For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
I'm still trying to understand what crime that Joe Biden committed.
Perhaps you could explain it to me.
The message seems to be that if evidence one day emerges to show that Joe Biden has committed a serious crime that would be terrible and he should face the consequences.
Which I can't argue with really.
Joe is actually generally a nice guy, so I dont believe he would have been complicit with hunters actions as he would have said what the fuck are you doing son thats not right
Still dont like his politics has to be said
The crazy thing is Trump fans have said that even ex-Presidents should be immune from prosecution (they do not all restrict themselves to claiming he is innocent, but that charging an ex-President is wrong in practice even if it is reasonable in theory), and the man himself claims to believe the Presidents can do whatever they want, and combine that with DOJ policy that serving presidents cannot be charged, and from their own arguments it shouldn't matter even if Biden has done everything they claim he has done, before or after serving as President.
Personally I'd think anyone who has done wrong should face consequences for that, but there is always so much false equivalence, innuendo masquerading as definitive proof, and my all time favourite, 'X may have done something wrong, but Y also has, so it is wrong to punish X. Also, punish Y'.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Hence Labour’s housing policy.
I think they might even be serious about it - one of the shadow cabinet referred to it as the “biggest transfer of power from central to local government in more than a generation” in a radio interview today.
That's the worst thing that can happen!
Is it ?
Or is it simply an attempt to reverse the worst aspects of Thatcher’s housing policy from three and a half decades ago ? That is a very large factor in landing us with the problems we now have.
Thatchers choice to sell off council housing was less than ideal however there was a choice made before that to make council housing based on need. This I think was a bigger mistake because people put their name down and found themselves falling down the list because people kept coming in above them. It made them cynical about council housing so they supported it as there was no chance of them getting a council house
It also caused a lot of racism in places like the East End where large families of new immigrants had a higher priority for new housing than one-child couples whose families had been there for generations.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
Funny how this guy never shares news about what Trump's kids have been up to and how it might affect his odds.
Yes, GOP propaganda disguised as a betting tip. Mr Ed would be purring.
Ah well, at least Mr Ed wouldn't be downplaying how many people the Russians have killed, like yourself did.
Anyway, you are missing the point. If all you say is correct, then the NYT and CBS should not be giving this the light of day. If they are raising questions, and putting it in such a way, then Biden has got some problems.
Re @Tres, plenty of people to talk about how Trump hasn't got a chance on here. It's the national sport.
I didn't do that. Nobody who can read and follow an argument thinks so.
Your middle para is meta smear technique.
Third para is also total bullshit. I'm almost alone on here in saying Trump has little chance of being president again. The vast majority think he's got a big chance even as they dread it.
So that's a 3 short para post from you and every one a horror show. Some sort of record. Hats off.
Putin is already no longer in power imo, it remains to be seen who takes over
My inexpert view would be his power is no longer as unfettered as it was. Ok, even dictators always have to be wary to some degree of other powers, but he had very little holding him back lately it seemed. With looking so passive yesterday, giving a fiery speech and then having Lukashenko sort it all out, and traitors ostensibly leaving with their skins still attached, it seens reasonable to conclude his reach has been limited.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
There's plenty of house building going on round here as it is. It's keeping prices low. What needs to happen is empty, derelict properties, both commercial and residential, need compulsorily purchased and demolished.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
Funny how this guy never shares news about what Trump's kids have been up to and how it might affect his odds.
Yes, GOP propaganda disguised as a betting tip. Mr Ed would be purring.
Ah well, at least Mr Ed wouldn't be downplaying how many people the Russians have killed, like yourself did.
Anyway, you are missing the point. If all you say is correct, then the NYT and CBS should not be giving this the light of day. If they are raising questions, and putting it in such a way, then Biden has got some problems.
Re @Tres, plenty of people to talk about how Trump hasn't got a chance on here. It's the national sport.
I didn't do that. Nobody who can read and follow an argument thinks so.
Your middle para is meta smear technique.
Third para is also total bullshit. I'm almost alone on here in saying Trump has little chance of being president again. The vast majority think he's got a big chance even as they dread it.
So that's a 3 short para post from you and every one a horror show. Some sort of record. Hats off.
Putin is already no longer in power imo, it remains to be seen who takes over
My inexpert view would be his power is no longer as unfettered as it was. Ok, even dictators always have to be wary to some degree of other powers, but he had very little holding him back lately it seemed. With looking so passive yesterday, giving a fiery speech and then having Lukashenko sort it all out, and traitors ostensibly leaving with their skins still attached, it seens reasonable to conclude his reach has been limited.
It can't have escaped even the least bright Russian who pays attention to the propaganda, that Wagner were lauded for years as heroes. Then overnight denounced as traitors. Then the next day given contracts in the Army.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
They don’t have any additional stops planned because there are no new towns planned.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
They don’t have any additional stops planned because there are no new towns planned.
Where would you put them ?
East of Piccadilly to Marsden will be almost entirely underground.
Warrington to Piccadilly will be via existing populated areas e.g. Lymm and Manchester airport.
> Edwin John James QC (c.1812 – 4 March 1882) was an English lawyer who also practised in the U.S., a Member of Parliament and would-be actor. Disbarred in England and Wales for professional misconduct, he ended his life in poverty. He was the first ever Queen's Counsel to suffer disbarment.
> He unsuccessfully attempted to establish a career as an actor . . .
> In 1859 he was elected Liberal MP for Marylebone. . . He spoke in public in support of democracy and against Napoleon III, and spent part of 1859 at the camp of Giuseppe Garibaldi.
> The Spectator described him as ... a leader in all actions for seduction, breach of promise of marriage, assault, and false imprisonment, and in all cases that involved the reputation of an actress or a horse.
> Denville, an actor by trade, ran one of the UK's leading repertory companies.[2] In 1924 Denville founded Denville Hall, a retirement home for actors in Northwood, London that is still in operation.[3]
> As a politician Denville was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Newcastle upon Tyne Central [and] held the seat until he was defeated in 1945.
> For a time he was associated with the far right of the Conservative Party, and during the 1930s was a leading member of the Friends of National Spain, which stressed support for Francisco Franco and anti-communism. He had also declared himself to be an admirer of Benito Mussolini . . . but critical of Adolf Hitler.
> Sir Derwent Hall Caine, 1st Baronet (12 September 1891 – 2 December 1971) was a British actor, publisher and Labour then National Labour politician. . .
> In America, he starred in . . . three films [including] the propaganda film Huns Within Our Gates.
. In 1929, he stood for parliament as Labour candidate for Liverpool, Everton and was returned as Member of Parliament. In January 1931, he was charged with dangerous driving after colliding with a taxi in the early hours of the morning in Trafalgar Square, injuring the four taxi passengers . . .[but] was subsequently acquitted.
> When the Labour government collapsed in 1931, he carried on supporting Ramsay MacDonald as a National Labour MP. Hall Caine was the only sitting National Labour MP to be opposed by the Conservatives at the 1931 general election. He lost his seat to Frank Hornby, and finished bottom of the poll.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
One imagines there might be some more detailed planning involved, like, you know, when this was done in the past.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
They don’t have any additional stops planned because there are no new towns planned.
Where would you put them ?
East of Piccadilly to Marsden will be almost entirely underground.
Warrington to Piccadilly will be via existing populated areas e.g. Lymm and Manchester airport.
Where do you suggest these new stops go ?
I don't know, but it’s not beyond the wit of humanity to build a few additional towns and provide transportation links.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
They don’t have any additional stops planned because there are no new towns planned.
Where would you put them ?
East of Piccadilly to Marsden will be almost entirely underground.
Warrington to Piccadilly will be via existing populated areas e.g. Lymm and Manchester airport.
Where do you suggest these new stops go ?
I don't know, but it’s not beyond the wit of humanity to build a few additional towns and provide transportation links.
Why not find existing towns that have poor existing transport links with a pre-existing population and fix them rather than building something new???
You are suggesting spending a fortune on creating new transport links for a new population in the hope that would be a better result than updating and fixing the existing towns and cities that have terrible connections today.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
They don’t have any additional stops planned because there are no new towns planned.
Where would you put them ?
East of Piccadilly to Marsden will be almost entirely underground.
Warrington to Piccadilly will be via existing populated areas e.g. Lymm and Manchester airport.
Where do you suggest these new stops go ?
I don't know, but it’s not beyond the wit of humanity to build a few additional towns and provide transportation links.
And other railways are available, too. On which stations can be built if needed. Quite the done thing, actually. Livingston New Town was built next to Uphall and has had two stations added since in recent years.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
Precisely and when you get more people bidding for properties the price goes up. I am still in contact with my old landlord in slough. He just rented out the studio appartment I used to rent which was an l shaped place with no windows just a light well 15 wide 20' long then the other part of the l was 15 by 10. He just got bit 1100 by one of the people wanting to rent it. I paid 750 in september last year
Hardly surprising: a logical consequence of decades of increasingly constricted supply followed by a sudden hike in interest rates causing a stampede exit by landlords. Of course you're going to end up with large numbers of desperate renters - who need a home, it's a necessity you can't do without - including many who will just have been thrown out by distressed landlords fire selling, competing to outbid one another. The surviving landlords in higher demand areas must be absolutely coining it.
Even up here, a good distance from London, what little property is available on the rental market starts at £550pcm for a room in an HMO, climbing to £950pcm for a two bed flat (and obviously much more for various grades of house.) For comparison, when I was last renting in 2014 I paid £650pcm for a two bed flat. Rents might have gone up by about a third in the intervening period but I'm pretty confident that earnings haven't.
I know that we all know that the housing market is a sick joke, but I couldn't resist drawing everyone's attention to this example in what might kindly be described as one of the less fashionable parts of Haringey:
This abomination, which the relevant lettings agent is apparently "proud to present" as a "studio apartment" is a small kitchen with a mattress shoved in one corner, and a broom-sized shower room and bog stuck on the side. Some poor sorry fuck is going to end up paying nearly ten grand a year for the dubious honour of calling it home. And there's no law to stop some greedy sod marketing this, or worse, to hard-up tenants. We encourage abuse in this country, we really do.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Hence Labour’s housing policy.
I think they might even be serious about it - one of the shadow cabinet referred to it as the “biggest transfer of power from central to local government in more than a generation” in a radio interview today.
That's the worst thing that can happen!
Is it ?
Or is it simply an attempt to reverse the worst aspects of Thatcher’s housing policy from three and a half decades ago ? That is a very large factor in landing us with the problems we now have.
Thatchers choice to sell off council housing was less than ideal however there was a choice made before that to make council housing based on need. This I think was a bigger mistake because people put their name down and found themselves falling down the list because people kept coming in above them. It made them cynical about council housing so they supported it as there was no chance of them getting a council house
It also caused a lot of racism in places like the East End where large families of new immigrants had a higher priority for new housing than one-child couples whose families had been there for generations.
That is natural in a way not claiming it it right but when you see you council flat disappearing because others come in above you what do say?
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
Precisely and when you get more people bidding for properties the price goes up. I am still in contact with my old landlord in slough. He just rented out the studio appartment I used to rent which was an l shaped place with no windows just a light well 15 wide 20' long then the other part of the l was 15 by 10. He just got bit 1100 by one of the people wanting to rent it. I paid 750 in september last year
Hardly surprising: a logical consequence of decades of increasingly constricted supply followed by a sudden hike in interest rates causing a stampede exit by landlords. Of course you're going to end up with large numbers of desperate renters - who need a home, it's a necessity you can't do without - including many who will just have been thrown out by distressed landlords fire selling, competing to outbid one another. The surviving landlords in higher demand areas must be absolutely coining it.
