You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
I don't think any country is "beyond repair". Look at Eastern Europe in the 1990's, or even in an extreme example Germany and Japan in the mid 40's, but in all those cases it took a massive shock to the system and some massive investment to get them out of the mess they were in.
It's not broken beyond repair but it's broken beyond what the politicians are willing to risk doing wrt to slashing pensioner benefits and healthcare provision for the old and funnelling that money into investment and tax cuts for working age people. That's how the UK shifts back to a path of sustainable growth but no politician, blue or red team, seems brave enough to say it. The UK economy is the emperor with no clothes.
Other Western European countries seem able to care for their elderly and be rich at the same time.
Other western countries don't have the same liability of defined benefit pensions as the UK.
Which is irreversible ancient history, because the liability for DB pensions arises out of contracts of employment signed up to when God was a boy. you mustn't go thinking OAPs and DBPs have anything in common beyond a name. OAPs is benefits which the govt could reduce to £0.00 a year tomorrow, with legal impunity. DBPs are a contractual right which the govt will be successfully sued for if it withholds or alters them, and I would think would also see its credit rating plummet to the low Bs if it tried such a thing
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
Agreed - something like that is essential. Personally I'd force them to keep the properties immaculate, so there's outgoings but no rent. It's all the same at the end of the day - we need to disincentivise hanging on to shitty properties hoping the wind changes.
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
This is completely unrealistic and ignores the very, very real issues with content licencing, residual payment deals for talent and the complexity of international content purchasing/sales. 9/10 times when the BBC procures a TV show it only purchases UK linear and streaming rights which it may then resell to Netflix.
If was going to make a BBC streaming service I'd do £6.99 per month for all non-live content. So no MOTD live or on catchup, but you do get Peaky Blinders and the recent back catalogue and make that available to cord cutters who live in the pure streaming world.
My point was that the BBC should have been working on this for the past decade, given how obvious it was going to be. The big dramas are more difficult, for the reasons you suggest of residual payments and licensing; but the soaps, comedy shows, and all the daytime crap, would be much easier.
Funding pretty much the whole production of something, but leaving out secondary streaming rights, would be a dereliction of duty for a commercial entity in recent times.
MOTD is the one programme that will never be allowed on an international iPlayer though. At least not unless they edit out all of the Premier League content that’s sold abroad separately.
But that's the point, the BBC rarely funds anywhere near the entirety of anything these days. Most of their content is licenced from the big UK players who are funded independently and they then sell domestic and international rights separately. The market has moved on a huge amount since then and taking it back to when everything was centrally approved by the BBC2 controller with BBC budgets would destroy the success of UK TV and movie production.
The BBC don't leave out streaming rights or international streaming rights, they simply can't afford to compete with Netflix and Amazon for them and it being a capitalist industry, there's little regard for sentiment when selling a product, it will go to the highest bidder.
I think we’re violently agreeing here. I’m contrasting the approach of the BBC over, say, Disney, who have managed to hold on to the rights for most of their content, and even the older stuff has ended up on their streaming service.
If BBC Worldwide, at the height of Top Gear’s popularity, had launched an international iPlayer with TG as an exclusive, they would likely be successful by now - but instead, they stuck with the old-world view of overseas licensing to TV networks, and they’re now like the guy trying to sell music CDs when everyone else has moved through Napster to Spotify.
Disney+ is yet to break even. Other parts of Disney are subsidising it.
Yes, from talking to friends who subscribe to various streaming services, a consolidation would be good for consumers and probably necessary for streamers who might not be profitable. We've seen it even here with PBers detailing their efforts to juggle services in order to watch sport while keeping children onside. It costs too much to subscribe to everything.
Disney+ are putting up fees, cracking down on password sharing and looking at introducing ads, like Netflix.
I enjoy both Disney+ and Netflix, but they're companies burning through investment while they try to win the streaming wars and work out the best model to do this. Holding them up as exemplars that the BBC should be copying doesn't really make sense. They don't offer a model that works and that the BBC could/should have been copying. No-one's yet worked out what that model should be.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
And if OGH starts handing out confidential information, he could end up with GDPR and related difficulties.
Yes, the poster is in more trouble, but it is a chain of misery and expense that will be created.
