyers, surgeons, company directors, celebrity authors etc, complete with pools and tennis courts. The average C of E vicarage now is a 20th century modern building which is much smaller than the original parsonage was with less room for parishioners and wardens to visit and for theological books
Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
Appalling, one reason I am a supporter of the Save the Parish movement which has now elected members to the C of E Synod
I would've thought you of all people would be delighted to see redundant ecclesiastical relics being transformed into character properties for minted buyers? After all, every chapel conversion that's done up to the nines as if ready for a World of Interiors photoshoot, followed swiftly by an appearance on Escape to the Country valued at £850,000, is another newly created opportunity for the children of the not-at-all meek to inherit a small chunk of the Earth at some point further down the line.
Absolutely not. I don't think many of the Old Rectories should have been sold to private buyers either.
There are plenty of old Manor Houses or Oast Houses or big detached 20th or 21st century properties which can be bought and passed down the family line via private inheritance. Church buildings should be inherited by Church congregations and Vicars and Bishops and Deans
The problem that you have, of course, is that many of these congregations consist of about three octogenarian spinsters who gather to receive communion every third Sunday of the month from a vicar who rotates around a circuit of half-a-dozen parishes. Funding all those piles must be a tremendous headache for the Church Commissioners.
Sell the excess buildings, on the other hand, and:
+The CofE has fewer properties to maintain, and more capital to spend on new vestments and such like - perhaps even a diocesan minibus to transport all fourteen surviving worshippers in the area to a single church to do Jesus stuff together each Sunday? +Much needed new homes are created +We get to see Nicki Chapman show Richard and Moira from Basingstoke around their dream retirement property in Herefordshire as light entertainment on a Tuesday afternoon
I mean, what's not to like?
We have 50 in our rural congregation and they aren't all pensioners.
The Church has £8 billion in assets, owns much lucrative property it rents out in central London and around the country as one of the UK's biggest landowners and also has many profitable investments in the stock market.
It should have more than enough to keep its churches going even if its congregations fell to just a handful in rural areas each.
At most there is usually only 1 Church of England church per 500-1,000 people and more often 1 per 10,000 people in the local population so it is not as if church property sold for residential accomodation will make much difference to the housing situation anyway (and most of it would be far too expensive for first time buyers). Old Rectories are usually over £1 million each sale price and even converted churches and chapels regularly £500k+to buy
Since when did a good Tory ever care about the affordability of property? Stratospheric prices are to be celebrated. They mean that well-heeled pensioners get to sit on fortunes that make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside, or can be tapped through equity release products to finance a new kitchen and a round the world cruise, and heirs can retire early and enjoy a luxury lifestyle when they inherit. These are your people and the maintenance of their privileges is your raison d'etre.
Besides, if the Church had enough money to maintain its vast estates of hugely expensive listed buildings then individual parishes wouldn't constantly be launching appeals to do up the tower or replace the lead on the roof or whatever, and all those artfully hand painted fundraising progress thermometers wouldn't exist.
As I said, there are plenty of detached houses they can buy which would be much more practical than living in a converted chapel or church.
The Tory Party's historic role is to preserve the established Church of England and its traditions and assets as much as it is to preserve the assets and wealth of the middle classes and landed gentry and the Monarchy.
If the Church of England scrapped church planting and cut spending on diocesan administrators and trendy schemes it would have a lot more money to be put into Parish churches
Re your claim that rectories don't get sold off - surely they should be, in favour of much more modern and practical detached houses which can be run on a vicar's stipend. But perhaps they do things differently in the C of E. I know of one huge 18th century local manse here in Scotland which got sold off for, or repurposed by the C of S as, a social/community home, and the rev ot a modern detached house almost next door to the kirkyard.
They almost all have been. That is the whole point.
Almost all the original large 18th and 19th century Georgian and Victorian old rectories are now owned by investment bankers, corporate lawyers, surgeons, company directors, celebrity authors etc. The average C of E vicarage now is a 20th century modern building which is much smaller than the original parsonage was
Sorry - I misread something you said earlier. But the point re practicality remains.
In the end the fact that people are having less kids means that mass immigration is inevitable - it is the same for the entirety of Europe. You can't 'pull the drawbridge up'. Why would you even want to do that? The problem is that we haven't worked out how to manage immigration. It should be one of the most urgent problems for the government to deal with.
In the end the fact that people are having less kids means that mass immigration is inevitable - it is the same for the entirety of Europe. You can't 'pull the drawbridge up'. Why would you even want to do that? The problem is that we haven't worked out how to manage immigration. It should be one of the most urgent problems for the government to deal with.
You miss the fact that birth rates are falling all over the world including africa. Immigration is a ponzi scheme and the end is in sight. Governments need to start planning now for how to deal with falling populations because in the next 4 to 5 decades there wont be enough immigrants of the 20 to thirty age group. Naturally they won't because politicians are arseholes that love to kick the can
In the end the fact that people are having less kids means that mass immigration is inevitable - it is the same for the entirety of Europe. You can't 'pull the drawbridge up'. Why would you even want to do that? The problem is that we haven't worked out how to manage immigration. It should be one of the most urgent problems for the government to deal with.
You miss the fact that birth rates are falling all over the world including africa. Immigration is a ponzi scheme and the end is in sight. Governments need to start planning now for how to deal with falling populations because in the next 4 to 5 decades there wont be enough immigrants of the 20 to thirty age group. Naturally they won't because politicians are arseholes that love to kick the can
Yes, the idea that we should just import more people, even supposing that were a good strategy, completely depends on there being a surplus of people elsewhere who want to come here.
Big time Jezza supporter & been a howling shitwit long before coming out as an antivaxxer...reason number 104947472 why we shouldn't take any notice of celebs opinions on politics, life, the universe, just because they are famous.
They are good at acting, nothing more.
Not entirely true - Arnie, for example, was a decent governor, and better elder statesman.
And the late, great Glenda Jackson was brilliant at acting and pretty good at politics.
And then there was Ronald Reagan of course. And Zelensky.
In the end the fact that people are having less kids means that mass immigration is inevitable - it is the same for the entirety of Europe. You can't 'pull the drawbridge up'. Why would you even want to do that? The problem is that we haven't worked out how to manage immigration. It should be one of the most urgent problems for the government to deal with.
And therefore it is no surprise the nationalist right Meloni is Italian PM, Le Pen leads some French polls now, the hard right Vox and AfD are surging in Spain and Germany. For neither the mainstream centre left or centre right parties in Europe have been able to manage immigration and reduce Channel crossings in a way their electorate find acceptable
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
1 Wages in the South are only 1.5 times those in the North, average property prices in the South are 2.5 times those in the North and in London 5 times those in the North. So even with a new job on a slightly lower wage you could still buy a property more easily without assistance.
2 With more wfh childcare is less of an issue and by schoolage less of an issue still.
Many will have moved from family and friends in the North and Midlands, Wales and Scotland to the bright lights of London who could easily move back to buy a cheaper property.
If we cut immigration properly of course we wouldn't have population growth needing as much new housing. The average British woman now has just 1.56 children, well below the 2.1 replacement level
The kind of mobility you describe will help some people, but needless to say not everyone who is priced out of the market in well-to-do areas has the option simply to up sticks (and indeed, if enough of them do then you simply cause the silly high prices to migrate and start pricing more people out in the areas where the escapees are moving to. Exhibit A: Cornwall.)