Even up here, a good distance from London, what little property is available on the rental market starts at £550pcm for a room in an HMO, climbing to £950pcm for a two bed flat (and obviously much more for various grades of house.) For comparison, when I was last renting in 2014 I paid £650pcm for a two bed flat. Rents might have gone up by about a third in the intervening period but I'm pretty confident that earnings haven't.
I know that we all know that the housing market is a sick joke, but I couldn't resist drawing everyone's attention to this example in what might kindly be described as one of the less fashionable parts of Haringey:
This abomination, which the relevant lettings agent is apparently "proud to present" as a "studio apartment" is a small kitchen with a mattress shoved in one corner, and a broom-sized shower room and bog stuck on the side. Some poor sorry fuck is going to end up paying nearly ten grand a year for the dubious honour of calling it home. And there's no law to stop some greedy sod marketing this, or worse, to hard-up tenants. We encourage abuse in this country, we really do.
"Exclusive of all bills." You'd think they could have included electricity and gas - it's not as if it would take much heating.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
Precisely and when you get more people bidding for properties the price goes up. I am still in contact with my old landlord in slough. He just rented out the studio appartment I used to rent which was an l shaped place with no windows just a light well 15 wide 20' long then the other part of the l was 15 by 10. He just got bit 1100 by one of the people wanting to rent it. I paid 750 in september last year
Hardly surprising: a logical consequence of decades of increasingly constricted supply followed by a sudden hike in interest rates causing a stampede exit by landlords. Of course you're going to end up with large numbers of desperate renters - who need a home, it's a necessity you can't do without - including many who will just have been thrown out by distressed landlords fire selling, competing to outbid one another. The surviving landlords in higher demand areas must be absolutely coining it.
Even up here, a good distance from London, what little property is available on the rental market starts at £550pcm for a room in an HMO, climbing to £950pcm for a two bed flat (and obviously much more for various grades of house.) For comparison, when I was last renting in 2014 I paid £650pcm for a two bed flat. Rents might have gone up by about a third in the intervening period but I'm pretty confident that earnings haven't.
I know that we all know that the housing market is a sick joke, but I couldn't resist drawing everyone's attention to this example in what might kindly be described as one of the less fashionable parts of Haringey:
This abomination, which the relevant lettings agent is apparently "proud to present" as a "studio apartment" is a small kitchen with a mattress shoved in one corner, and a broom-sized shower room and bog stuck on the side. Some poor sorry fuck is going to end up paying nearly ten grand a year for the dubious honour of calling it home. And there's no law to stop some greedy sod marketing this, or worse, to hard-up tenants. We encourage abuse in this country, we really do.
"Exclusive of all bills." You'd think they could have included electricity and gas - it's not as if it would take much heating.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
Precisely and when you get more people bidding for properties the price goes up. I am still in contact with my old landlord in slough. He just rented out the studio appartment I used to rent which was an l shaped place with no windows just a light well 15 wide 20' long then the other part of the l was 15 by 10. He just got bit 1100 by one of the people wanting to rent it. I paid 750 in september last year
Hardly surprising: a logical consequence of decades of increasingly constricted supply followed by a sudden hike in interest rates causing a stampede exit by landlords. Of course you're going to end up with large numbers of desperate renters - who need a home, it's a necessity you can't do without - including many who will just have been thrown out by distressed landlords fire selling, competing to outbid one another. The surviving landlords in higher demand areas must be absolutely coining it.
Even up here, a good distance from London, what little property is available on the rental market starts at £550pcm for a room in an HMO, climbing to £950pcm for a two bed flat (and obviously much more for various grades of house.) For comparison, when I was last renting in 2014 I paid £650pcm for a two bed flat. Rents might have gone up by about a third in the intervening period but I'm pretty confident that earnings haven't.
I know that we all know that the housing market is a sick joke, but I couldn't resist drawing everyone's attention to this example in what might kindly be described as one of the less fashionable parts of Haringey:
This abomination, which the relevant lettings agent is apparently "proud to present" as a "studio apartment" is a small kitchen with a mattress shoved in one corner, and a broom-sized shower room and bog stuck on the side. Some poor sorry fuck is going to end up paying nearly ten grand a year for the dubious honour of calling it home. And there's no law to stop some greedy sod marketing this, or worse, to hard-up tenants. We encourage abuse in this country, we really do.
Sadly defunct weekly column dedicated to highlighting how endemic stuff like this has become on the rental market:
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
They don’t have any additional stops planned because there are no new towns planned.
Where would you put them ?
East of Piccadilly to Marsden will be almost entirely underground.
Warrington to Piccadilly will be via existing populated areas e.g. Lymm and Manchester airport.
Where do you suggest these new stops go ?
I don't know, but it’s not beyond the wit of humanity to build a few additional towns and provide transportation links.
Why not find existing towns that have poor existing transport links with a pre-existing population and fix them rather than building something new???
You are suggesting spending a fortune on creating new transport links for a new population in the hope that would be a better result than updating and fixing the existing towns and cities that have terrible connections today.
Makes no sense to me.
There’s a strong demand for extra houses, and new towns are a quick way of building many new ones.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
They don’t have any additional stops planned because there are no new towns planned.
Where would you put them ?
East of Piccadilly to Marsden will be almost entirely underground.
Warrington to Piccadilly will be via existing populated areas e.g. Lymm and Manchester airport.
Where do you suggest these new stops go ?
I don't know, but it’s not beyond the wit of humanity to build a few additional towns and provide transportation links.
It may not be beyond the wit of humanity but it's definitely beyond the capability of our current leadership...
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
Precisely and when you get more people bidding for properties the price goes up. I am still in contact with my old landlord in slough. He just rented out the studio appartment I used to rent which was an l shaped place with no windows just a light well 15 wide 20' long then the other part of the l was 15 by 10. He just got bit 1100 by one of the people wanting to rent it. I paid 750 in september last year
Hardly surprising: a logical consequence of decades of increasingly constricted supply followed by a sudden hike in interest rates causing a stampede exit by landlords. Of course you're going to end up with large numbers of desperate renters - who need a home, it's a necessity you can't do without - including many who will just have been thrown out by distressed landlords fire selling, competing to outbid one another. The surviving landlords in higher demand areas must be absolutely coining it.
Even up here, a good distance from London, what little property is available on the rental market starts at £550pcm for a room in an HMO, climbing to £950pcm for a two bed flat (and obviously much more for various grades of house.) For comparison, when I was last renting in 2014 I paid £650pcm for a two bed flat. Rents might have gone up by about a third in the intervening period but I'm pretty confident that earnings haven't.
I know that we all know that the housing market is a sick joke, but I couldn't resist drawing everyone's attention to this example in what might kindly be described as one of the less fashionable parts of Haringey:
This abomination, which the relevant lettings agent is apparently "proud to present" as a "studio apartment" is a small kitchen with a mattress shoved in one corner, and a broom-sized shower room and bog stuck on the side. Some poor sorry fuck is going to end up paying nearly ten grand a year for the dubious honour of calling it home. And there's no law to stop some greedy sod marketing this, or worse, to hard-up tenants. We encourage abuse in this country, we really do.
What would you do, ban it from being rented at all or price-fix it? Neither makes sense.
What is worse here, is that you just know two people are going to have to live there: no sane single person would waste all that space by having a double bed, even the sex-obsessed.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
Precisely and when you get more people bidding for properties the price goes up. I am still in contact with my old landlord in slough. He just rented out the studio appartment I used to rent which was an l shaped place with no windows just a light well 15 wide 20' long then the other part of the l was 15 by 10. He just got bit 1100 by one of the people wanting to rent it. I paid 750 in september last year
Hardly surprising: a logical consequence of decades of increasingly constricted supply followed by a sudden hike in interest rates causing a stampede exit by landlords. Of course you're going to end up with large numbers of desperate renters - who need a home, it's a necessity you can't do without - including many who will just have been thrown out by distressed landlords fire selling, competing to outbid one another. The surviving landlords in higher demand areas must be absolutely coining it.
Even up here, a good distance from London, what little property is available on the rental market starts at £550pcm for a room in an HMO, climbing to £950pcm for a two bed flat (and obviously much more for various grades of house.) For comparison, when I was last renting in 2014 I paid £650pcm for a two bed flat. Rents might have gone up by about a third in the intervening period but I'm pretty confident that earnings haven't.
I know that we all know that the housing market is a sick joke, but I couldn't resist drawing everyone's attention to this example in what might kindly be described as one of the less fashionable parts of Haringey:
This abomination, which the relevant lettings agent is apparently "proud to present" as a "studio apartment" is a small kitchen with a mattress shoved in one corner, and a broom-sized shower room and bog stuck on the side. Some poor sorry fuck is going to end up paying nearly ten grand a year for the dubious honour of calling it home. And there's no law to stop some greedy sod marketing this, or worse, to hard-up tenants. We encourage abuse in this country, we really do.
Sadly defunct weekly column dedicated to highlighting how endemic stuff like this has become on the rental market:
You have to grapple with the problem that, if you regulate it more, then it pushes up rents further. If you enforce it more, this results in costs that have to ultimately be reclaimed through higher taxes. Wages go up as well to pay for the higher rents. So the impulse to try and correct 'abuse' just leads to inflation. And it doesn't change the underworld of illegal, unregulated letting, in conditions worse than this, where greater abuses are taking place.
At some level people make the choice to live like this in London.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
Precisely and when you get more people bidding for properties the price goes up. I am still in contact with my old landlord in slough. He just rented out the studio appartment I used to rent which was an l shaped place with no windows just a light well 15 wide 20' long then the other part of the l was 15 by 10. He just got bit 1100 by one of the people wanting to rent it. I paid 750 in september last year
Hardly surprising: a logical consequence of decades of increasingly constricted supply followed by a sudden hike in interest rates causing a stampede exit by landlords. Of course you're going to end up with large numbers of desperate renters - who need a home, it's a necessity you can't do without - including many who will just have been thrown out by distressed landlords fire selling, competing to outbid one another. The surviving landlords in higher demand areas must be absolutely coining it.
Even up here, a good distance from London, what little property is available on the rental market starts at £550pcm for a room in an HMO, climbing to £950pcm for a two bed flat (and obviously much more for various grades of house.) For comparison, when I was last renting in 2014 I paid £650pcm for a two bed flat. Rents might have gone up by about a third in the intervening period but I'm pretty confident that earnings haven't.
I know that we all know that the housing market is a sick joke, but I couldn't resist drawing everyone's attention to this example in what might kindly be described as one of the less fashionable parts of Haringey:
This abomination, which the relevant lettings agent is apparently "proud to present" as a "studio apartment" is a small kitchen with a mattress shoved in one corner, and a broom-sized shower room and bog stuck on the side. Some poor sorry fuck is going to end up paying nearly ten grand a year for the dubious honour of calling it home. And there's no law to stop some greedy sod marketing this, or worse, to hard-up tenants. We encourage abuse in this country, we really do.
What would you do, ban it from being rented at all or price-fix it?