Naah just ask to see the colour of their subpoena, and you're all good.
It's the differential that I am on about. This is a minor inconvenience to the website vs potentially life-altering misery for the defamer, and I am puzzled that point B never gets star, or indeed any, billing.
It's pointed out regularly.
But people get to make their own choices - they don't get to make Mike's choices for him.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Money laundering aside (I know that happens) cafes, tattoo parlours and salons are staying open because you have to attend them. Clothes shops are about middling because you don't have to attend them, but many like to try on their clothes before they buy. More shops should have business models where benefiting by being there in person is a key part of the offering.
Yes, it was only a matter of time for Wilko - I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did. They sold very little that couldn't be bought more easily and conveniently on the internet, and their profit margins on the rest must have been microscopic. As you say, town centres need to focus on services and leisure rather than shops that sell goods.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
And if OGH starts handing out confidential information, he could end up with GDPR and related difficulties.
Yes, the poster is in more trouble, but it is a chain of misery and expense that will be created.
Naah just ask to see the colour of their subpoena, and you're all good.
It's the differential that I am on about. This is a minor inconvenience to the website vs potentially life-altering misery for the defamer, and I am puzzled that point B never gets star, or indeed any, billing.
It's pointed out regularly.
But people get to make their own choices - they don't get to make Mike's choices for him.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
And if OGH starts handing out confidential information, he could end up with GDPR and related difficulties.
Yes, the poster is in more trouble, but it is a chain of misery and expense that will be created.
Naah just ask to see the colour of their subpoena, and you're all good.
It's the differential that I am on about. This is a minor inconvenience to the website vs potentially life-altering misery for the defamer, and I am puzzled that point B never gets star, or indeed any, billing.
It's pointed out regularly.
But people get to make their own choices - they don't get to make Mike's choices for him.
Here's the comment from RCS in a list of what's allowed or not allowed on PB:
4. Don't libel public figures. OGH has had correspondance [sic] from Carter Ruck in the past, and he didn't enjoy the experience. If you're putting OGH in danger of getting sued, you will be banned.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Sorry, which cafes are these?
And how can one tell? Presumably they sell actual coffee for a price competitive with costa and starbucks, and presumably 95% of their sales are card, like everywhere else, so how does this even work?
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
HS2 says that by the time government procurement processes and appeals have happened it would cost £240 billion, take 75 years and stop in a random field somewhere near Widnes.
It's a third of the distance between Leeds and Bradford.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Bit in bold: My honest response, rather sadly, is "These days, I'm just glad somebody local is making money".
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
And if OGH starts handing out confidential information, he could end up with GDPR and related difficulties.
Yes, the poster is in more trouble, but it is a chain of misery and expense that will be created.
Naah just ask to see the colour of their subpoena, and you're all good.
It's the differential that I am on about. This is a minor inconvenience to the website vs potentially life-altering misery for the defamer, and I am puzzled that point B never gets star, or indeed any, billing.
It's pointed out regularly.
But people get to make their own choices - they don't get to make Mike's choices for him.
Here's the comment from RCS in a list of what's allowed or not allowed on PB:
4. Don't libel public figures. OGH has had correspondance [sic] from Carter Ruck in the past, and he didn't enjoy the experience. If you're putting OGH in danger of getting sued, you will be banned.
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
This is completely unrealistic and ignores the very, very real issues with content licencing, residual payment deals for talent and the complexity of international content purchasing/sales. 9/10 times when the BBC procures a TV show it only purchases UK linear and streaming rights which it may then resell to Netflix.
If was going to make a BBC streaming service I'd do £6.99 per month for all non-live content. So no MOTD live or on catchup, but you do get Peaky Blinders and the recent back catalogue and make that available to cord cutters who live in the pure streaming world.
My point was that the BBC should have been working on this for the past decade, given how obvious it was going to be. The big dramas are more difficult, for the reasons you suggest of residual payments and licensing; but the soaps, comedy shows, and all the daytime crap, would be much easier.
Funding pretty much the whole production of something, but leaving out secondary streaming rights, would be a dereliction of duty for a commercial entity in recent times.
MOTD is the one programme that will never be allowed on an international iPlayer though. At least not unless they edit out all of the Premier League content that’s sold abroad separately.