Ultimately there's no long-term solution that does not involve building, and building, and building, until supply catches up with demand and wages start to rise faster than house prices.
And don't make me laugh about restricting immigration. Somebody needs to pay the taxes to keep all those pensions in payment and stop the NHS completely collapsing into a pile of rubble, and no-one is going to ask the minted shire Tory vote to shell out themselves. That means feeding large numbers of new workers into the demographic Ponzi scheme to stop the whole thing from falling over. Besides which, whilst there's significant opposition to boat people migration, most of the electorate doesn't care how many Ukrainian refugees, Hongkongers, students, or workers in general who've been invited to do a job, end up coming over here. One thing Brexit did achieve, by shutting out hand car washers, coffee shop baristas and other forms of speculative casual migration from the EU, is to kill mass movement of labour stone dead as a public concern.
Average wages are likely never going to rise faster than average house prices rise now, even if you destroyed all the greenbelt with new housing.
AI if anything will exacerbate that, hollowing out middle income jobs and expanding low paid insecure jobs on a worst case scenario.
The only reason our population is rising is immigration, our birthrate is falling, we should at least cut it so our population levels stabilise
Nonsense. Put up enough bog standard identikit family houses and their price will stagnate or fall, which will lower housing costs for most renters and new buyers even if more desirable properties in choice locations continue to inflate away. That will require public sector intervention but it is achievable. It's all a matter of meeting demand with sufficient supply.
The politicians - both Labour's and yours - won't choke off the flow of imported workers, both for the reasons I previously described and because it's typically cheaper to import skilled workers in various shortage sectors than to train them.
Meanwhile, and hard on the heels of the Times article (and others referring to the same source) on lab leak, the declassified Intelligence Community report has been published:
Remember that the story was that intelligence sources had actually determined that a virus from the Mojiang mines was genetically modified at WIV in part of a bioweapons programme before being accidentally released and three WIV staff came down with covid in late 2019 and this was "the smoking gun"?
Pretty much all of that is the opposite of what's actually come out of them. Less a smoking gun, more a scorched banana.
And
The report does say that some bits are classified to protect sources but that the classified bits agree with the unclassified bits. While it could be contended that "oh, China are lying about the seronegativity, because of course they would," that would require that the IC didn't get any independent corroboration, and that China decided to keep the people who accidentally leaked it on at the same jobs and let them keep publishing, despite the enormous damage caused.
This all doesn't mean that it WASN'T a lab leak. Just that the purported evidence was non-existent. I still keep that possibility open, even if it's considerably lower than a zoonotic spillover - it's just that there's no evidence to support it other than the lab being there (and if it was not genetically engineered, any lab with coronavirus specimens would be just as coincidental, and those exist in most large Chinese cities, anyway - and a zoonotic spillover would need to get superspread repeatedly to make the leap stick, so a large city somewhere that illegal live wildlife is in close proximity to humans would be necessary).
Cheers. Yes, lab leak possible but 2nd fav is where I am based on trusted sources of which one is definitely you as regards here on PB.
No apology needed from @Leon since one doesn't want to see this issue personalised in that way.
Big time Jezza supporter & been a howling shitwit long before coming out as an antivaxxer...reason number 104947472 why we shouldn't take any notice of celebs opinions on politics, life, the universe, just because they are famous.
They are good at acting, nothing more.
Not sure that is even true. Seems quite a few just play a version of themselves every time...cough cough Hugh Grant.
Bit unfair. Jeremy Thorpe? And although he did play the same 'type' in all those Notting Hill genre films it isn't by all accounts what he's like irl. He's a bit of a misery guts.
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
1 Wages in the South are only 1.5 times those in the North, average property prices in the South are 2.5 times those in the North and in London 5 times those in the North. So even with a new job on a slightly lower wage you could still buy a property more easily without assistance.
2 With more wfh childcare is less of an issue and by schoolage less of an issue still.
Many will have moved from family and friends in the North and Midlands, Wales and Scotland to the bright lights of London who could easily move back to buy a cheaper property.
If we cut immigration properly of course we wouldn't have population growth needing as much new housing. The average British woman now has just 1.56 children, well below the 2.1 replacement level
The kind of mobility you describe will help some people, but needless to say not everyone who is priced out of the market in well-to-do areas has the option simply to up sticks (and indeed, if enough of them do then you simply cause the silly high prices to migrate and start pricing more people out in the areas where the escapees are moving to. Exhibit A: Cornwall.)
Ultimately there's no long-term solution that does not involve building, and building, and building, until supply catches up with demand and wages start to rise faster than house prices.
And don't make me laugh about restricting immigration. Somebody needs to pay the taxes to keep all those pensions in payment and stop the NHS completely collapsing into a pile of rubble, and no-one is going to ask the minted shire Tory vote to shell out themselves. That means feeding large numbers of new workers into the demographic Ponzi scheme to stop the whole thing from falling over. Besides which, whilst there's significant opposition to boat people migration, most of the electorate doesn't care how many Ukrainian refugees, Hongkongers, students, or workers in general who've been invited to do a job, end up coming over here. One thing Brexit did achieve, by shutting out hand car washers, coffee shop baristas and other forms of speculative casual migration from the EU, is to kill mass movement of labour stone dead as a public concern.
Average wages are likely never going to rise faster than average house prices rise now, even if you destroyed all the greenbelt with new housing.
AI if anything will exacerbate that, hollowing out middle income jobs and expanding low paid insecure jobs on a worst case scenario.
The only reason our population is rising is immigration, our birthrate is falling, we should at least cut it so our population levels stabilise
Nonsense. Put up enough bog standard identikit family houses and their price will stagnate or fall, which will lower housing costs for most renters and new buyers even if more desirable properties in choice locations continue to inflate away. That will require public sector intervention but it is achievable. It's all a matter of meeting demand with sufficient supply.
The politicians - both Labour's and yours - won't choke off the flow of imported workers, both for the reasons I previously described and because it's typically cheaper to import skilled workers in various shortage sectors than to train them.
If cheap immigration and building all over the greenbelt is the preferred mode of the establishment parties and large corporations prefer to import cheap labour than train up domestic workers, then expect a surge to the Nationalist right nationally as on the continent and NIMBY Independents and LDs and Greens to continue to surge locally
There was the thought that lockdown would result in a big uptick in birthrates, did that actually prove to be true? I would hazard a guess divorce rates went up as well.
Quite the opposite, it caused a massive collapse in birth rates.
Oddly enough telling young, fertile people they can't go out and hook up with other people is not conducive to boosting birth rates. I wonder why?
Which is an interesting proposition. How many of average conceptions are in established relationships with people living together, vs those to hook ups and fresh relationships, I.e. the ones that were prevented during lockdown.
Some took lockdown as an opportunity to move from boyfriend/girlfriend to living together - this happened a couple of times within my wider family - with sometimes good outcomes. I have attended two marriages in the last year arising from this. I seem to recall one of the science advisers making this gentle suggestion at the start of a lockdown. Maybe occasionally it helped people to grow up a bit.