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
Precisely and when you get more people bidding for properties the price goes up. I am still in contact with my old landlord in slough. He just rented out the studio appartment I used to rent which was an l shaped place with no windows just a light well 15 wide 20' long then the other part of the l was 15 by 10. He just got bit 1100 by one of the people wanting to rent it. I paid 750 in september last year
Hardly surprising: a logical consequence of decades of increasingly constricted supply followed by a sudden hike in interest rates causing a stampede exit by landlords. Of course you're going to end up with large numbers of desperate renters - who need a home, it's a necessity you can't do without - including many who will just have been thrown out by distressed landlords fire selling, competing to outbid one another. The surviving landlords in higher demand areas must be absolutely coining it.
Even up here, a good distance from London, what little property is available on the rental market starts at £550pcm for a room in an HMO, climbing to £950pcm for a two bed flat (and obviously much more for various grades of house.) For comparison, when I was last renting in 2014 I paid £650pcm for a two bed flat. Rents might have gone up by about a third in the intervening period but I'm pretty confident that earnings haven't.
I know that we all know that the housing market is a sick joke, but I couldn't resist drawing everyone's attention to this example in what might kindly be described as one of the less fashionable parts of Haringey:
This abomination, which the relevant lettings agent is apparently "proud to present" as a "studio apartment" is a small kitchen with a mattress shoved in one corner, and a broom-sized shower room and bog stuck on the side. Some poor sorry fuck is going to end up paying nearly ten grand a year for the dubious honour of calling it home. And there's no law to stop some greedy sod marketing this, or worse, to hard-up tenants. We encourage abuse in this country, we really do.
What would you do, ban it from being rented at all or price-fix it? Neither makes sense.
What is worse here, is that you just know two people are going to have to live there: no sane single person would waste all that space by having a double bed, even the sex-obsessed.
Competition would drive properties like this away. We need 3 million more properties in this country and we need them today.
Healthy European countries have fewer than 90% of properties occupied, so a prospective tenant could look at something like that and say "screw that, I'm not paying for that dump" and go somewhere else instead.
We run at virtually 100% occupancy. So people have to get whatever scraps are available.
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
Funny how this guy never shares news about what Trump's kids have been up to and how it might affect his odds.
Yes, GOP propaganda disguised as a betting tip. Mr Ed would be purring.
Ah well, at least Mr Ed wouldn't be downplaying how many people the Russians have killed, like yourself did.
Anyway, you are missing the point. If all you say is correct, then the NYT and CBS should not be giving this the light of day. If they are raising questions, and putting it in such a way, then Biden has got some problems.
Re @Tres, plenty of people to talk about how Trump hasn't got a chance on here. It's the national sport.
yeah but to paraphrase the Arctic Monkeys, why do you only ever post about Hunter Biden?
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
They don’t have any additional stops planned because there are no new towns planned.
Where would you put them ?
East of Piccadilly to Marsden will be almost entirely underground.
Warrington to Piccadilly will be via existing populated areas e.g. Lymm and Manchester airport.
Where do you suggest these new stops go ?
I don't know, but it’s not beyond the wit of humanity to build a few additional towns and provide transportation links.
Why not find existing towns that have poor existing transport links with a pre-existing population and fix them rather than building something new???
You are suggesting spending a fortune on creating new transport links for a new population in the hope that would be a better result than updating and fixing the existing towns and cities that have terrible connections today.
Makes no sense to me.
There’s a strong demand for extra houses, and new towns are a quick way of building many new ones.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
Precisely and when you get more people bidding for properties the price goes up. I am still in contact with my old landlord in slough. He just rented out the studio appartment I used to rent which was an l shaped place with no windows just a light well 15 wide 20' long then the other part of the l was 15 by 10. He just got bit 1100 by one of the people wanting to rent it. I paid 750 in september last year
Hardly surprising: a logical consequence of decades of increasingly constricted supply followed by a sudden hike in interest rates causing a stampede exit by landlords. Of course you're going to end up with large numbers of desperate renters - who need a home, it's a necessity you can't do without - including many who will just have been thrown out by distressed landlords fire selling, competing to outbid one another. The surviving landlords in higher demand areas must be absolutely coining it.
Even up here, a good distance from London, what little property is available on the rental market starts at £550pcm for a room in an HMO, climbing to £950pcm for a two bed flat (and obviously much more for various grades of house.) For comparison, when I was last renting in 2014 I paid £650pcm for a two bed flat. Rents might have gone up by about a third in the intervening period but I'm pretty confident that earnings haven't.
I know that we all know that the housing market is a sick joke, but I couldn't resist drawing everyone's attention to this example in what might kindly be described as one of the less fashionable parts of Haringey:
This abomination, which the relevant lettings agent is apparently "proud to present" as a "studio apartment" is a small kitchen with a mattress shoved in one corner, and a broom-sized shower room and bog stuck on the side. Some poor sorry fuck is going to end up paying nearly ten grand a year for the dubious honour of calling it home. And there's no law to stop some greedy sod marketing this, or worse, to hard-up tenants. We encourage abuse in this country, we really do.
What would you do, ban it from being rented at all or price-fix it?
On Council House waiting lists. Some (including my own) have choice based letting. Which involves having a number of points enabling you to bid on certain properties. And then it's first come first served. I successfully bid 3 days after registration. At midnight on the Wednesday/Thursday when the weekly lists of available properties are released. Then it was just a case of visiting and agreeing and getting the keys. Took 7 weeks in total from registration to being moved in. And they were closed for four of them over Christmas New Year.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
Precisely and when you get more people bidding for properties the price goes up. I am still in contact with my old landlord in slough. He just rented out the studio appartment I used to rent which was an l shaped place with no windows just a light well 15 wide 20' long then the other part of the l was 15 by 10. He just got bit 1100 by one of the people wanting to rent it. I paid 750 in september last year
Hardly surprising: a logical consequence of decades of increasingly constricted supply followed by a sudden hike in interest rates causing a stampede exit by landlords. Of course you're going to end up with large numbers of desperate renters - who need a home, it's a necessity you can't do without - including many who will just have been thrown out by distressed landlords fire selling, competing to outbid one another. The surviving landlords in higher demand areas must be absolutely coining it.
Even up here, a good distance from London, what little property is available on the rental market starts at £550pcm for a room in an HMO, climbing to £950pcm for a two bed flat (and obviously much more for various grades of house.) For comparison, when I was last renting in 2014 I paid £650pcm for a two bed flat. Rents might have gone up by about a third in the intervening period but I'm pretty confident that earnings haven't.
I know that we all know that the housing market is a sick joke, but I couldn't resist drawing everyone's attention to this example in what might kindly be described as one of the less fashionable parts of Haringey:
This abomination, which the relevant lettings agent is apparently "proud to present" as a "studio apartment" is a small kitchen with a mattress shoved in one corner, and a broom-sized shower room and bog stuck on the side. Some poor sorry fuck is going to end up paying nearly ten grand a year for the dubious honour of calling it home. And there's no law to stop some greedy sod marketing this, or worse, to hard-up tenants. We encourage abuse in this country, we really do.
What would you do, ban it from being rented at all or price-fix it? Neither makes sense.
What is worse here, is that you just know two people are going to have to live there: no sane single person would waste all that space by having a double bed, even the sex-obsessed.
Build. Build so many houses that the bottom falls out of this kind of market.
Exactly!
I know I may sound like a broken record but if you look at Japan since they liberated their planning and let people build whatever they want (subject to regulations) on their own land in residential zones ... Not only have prices not risen in the same time ours have gone into orbit, not only has Tokyo seen major population growth absorbed without price rises ...
... but on top of that the quality of housing has improved. Floor space per home has been growing, rather than shrinking, even with prices stable and population growing.
Nice example of the archetype article from top journalist.
Summary: UK is without hope in politics and the future. Everyone in (insert small town name) agrees. I shall keep a close secret why this is the case, why no-one in politics is offering non unicorn solutions, and what could possibly be done about it.
On Council House waiting lists. Some (including my own) have choice based letting. Which involves having a number of points enabling you to bid on certain properties. And then it's first come first served. I successfully bid 3 days after registration. At midnight on the Wednesday/Thursday when the weekly lists of available properties are released. Then it was just a case of visiting and agreeing and getting the keys. Took 7 weeks in total from registration to being moved in. And they were closed for four of them over Christmas New Year.
How many points did you have because many found the points that they got ended up in them falling down the queue as they had less points because they had 1 less child and the fact they had been waiting 2 years was irrelevant because some who has 1 more kid but was only waiting 3 months took priority
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
Precisely and when you get more people bidding for properties the price goes up. I am still in contact with my old landlord in slough. He just rented out the studio appartment I used to rent which was an l shaped place with no windows just a light well 15 wide 20' long then the other part of the l was 15 by 10. He just got bit 1100 by one of the people wanting to rent it. I paid 750 in september last year
Hardly surprising: a logical consequence of decades of increasingly constricted supply followed by a sudden hike in interest rates causing a stampede exit by landlords. Of course you're going to end up with large numbers of desperate renters - who need a home, it's a necessity you can't do without - including many who will just have been thrown out by distressed landlords fire selling, competing to outbid one another. The surviving landlords in higher demand areas must be absolutely coining it.
Even up here, a good distance from London, what little property is available on the rental market starts at £550pcm for a room in an HMO, climbing to £950pcm for a two bed flat (and obviously much more for various grades of house.) For comparison, when I was last renting in 2014 I paid £650pcm for a two bed flat. Rents might have gone up by about a third in the intervening period but I'm pretty confident that earnings haven't.
I know that we all know that the housing market is a sick joke, but I couldn't resist drawing everyone's attention to this example in what might kindly be described as one of the less fashionable parts of Haringey:
This abomination, which the relevant lettings agent is apparently "proud to present" as a "studio apartment" is a small kitchen with a mattress shoved in one corner, and a broom-sized shower room and bog stuck on the side. Some poor sorry fuck is going to end up paying nearly ten grand a year for the dubious honour of calling it home. And there's no law to stop some greedy sod marketing this, or worse, to hard-up tenants. We encourage abuse in this country, we really do.
What would you do, ban it from being rented at all or price-fix it?
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Sorry but new roads don’t solve problems - and it’s probably worth watching c4 to,or row to see Ben Elton comparing rail around London and the rest of the UK.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
This won't change your view in any way, but it is worth saying the following.
The situation with high housing costs is remarkably similar in many western countries. There are areas where demand is high reflected in high land values and other areas where demand is low reflected in low land values. High house prices in areas of high demand are largely a consequence of demand plus historically cheap money for the last 2 decades. (although build cost inflation means that they are no longer that high, in objective terms).
It is just fundamentally wrong to blame this situation on 'planning' and misguided to believe it will be solved by allowing everyone to build anywhere by 'removing planning obstacles'. The cost of the latter approach would be unthinkably high, turning the countryside around major urban areas in to inefficient, unplanned sprawl with little or no supporting infrastructure. It is hard to see what, if any, benefits would accrue, other than to educate people why a planning system is needed.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Sorry but new roads don’t solve problems - and it’s probably worth watching c4 to,or row to see Ben Elton comparing rail around London and the rest of the UK.
You do know ben elton is a complete dick and nothing he says should be taken as gospel.
Having said that its also true london had good public transport....almost nowhere else has. London people saying just take a bus is farcical
'Greek conservative leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis is on course to win a second term as prime minister and a majority in parliament, latest results show.