But that's the point, the BBC rarely funds anywhere near the entirety of anything these days. Most of their content is licenced from the big UK players who are funded independently and they then sell domestic and international rights separately. The market has moved on a huge amount since then and taking it back to when everything was centrally approved by the BBC2 controller with BBC budgets would destroy the success of UK TV and movie production.
The BBC don't leave out streaming rights or international streaming rights, they simply can't afford to compete with Netflix and Amazon for them and it being a capitalist industry, there's little regard for sentiment when selling a product, it will go to the highest bidder.
I think we’re violently agreeing here. I’m contrasting the approach of the BBC over, say, Disney, who have managed to hold on to the rights for most of their content, and even the older stuff has ended up on their streaming service.
If BBC Worldwide, at the height of Top Gear’s popularity, had launched an international iPlayer with TG as an exclusive, they would likely be successful by now - but instead, they stuck with the old-world view of overseas licensing to TV networks, and they’re now like the guy trying to sell music CDs when everyone else has moved through Napster to Spotify.
Disney+ is yet to break even. Other parts of Disney are subsidising it.
Yes, from talking to friends who subscribe to various streaming services, a consolidation would be good for consumers and probably necessary for streamers who might not be profitable. We've seen it even here with PBers detailing their efforts to juggle services in order to watch sport while keeping children onside. It costs too much to subscribe to everything.
Disney+ are putting up fees, cracking down on password sharing and looking at introducing ads, like Netflix.
I enjoy both Disney+ and Netflix, but they're companies burning through investment while they try to win the streaming wars and work out the best model to do this...
Chatter is that Apple might buy Disney. Might even make sense (if the competition authorities allowed it).
One of the principle problems with NHS waiting lists is the NHS. It has a structure and ethos designed for the 1950s.
Labour will, like they did before, hose money at it from borrowing. The hose will be eagerly and greedily picked up by the BMA who do not think that £120k a year for a job where you can also have an additional private practice is enough for someone in the safest job in the known universe.
What is the answer? An acceptance by the British people that the NHS is not and never has been "the envy of the world" and that it needs substantial reform and that certain aspects of our lives we need to take responsibility for ourselves.
Additionally the medical profession needs to understand that if they want to earn megabucks they need to take some career risks and not expect the taxpayer (where the average person earns £28k year) to feather bed them just because they have the letters Dr in front of their names.
The NHS's structure is very different to what it was in the 1950s. The main reason for long waiting lists is that the UK spends less on healthcare than comparable countries.
"The NHS's structure is very different to what it was in the 1950s" No shit Sherlock! The question is as to whether the structures put in place then (such as the generous provisions that allow hospital consultants to also have private practice alongside the security of their NHS contracts), ie legacy issues, still cause problems today. Answer - Yes
On waiting times, yours is a a somewhat simplistic analysis. The UK health spending per capita is 18% below EU average (if this is what you call comparable countries), and this is regrettable in my view, but the relationship to waiting times is very much more complex and a lot of it is structural and due to inefficiencies of the NHS bureaucracy. It is unlikely that without significant reform there would be a great improvement in waiting times.
Incidentally, you will be interested to know, that outside our insular NHS bubble all health systems across Europe are struggling with staffing levels.
So, you agree that we spend nearly a fifth less than the EU average, but you think the problems are structural? Why don't you try spending a fifth less on everything in your life and then see whether structural changes can compensate?
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Sorry, which cafes are these?
The ones which very obviously have quite high overheads (town centre rents and rates), and equally obviously hardly any customers. I won't give any particular examples.
I went to get a coffee at a new kiosk that’s been set up in the local park the other day.
There was light rain, and nobody was about. The kiosk looked empty. As I approached, I said loudly, “Hello!”.
A bearded hipster roused himself sheepishly from the floor of the kiosk where he’d been sleeping.
Very nice man, good coffee. He explained that he lived on a canal boat, times were tough, and nobody under 40 expected to buy a house anymore.
There’s a lot wonderfully and terrifyingly British about this story.