Meanwhile, and hard on the heels of the Times article (and others referring to the same source) on lab leak, the declassified Intelligence Community report has been published:
Remember that the story was that intelligence sources had actually determined that a virus from the Mojiang mines was genetically modified at WIV in part of a bioweapons programme before being accidentally released and three WIV staff came down with covid in late 2019 and this was "the smoking gun"?
Pretty much all of that is the opposite of what's actually come out of them. Less a smoking gun, more a scorched banana.
And
The report does say that some bits are classified to protect sources but that the classified bits agree with the unclassified bits. While it could be contended that "oh, China are lying about the seronegativity, because of course they would," that would require that the IC didn't get any independent corroboration, and that China decided to keep the people who accidentally leaked it on at the same jobs and let them keep publishing, despite the enormous damage caused.
This all doesn't mean that it WASN'T a lab leak. Just that the purported evidence was non-existent. I still keep that possibility open, even if it's considerably lower than a zoonotic spillover - it's just that there's no evidence to support it other than the lab being there (and if it was not genetically engineered, any lab with coronavirus specimens would be just as coincidental, and those exist in most large Chinese cities, anyway - and a zoonotic spillover would need to get superspread repeatedly to make the leap stick, so a large city somewhere that illegal live wildlife is in close proximity to humans would be necessary).
Straw man. Mainstream lab leak theory says they were messing with the virus because 1. they could 2. they had a grant to do so. I am sure you can find the bio weapon theory on 4chan and similar, but it remains fringe.
"no evidence to support it other than the lab being there" - i.e. no evidence other than some exceptionally strong evidence, unless you have arbitrarily demoted circumstantial evidence. It counts.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
1 Wages in the South are only 1.5 times those in the North, average property prices in the South are 2.5 times those in the North and in London 5 times those in the North. So even with a new job on a slightly lower wage you could still buy a property more easily without assistance.
2 With more wfh childcare is less of an issue and by schoolage less of an issue still.
Many will have moved from family and friends in the North and Midlands, Wales and Scotland to the bright lights of London who could easily move back to buy a cheaper property.
If we cut immigration properly of course we wouldn't have population growth needing as much new housing. The average British woman now has just 1.56 children, well below the 2.1 replacement level
The kind of mobility you describe will help some people, but needless to say not everyone who is priced out of the market in well-to-do areas has the option simply to up sticks (and indeed, if enough of them do then you simply cause the silly high prices to migrate and start pricing more people out in the areas where the escapees are moving to. Exhibit A: Cornwall.)
Ultimately there's no long-term solution that does not involve building, and building, and building, until supply catches up with demand and wages start to rise faster than house prices.
And don't make me laugh about restricting immigration. Somebody needs to pay the taxes to keep all those pensions in payment and stop the NHS completely collapsing into a pile of rubble, and no-one is going to ask the minted shire Tory vote to shell out themselves. That means feeding large numbers of new workers into the demographic Ponzi scheme to stop the whole thing from falling over. Besides which, whilst there's significant opposition to boat people migration, most of the electorate doesn't care how many Ukrainian refugees, Hongkongers, students, or workers in general who've been invited to do a job, end up coming over here. One thing Brexit did achieve, by shutting out hand car washers, coffee shop baristas and other forms of speculative casual migration from the EU, is to kill mass movement of labour stone dead as a public concern.
Average wages are likely never going to rise faster than average house prices rise now, even if you destroyed all the greenbelt with new housing.
AI if anything will exacerbate that, hollowing out middle income jobs and expanding low paid insecure jobs on a worst case scenario.
The only reason our population is rising is immigration, our birthrate is falling, we should at least cut it so our population levels stabilise
Nonsense. Put up enough bog standard identikit family houses and their price will stagnate or fall, which will lower housing costs for most renters and new buyers even if more desirable properties in choice locations continue to inflate away. That will require public sector intervention but it is achievable. It's all a matter of meeting demand with sufficient supply.
The politicians - both Labour's and yours - won't choke off the flow of imported workers, both for the reasons I previously described and because it's typically cheaper to import skilled workers in various shortage sectors than to train them.
Unlikely to happen commercially, as we're seeing. We're in a bit of the maths space where it's more profitable for builders to dribble out new homes, because they can be confident that they will sell for more later. And if selling prices fall, that's a cast iron excuse to pause a development. (I remember that happening around South Hampshire in the 90s crash, and it sucked pretty badly for the early adopters, because public facilities were delayed for ages.)
Which sounds like a good reason to separate building the houses from the planning and marketing thereof. And probably put the planning and marketing in the hands of someone who is under less pressure to maximise profit. Which sounds like some tendril of the state to me.
Not sure I like the idea, but does anyone have a better one?
In the end the fact that people are having less kids means that mass immigration is inevitable - it is the same for the entirety of Europe. You can't 'pull the drawbridge up'. Why would you even want to do that? The problem is that we haven't worked out how to manage immigration. It should be one of the most urgent problems for the government to deal with.
You miss the fact that birth rates are falling all over the world including africa. Immigration is a ponzi scheme and the end is in sight. Governments need to start planning now for how to deal with falling populations because in the next 4 to 5 decades there wont be enough immigrants of the 20 to thirty age group. Naturally they won't because politicians are arseholes that love to kick the can
Except that they don't need to plan for falling populations, they need to implement the correct policies to stabilise the population, or at any rate to bolster births enough that the decline is gentle, as opposed to the population dropping like a stone and what's left of the working age cohorts drowning in a tsunami of dependent elderly.
Tax wealthier, older people more and give the money to younger people, in particular through lower taxation of earned incomes, free or heavily subsidised kiddie care, and a huge housebuilding program. If household formation and pumping out babies is made affordable for people in their twenties then more of them will choose to do it, and the inversion of the demographic pyramid will be that much less acute.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
1 Wages in the South are only 1.5 times those in the North, average property prices in the South are 2.5 times those in the North and in London 5 times those in the North. So even with a new job on a slightly lower wage you could still buy a property more easily without assistance.
2 With more wfh childcare is less of an issue and by schoolage less of an issue still.
Many will have moved from family and friends in the North and Midlands, Wales and Scotland to the bright lights of London who could easily move back to buy a cheaper property.
If we cut immigration properly of course we wouldn't have population growth needing as much new housing. The average British woman now has just 1.56 children, well below the 2.1 replacement level
The kind of mobility you describe will help some people, but needless to say not everyone who is priced out of the market in well-to-do areas has the option simply to up sticks (and indeed, if enough of them do then you simply cause the silly high prices to migrate and start pricing more people out in the areas where the escapees are moving to. Exhibit A: Cornwall.)
Ultimately there's no long-term solution that does not involve building, and building, and building, until supply catches up with demand and wages start to rise faster than house prices.
And don't make me laugh about restricting immigration. Somebody needs to pay the taxes to keep all those pensions in payment and stop the NHS completely collapsing into a pile of rubble, and no-one is going to ask the minted shire Tory vote to shell out themselves. That means feeding large numbers of new workers into the demographic Ponzi scheme to stop the whole thing from falling over. Besides which, whilst there's significant opposition to boat people migration, most of the electorate doesn't care how many Ukrainian refugees, Hongkongers, students, or workers in general who've been invited to do a job, end up coming over here. One thing Brexit did achieve, by shutting out hand car washers, coffee shop baristas and other forms of speculative casual migration from the EU, is to kill mass movement of labour stone dead as a public concern.