He beat centre-left rival Syriza in May, but called new elections in a bid to win enough seats to govern alone.
His New Democracy party polled 40.4%, 20 points ahead of Syriza, with three-quarters of the vote counted.
The vote came 11 days after a migrant boat tragedy off Greece in which 500 people are thought to have died.
Although three days of mourning were held, the disaster had little effect on the campaign and Greeks voted to maintain economic stability.
Under Greek election rules for a second election, the conservatives are awarded a bonus number of seats in parliament, but the exact number depends on the final result.
Former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras's Syriza party was unable to narrow the margin of last month's defeat.
But there was success for the newly created far-right Spartans party, which was set to pass the 3% vote-share threshold to enter parliament.
The Spartans only emerged as a political force this month when the Greek Supreme Court banned another far-right party, the Greeks, and its jailed founder threw his weight behind them.'
On Council House waiting lists. Some (including my own) have choice based letting. Which involves having a number of points enabling you to bid on certain properties. And then it's first come first served. I successfully bid 3 days after registration. At midnight on the Wednesday/Thursday when the weekly lists of available properties are released. Then it was just a case of visiting and agreeing and getting the keys. Took 7 weeks in total from registration to being moved in. And they were closed for four of them over Christmas New Year.
How many points did you have because many found the points that they got ended up in them falling down the queue as they had less points because they had 1 less child and the fact they had been waiting 2 years was irrelevant because some who has 1 more kid but was only waiting 3 months took priority
The points enable you to bid on certain properties. For example. I was newly single but my kids grown up. So I was only eligible to bid on one bedroom flats. There is no "queue". You can't "fall down" it. It is all Online. They come out weekly, and once registered, they have a button marked "bid" next to them if you qualify for a particular property. Or "ineligible" if you don't. I bid on two. And was fastest finger first on one of them.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Sorry but new roads don’t solve problems - and it’s probably worth watching c4 to,or row to see Ben Elton comparing rail around London and the rest of the UK.
That sort of timid, self defeating attitude is part of the problem. Of course new roads do solve problems.
I live in a fast growing new town (they do still exist, just not enough of them). We have thousands of homes being built, all of which are getting snapped up. New shops, businesses, industry opening too.
And what is the key new transport infrastructure underpinning this? One new motorway junction, with one new A road.
There's talk we might get a train station in a few years time, I'm not holding my breath, but the new motorway junction? People who get about by road are happy with that. And outside London it's roads, not rail, that truly matters. Of course London is different but WE ARE NOT LONDON.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
This won't change your view in any way, but it is worth saying the following.
The situation with high housing costs is remarkably similar in many western countries. There are areas where demand is high reflected in high land values and other areas where demand is low reflected in low land values. High house prices in areas of high demand are largely a consequence of demand plus historically cheap money for the last 2 decades. (although build cost inflation means that they are no longer that high, in objective terms).
It is just fundamentally wrong to blame this situation on 'planning' and misguided to believe it will be solved by allowing everyone to build anywhere by 'removing planning obstacles'. The cost of the latter approach would be unthinkably high, turning the countryside around major urban areas in to inefficient, unplanned sprawl with little or no supporting infrastructure. It is hard to see what, if any, benefits would accrue, other than to educate people why a planning system is needed.
Look at Japan. Look at Tokyo.
Same low rates. Lower actually.
Same population density. Higher actually.
Same growing population in cities.
Different planning system.
Result?
We have faced rampant price rises. They have stable prices.
We face shrinking houses in new builds. Their new builds are better quality and bigger floor space than older stock.
Name one way our system is doing a better job than Japan's.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Sorry but new roads don’t solve problems - and it’s probably worth watching c4 to,or row to see Ben Elton comparing rail around London and the rest of the UK.
That sort of timid, self defeating attitude is part of the problem. Of course new roads do solve problems.
I live in a fast growing new town (they do still exist, just not enough of them). We have thousands of homes being built, all of which are getting snapped up. New shops, businesses, industry opening too.
And what is the key new transport infrastructure underpinning this? One new motorway junction, with one new A road.
There's talk we might get a train station in a few years time, I'm not holding my breath, but the new motorway junction? People who get about by road are happy with that. And outside London it's roads, not rail, that truly matters. Of course London is different but WE ARE NOT LONDON.
That’s false consciousness. You actually travel everywhere by rail.
1. In 2017, a text Hunter Biden sent implied he had the protection of his dad 2. At that time, his dad was just a private citizen
Hunter Biden is a junkie. And like the vast majority of junkies, he will have told many lies along the way.
Hunter Biden was also the son of a former VP.
That will, no doubt, have given him ample opportunity to turn his status and his lies into drugs, and to protect him to some extent, even if his father was completely unaware of it.
But I'm struggling to see what crime, or even impropriety, Joe Biden committed.
I agree until there is any evidence joe participated rather than "You know who my father is" from hunter then no crime
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
This won't change your view in any way, but it is worth saying the following.
The situation with high housing costs is remarkably similar in many western countries. There are areas where demand is high reflected in high land values and other areas where demand is low reflected in low land values. High house prices in areas of high demand are largely a consequence of demand plus historically cheap money for the last 2 decades. (although build cost inflation means that they are no longer that high, in objective terms).
It is just fundamentally wrong to blame this situation on 'planning' and misguided to believe it will be solved by allowing everyone to build anywhere by 'removing planning obstacles'. The cost of the latter approach would be unthinkably high, turning the countryside around major urban areas in to inefficient, unplanned sprawl with little or no supporting infrastructure. It is hard to see what, if any, benefits would accrue, other than to educate people why a planning system is needed.
Look at Japan. Look at Tokyo.
Same low rates. Lower actually.
Same population density. Higher actually.
Same growing population in cities.
Different planning system.
Result?
We have faced rampant price rises. They have stable prices.
We face shrinking houses in new builds. Their new builds are better quality and bigger floor space than older stock.
Name one way our system is doing a better job than Japan's.
Have you seen how shit Japanese cities look? They're used for films of future dystopias.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
This won't change your view in any way, but it is worth saying the following.
The situation with high housing costs is remarkably similar in many western countries. There are areas where demand is high reflected in high land values and other areas where demand is low reflected in low land values. High house prices in areas of high demand are largely a consequence of demand plus historically cheap money for the last 2 decades. (although build cost inflation means that they are no longer that high, in objective terms).
It is just fundamentally wrong to blame this situation on 'planning' and misguided to believe it will be solved by allowing everyone to build anywhere by 'removing planning obstacles'. The cost of the latter approach would be unthinkably high, turning the countryside around major urban areas in to inefficient, unplanned sprawl with little or no supporting infrastructure. It is hard to see what, if any, benefits would accrue, other than to educate people why a planning system is needed.
Look at Japan. Look at Tokyo.
Same low rates. Lower actually.
Same population density. Higher actually.
Same growing population in cities.
Different planning system.
Result?
We have faced rampant price rises. They have stable prices.
We face shrinking houses in new builds. Their new builds are better quality and bigger floor space than older stock.
Name one way our system is doing a better job than Japan's.
Have you seen how shit Japanese cities look? They're used for films of future dystopias.
On Council House waiting lists. Some (including my own) have choice based letting. Which involves having a number of points enabling you to bid on certain properties. And then it's first come first served. I successfully bid 3 days after registration. At midnight on the Wednesday/Thursday when the weekly lists of available properties are released. Then it was just a case of visiting and agreeing and getting the keys. Took 7 weeks in total from registration to being moved in. And they were closed for four of them over Christmas New Year.
How many points did you have because many found the points that they got ended up in them falling down the queue as they had less points because they had 1 less child and the fact they had been waiting 2 years was irrelevant because some who has 1 more kid but was only waiting 3 months took priority
The points enable you to bid on certain properties. For example. I was newly single but my kids grown up. So I was only eligible to bid on one bedroom flats. There is no "queue". You can't "fall down" it. It is all Online. They come out weekly, and once registered, they have a button marked "bid" next to them if you qualify for a particular property. Or "ineligible" if you don't. I bid on two. And was fastest finger first on one of them.
You say there is no queue but I know people who went for a council flat when mid twenties and they are still waiting 30 years later and keep finding their position number is larger
I'm not convinced about the idea of sequestering Russian assets in the west. Legally it is obviously fraught with difficulty for one. Secondly though it is removing an incentive for Russia to make peace with the west on our terms. If they aren't getting their assets back anyway why bother? To me, freezes seem like the best option.
Of course unfreezing could be dependent on a certain percentage of those funds, certainly government cash, going towards Ukrainian reconstruction. Bit sneaky but they would still get something back and we'll be paying for the reconstruction too.
1. In 2017, a text Hunter Biden sent implied he had the protection of his dad 2. At that time, his dad was just a private citizen
Hunter Biden is a junkie. And like the vast majority of junkies, he will have told many lies along the way.
Hunter Biden was also the son of a former VP.
That will, no doubt, have given him ample opportunity to turn his status and his lies into drugs, and to protect him to some extent, even if his father was completely unaware of it.
But I'm struggling to see what crime, or even impropriety, Joe Biden committed.
I agree until there is any evidence joe participated rather than "You know who my father is" from hunter then no crime
Hmmm. This has the aroma of beer and curry to me.
I have had neither and not a fan of joe biden....I just dont want to call him an arsehole for something his kid did unless we have evidence he was complicit
I'm not convinced about the idea of sequestering Russian assets in the west. Legally it is obviously fraught with difficulty for one. Secondly though it is removing an incentive for Russia to make peace with the west on our terms. If they aren't getting their assets back anyway why bother?
I think on balance you are right. Look at what happened after WW1 for a perfect example of how not to act as victors.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Sorry but new roads don’t solve problems - and it’s probably worth watching c4 to,or row to see Ben Elton comparing rail around London and the rest of the UK.
That sort of timid, self defeating attitude is part of the problem. Of course new roads do solve problems.
I live in a fast growing new town (they do still exist, just not enough of them). We have thousands of homes being built, all of which are getting snapped up. New shops, businesses, industry opening too.
And what is the key new transport infrastructure underpinning this? One new motorway junction, with one new A road.
There's talk we might get a train station in a few years time, I'm not holding my breath, but the new motorway junction? People who get about by road are happy with that. And outside London it's roads, not rail, that truly matters. Of course London is different but WE ARE NOT LONDON.
The problem here is that what you are now making is an argument for planning, which you claim to reject. The reason why everything is working in your development is more likely than not because decades of work went in to the new trunk roads and motorway junctions, negotiated by the Council with Highways England and the government, as well as the co-siting of commercial development and community infrastructure, and finding ways to fund all this, including through Section 106 contributions by developers. That is what planning is and the value that it adds. If you get rid of planning then none of that happens, houses get built but you can't get anywhere, there are crap roads, no shops, infrastructure etc.
You could say ok, why not just zone the land through the plan making process and then have a design code rather than having to go through the pain and delay of needing planning permission. You could well do that and some countries do. The main problem is it makes it harder to go through the first stage of the process (the plan making stage) because you need to be absolutely sure that everything is solved before you can confidently rely on a design code for the purposes of delivery.
A design code is just a delivery mechanism not an alternative to having a planning system. Looking at your example of Japan, my guess is just that they are better at planning because the state is more assertive and organised at building infrastructure. I'd guess the falling prices are more to do with historic deflation than falling demand. But I've never studied the Japanese system in detail so don't feel able to authoritively comment on it.