But isn't home ownership a bit bourgeois anyway? Surely those of a left leaning tendency should be pleased at this trajectory. In another 30 years of no Tory rule everyone will be in newly built council flat and will go to work on a bus. Yes you will have to wait about a year to get your internet connected and you will regularly queue up for the standpipe when the water goes off, or work by candle light when the leccy goes off, but think of how chuffed we will all feel about those nationalised utilities even though the brothers keep taking the workers out on strike and the overflows into the sea are so much worse than ever. When we are bathing in the sea and the turds float past you (like in my childhood in Lyme Regis) you can be content in the knowledge that "we" own them! Yay!
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
And if OGH starts handing out confidential information, he could end up with GDPR and related difficulties.
Yes, the poster is in more trouble, but it is a chain of misery and expense that will be created.
Naah just ask to see the colour of their subpoena, and you're all good.
It's the differential that I am on about. This is a minor inconvenience to the website vs potentially life-altering misery for the defamer, and I am puzzled that point B never gets star, or indeed any, billing.
It's pointed out regularly.
But people get to make their own choices - they don't get to make Mike's choices for him.
Here's the comment from RCS in a list of what's allowed or not allowed on PB:
4. Don't libel public figures. OGH has had correspondance [sic] from Carter Ruck in the past, and he didn't enjoy the experience. If you're putting OGH in danger of getting sued, you will be banned.
Well, originally we were going to link the bloody lot with a proper fast railway line. But that got abandoned under the Integrated Rail Plan which in among a lot of other dishonest bollocks said that taking out a couple of curves on existing lines and bringing a slow freight-only route back into passenger commission would be just as good.
The UK is not broken beyond repair and nor is it a 'middle-poor' Western country.
The UK has the sixth-largest national economy in the world in nominal GDP and tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Our economy constitutes 2.3% of world GDP and we are the 8th easiest place to do business in the world. Standard of living here is perfectly comparable to France, Germany or the Netherlands. Employment is very high as is our HDI.
The problem is nominal GDP per capita, where because of our larger population we do slip down the rankings and there is wider regional inequality as our economy is so globalised and focused on London. But, we shouldn't be too hyberbolic about it: Manchester has hugely re-generated in the last 25 years.
More investment (over 20-30 years) in infrastructure, skills, education and R&D in the industries of the future is needed - we spend far too much on flat-tyres like pensions, debt and the NHS, that consume all our national income - and services carries us.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Whose job is it to check and enforce? If it's local authorities they were gutted by Osborne and have no resources for it. If it's HMRC I don't know. I've always assumed battling tax evasion should be net revenue positive.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Because austerity wrecked everyone's budgets and no-one's got the resources to investigate?
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Whose job is it to check and enforce? If it's local authorities they were gutted by Osborne and have no resources for it. If it's HMRC I don't know. I've always assumed battling tax evasion should be net revenue positive.
My local authority was so gutted it built offices that senior executives at Microsoft would be very pleased with
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
Actually, I do know there is a difference. My putting it that way was to imply the fuller statement "I don't give a rat's arse if you are happy to attract legal attention even after the reminder, but I do think it's a bit much to cause grief and hassle for OGH".
Incidentally: doesn't coughing up personal data cause GDPR issues? Or is there some exemption? Just out of curiosity.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
I don't think any country is "beyond repair". Look at Eastern Europe in the 1990's, or even in an extreme example Germany and Japan in the mid 40's, but in all those cases it took a massive shock to the system and some massive investment to get them out of the mess they were in.
It's not broken beyond repair but it's broken beyond what the politicians are willing to risk doing wrt to slashing pensioner benefits and healthcare provision for the old and funnelling that money into investment and tax cuts for working age people. That's how the UK shifts back to a path of sustainable growth but no politician, blue or red team, seems brave enough to say it. The UK economy is the emperor with no clothes.
Other Western European countries seem able to care for their elderly and be rich at the same time.
Other western countries don't have the same liability of defined benefit pensions as the UK.
@Neil formerly of this parish repeatedly assured me that they were cheaper than DC pensions for the public sector.
The rise in gilt rates, and consequent improvement in annuities will bring up DC pensions significantly. The low rares of the last 15 years were catastrophic for these schemes.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
Actually, I do know there is a difference. My putting it that way was to imply the fuller statement "I don't give a rat's arse if you are happy to attract legal attention even after the reminder, but I do think it's a bit much to cause grief and hassle for OGH".