Average wages are likely never going to rise faster than average house prices rise now, even if you destroyed all the greenbelt with new housing.
AI if anything will exacerbate that, hollowing out middle income jobs and expanding low paid insecure jobs on a worst case scenario.
The only reason our population is rising is immigration, our birthrate is falling, we should at least cut it so our population levels stabilise
Nonsense. Put up enough bog standard identikit family houses and their price will stagnate or fall, which will lower housing costs for most renters and new buyers even if more desirable properties in choice locations continue to inflate away. That will require public sector intervention but it is achievable. It's all a matter of meeting demand with sufficient supply.
The politicians - both Labour's and yours - won't choke off the flow of imported workers, both for the reasons I previously described and because it's typically cheaper to import skilled workers in various shortage sectors than to train them.
Unlikely to happen commercially, as we're seeing. We're in a bit of the maths space where it's more profitable for builders to dribble out new homes, because they can be confident that they will sell for more later. And if selling prices fall, that's a cast iron excuse to pause a development. (I remember that happening around South Hampshire in the 90s crash, and it sucked pretty badly for the early adopters, because public facilities were delayed for ages.)
Which sounds like a good reason to separate building the houses from the planning and marketing thereof. And probably put the planning and marketing in the hands of someone who is under less pressure to maximise profit. Which sounds like some tendril of the state to me.
Not sure I like the idea, but does anyone have a better one?
It's happening in Scotland right now. Called "council housing".
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
In the UK (other places will be similar) a combination of factors tends to set the maximum at 2 children - meaning the average plummets.
The needs for 2 incomes; the nature and cost of modern housing; the assumption that every child needs their own bedroom; the unspoken expectations of employers about maternity leave (above 2 is a bit off); car seats and cars; the shape of society/education etc means you are 30+ before you start; a culture in which teenage pregnancy=feckless.
If you organised deliberately to stop babies, you could hardly improve on all this.
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
Movement from rural to urban. To a farmer a child is an asset, a spare pair of hands and free labour. To an accountant a child is a debit, an expensive and noisy piece of furniture
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
First one. Absolutely. Particularly in rapidly developing countries. We know this. Second. You're right it is happening. But a causal correlation hasn't been proved. Third. Yes, but. This doesn't account for differences between developed countries.
None of these suddenly happened in 2017. Nor began in 2012. Which is why I assert something we haven't fully understood is at play.
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
Movement from rural to urban. To a farmer a child is an asset, a spare pair of hands and free labour. To an accountant a child is a debit, an expensive and noisy piece of furniture
While that is logical, children are rarely regarded on the profit loss axis by most parents that are sociopaths. I loved my son, would have loved to have more but every extra I had would have made my sons life worse because when we had them there was no sure start, no child care etc. The question then became do we think we are giving our child enough....the answer was no, can we justify having a second when we are already not caring for him in a way we were happy with...again the answer was no
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
Movement from rural to urban. To a farmer a child is an asset, a spare pair of hands and free labour. To an accountant a child is a debit, an expensive and noisy piece of furniture
While that is logical, children are rarely regarded on the profit loss axis by most parents that are sociopaths. I loved my son, would have loved to have more but every extra I had would have made my sons life worse because when we had them there was no sure start, no child care etc. The question then became do we think we are giving our child enough....the answer was no, can we justify having a second when we are already not caring for him in a way we were happy with...again the answer was no
Your first sentence said that parents do not do profit/loss calculations. Your second and later sentences gave an example of you as a parent doing a profit/loss calc, albeit in qualitative not quantitative terms.
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
First one. Absolutely. Particularly in rapidly developing countries. We know this. Second. You're right it is happening. But a causal correlation hasn't been proved. Third. Yes, but. This doesn't account for differences between developed countries.
None of these suddenly happened in 2017. Nor began in 2012. Which is why I assert something we haven't fully understood is at play.
I did not claim it started in 2017 or 2012. Its something that has been happening all my life
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
First one. Absolutely. Particularly in rapidly developing countries. We know this. Second. You're right it is happening. But a causal correlation hasn't been proved. Third. Yes, but. This doesn't account for differences between developed countries.
None of these suddenly happened in 2017. Nor began in 2012. Which is why I assert something we haven't fully understood is at play.
I did not claim it started in 2017 or 2012. Its something that has been happening all my life
My grandmother had 4 kids, the next generation on average had 2 kids,my generation of the family has had probably on average less than 1
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
Movement from rural to urban. To a farmer a child is an asset, a spare pair of hands and free labour. To an accountant a child is a debit, an expensive and noisy piece of furniture
While that is logical, children are rarely regarded on the profit loss axis by most parents that are sociopaths. I loved my son, would have loved to have more but every extra I had would have made my sons life worse because when we had them there was no sure start, no child care etc. The question then became do we think we are giving our child enough....the answer was no, can we justify having a second when we are already not caring for him in a way we were happy with...again the answer was no
Your first sentence said that parents do not do profit/loss calculations. Your second and later sentences gave an example of you as a parent doing a profit/loss calc, albeit in qualitative not quantitative terms.
No it wasn't profit or loss. Neither came into it. We just didn't feel we could raise two kids and give them both the life we wanted. Deciding not to buy a car isnt a profit loss situation either. There is no profit made off having kids. We just regarded it as child abuse to have another child where we couldn't afford both and would have to make them both live in poverty.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Decamping to a different part of the country to escape ludicrous property prices is only practical if:
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and, 2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
1 Wages in the South are only 1.5 times those in the North, average property prices in the South are 2.5 times those in the North and in London 5 times those in the North. So even with a new job on a slightly lower wage you could still buy a property more easily without assistance.
2 With more wfh childcare is less of an issue and by schoolage less of an issue still.
Many will have moved from family and friends in the North and Midlands, Wales and Scotland to the bright lights of London who could easily move back to buy a cheaper property.
If we cut immigration properly of course we wouldn't have population growth needing as much new housing. The average British woman now has just 1.56 children, well below the 2.1 replacement level
The kind of mobility you describe will help some people, but needless to say not everyone who is priced out of the market in well-to-do areas has the option simply to up sticks (and indeed, if enough of them do then you simply cause the silly high prices to migrate and start pricing more people out in the areas where the escapees are moving to. Exhibit A: Cornwall.)
Ultimately there's no long-term solution that does not involve building, and building, and building, until supply catches up with demand and wages start to rise faster than house prices.
And don't make me laugh about restricting immigration. Somebody needs to pay the taxes to keep all those pensions in payment and stop the NHS completely collapsing into a pile of rubble, and no-one is going to ask the minted shire Tory vote to shell out themselves. That means feeding large numbers of new workers into the demographic Ponzi scheme to stop the whole thing from falling over. Besides which, whilst there's significant opposition to boat people migration, most of the electorate doesn't care how many Ukrainian refugees, Hongkongers, students, or workers in general who've been invited to do a job, end up coming over here. One thing Brexit did achieve, by shutting out hand car washers, coffee shop baristas and other forms of speculative casual migration from the EU, is to kill mass movement of labour stone dead as a public concern.