In summary the problem is not that a planning system exists in the first place, but because the one we have isn't working very well.
On Council House waiting lists. Some (including my own) have choice based letting. Which involves having a number of points enabling you to bid on certain properties. And then it's first come first served. I successfully bid 3 days after registration. At midnight on the Wednesday/Thursday when the weekly lists of available properties are released. Then it was just a case of visiting and agreeing and getting the keys. Took 7 weeks in total from registration to being moved in. And they were closed for four of them over Christmas New Year.
How many points did you have because many found the points that they got ended up in them falling down the queue as they had less points because they had 1 less child and the fact they had been waiting 2 years was irrelevant because some who has 1 more kid but was only waiting 3 months took priority
The points enable you to bid on certain properties. For example. I was newly single but my kids grown up. So I was only eligible to bid on one bedroom flats. There is no "queue". You can't "fall down" it. It is all Online. They come out weekly, and once registered, they have a button marked "bid" next to them if you qualify for a particular property. Or "ineligible" if you don't. I bid on two. And was fastest finger first on one of them.
You say there is no queue but I know people who went for a council flat when mid twenties and they are still waiting 30 years later and keep finding their position number is larger
He's saying it's a different system. No position number.
The problem is it entails getting on the system and then being tech savvy too to be fastest finger first.
We looked into it last year before we moved. Problem is we wouldn't even get onto the system before we were homeless, and we didn't want to wait to be homeless.
Thankfully we didn't have to, but others aren't so lucky.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Sorry but new roads don’t solve problems - and it’s probably worth watching c4 to,or row to see Ben Elton comparing rail around London and the rest of the UK.
That sort of timid, self defeating attitude is part of the problem. Of course new roads do solve problems.
I live in a fast growing new town (they do still exist, just not enough of them). We have thousands of homes being built, all of which are getting snapped up. New shops, businesses, industry opening too.
And what is the key new transport infrastructure underpinning this? One new motorway junction, with one new A road.
There's talk we might get a train station in a few years time, I'm not holding my breath, but the new motorway junction? People who get about by road are happy with that. And outside London it's roads, not rail, that truly matters. Of course London is different but WE ARE NOT LONDON.
That’s false consciousness. You actually travel everywhere by rail.
I think I hear a train a'comin' Comin' down the line And I really want to catch it So I can haul my be-hind Far from Dartmoor Prison Where every day's the same But even worse for me - There ain't no damn train!
I'm not convinced about the idea of sequestering Russian assets in the west. Legally it is obviously fraught with difficulty for one. Secondly though it is removing an incentive for Russia to make peace with the west on our terms. If they aren't getting their assets back anyway why bother?
I think on balance you are right. Look at what happened after WW1 for a perfect example of how not to act as victors.
There is however the little question of reparations for the damage inflicted by the unprovoked war they initiated
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Sorry but new roads don’t solve problems - and it’s probably worth watching c4 to,or row to see Ben Elton comparing rail around London and the rest of the UK.
You do know ben elton is a complete dick and nothing he says should be taken as gospel.
Having said that its also true london had good public transport....almost nowhere else has. London people saying just take a bus is farcical
I am lucky to be served by several bus routes out here in the sticks. Some of them go where I wish to travel to. Some of them *even turn up*. Can you imagine!?
On Council House waiting lists. Some (including my own) have choice based letting. Which involves having a number of points enabling you to bid on certain properties. And then it's first come first served. I successfully bid 3 days after registration. At midnight on the Wednesday/Thursday when the weekly lists of available properties are released. Then it was just a case of visiting and agreeing and getting the keys. Took 7 weeks in total from registration to being moved in. And they were closed for four of them over Christmas New Year.
I applied for a council flat a few years ago and was told I'd have to wait around 40 years on the list.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Sorry but new roads don’t solve problems - and it’s probably worth watching c4 to,or row to see Ben Elton comparing rail around London and the rest of the UK.
You do know ben elton is a complete dick and nothing he says should be taken as gospel.
Having said that its also true london had good public transport....almost nowhere else has. London people saying just take a bus is farcical
I am lucky to be served by several bus routes out here in the sticks. Some of them go where I wish to travel to. Some of them *even turn up*. Can you imagine!?
Same here I mostly use buses however a lot of the places are not the same I never for example used buses in slough because they a) rarely turned up b) they were generally not much different in price to a taxi and c) rarely went where you wanted to go
On Council House waiting lists. Some (including my own) have choice based letting. Which involves having a number of points enabling you to bid on certain properties. And then it's first come first served. I successfully bid 3 days after registration. At midnight on the Wednesday/Thursday when the weekly lists of available properties are released. Then it was just a case of visiting and agreeing and getting the keys. Took 7 weeks in total from registration to being moved in. And they were closed for four of them over Christmas New Year.
I applied for a council flat a few years ago and was told I'd have to wait around 40 years on the list.
Maybe it depends on the council, I know when I asked to get on the list they just laughed
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
This won't change your view in any way, but it is worth saying the following.
The situation with high housing costs is remarkably similar in many western countries. There are areas where demand is high reflected in high land values and other areas where demand is low reflected in low land values. High house prices in areas of high demand are largely a consequence of demand plus historically cheap money for the last 2 decades. (although build cost inflation means that they are no longer that high, in objective terms).
It is just fundamentally wrong to blame this situation on 'planning' and misguided to believe it will be solved by allowing everyone to build anywhere by 'removing planning obstacles'. The cost of the latter approach would be unthinkably high, turning the countryside around major urban areas in to inefficient, unplanned sprawl with little or no supporting infrastructure. It is hard to see what, if any, benefits would accrue, other than to educate people why a planning system is needed.
Look at Japan. Look at Tokyo.
Same low rates. Lower actually.
Same population density. Higher actually.
Same growing population in cities.
Different planning system.
Result?
We have faced rampant price rises. They have stable prices.
We face shrinking houses in new builds. Their new builds are better quality and bigger floor space than older stock.
Name one way our system is doing a better job than Japan's.
Japan has much tighter controls on immigration than the UK, so its falling birthrates do filter through to less demand for housing too.
On top of the better quality of the new build properties they do build
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Sorry but new roads don’t solve problems - and it’s probably worth watching c4 to,or row to see Ben Elton comparing rail around London and the rest of the UK.
That sort of timid, self defeating attitude is part of the problem. Of course new roads do solve problems.
I live in a fast growing new town (they do still exist, just not enough of them). We have thousands of homes being built, all of which are getting snapped up. New shops, businesses, industry opening too.
And what is the key new transport infrastructure underpinning this? One new motorway junction, with one new A road.
There's talk we might get a train station in a few years time, I'm not holding my breath, but the new motorway junction? People who get about by road are happy with that. And outside London it's roads, not rail, that truly matters. Of course London is different but WE ARE NOT LONDON.
Trouble is, maybe the rest of the country needs to be more like London; after all, London is one of the places in the UK that broadly pays its way.
Sure, it's hard to prove. But it still leads to a question. Suppose there was a decent probability that you, your town and your country would be better off if there was less car infrastructure (less parking, narrower roads, more closely-spaced houses). Part of the tradeoff would be that your immediate neighbourhood could support a wider range of facilities and businesses. Where's the line where you would accept using your car less often? £1000 a year? £5000 a year? £10000 a year?
How seriously do you want yourself and your community to be richer?
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Sorry but new roads don’t solve problems - and it’s probably worth watching c4 to,or row to see Ben Elton comparing rail around London and the rest of the UK.
That sort of timid, self defeating attitude is part of the problem. Of course new roads do solve problems.
I live in a fast growing new town (they do still exist, just not enough of them). We have thousands of homes being built, all of which are getting snapped up. New shops, businesses, industry opening too.
And what is the key new transport infrastructure underpinning this? One new motorway junction, with one new A road.
There's talk we might get a train station in a few years time, I'm not holding my breath, but the new motorway junction? People who get about by road are happy with that. And outside London it's roads, not rail, that truly matters. Of course London is different but WE ARE NOT LONDON.
The problem here is that what you are now making is an argument for planning, which you claim to reject. The reason why everything is working in your development is more likely than not because decades of work went in to the new trunk roads and motorway junctions, negotiated by the Council with Highways England and the government, as well as the co-siting of commercial development and community infrastructure, and finding ways to fund all this, including through Section 106 contributions by developers. That is what planning is and the value that it adds. If you get rid of planning then none of that happens, houses get built but you can't get anywhere, there are crap roads, no shops, infrastructure etc.
You could say ok, why not just zone the land through the plan making process and then have a design code rather than having to go through the pain and delay of needing planning permission. You could well do that and some countries do. The main problem is it makes it harder to go through the first stage of the process (the plan making stage) because you need to be absolutely sure that everything is solved before you can confidently rely on a design code for the purposes of delivery.
A design code is just a delivery mechanism not an alternative to having a planning system. Looking at your example of Japan, my guess is just that they are better at planning because the state is more assertive and organised at building infrastructure. I'd guess the falling prices are more to do with historic deflation than falling demand. But I've never studied the Japanese system in detail so don't feel able to authoritively comment on it.
In summary the problem is not that a planning system exists in the first place, but because the one we have isn't working very well.
Sorry that's not remotely an argument for planning, you could not be more wrong. There isn't time for decades of work as our population levels weren't the same decades ago, and if decades of work are going into it then no wonder everything is so broken as the facts decades ago are not the facts today.
If everything is planned then I'm curious where the new railway station, new schools, new GPs and everything else are. None of them exist. I still am registered at my old GP in my old town, I've not transferred my kids schooling either, and drive across the river to a different town for those.
Organic development works better. If houses are built, but no schools etc then people will vote for what they need. Unsurprisingly at the local elections the local Lib Dem (who got elected) was not campaigning on NIMBYism, but supporting new GPs to built and new schools to be built. Because that's what the new residents need and its not all there yet. Supermarkets have opened etc because businesses like Aldi and ASDA will open branches where their customers are. Thousands of people move into an area, they'll be in like a shot to get a shot at those customers.
The state is bloody useless at planning. Design transportation, sure, then let it organically grow in what's zoned there.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Sorry but new roads don’t solve problems - and it’s probably worth watching c4 to,or row to see Ben Elton comparing rail around London and the rest of the UK.
That sort of timid, self defeating attitude is part of the problem. Of course new roads do solve problems.
I live in a fast growing new town (they do still exist, just not enough of them). We have thousands of homes being built, all of which are getting snapped up. New shops, businesses, industry opening too.
And what is the key new transport infrastructure underpinning this? One new motorway junction, with one new A road.
There's talk we might get a train station in a few years time, I'm not holding my breath, but the new motorway junction? People who get about by road are happy with that. And outside London it's roads, not rail, that truly matters. Of course London is different but WE ARE NOT LONDON.
That’s false consciousness. You actually travel everywhere by rail.
Caroline knows how fragile we are With hope as our faith We look to the stars Caroline's Monkey is crying again There's no satisfaction on Caroline's train
On Council House waiting lists. Some (including my own) have choice based letting. Which involves having a number of points enabling you to bid on certain properties. And then it's first come first served. I successfully bid 3 days after registration. At midnight on the Wednesday/Thursday when the weekly lists of available properties are released. Then it was just a case of visiting and agreeing and getting the keys. Took 7 weeks in total from registration to being moved in. And they were closed for four of them over Christmas New Year.