Incidentally: doesn't coughing up personal data cause GDPR issues? Or is there some exemption? Just out of curiosity.
Yeah might do, the trick is to wait for a court order to disclose the info
One of the principle problems with NHS waiting lists is the NHS. It has a structure and ethos designed for the 1950s.
Labour will, like they did before, hose money at it from borrowing. The hose will be eagerly and greedily picked up by the BMA who do not think that £120k a year for a job where you can also have an additional private practice is enough for someone in the safest job in the known universe.
What is the answer? An acceptance by the British people that the NHS is not and never has been "the envy of the world" and that it needs substantial reform and that certain aspects of our lives we need to take responsibility for ourselves.
Additionally the medical profession needs to understand that if they want to earn megabucks they need to take some career risks and not expect the taxpayer (where the average person earns £28k year) to feather bed them just because they have the letters Dr in front of their names.
The NHS's structure is very different to what it was in the 1950s. The main reason for long waiting lists is that the UK spends less on healthcare than comparable countries.
"The NHS's structure is very different to what it was in the 1950s" No shit Sherlock! The question is as to whether the structures put in place then (such as the generous provisions that allow hospital consultants to also have private practice alongside the security of their NHS contracts), ie legacy issues, still cause problems today. Answer - Yes
On waiting times, yours is a a somewhat simplistic analysis. The UK health spending per capita is 18% below EU average (if this is what you call comparable countries), and this is regrettable in my view, but the relationship to waiting times is very much more complex and a lot of it is structural and due to inefficiencies of the NHS bureaucracy. It is unlikely that without significant reform there would be a great improvement in waiting times.
Incidentally, you will be interested to know, that outside our insular NHS bubble all health systems across Europe are struggling with staffing levels.
So, you agree that we spend nearly a fifth less than the EU average, but you think the problems are structural? Why don't you try spending a fifth less on everything in your life and then see whether structural changes can compensate?
I have made efficiencies in my own business to that extent and taken haircuts to my own income. Apologists for the NHS bureaucracy boast that it doesn't make profits as though that is a good thing. Therefore it should need less spend surely?
I am slightly taking the piss. I don't know whether you have ever worked in or around the NHS? I have, and I am sad to say that it is the most inefficient organisation I have ever had dealings with. Even by public sector standards.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
Indeed. I think it is quite hard for governments to accelerate growth*, but fairly straightforward for them to slow or stop it.
*perhaps excluding allowing private companies to benefit from public resources like clean air, green fields, community cohesion etc.
The UK is not broken beyond repair and nor is it a 'middle-poor' Western country.
The UK has the sixth-largest national economy in the world in nominal GDP and tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Our economy constitutes 2.3% of world GDP and we are the 8th easiest place to do business in the world. Standard of living here is perfectly comparable to France, Germany or the Netherlands. Employment is very high as is our HDI.
The problem is nominal GDP per capita, where because of our larger population we do slip down the rankings and there is wider regional inequality as our economy is so globalised and focused on London. But, we shouldn't be too hyberbolic about it: Manchester has hugely re-generated in the last 25 years.
More investment (over 20-30 years) in infrastructure, skills, education and R&D in the industries of the future is needed - we spend far too much on flat-tyres like pensions, debt and the NHS, that consume all our national income - and services carries us.
To hit services and London would be madness.
We all live per capita. So saying we’re the 6th largest doesn’t mean anything.
I agree with much of your post, but it is are still in denial of the main issue.
@Neil formerly of this parish repeatedly assured me that they were cheaper than DC pensions for the public sector.
It was a long time ago, but if I remember correctly he was making the point that switching public-sector DB pensions wholesale over to DC would, in the early years of the change, leave a big hole in the public finances. This is because the contributions of current employees would suddenly be going into their own ring-fenced funds, rather than being available to contribute towards the unfunded pensions already in payment.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
And if OGH starts handing out confidential information, he could end up with GDPR and related difficulties.
Yes, the poster is in more trouble, but it is a chain of misery and expense that will be created.
Naah just ask to see the colour of their subpoena, and you're all good.