Average wages are likely never going to rise faster than average house prices rise now, even if you destroyed all the greenbelt with new housing.
AI if anything will exacerbate that, hollowing out middle income jobs and expanding low paid insecure jobs on a worst case scenario.
The only reason our population is rising is immigration, our birthrate is falling, we should at least cut it so our population levels stabilise
Nonsense. Put up enough bog standard identikit family houses and their price will stagnate or fall, which will lower housing costs for most renters and new buyers even if more desirable properties in choice locations continue to inflate away. That will require public sector intervention but it is achievable. It's all a matter of meeting demand with sufficient supply.
The politicians - both Labour's and yours - won't choke off the flow of imported workers, both for the reasons I previously described and because it's typically cheaper to import skilled workers in various shortage sectors than to train them.
Unlikely to happen commercially, as we're seeing. We're in a bit of the maths space where it's more profitable for builders to dribble out new homes, because they can be confident that they will sell for more later. And if selling prices fall, that's a cast iron excuse to pause a development. (I remember that happening around South Hampshire in the 90s crash, and it sucked pretty badly for the early adopters, because public facilities were delayed for ages.)
Which sounds like a good reason to separate building the houses from the planning and marketing thereof. And probably put the planning and marketing in the hands of someone who is under less pressure to maximise profit. Which sounds like some tendril of the state to me.
Not sure I like the idea, but does anyone have a better one?
It's happening in Scotland right now. Called "council housing".
Meanwhile, and hard on the heels of the Times article (and others referring to the same source) on lab leak, the declassified Intelligence Community report has been published:
Remember that the story was that intelligence sources had actually determined that a virus from the Mojiang mines was genetically modified at WIV in part of a bioweapons programme before being accidentally released and three WIV staff came down with covid in late 2019 and this was "the smoking gun"?
Pretty much all of that is the opposite of what's actually come out of them. Less a smoking gun, more a scorched banana.
And
The report does say that some bits are classified to protect sources but that the classified bits agree with the unclassified bits. While it could be contended that "oh, China are lying about the seronegativity, because of course they would," that would require that the IC didn't get any independent corroboration, and that China decided to keep the people who accidentally leaked it on at the same jobs and let them keep publishing, despite the enormous damage caused.
This all doesn't mean that it WASN'T a lab leak. Just that the purported evidence was non-existent. I still keep that possibility open, even if it's considerably lower than a zoonotic spillover - it's just that there's no evidence to support it other than the lab being there (and if it was not genetically engineered, any lab with coronavirus specimens would be just as coincidental, and those exist in most large Chinese cities, anyway - and a zoonotic spillover would need to get superspread repeatedly to make the leap stick, so a large city somewhere that illegal live wildlife is in close proximity to humans would be necessary).
Straw man. Mainstream lab leak theory says they were messing with the virus because 1. they could 2. they had a grant to do so. I am sure you can find the bio weapon theory on 4chan and similar, but it remains fringe.
"no evidence to support it other than the lab being there" - i.e. no evidence other than some exceptionally strong evidence, unless you have arbitrarily demoted circumstantial evidence. It counts.
As Wikipedia puts it: "However, most large Chinese cities have laboratories which study coronaviruses.[14][17] Virus outbreaks tend to begin in rural areas, but are first noticed in large cities.[18] If a coronavirus outbreak occurs in China, there is a high likelihood it will occur near a large city and therefore near a laboratory studying coronaviruses."
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
Movement from rural to urban. To a farmer a child is an asset, a spare pair of hands and free labour. To an accountant a child is a debit, an expensive and noisy piece of furniture
While that is logical, children are rarely regarded on the profit loss axis by most parents that are sociopaths. I loved my son, would have loved to have more but every extra I had would have made my sons life worse because when we had them there was no sure start, no child care etc. The question then became do we think we are giving our child enough....the answer was no, can we justify having a second when we are already not caring for him in a way we were happy with...again the answer was no
Your first sentence said that parents do not do profit/loss calculations. Your second and later sentences gave an example of you as a parent doing a profit/loss calc, albeit in qualitative not quantitative terms.
No it wasn't profit or loss. Neither came into it. We just didn't feel we could raise two kids and give them both the life we wanted. Deciding not to buy a car isnt a profit loss situation either. There is no profit made off having kids. We just regarded it as child abuse to have another child where we couldn't afford both and would have to make them both live in poverty.
Let me phrase it differently then. You made a financial calculation.
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
Movement from rural to urban. To a farmer a child is an asset, a spare pair of hands and free labour. To an accountant a child is a debit, an expensive and noisy piece of furniture
While that is logical, children are rarely regarded on the profit loss axis by most parents that are sociopaths. I loved my son, would have loved to have more but every extra I had would have made my sons life worse because when we had them there was no sure start, no child care etc. The question then became do we think we are giving our child enough....the answer was no, can we justify having a second when we are already not caring for him in a way we were happy with...again the answer was no
Your first sentence said that parents do not do profit/loss calculations. Your second and later sentences gave an example of you as a parent doing a profit/loss calc, albeit in qualitative not quantitative terms.
No it wasn't profit or loss. Neither came into it. We just didn't feel we could raise two kids and give them both the life we wanted. Deciding not to buy a car isnt a profit loss situation either. There is no profit made off having kids. We just regarded it as child abuse to have another child where we couldn't afford both and would have to make them both live in poverty.
Let me phrase it differently then. You made a financial calculation.
Yes and decided it would be abusive to make two children live in poverty for what we wanted so didn't
Polls close 5pm UK time - being held under a different system to the May election, this one has a seat bonus for the winning party so this should see New Democracy over the majority line.
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
First one. Absolutely. Particularly in rapidly developing countries. We know this. Second. You're right it is happening. But a causal correlation hasn't been proved. Third. Yes, but. This doesn't account for differences between developed countries.
None of these suddenly happened in 2017. Nor began in 2012. Which is why I assert something we haven't fully understood is at play.
I did not claim it started in 2017 or 2012. Its something that has been happening all my life
I also think it is something that is a reinforcing loop. The expense of having a child is very clear, and people know the living standards and vacation they are missing out on to not get it. The loss of social time in the early years is very tangible, especially when you are currently going through it with your first child.
But the benefits are more intangible. People that grow up without experiencing a large, positive family life don't know what they are missing out on. My grandparents made a big deal of getting the extended family together and running round with my cousins were the happiest parts of my childhood. It also means when you fell out with one sibling or cousin, you just went and played with others. That is part of the reason my wife and I had four kids.
But if you grew up an only child, or with one sibling, and weren't close to any cousins, you are not aware of that. And just two siblings can often have strained relationships. Very easy to say "one and done" in that environment. And of course the effect of people doing that means more of the next generation is in the same boat.
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
First one. Absolutely. Particularly in rapidly developing countries. We know this. Second. You're right it is happening. But a causal correlation hasn't been proved. Third. Yes, but. This doesn't account for differences between developed countries.
None of these suddenly happened in 2017. Nor began in 2012. Which is why I assert something we haven't fully understood is at play.
I did not claim it started in 2017 or 2012. Its something that has been happening all my life
I also think it is something that is a reinforcing loop. The expense of having a child is very clear, and people know the living standards and vacation they are missing out on to not get it. The loss of social time in the early years is very tangible, especially when you are currently going through it with your first child.