How many points did you have because many found the points that they got ended up in them falling down the queue as they had less points because they had 1 less child and the fact they had been waiting 2 years was irrelevant because some who has 1 more kid but was only waiting 3 months took priority
The points enable you to bid on certain properties. For example. I was newly single but my kids grown up. So I was only eligible to bid on one bedroom flats. There is no "queue". You can't "fall down" it. It is all Online. They come out weekly, and once registered, they have a button marked "bid" next to them if you qualify for a particular property. Or "ineligible" if you don't. I bid on two. And was fastest finger first on one of them.
You say there is no queue but I know people who went for a council flat when mid twenties and they are still waiting 30 years later and keep finding their position number is larger
That's because those Councils choose to operate that way.There is no queue under a choice based letting system. Nor is there a waiting list. Councils can introduce it if they want to.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Sorry but new roads don’t solve problems - and it’s probably worth watching c4 to,or row to see Ben Elton comparing rail around London and the rest of the UK.
That sort of timid, self defeating attitude is part of the problem. Of course new roads do solve problems.
I live in a fast growing new town (they do still exist, just not enough of them). We have thousands of homes being built, all of which are getting snapped up. New shops, businesses, industry opening too.
And what is the key new transport infrastructure underpinning this? One new motorway junction, with one new A road.
There's talk we might get a train station in a few years time, I'm not holding my breath, but the new motorway junction? People who get about by road are happy with that. And outside London it's roads, not rail, that truly matters. Of course London is different but WE ARE NOT LONDON.
Trouble is, maybe the rest of the country needs to be more like London; after all, London is one of the places in the UK that broadly pays its way.
Sure, it's hard to prove. But it still leads to a question. Suppose there was a decent probability that you, your town and your country would be better off if there was less car infrastructure (less parking, narrower roads, more closely-spaced houses). Part of the tradeoff would be that your immediate neighbourhood could support a wider range of facilities and businesses. Where's the line where you would accept using your car less often? £1000 a year? £5000 a year? £10000 a year?
How seriously do you want yourself and your community to be richer?
Public transport has fuck all to do with london's prodcutiveness frankly. I worked for a company in oxford that moved to to readng...I knew they were doing it which was why I accepted the off as wasnt going to commute to oxford for long 3 to 4 hours each way to wantage.
Their reason for moving, and its precovid was south east is only place we can find the skills we are looking for. Now post covid they can find them anywhere in the uk now the "you need to be in everyday" totem is broken. There was nothing I could have done in the 5 years I worked for them that could not have been done remotely.......they were just old style we need you in so we got to move to the southeast for access to people we need
Not an exact historical analogy, but an interesting one.
The Qin Dynasty collapsed in 206 B.C because being late was punished with death. When a Chinese general noticed he was going to be late, and realized the punishment for being late was the same as for rebellion, he rebelled. Prigozhin probably had a similar realization recently. https://twitter.com/Der_Parrot/status/1672362837853999106
On Council House waiting lists. Some (including my own) have choice based letting. Which involves having a number of points enabling you to bid on certain properties. And then it's first come first served. I successfully bid 3 days after registration. At midnight on the Wednesday/Thursday when the weekly lists of available properties are released. Then it was just a case of visiting and agreeing and getting the keys. Took 7 weeks in total from registration to being moved in. And they were closed for four of them over Christmas New Year.
I applied for a council flat a few years ago and was told I'd have to wait around 40 years on the list.
There is no "list" with choice based letting. You register. You bid. You are limited to three bids a week I think.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
There has been an increase in new household formation (divorce never really noticed, but also immigration) and a sclerotic planning system resulting in constraints on supply. Additionally much of the public good spending (eg on insulation) has been laid on house owners through building regs. The lack of an efficient social housing system (council houses, lifetime tenancies rather than renewable at need tenancies, idiotic refusal to use the governments monopsony to drive down rental payments to private landlords) have contributed as well.
All these have contributed to excess house prices, supported by the cultural shift to mortgages being based on dual incomes and affordability based lending multiple expansion (artificially low interest rates). Basically a massive failure of government regulation and the former building societies switching to a distribution-led model rather than underwriting mortgages themselves.
Business investment - English and a non-contributory welfare system plus lack of a national ID card made the UK a hugely attractive place for immigrants (especially young EU citizens) keeping wage costs down - effectively business had an unlimited pool of labour to draw on. Additionally Brown’s response of tax credits just shifted wage costs onto the tax payers dime, reinforcing the problem.
If the alternative to business investment is low wage labour it’s harder to make the case stack up. A minor note would be the willingness of management to sell companies to international businesses who wouldn’t then have a specific incentive to invest in the UK.
Well, we've had idiot Tory MPs saying daft/stupid/offensive things.
So a Labour MP has decided to join in - Andrew Western, MP for Stratford and Urmston - and show his disdain for the principle of innocence until proven guilty and the right of those accused of criminal offences to get legal advice.
On Council House waiting lists. Some (including my own) have choice based letting. Which involves having a number of points enabling you to bid on certain properties. And then it's first come first served. I successfully bid 3 days after registration. At midnight on the Wednesday/Thursday when the weekly lists of available properties are released. Then it was just a case of visiting and agreeing and getting the keys. Took 7 weeks in total from registration to being moved in. And they were closed for four of them over Christmas New Year.
How many points did you have because many found the points that they got ended up in them falling down the queue as they had less points because they had 1 less child and the fact they had been waiting 2 years was irrelevant because some who has 1 more kid but was only waiting 3 months took priority
The points enable you to bid on certain properties. For example. I was newly single but my kids grown up. So I was only eligible to bid on one bedroom flats. There is no "queue". You can't "fall down" it. It is all Online. They come out weekly, and once registered, they have a button marked "bid" next to them if you qualify for a particular property. Or "ineligible" if you don't. I bid on two. And was fastest finger first on one of them.
You say there is no queue but I know people who went for a council flat when mid twenties and they are still waiting 30 years later and keep finding their position number is larger
That's because those Councils choose to operate that way.There is no queue under a choice based letting system. Nor is there a waiting list. Councils can introduce it if they want to.
Where was this?
I've not worked in this area recently, but when I did, it was hugely different across the country. Some areas had a surplus of council housing, so a reasonable amount of turnover, but most of London was almost impossible. There was so little housing that you had to have significant additional needs to get anywhere near a flat.
On Council House waiting lists. Some (including my own) have choice based letting. Which involves having a number of points enabling you to bid on certain properties. And then it's first come first served. I successfully bid 3 days after registration. At midnight on the Wednesday/Thursday when the weekly lists of available properties are released. Then it was just a case of visiting and agreeing and getting the keys. Took 7 weeks in total from registration to being moved in. And they were closed for four of them over Christmas New Year.
I applied for a council flat a few years ago and was told I'd have to wait around 40 years on the list.
There is no "list" with choice based letting. You register. You bid. You are limited to three bids a week I think.
And what do you bid with your need points....been a single male on that list for 50 years you still have the need points you started with
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Well not if it was all Hunter.
I’m taking the texts at face value - no reason not to. But obviously if it was all Hunter than Biden isn’t responsible.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
This won't change your view in any way, but it is worth saying the following.
The situation with high housing costs is remarkably similar in many western countries. There are areas where demand is high reflected in high land values and other areas where demand is low reflected in low land values. High house prices in areas of high demand are largely a consequence of demand plus historically cheap money for the last 2 decades. (although build cost inflation means that they are no longer that high, in objective terms).
It is just fundamentally wrong to blame this situation on 'planning' and misguided to believe it will be solved by allowing everyone to build anywhere by 'removing planning obstacles'. The cost of the latter approach would be unthinkably high, turning the countryside around major urban areas in to inefficient, unplanned sprawl with little or no supporting infrastructure. It is hard to see what, if any, benefits would accrue, other than to educate people why a planning system is needed.
Look at Japan. Look at Tokyo.
Same low rates. Lower actually.
Same population density. Higher actually.
Same growing population in cities.
Different planning system.
Result?
We have faced rampant price rises. They have stable prices.
We face shrinking houses in new builds. Their new builds are better quality and bigger floor space than older stock.
Name one way our system is doing a better job than Japan's.
Japan has much tighter controls on immigration than the UK, so its falling birthrates do filter through to less demand for housing too.
On top of the better quality of the new build properties they do build
Tokyo has growing population, immigration controls or no.
And the better quality building is because they have the planning system they have, or lack of it. Competition means building a better home is better than building a shithole but still being able to sell/let it because TINA applies.
Hope you enjoyed the hot weather because that's it for about 2 weeks at least.
Would you perhaps consider a looooong weekend in East Jesus, Texas . . . during current record heatwave . . . during power outage?
Confession - today in Seattle it's sunny with current temp in low 70sF light wind moderate humdity & pollen, etc.
Damn near perfect.
Yesterday my humble hood posted big regional classic Car Show. With "classic" very loosely defined, but many true classics, and plenty of cool vehicles of diverse description. Ditto re: the crowd, which was not the biggest I've seen (day started cool and cloudy) but largest post-pandemic. People of all ages and degrees of interest in auto-ology, very kid friendly - the little ones enjoyed our small local park.
Well organized with sub-minimal fuss or mess (aside from loud engines at 5am); done, dusted and picked up by 6pm. Many local businesses did roaring trade, as did numerous vendors of everything from electric cars to carmel-corn; got me a big bag of the latter (which has mysteriously disappeared)
Above all, thousands of folks from around Puget Sound enjoyed themselves, at our neighborhood's annual contribution to our region.
Bit surreal given contemporaneous developments in Russia (or other way around?)
Went out at one point to check out the Car Show . . . got back and the March on Moscow had done a 180.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
This won't change your view in any way, but it is worth saying the following.
The situation with high housing costs is remarkably similar in many western countries. There are areas where demand is high reflected in high land values and other areas where demand is low reflected in low land values. High house prices in areas of high demand are largely a consequence of demand plus historically cheap money for the last 2 decades. (although build cost inflation means that they are no longer that high, in objective terms).
It is just fundamentally wrong to blame this situation on 'planning' and misguided to believe it will be solved by allowing everyone to build anywhere by 'removing planning obstacles'. The cost of the latter approach would be unthinkably high, turning the countryside around major urban areas in to inefficient, unplanned sprawl with little or no supporting infrastructure. It is hard to see what, if any, benefits would accrue, other than to educate people why a planning system is needed.
Look at Japan. Look at Tokyo.
Same low rates. Lower actually.
Same population density. Higher actually.
Same growing population in cities.
Different planning system.
Result?
We have faced rampant price rises. They have stable prices.
We face shrinking houses in new builds. Their new builds are better quality and bigger floor space than older stock.
Name one way our system is doing a better job than Japan's.
Using Japan as an example to follow is really dumb. Their land usage pattern is entirely different to ours and in ways you would certainly not be interested in following.
In England, agricultural land accounts for 63% of our land. In Japan it is just 11% - Japan imports 60% of its food. In England, forests, lakes and grassland (moors etc) account for 20% of our land. In Japan it is over 70%. In England residential land, including gardens accounts for 6.1% of land usage. In Japan it is just over half that at 3.2%
So they actually have far less of their land under residential development than in England and 3 times as much left to nature. The difference of course being nothing to do with planning but the fact they have a different cultural tradition when it comes to living on top of each other.