It's the differential that I am on about. This is a minor inconvenience to the website vs potentially life-altering misery for the defamer, and I am puzzled that point B never gets star, or indeed any, billing.
It's pointed out regularly.
But people get to make their own choices - they don't get to make Mike's choices for him.
Here's the comment from RCS in a list of what's allowed or not allowed on PB:
4. Don't libel public figures. OGH has had correspondance [sic] from Carter Ruck in the past, and he didn't enjoy the experience. If you're putting OGH in danger of getting sued, you will be banned.
Well, originally we were going to link the bloody lot with a proper fast railway line. But that got abandoned under the Integrated Rail Plan which in among a lot of other dishonest bollocks said that taking out a couple of curves on existing lines and bringing a slow freight-only route back into passenger commission would be just as good.
I think you probably meant to reply to me there ?
It's typical of investment policy that the cheese paring started with the trans-Pennine rail plan. Particularly stupid, as it could have been delivered for a fraction of what HS2 (completed or not) will now cost - and would have generated a return on the investment much sooner.
The UK is not broken beyond repair and nor is it a 'middle-poor' Western country.
The UK has the sixth-largest national economy in the world in nominal GDP and tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Our economy constitutes 2.3% of world GDP and we are the 8th easiest place to do business in the world. Standard of living here is perfectly comparable to France, Germany or the Netherlands. Employment is very high as is our HDI.
The problem is nominal GDP per capita, where because of our larger population we do slip down the rankings and there is wider regional inequality as our economy is so globalised and focused on London. But, we shouldn't be too hyberbolic about it: Manchester has hugely re-generated in the last 25 years.
More investment (over 20-30 years) in infrastructure, skills, education and R&D in the industries of the future is needed - we spend far too much on flat-tyres like pensions, debt and the NHS, that consume all our national income - and services carries us.
To hit services and London would be madness.
We all live per capita. So saying we’re the 6th largest doesn’t mean anything.
I agree with much of your post, but it is are still in denial of the main issue.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Because austerity wrecked everyone's budgets and no-one's got the resources to investigate?
Probably - and the councils presumably share viewcode's POV regarding their revenue.
Living in the US as I do, I refuse to accept substandard performance in the UK.
The US is incredibly litigious - adding to transaction costs, has an appallingly wasteful healthcare system, deeply entrenched and racialised inequality, an opioid crisis, and an unstable political system.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
I don't think any country is "beyond repair". Look at Eastern Europe in the 1990's, or even in an extreme example Germany and Japan in the mid 40's, but in all those cases it took a massive shock to the system and some massive investment to get them out of the mess they were in.
It's not broken beyond repair but it's broken beyond what the politicians are willing to risk doing wrt to slashing pensioner benefits and healthcare provision for the old and funnelling that money into investment and tax cuts for working age people. That's how the UK shifts back to a path of sustainable growth but no politician, blue or red team, seems brave enough to say it. The UK economy is the emperor with no clothes.
Other Western European countries seem able to care for their elderly and be rich at the same time.
Other western countries don't have the same liability of defined benefit pensions as the UK.
@Neil formerly of this parish repeatedly assured me that they were cheaper than DC pensions for the public sector.
Iirc that was based on wildly optimistic GDP scenarios where the DB liability tomorrow was smaller than shifting everyone to DC today. It was complete bullshit written by the big public sector unions to prevent DB pension schemes from being closed.
Well, who knows? It depends what assumptions are made about investment income and these can be volatile. From the 1980s onwards, we suffered from employers taking pension holidays because their funds were deemed to be overfunded, and other firms being taken over to get raiders hands on pension funds. These are what killed private sector defined benefit pensions. Government did not help, of course, as it stood back and watched in the name of free enterprise and then increased taxes.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
Fair point - though the actual one is that centralisation of government and resources since WWII has been very much a bipartisan effort, even if the means have been different. Thatcher was just the same, if not worse, in that respect.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
I thought it was the woke who were wanting to ban the classics for offending someone or other. Who would have thought the anti-wokists were a bunch of hypocrites and authoritarians? I'm sure none of us saw that coming.