But the benefits are more intangible. People that grow up without experiencing a large, positive family life don't know what they are missing out on. My grandparents made a big deal of getting the extended family together and running round with my cousins were the happiest parts of my childhood. It also means when you fell out with one sibling or cousin, you just went and played with others. That is part of the reason my wife and I had four kids.
But if you grew up an only child, or with one sibling, and weren't close to any cousins, you are not aware of that. And just two siblings can often have strained relationships. Very easy to say "one and done" in that environment. And of course the effect of people doing that means more of the next generation is in the same boat.
Loss of social time and vacations? Really fuck off with that it didn't even come into it. Since my son was born I have had exactly two vacations that didn't involve visiting and staying with family both of which were after he left for university. Social time involved friends visiting us because we weren't able to goto a bar more than once every few months and even then we could only do that for one person not both so we took turns.
A second child would have put us to the point where we really couldn't support either in anyway
Meanwhile, and hard on the heels of the Times article (and others referring to the same source) on lab leak, the declassified Intelligence Community report has been published:
Remember that the story was that intelligence sources had actually determined that a virus from the Mojiang mines was genetically modified at WIV in part of a bioweapons programme before being accidentally released and three WIV staff came down with covid in late 2019 and this was "the smoking gun"?
Pretty much all of that is the opposite of what's actually come out of them. Less a smoking gun, more a scorched banana.
And
The report does say that some bits are classified to protect sources but that the classified bits agree with the unclassified bits. While it could be contended that "oh, China are lying about the seronegativity, because of course they would," that would require that the IC didn't get any independent corroboration, and that China decided to keep the people who accidentally leaked it on at the same jobs and let them keep publishing, despite the enormous damage caused.
This all doesn't mean that it WASN'T a lab leak. Just that the purported evidence was non-existent. I still keep that possibility open, even if it's considerably lower than a zoonotic spillover - it's just that there's no evidence to support it other than the lab being there (and if it was not genetically engineered, any lab with coronavirus specimens would be just as coincidental, and those exist in most large Chinese cities, anyway - and a zoonotic spillover would need to get superspread repeatedly to make the leap stick, so a large city somewhere that illegal live wildlife is in close proximity to humans would be necessary).
Straw man. Mainstream lab leak theory says they were messing with the virus because 1. they could 2. they had a grant to do so. I am sure you can find the bio weapon theory on 4chan and similar, but it remains fringe.
"no evidence to support it other than the lab being there" - i.e. no evidence other than some exceptionally strong evidence, unless you have arbitrarily demoted circumstantial evidence. It counts.
"The US investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons."
...
"They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”"
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
First one. Absolutely. Particularly in rapidly developing countries. We know this. Second. You're right it is happening. But a causal correlation hasn't been proved. Third. Yes, but. This doesn't account for differences between developed countries.
None of these suddenly happened in 2017. Nor began in 2012. Which is why I assert something we haven't fully understood is at play.
I did not claim it started in 2017 or 2012. Its something that has been happening all my life
No. I know you didn't. But world fertility rates (births per woman) have been falling since the early 60's (1963). However, they rose in 2012. (Also 1968 and 1982).Then declined considerably more swiftly from 2017. In searching for explanations, these anomalies haven't been explained.
If you go back further, it's been happening all of @JackW's life;
The big fall- the first third of the twentieth century- is presumably all about education and emancipation of women. All the wobbles since then look pretty minor by comparison, though they do seem to correlate with feel good/feel bad times. (Which makes sense.)
And whilst there was a lockdown effect on birth rates, it wasn't that big (10% or so?) and seems to have bounced back;
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
First one. Absolutely. Particularly in rapidly developing countries. We know this. Second. You're right it is happening. But a causal correlation hasn't been proved. Third. Yes, but. This doesn't account for differences between developed countries.
None of these suddenly happened in 2017. Nor began in 2012. Which is why I assert something we haven't fully understood is at play.
I did not claim it started in 2017 or 2012. Its something that has been happening all my life
I also think it is something that is a reinforcing loop. The expense of having a child is very clear, and people know the living standards and vacation they are missing out on to not get it. The loss of social time in the early years is very tangible, especially when you are currently going through it with your first child.
But the benefits are more intangible. People that grow up without experiencing a large, positive family life don't know what they are missing out on. My grandparents made a big deal of getting the extended family together and running round with my cousins were the happiest parts of my childhood. It also means when you fell out with one sibling or cousin, you just went and played with others. That is part of the reason my wife and I had four kids.
But if you grew up an only child, or with one sibling, and weren't close to any cousins, you are not aware of that. And just two siblings can often have strained relationships. Very easy to say "one and done" in that environment. And of course the effect of people doing that means more of the next generation is in the same boat.
Loss of social time and vacations? Really fuck off with that it didn't even come into it. Since my son was born I have had exactly two vacations that didn't involve visiting and staying with family both of which were after he left for university. Social time involved friends visiting us because we weren't able to goto a bar more than once every few months and even then we could only do that for one person not both so we took turns.
A second child would have put us to the point where we really couldn't support either in anyway
You seem to be reinforcing my point? Social time and vacations are absolutely lost for every additional kid, as your example shows. That is a clear cost. The benefits, while greater in my opinion, are less obvious. Particularly at the age of life you make the decision.
If you go back further, it's been happening all of @JackW's life;
The big fall- the first third of the twentieth century- is presumably all about education and emancipation of women. All the wobbles since then look pretty minor by comparison, though they do seem to correlate with feel good/feel bad times. (Which makes sense.)
And whilst there was a lockdown effect on birth rates, it wasn't that big (10% or so?) and seems to have bounced back;
Interesting graph as it supports one of my big 3 causes to some extent though still not claiming its a proved link
The 60's where premarital sex became more common due to the introduction of the contraceptive pill and more socially acceptable. A big rise then as estrogen rose in the evironment and food chain a fall of births. I suspect if you put a graph there of sperm counts you would find also a correlation.
Do I think the contraceptive pill was a bad thing if I am correct? No not at all. However it maybe says we have to do more to prevent the hormone entering the food chain sure if we want a rising population. Personally I think a falling population is good news for the world and politicians just need to grasp the nettle and deal with it
Re demography. It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause. Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one. We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it. Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling. But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically. It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
To give a few reasons and not sure all are true but what I suspect
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
First one. Absolutely. Particularly in rapidly developing countries. We know this. Second. You're right it is happening. But a causal correlation hasn't been proved. Third. Yes, but. This doesn't account for differences between developed countries.
None of these suddenly happened in 2017. Nor began in 2012. Which is why I assert something we haven't fully understood is at play.
I did not claim it started in 2017 or 2012. Its something that has been happening all my life
I also think it is something that is a reinforcing loop. The expense of having a child is very clear, and people know the living standards and vacation they are missing out on to not get it. The loss of social time in the early years is very tangible, especially when you are currently going through it with your first child.
But the benefits are more intangible. People that grow up without experiencing a large, positive family life don't know what they are missing out on. My grandparents made a big deal of getting the extended family together and running round with my cousins were the happiest parts of my childhood. It also means when you fell out with one sibling or cousin, you just went and played with others. That is part of the reason my wife and I had four kids.