A few basic calculations shows that in terms of residential land, population density in Japan is around 104 people per hectare whilst in the UK it is around 86 people per hectare. This is just for residential land.
If Japan teaches us anything useful it is that they have dealt with their increasing population by building up, not out.
On Council House waiting lists. Some (including my own) have choice based letting. Which involves having a number of points enabling you to bid on certain properties. And then it's first come first served. I successfully bid 3 days after registration. At midnight on the Wednesday/Thursday when the weekly lists of available properties are released. Then it was just a case of visiting and agreeing and getting the keys. Took 7 weeks in total from registration to being moved in. And they were closed for four of them over Christmas New Year.
How many points did you have because many found the points that they got ended up in them falling down the queue as they had less points because they had 1 less child and the fact they had been waiting 2 years was irrelevant because some who has 1 more kid but was only waiting 3 months took priority
The points enable you to bid on certain properties. For example. I was newly single but my kids grown up. So I was only eligible to bid on one bedroom flats. There is no "queue". You can't "fall down" it. It is all Online. They come out weekly, and once registered, they have a button marked "bid" next to them if you qualify for a particular property. Or "ineligible" if you don't. I bid on two. And was fastest finger first on one of them.
You say there is no queue but I know people who went for a council flat when mid twenties and they are still waiting 30 years later and keep finding their position number is larger
He's saying it's a different system. No position number.
The problem is it entails getting on the system and then being tech savvy too to be fastest finger first.
We looked into it last year before we moved. Problem is we wouldn't even get onto the system before we were homeless, and we didn't want to wait to be homeless.
Thankfully we didn't have to, but others aren't so lucky.
I got on the system before I was homeless. I don't consider myself tech savvy. There were only two properties available I was eligible for. I didn't care where I lived in this giant County. That certainly helped. It is a much better system.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
This won't change your view in any way, but it is worth saying the following.
The situation with high housing costs is remarkably similar in many western countries. There are areas where demand is high reflected in high land values and other areas where demand is low reflected in low land values. High house prices in areas of high demand are largely a consequence of demand plus historically cheap money for the last 2 decades. (although build cost inflation means that they are no longer that high, in objective terms).
It is just fundamentally wrong to blame this situation on 'planning' and misguided to believe it will be solved by allowing everyone to build anywhere by 'removing planning obstacles'. The cost of the latter approach would be unthinkably high, turning the countryside around major urban areas in to inefficient, unplanned sprawl with little or no supporting infrastructure. It is hard to see what, if any, benefits would accrue, other than to educate people why a planning system is needed.
Look at Japan. Look at Tokyo.
Same low rates. Lower actually.
Same population density. Higher actually.
Same growing population in cities.
Different planning system.
Result?
We have faced rampant price rises. They have stable prices.
We face shrinking houses in new builds. Their new builds are better quality and bigger floor space than older stock.
Name one way our system is doing a better job than Japan's.
Japan's population is declining at quite a significant rate. It's down by more than 3 million since its peak in 2010.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
I’m not really interested in the Hunter Biden saga - was reacting just to the post. (By the way Biden’s family is very wealthy for someone in public service). But if there is no more evidence than those texts it’s not enough to convict
You do realise the $2bn is a fund? I’m sure he used the connections he developed to get it, and timing was very quick, so well into the murky grey zone, but unless there is specific evidence of corruption then you need to be careful about bald statements
Not an exact historical analogy, but an interesting one.
The Qin Dynasty collapsed in 206 B.C because being late was punished with death. When a Chinese general noticed he was going to be late, and realized the punishment for being late was the same as for rebellion, he rebelled. Prigozhin probably had a similar realization recently. https://twitter.com/Der_Parrot/status/1672362837853999106
Certainly is.
Think maybe that Jim Miller's take was (maybe) closest to the mark: industrial action by Prigozhin, for himself and (maybe) for his merry mercenary band of fellow jail-birds?
Details of last week's Yougov out and have more 2019 Tory voters now going RefUK than Labour after Boris leaves the Commons and the Partygate report vote.
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.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
This won't change your view in any way, but it is worth saying the following.
The situation with high housing costs is remarkably similar in many western countries. There are areas where demand is high reflected in high land values and other areas where demand is low reflected in low land values. High house prices in areas of high demand are largely a consequence of demand plus historically cheap money for the last 2 decades. (although build cost inflation means that they are no longer that high, in objective terms).
It is just fundamentally wrong to blame this situation on 'planning' and misguided to believe it will be solved by allowing everyone to build anywhere by 'removing planning obstacles'. The cost of the latter approach would be unthinkably high, turning the countryside around major urban areas in to inefficient, unplanned sprawl with little or no supporting infrastructure. It is hard to see what, if any, benefits would accrue, other than to educate people why a planning system is needed.
Look at Japan. Look at Tokyo.
Same low rates. Lower actually.
Same population density. Higher actually.
Same growing population in cities.
Different planning system.
Result?
We have faced rampant price rises. They have stable prices.
We face shrinking houses in new builds. Their new builds are better quality and bigger floor space than older stock.
Name one way our system is doing a better job than Japan's.
Using Japan as an example to follow is really dumb. Their land usage pattern is entirely different to ours and in ways you would certainly not be interested in following.
In England, agricultural land accounts for 63% of our land. In Japan it is just 11% - Japan imports 60% of its food. In England, forests, lakes and grassland (moors etc) account for 20% of our land. In Japan it is over 70%. In England residential land, including gardens accounts for 6.1% of land usage. In Japan it is just over half that at 3.2%
So they actually have far less of their land under residential development than in England and 3 times as much left to nature. The difference of course being nothing to do with planning but the fact they have a different cultural tradition when it comes to living on top of each other.
A few basic calculations shows that in terms of residential land, population density in Japan is around 104 people per hectare whilst in the UK it is around 86 people per hectare. This is just for resdential land.
If Japan teaches us anything useful it is that they have dealt with their increasing population by building up, not out.
Yes, because they have zoning. Which is what I've argued for.
They don't have an oligopoly of house developers who can work a planning system where more than a quarter of residential planning applications are rejected. They have residential zones and building regs and what you do with your own land is up to you.
So yes, if building up is more productive, do that.
What's the objection to that?
They're even more densely populated in their residential areas than us, yet it works. Without concreting over the entire country.
Comments
Personally I'd think anyone who has done wrong should face consequences for that, but there is always so much false equivalence, innuendo masquerading as definitive proof, and my all time favourite, 'X may have done something wrong, but Y also has, so it is wrong to punish X. Also, punish Y'.
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/news-opinion/britain-broken-every-direction-know-27184397
Your middle para is meta smear technique.
Third para is also total bullshit. I'm almost alone on here in saying Trump has little chance of being president again. The vast majority think he's got a big chance even as they dread it.
So that's a 3 short para post from you and every one a horror show. Some sort of record. Hats off.
What needs to happen is empty, derelict properties, both commercial and residential, need compulsorily purchased and demolished.
Then overnight denounced as traitors.
Then the next day given contracts in the Army.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
East of Piccadilly to Marsden will be almost entirely underground.
Warrington to Piccadilly will be via existing populated areas e.g. Lymm and Manchester airport.
Where do you suggest these new stops go ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_James_(barrister)
> Edwin John James QC (c.1812 – 4 March 1882) was an English lawyer who also practised in the U.S., a Member of Parliament and would-be actor. Disbarred in England and Wales for professional misconduct, he ended his life in poverty. He was the first ever Queen's Counsel to suffer disbarment.
> He unsuccessfully attempted to establish a career as an actor . . .
> In 1859 he was elected Liberal MP for Marylebone. . . He spoke in public in support of democracy and against Napoleon III, and spent part of 1859 at the camp of Giuseppe Garibaldi.
> The Spectator described him as ... a leader in all actions for seduction, breach of promise of marriage, assault, and false imprisonment, and in all cases that involved the reputation of an actress or a horse.
SSI - then came the Scandal . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Denville
> Denville, an actor by trade, ran one of the UK's leading repertory companies.[2] In 1924 Denville founded Denville Hall, a retirement home for actors in Northwood, London that is still in operation.[3]
> As a politician Denville was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Newcastle upon Tyne Central [and] held the seat until he was defeated in 1945.
> For a time he was associated with the far right of the Conservative Party, and during the 1930s was a leading member of the Friends of National Spain, which stressed support for Francisco Franco and anti-communism. He had also declared himself to be an admirer of Benito Mussolini . . . but critical of Adolf Hitler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derwent_Hall_Caine
> Sir Derwent Hall Caine, 1st Baronet (12 September 1891 – 2 December 1971) was a British actor, publisher and Labour then National Labour politician. . .
> In America, he starred in . . . three films [including] the propaganda film Huns Within Our Gates.
. In 1929, he stood for parliament as Labour candidate for Liverpool, Everton and was returned as Member of Parliament. In January 1931, he was charged with dangerous driving after colliding with a taxi in the early hours of the morning in Trafalgar Square, injuring the four taxi passengers . . .[but] was subsequently acquitted.
> When the Labour government collapsed in 1931, he carried on supporting Ramsay MacDonald as a National Labour MP. Hall Caine was the only sitting National Labour MP to be opposed by the Conservatives at the 1931 general election. He lost his seat to Frank Hornby, and finished bottom of the poll.
You are suggesting spending a fortune on creating new transport links for a new population in the hope that would be a better result than updating and fixing the existing towns and cities that have terrible connections today.
Makes no sense to me.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/135169622
This abomination, which the relevant lettings agent is apparently "proud to present" as a "studio apartment" is a small kitchen with a mattress shoved in one corner, and a broom-sized shower room and bog stuck on the side. Some poor sorry fuck is going to end up paying nearly ten grand a year for the dubious honour of calling it home. And there's no law to stop some greedy sod marketing this, or worse, to hard-up tenants. We encourage abuse in this country, we really do.
Classic Saturday Night Live - Coneheads Family Feud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RD49DYTlrk
https://www.vice.com/en/topic/london-rental-opportunity-of-the-week
“Oh like he’s some Adonis?...He should take a look in the mirror every once in a while”
https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1672995455741878273
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
What is worse here, is that you just know two people are going to have to live there: no sane single person would waste all that space by having a double bed, even the sex-obsessed.
Ted Cruz tried this strategy (somewhat) in 2016, but fact that he's (almost) as big (and nasty) an asshole as DJT rendered it ineffective.
At some level people make the choice to live like this in London.
Healthy European countries have fewer than 90% of properties occupied, so a prospective tenant could look at something like that and say "screw that, I'm not paying for that dump" and go somewhere else instead.
We run at virtually 100% occupancy. So people have to get whatever scraps are available.
As is urban sprawl outwards from existing ones.
Some (including my own) have choice based letting. Which involves having a number of points enabling you to bid on certain properties.
And then it's first come first served.
I successfully bid 3 days after registration. At midnight on the Wednesday/Thursday when the weekly lists of available properties are released.
Then it was just a case of visiting and agreeing and getting the keys.
Took 7 weeks in total from registration to being moved in. And they were closed for four of them over Christmas New Year.
I know I may sound like a broken record but if you look at Japan since they liberated their planning and let people build whatever they want (subject to regulations) on their own land in residential zones ... Not only have prices not risen in the same time ours have gone into orbit, not only has Tokyo seen major population growth absorbed without price rises ...
... but on top of that the quality of housing has improved. Floor space per home has been growing, rather than shrinking, even with prices stable and population growing.