One of Douglas Murray's concerns in his criticisms of the progressive left and its culture war antics was that it would eventually lead to a reaction from the right and the weight of popular opinion would fall behind it. And this is how it may be playing out. The experience of the Republicans seems to be that, rather than 'appeals to reason and common sense', it is more effective to just replicate the same tactics as the left. In politics, it isn't realistic to try and hold the right to a higher standard than the left, because it is all about winning power.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
HS2 says that by the time government procurement processes and appeals have happened it would cost £240 billion, take 75 years and stop in a random field somewhere near Widnes.
I can dig a tunnel between the two in a few seconds.
Well, who knows? It depends what assumptions are made about investment income and these can be volatile. From the 1980s onwards, we suffered from employers taking pension holidays because their funds were deemed to be overfunded, and other firms being taken over to get raiders hands on pension funds. These are what killed private sector defined benefit pensions. Government did not help, of course, as it stood back and watched in the name of free enterprise and then increased taxes.
The problem wasn't that the government stood back, they actually forbade companies from 'over-funding' their pension funds in what seemed to be the good times. This was because they thought it was a form of tax evasion to put money into a pension surplus rather than retain it as taxable profit.
The UK is not broken beyond repair and nor is it a 'middle-poor' Western country.
The UK has the sixth-largest national economy in the world in nominal GDP and tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Our economy constitutes 2.3% of world GDP and we are the 8th easiest place to do business in the world. Standard of living here is perfectly comparable to France, Germany or the Netherlands. Employment is very high as is our HDI.
The problem is nominal GDP per capita, where because of our larger population we do slip down the rankings and there is wider regional inequality as our economy is so globalised and focused on London. But, we shouldn't be too hyberbolic about it: Manchester has hugely re-generated in the last 25 years.
More investment (over 20-30 years) in infrastructure, skills, education and R&D in the industries of the future is needed - we spend far too much on flat-tyres like pensions, debt and the NHS, that consume all our national income - and services carries us.
To hit services and London would be madness.
We all live per capita. So saying we’re the 6th largest doesn’t mean anything.
I agree with much of your post, but it is are still in denial of the main issue.
No we don't. Per capita is an artificial divider of the total size of the whole economy and crudely allocates it per head of population. Just because some people are very wealthy doesn't mean everyone feels a piece of it. We live according to our personal income and our cost of living equation, which wildly varies.
You are obsessed with British decline and think its all entirely down to Brexit.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
A chap I knew, looked at building a factory in the North, during the early 2000s. The local politicians didn’t want it - they were worried by the idea that “poshing the area” would cause political changes.
I thought it was the woke who were wanting to ban the classics for offending someone or other. Who would have thought the anti-wokists were a bunch of hypocrites and authoritarians? I'm sure none of us saw that coming.
One of Douglas Murray's concerns in his criticisms of the progressive left and its culture war antics was that it would eventually lead to a reaction from the right and the weight of popular opinion would fall behind it. And this is how it may be playing out. The experience of the Republicans seems to be that, rather than 'appeals to reason and common sense', it is more effective to just replicate the same tactics as the left. In politics, it isn't realistic to try and hold the right to a higher standard than the left, because it is all about winning power.
Good point, except that in America at least, it is the right and not the left that has been making the running for the past several decades. From gerrymandering via corruption to stacking courts. It goes beyond culture wars.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
Actually, I do know there is a difference. My putting it that way was to imply the fuller statement "I don't give a rat's arse if you are happy to attract legal attention even after the reminder, but I do think it's a bit much to cause grief and hassle for OGH".
Incidentally: doesn't coughing up personal data cause GDPR issues? Or is there some exemption? Just out of curiosity.
Yes I think it would. I suspect there may be other ways to trace the poster, though those who hide behind a VPN might be much harder to trace, particularly if they have also set up a difficult to trace email.
Either way, if someone very litigious decided to go after OGH on the grounds of what another poster said it would almost certainly close the site. He is not Mark Zuckerburg and does not have an army of lawyers.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
A chap I knew, looked at building a factory in the North, during the early 2000s. The local politicians didn’t want it - they were worried by the idea that “poshing the area” would cause political changes.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha….
If you were trying to build the factory now, the concern would be the effect of manufacturing industry on Net Zero targets.
Much better to keep the manufacturing in China and India, who don’t care about such things except for warm words at conferences.