But if you grew up an only child, or with one sibling, and weren't close to any cousins, you are not aware of that. And just two siblings can often have strained relationships. Very easy to say "one and done" in that environment. And of course the effect of people doing that means more of the next generation is in the same boat.
Loss of social time and vacations? Really fuck off with that it didn't even come into it. Since my son was born I have had exactly two vacations that didn't involve visiting and staying with family both of which were after he left for university. Social time involved friends visiting us because we weren't able to goto a bar more than once every few months and even then we could only do that for one person not both so we took turns.
A second child would have put us to the point where we really couldn't support either in anyway
You seem to be reinforcing my point? Social time and vacations are absolutely lost for every additional kid, as your example shows. That is a clear cost. The benefits, while greater in my opinion, are less obvious. Particularly at the age of life you make the decision.
You missed my point then social time and vacations were already gone....they played no part in out decisions not to have another
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
I have been saying the same for ages. Instead everyone here wants the status quo and their particular bug bear fully funded. What the state does I agree should be full funded. That means however saying this is how much we have to spend. This is the cost of fully funding all these things. What do you want because we have to drop the rest.
I've had the women's Ashes on the radio since it came on today. I wasn't expecting to enjoy this match as much as I have, and it's set up really nicely. What a shame it's a one off game; I'd like it to be three Tests at least
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I had left (both the CoE and Wythall) by the time the church closed its doors in 1986. Friends who wanted a church wedding had to use Tanworth in Arden Church (famous for being both the final resting place of dour rocker Nick Drake and motorcycle legend Mike Hailwood) some 6 or so miles away. People of Hollywood and Wythall had no heritage links to Tanworth in Arden, it was even in a different county. There is a new "church" in Hollywood/Wythall which I have not seen. I am guessing it is a glorified village hall.
1. You and the significant other are in a line of employment where you are permitted to WFH 100% of the time - otherwise you're liable to need to trade a well paying job for a poorer paid one, and you're back in the same trap; and,
2. You're both prepared to leave behind your entire support network of family and friends, and you're not reliant on them for kiddie care (in which case you have to fork out eyewatering fees, and again you're caught in the trap)
There is no definitive solution to the problems caused by the lack of housing other than building vast numbers of houses, year after year after year, faster than the rate at which existing demand is being bolstered by endless population growth - and that's going to take a long time, even if we find ourselves under a succession of Governments with the willpower to do so.
Much like internet commentators, but usually better looking and less likely to achieve self reflection from peers laughing at them.
I see the fierce moral urgency of honouring the will of the Independent Pay Review bodies has dissipated.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/25/uk-government-willing-to-ignore-public-sector-pay-review-bodies-minister-says
2 With more wfh childcare is less of an issue and by schoolage less of an issue still.
Many will have moved from family and friends in the North and Midlands, Wales and Scotland to the bright lights of London who could easily move back to buy a cheaper property.
If we cut immigration properly of course we wouldn't have population growth needing as much new housing. The average British woman now has just 1.56 children, well below the 2.1 replacement level
There simply aren't many openings for qualified accountants, solicitors and financial advisors around here.
You might think a Conservative government would have a concept of supply and demand, though.
As for cutting costs. Well. We'll see many more on agency supply.
Besides, if the Church had enough money to maintain its vast estates of hugely expensive listed buildings then individual parishes wouldn't constantly be launching appeals to do up the tower or replace the lead on the roof or whatever, and all those artfully hand painted fundraising progress thermometers wouldn't exist.
You are merely urging that the problem moves to regional hubs.
Plus. Who does the entry level work in London? Somebody has too.
The Tory Party's historic role is to preserve the established Church of England and its traditions and assets as much as it is to preserve the assets and wealth of the middle classes and landed gentry and the Monarchy. It just added some free market liberals and working class Patriots and ex council home owners onto that coalition in the 20th century.
If the Church of England scrapped church planting and cut spending on diocesan administrators and trendy schemes it would have a lot more money to be put into Parish churches
The whole thing is an echo of the ongoing conversation here. It would be great to have more parishes having more clergy. But that depends on persuading churchgoers to pay more (quite a lot more) and on more of them being prepared to live the crazy life of a vicar. And neither of those is popular either.
And yes, there is a hefty and growing pile of assets the church has. But we shouldn't carelessly dip into them to spend on us now, as some would like. A lot of the assets are there to match known liabilities, especially pensions, in another echo of the wider conversation. As for the rest of them- if the church isn't prepared to take a long view of history, who can?
They then get confused because they get the impression that they are being listened to means they are speaking truth rather than bollocks
Oddly enough telling young, fertile people they can't go out and hook up with other people is not conducive to boosting birth rates. I wonder why?
You can also do entry work in London in your 20s then move North to start a family and buy property in your 30s
Maybe he put his money in firms like Binance, so now he does?
If so, then support that stance or not it does indicate a lowering of ambition about the next GE for the party
And this may come as an amazing revelation to you.
Not everyone arranges their entire existence around maximising their property wealth.
Seriously…that is idiotic. If you had restricted your ire to simply stating “we should take no more notice of their opinions than anyone else” you’d have a point but why shouldn’t actors be as good as politics as geologists, bus conductors, secretaries, jockeys, etc etc? They can usually deliver a speech at least, and their opinions are worth as much as anyone else’s. Whether you take any notice is up to you.
A woman can meet someone in a club and be a mother eight and a half months later.
Evangelical churches have bigger congregations on average as they don't have the assets and investments of the C of E and so need to raise more funds from their congregations.
The C of E is one of the biggest landlords in the UK, has lots of stock market investments (more than enough to cover pensions and beyond) and plenty which could be put into Parishes regardless of congregation size.
One advantage of being a Vicar is you get a house mortgage and rent free, particularly beneficial in the current climate, even if you only get a very average salary you also get a reasonable pension.
So if you haven't got millionaire parents who can buy you a property in your 30s mortgage free and find the rent too much on your income, why not consider theological college?
Lockdown prevented all those style of pregnancies from occurring.
Ultimately there's no long-term solution that does not involve building, and building, and building, until supply catches up with demand and wages start to rise faster than house prices.
And don't make me laugh about restricting immigration. Somebody needs to pay the taxes to keep all those pensions in payment and stop the NHS completely collapsing into a pile of rubble, and no-one is going to ask the minted shire Tory vote to shell out themselves. That means feeding large numbers of new workers into the demographic Ponzi scheme to stop the whole thing from falling over. Besides which, whilst there's significant opposition to boat people migration, most of the electorate doesn't care how many Ukrainian refugees, Hongkongers, students, or workers in general who've been invited to do a job, end up coming over here. One thing Brexit did achieve, by shutting out hand car washers, coffee shop baristas and other forms of speculative casual migration from the EU, is to kill mass movement of labour stone dead as a public concern.
Regardless of what the people think that say lets encourage people to have more kids the truth is writ large worldwide. People are increasingly having less kids as education for women rises and they dont need to have 8 kids in the hope that 1 or 2 survive.