Their system works.
Future of UK battery making thrown further into doubt after company founded by David Collard was visited by federal police
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/25/britishvolt-buyer-david-collard-raided-australian-authorities
Summary: UK is without hope in politics and the future. Everyone in (insert small town name) agrees. I shall keep a close secret why this is the case, why no-one in politics is offering non unicorn solutions, and what could possibly be done about it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/25/britain-crises-hopelessness-market-towns-suburbs
The situation with high housing costs is remarkably similar in many western countries. There are areas where demand is high reflected in high land values and other areas where demand is low reflected in low land values. High house prices in areas of high demand are largely a consequence of demand plus historically cheap money for the last 2 decades. (although build cost inflation means that they are no longer that high, in objective terms).
It is just fundamentally wrong to blame this situation on 'planning' and misguided to believe it will be solved by allowing everyone to build anywhere by 'removing planning obstacles'. The cost of the latter approach would be unthinkably high, turning the countryside around major urban areas in to inefficient, unplanned sprawl with little or no supporting infrastructure. It is hard to see what, if any, benefits would accrue, other than to educate people why a planning system is needed.
Having said that its also true london had good public transport....almost nowhere else has. London people saying just take a bus is farcical
He beat centre-left rival Syriza in May, but called new elections in a bid to win enough seats to govern alone.
His New Democracy party polled 40.4%, 20 points ahead of Syriza, with three-quarters of the vote counted.
The vote came 11 days after a migrant boat tragedy off Greece in which 500 people are thought to have died.
Although three days of mourning were held, the disaster had little effect on the campaign and Greeks voted to maintain economic stability.
Under Greek election rules for a second election, the conservatives are awarded a bonus number of seats in parliament, but the exact number depends on the final result.
Former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras's Syriza party was unable to narrow the margin of last month's defeat.
But there was success for the newly created far-right Spartans party, which was set to pass the 3% vote-share threshold to enter parliament.
The Spartans only emerged as a political force this month when the Greek Supreme Court banned another far-right party, the Greeks, and its jailed founder threw his weight behind them.'
10 seats also for socially conservative Christian Greek Orthodox Niki party
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65997486
For example. I was newly single but my kids grown up. So I was only eligible to bid on one bedroom flats.
There is no "queue". You can't "fall down" it.
It is all Online. They come out weekly, and once registered, they have a button marked "bid" next to them if you qualify for a particular property. Or "ineligible" if you don't.
I bid on two. And was fastest finger first on one of them.
I live in a fast growing new town (they do still exist, just not enough of them). We have thousands of homes being built, all of which are getting snapped up. New shops, businesses, industry opening too.
And what is the key new transport infrastructure underpinning this? One new motorway junction, with one new A road.
There's talk we might get a train station in a few years time, I'm not holding my breath, but the new motorway junction? People who get about by road are happy with that. And outside London it's roads, not rail, that truly matters. Of course London is different but WE ARE NOT LONDON.
What they had was horse shit. And bull shit.
Same low rates. Lower actually.
Same population density. Higher actually.
Same growing population in cities.
Different planning system.
Result?
We have faced rampant price rises. They have stable prices.
We face shrinking houses in new builds. Their new builds are better quality and bigger floor space than older stock.
Name one way our system is doing a better job than Japan's.
I think people living in shitty box homes like this are more dystopian even if they look 'nice' to you from the outside. https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/135169622
I'm not convinced about the idea of sequestering Russian assets in the west. Legally it is obviously fraught with difficulty for one. Secondly though it is removing an incentive for Russia to make peace with the west on our terms. If they aren't getting their assets back anyway why bother? To me, freezes seem like the best option.
Of course unfreezing could be dependent on a certain percentage of those funds, certainly government cash, going towards Ukrainian reconstruction. Bit sneaky but they would still get something back and we'll be paying for the reconstruction too.
You could say ok, why not just zone the land through the plan making process and then have a design code rather than having to go through the pain and delay of needing planning permission. You could well do that and some countries do. The main problem is it makes it harder to go through the first stage of the process (the plan making stage) because you need to be absolutely sure that everything is solved before you can confidently rely on a design code for the purposes of delivery.
A design code is just a delivery mechanism not an alternative to having a planning system. Looking at your example of Japan, my guess is just that they are better at planning because the state is more assertive and organised at building infrastructure. I'd guess the falling prices are more to do with historic deflation than falling demand. But I've never studied the Japanese system in detail so don't feel able to authoritively comment on it.
In summary the problem is not that a planning system exists in the first place, but because the one we have isn't working very well.
The problem is it entails getting on the system and then being tech savvy too to be fastest finger first.
We looked into it last year before we moved. Problem is we wouldn't even get onto the system before we were homeless, and we didn't want to wait to be homeless.
Thankfully we didn't have to, but others aren't so lucky.
Comin' down the line
And I really want to catch it
So I can haul my be-hind
Far from Dartmoor Prison
Where every day's the same
But even worse for me -
There ain't no damn train!
On top of the better quality of the new build properties they do build
I'm reasonably convinced by the argument that a) the rubbishness of public transport is one of the things that stops English cities being productive and b) rail based is far more useful than road based. (Here's a summary: https://productivityinsightsnetwork.co.uk/2019/01/real-journey-time-real-city-size-and-the-disappearing-productivity-puzzle/)
Sure, it's hard to prove. But it still leads to a question. Suppose there was a decent probability that you, your town and your country would be better off if there was less car infrastructure (less parking, narrower roads, more closely-spaced houses). Part of the tradeoff would be that your immediate neighbourhood could support a wider range of facilities and businesses. Where's the line where you would accept using your car less often? £1000 a year? £5000 a year? £10000 a year?
How seriously do you want yourself and your community to be richer?
If everything is planned then I'm curious where the new railway station, new schools, new GPs and everything else are. None of them exist. I still am registered at my old GP in my old town, I've not transferred my kids schooling either, and drive across the river to a different town for those.
Organic development works better. If houses are built, but no schools etc then people will vote for what they need. Unsurprisingly at the local elections the local Lib Dem (who got elected) was not campaigning on NIMBYism, but supporting new GPs to built and new schools to be built. Because that's what the new residents need and its not all there yet. Supermarkets have opened etc because businesses like Aldi and ASDA will open branches where their customers are. Thousands of people move into an area, they'll be in like a shot to get a shot at those customers.
The state is bloody useless at planning. Design transportation, sure, then let it organically grow in what's zoned there.
With hope as our faith
We look to the stars
Caroline's Monkey is crying again
There's no satisfaction on Caroline's train
Councils can introduce it if they want to.
Their reason for moving, and its precovid was south east is only place we can find the skills we are looking for. Now post covid they can find them anywhere in the uk now the "you need to be in everyday" totem is broken. There was nothing I could have done in the 5 years I worked for them that could not have been done remotely.......they were just old style we need you in so we got to move to the southeast for access to people we need
The Qin Dynasty collapsed in 206 B.C because being late was punished with death. When a Chinese general noticed he was going to be late, and realized the punishment for being late was the same as for rebellion, he rebelled. Prigozhin probably had a similar realization recently.
https://twitter.com/Der_Parrot/status/1672362837853999106
All these have contributed to excess house prices, supported by the cultural shift to mortgages being based on dual incomes and affordability based lending multiple expansion (artificially low interest rates). Basically a massive failure of government regulation and the former building societies switching to a distribution-led model rather than underwriting mortgages themselves.
Business investment - English and a non-contributory welfare system plus lack of a national ID card made the UK a hugely attractive place for immigrants (especially young EU citizens) keeping wage costs down - effectively business had an unlimited pool of labour to draw on. Additionally Brown’s response of tax credits just shifted wage costs onto the tax payers dime, reinforcing the problem.
If the alternative to business investment is low wage labour it’s harder to make the case stack up. A minor note would be the willingness of management to sell companies to international businesses who wouldn’t then have a specific incentive to invest in the UK.
So a Labour MP has decided to join in - Andrew Western, MP for Stratford and Urmston - and show his disdain for the principle of innocence until proven guilty and the right of those accused of criminal offences to get legal advice.
https://twitter.com/andrewhwestern/status/1673012638085701632?s=61&t=wWWeJB3W_ksMJK4LA1OvkA
Perhaps his party leader could give him a few lessons on the basics of the criminal justice system.
I've not worked in this area recently, but when I did, it was hugely different across the country. Some areas had a surplus of council housing, so a reasonable amount of turnover, but most of London was almost impossible. There was so little housing that you had to have significant additional needs to get anywhere near a flat.
And the better quality building is because they have the planning system they have, or lack of it. Competition means building a better home is better than building a shithole but still being able to sell/let it because TINA applies.
Confession - today in Seattle it's sunny with current temp in low 70sF light wind moderate humdity & pollen, etc.
Damn near perfect.
Yesterday my humble hood posted big regional classic Car Show. With "classic" very loosely defined, but many true classics, and plenty of cool vehicles of diverse description. Ditto re: the crowd, which was not the biggest I've seen (day started cool and cloudy) but largest post-pandemic. People of all ages and degrees of interest in auto-ology, very kid friendly - the little ones enjoyed our small local park.
Well organized with sub-minimal fuss or mess (aside from loud engines at 5am); done, dusted and picked up by 6pm. Many local businesses did roaring trade, as did numerous vendors of everything from electric cars to carmel-corn; got me a big bag of the latter (which has mysteriously disappeared)
Above all, thousands of folks from around Puget Sound enjoyed themselves, at our neighborhood's annual contribution to our region.
Bit surreal given contemporaneous developments in Russia (or other way around?)
Went out at one point to check out the Car Show . . . got back and the March on Moscow had done a 180.
In England, agricultural land accounts for 63% of our land. In Japan it is just 11% - Japan imports 60% of its food.
In England, forests, lakes and grassland (moors etc) account for 20% of our land. In Japan it is over 70%.
In England residential land, including gardens accounts for 6.1% of land usage. In Japan it is just over half that at 3.2%
So they actually have far less of their land under residential development than in England and 3 times as much left to nature. The difference of course being nothing to do with planning but the fact they have a different cultural tradition when it comes to living on top of each other.
A few basic calculations shows that in terms of residential land, population density in Japan is around 104 people per hectare whilst in the UK it is around 86 people per hectare. This is just for residential land.
If Japan teaches us anything useful it is that they have dealt with their increasing population by building up, not out.
I don't consider myself tech savvy.
There were only two properties available I was eligible for.
I didn't care where I lived in this giant County.
That certainly helped.
It is a much better system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Vital_statistics
You do realise the $2bn is a fund? I’m sure he used the connections he developed to get it, and timing was very quick, so well into the murky grey zone, but unless there is specific evidence of corruption then you need to be careful about bald statements
Think maybe that Jim Miller's take was (maybe) closest to the mark: industrial action by Prigozhin, for himself and (maybe) for his merry mercenary band of fellow jail-birds?
16% of 2019 Conservative voters now back RefUK and 15% back Starmer Labour.
https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/5wuhxdx0xb/TheTimes_VI_230621_W.pdf
They don't have an oligopoly of house developers who can work a planning system where more than a quarter of residential planning applications are rejected. They have residential zones and building regs and what you do with your own land is up to you.
So yes, if building up is more productive, do that.
What's the objection to that?
They're even more densely populated in their residential areas than us, yet it works. Without concreting over the entire country.