Instead of campaigning for more kids instead campaign to get governements worldwide to work out how we deal with it
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-on-Potential-Links-Between-the-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-and-the-Origins-of-COVID-19-20230623.pdf
Remember that the story was that intelligence sources had actually determined that a virus from the Mojiang mines was genetically modified at WIV in part of a bioweapons programme before being accidentally released and three WIV staff came down with covid in late 2019 and this was "the smoking gun"?
Pretty much all of that is the opposite of what's actually come out of them. Less a smoking gun, more a scorched banana.
And
The report does say that some bits are classified to protect sources but that the classified bits agree with the unclassified bits. While it could be contended that "oh, China are lying about the seronegativity, because of course they would," that would require that the IC didn't get any independent corroboration, and that China decided to keep the people who accidentally leaked it on at the same jobs and let them keep publishing, despite the enormous damage caused.
This all doesn't mean that it WASN'T a lab leak. Just that the purported evidence was non-existent. I still keep that possibility open, even if it's considerably lower than a zoonotic spillover - it's just that there's no evidence to support it other than the lab being there (and if it was not genetically engineered, any lab with coronavirus specimens would be just as coincidental, and those exist in most large Chinese cities, anyway - and a zoonotic spillover would need to get superspread repeatedly to make the leap stick, so a large city somewhere that illegal live wildlife is in close proximity to humans would be necessary).
AI if anything will exacerbate that, hollowing out middle income jobs and expanding low paid insecure jobs on a worst case scenario.
The only reason our population is rising is immigration, our birthrate is falling, we should at least cut it so our population levels stabilise
IIRC the last year of mass council house completions was, perhaps unsurprisingly, 1979 - and the country has failed to build as many residential properties in any single year since then. The failure to replace the social rented housing flogged off in the 80s, and, by extension, to build enough homes for our growing population ever since, is at the root of the structural socio-economic problems that we now face.
Almost all the original large 18th and 19th century Georgian and Victorian old rectories are now owned by rich investment bankers, corporate lawyers, surgeons, company directors, celebrity authors etc, complete with pools and tennis courts. The average C of E vicarage now is a 20th century modern building which is much smaller than the original parsonage was with less room for parishioners and wardens to visit and for theological books
In the end the fact that people are having less kids means that mass immigration is inevitable - it is the same for the entirety of Europe. You can't 'pull the drawbridge up'. Why would you even want to do that? The problem is that we haven't worked out how to manage immigration. It should be one of the most urgent problems for the government to deal with.
The politicians - both Labour's and yours - won't choke off the flow of imported workers, both for the reasons I previously described and because it's typically cheaper to import skilled workers in various shortage sectors than to train them.
No apology needed from @Leon since one doesn't want to see this issue personalised in that way.
It's very rare that a rise or fall in birth rates has a single, identifiable cause.
Also. It is rare to have a single cause. Nor an identifiable one.
We either don't know the reason, or there is something in our collective unconscious driving it.
Pagan is right. World birth rates are falling.
But no one knows why. Nor why they peaked in 2012, and, after a period of very slow decline fell off a cliff in 2017 and continued to fall dramatically.
It isn't sensible to assume it will continue.
"no evidence to support it other than the lab being there" - i.e. no evidence other than some exceptionally strong evidence, unless you have arbitrarily demoted circumstantial evidence. It counts.
Which sounds like a good reason to separate building the houses from the planning and marketing thereof. And probably put the planning and marketing in the hands of someone who is under less pressure to maximise profit. Which sounds like some tendril of the state to me.
Not sure I like the idea, but does anyone have a better one?
Tax wealthier, older people more and give the money to younger people, in particular through lower taxation of earned incomes, free or heavily subsidised kiddie care, and a huge housebuilding program. If household formation and pumping out babies is made affordable for people in their twenties then more of them will choose to do it, and the inversion of the demographic pyramid will be that much less acute.
Female education meaning they dont want to be a baby factory
Estrogen etc entering the evironment and therefore the food chain suppressing sperm counts, sperm counts falling being documented as a fact though not the cause
Cost of having kids is ever rising in the western world, for example I had one child because I could not afford a second as I got not benefits to help me
To name the top 3
The needs for 2 incomes; the nature and cost of modern housing; the assumption that every child needs their own bedroom; the unspoken expectations of employers about maternity leave (above 2 is a bit off); car seats and cars; the shape of society/education etc means you are 30+ before you start; a culture in which teenage pregnancy=feckless.
If you organised deliberately to stop babies, you could hardly improve on all this.
Perun 20230625: Ukraine's Counter Offensive (So far) - Attrition, Adaptation & What Next?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olH2-_Gtczw
Second. You're right it is happening. But a causal correlation hasn't been proved.
Third. Yes, but. This doesn't account for differences between developed countries.
None of these suddenly happened in 2017. Nor began in 2012.
Which is why I assert something we haven't fully understood is at play.
CaspianReport 20230625: Wagner secretly in war in Africa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydH39HjuFZs
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tories-refused-to-build-social-housing-because-it-would-create-labour-voters-nick-clegg-says-a7223796.html
Polls close 5pm UK time - being held under a different system to the May election, this one has a seat bonus for the winning party so this should see New Democracy over the majority line.
https://ekloges.ypes.gr/current/v/home/en/
https://www.ertflix.gr/en/epg/now-on-tv
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZYVCkGwV50
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2023_Greek_legislative_election
Thanks,
DC
But the benefits are more intangible. People that grow up without experiencing a large, positive family life don't know what they are missing out on. My grandparents made a big deal of getting the extended family together and running round with my cousins were the happiest parts of my childhood. It also means when you fell out with one sibling or cousin, you just went and played with others. That is part of the reason my wife and I had four kids.
But if you grew up an only child, or with one sibling, and weren't close to any cousins, you are not aware of that. And just two siblings can often have strained relationships. Very easy to say "one and done" in that environment. And of course the effect of people doing that means more of the next generation is in the same boat.
A second child would have put us to the point where we really couldn't support either in anyway
Not a strawman.
The Times report to which I referred:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/inside-wuhan-lab-covid-pandemic-china-america-qhjwwwvm0
"The US investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons."
...
"They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”"
Also:
Bombshell Covid warning China was working on 'biological weapon' before lab leak
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1779591/covid-lab-leak-wuhan-china
(But I think that was just pretty much copied from the Times)
Previously from the Times:
Biological weapons lab leaked coronavirus, claims US official
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/biological-weapons-lab-leaked-coronavirus-claims-us-official-tfw829wxh
In searching for explanations, these anomalies haven't been explained.
The big fall- the first third of the twentieth century- is presumably all about education and emancipation of women. All the wobbles since then look pretty minor by comparison, though they do seem to correlate with feel good/feel bad times. (Which makes sense.)
And whilst there was a lockdown effect on birth rates, it wasn't that big (10% or so?) and seems to have bounced back;
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/effect-lockdowns-birth-rates-uk
The 60's where premarital sex became more common due to the introduction of the contraceptive pill and more socially acceptable. A big rise then as estrogen rose in the evironment and food chain a fall of births. I suspect if you put a graph there of sperm counts you would find also a correlation.
Do I think the contraceptive pill was a bad thing if I am correct? No not at all. However it maybe says we have to do more to prevent the hormone entering the food chain sure if we want a rising population. Personally I think a falling population is good news for the world and politicians just need to grasp the nettle and deal with it
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.