The reason most Remainers want to Rejoin is #values - economics they think is a useful lever to get there, which is why they keep banging on about it.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
A chap I knew, looked at building a factory in the North, during the early 2000s. The local politicians didn’t want it - they were worried by the idea that “poshing the area” would cause political changes.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha….
Yep, good old caring lefties. Who needs jobs if they are in the private sector? We should all be employed by the state.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
A chap I knew, looked at building a factory in the North, during the early 2000s. The local politicians didn’t want it - they were worried by the idea that “poshing the area” would cause political changes.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha….
Yep, good old caring lefties. Who needs jobs if they are in the private sector? We should all be employed by the state.
Without disclosing private information (ha) the location was in the Red Wall.
So keeping the post industrial decline worked out well, there.
Many people in the SNP believed that Labour did the same in parts of Scotland, incidentally. The seats where they counted the Labour vote with a pair of scales etc...
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
This is completely unrealistic and ignores the very, very real issues with content licencing, residual payment deals for talent and the complexity of international content purchasing/sales. 9/10 times when the BBC procures a TV show it only purchases UK linear and streaming rights which it may then resell to Netflix.
If was going to make a BBC streaming service I'd do £6.99 per month for all non-live content. So no MOTD live or on catchup, but you do get Peaky Blinders and the recent back catalogue and make that available to cord cutters who live in the pure streaming world.
My point was that the BBC should have been working on this for the past decade, given how obvious it was going to be. The big dramas are more difficult, for the reasons you suggest of residual payments and licensing; but the soaps, comedy shows, and all the daytime crap, would be much easier.
Funding pretty much the whole production of something, but leaving out secondary streaming rights, would be a dereliction of duty for a commercial entity in recent times.
MOTD is the one programme that will never be allowed on an international iPlayer though. At least not unless they edit out all of the Premier League content that’s sold abroad separately.
But that's the point, the BBC rarely funds anywhere near the entirety of anything these days. Most of their content is licenced from the big UK players who are funded independently and they then sell domestic and international rights separately. The market has moved on a huge amount since then and taking it back to when everything was centrally approved by the BBC2 controller with BBC budgets would destroy the success of UK TV and movie production.
The BBC don't leave out streaming rights or international streaming rights, they simply can't afford to compete with Netflix and Amazon for them and it being a capitalist industry, there's little regard for sentiment when selling a product, it will go to the highest bidder.
I think we’re violently agreeing here. I’m contrasting the approach of the BBC over, say, Disney, who have managed to hold on to the rights for most of their content, and even the older stuff has ended up on their streaming service.
If BBC Worldwide, at the height of Top Gear’s popularity, had launched an international iPlayer with TG as an exclusive, they would likely be successful by now - but instead, they stuck with the old-world view of overseas licensing to TV networks, and they’re now like the guy trying to sell music CDs when everyone else has moved through Napster to Spotify.
Disney+ is yet to break even. Other parts of Disney are subsidising it.
Yes, from talking to friends who subscribe to various streaming services, a consolidation would be good for consumers and probably necessary for streamers who might not be profitable. We've seen it even here with PBers detailing their efforts to juggle services in order to watch sport while keeping children onside. It costs too much to subscribe to everything.
Disney+ are putting up fees, cracking down on password sharing and looking at introducing ads, like Netflix.
I enjoy both Disney+ and Netflix, but they're companies burning through investment while they try to win the streaming wars and work out the best model to do this...
Chatter is that Apple might buy Disney. Might even make sense (if the competition authorities allowed it).
I hope not. I hate Apple. I quite like Disney. I'd have to start hating Disney. That's a bit like hating Mickey Mouse - odd.
The reason most Remainers want to Rejoin is #values - economics they think is a useful lever to get there, which is why they keep banging on about it.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
I can very safely say I'm not in that category. All about the economics for me.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
HS2 says that by the time government procurement processes and appeals have happened it would cost £240 billion, take 75 years and stop in a random field somewhere near Widnes.
I can dig a tunnel between the two in a few seconds.
{picks up manual for Casaba Howitzer}
The civil service should be on the case of how to apply AI to the issue of infrastructure delivery. So 75 years becomes 7 months. Loads of things could become possible - building a million council houses, building new railway lines, new water and power infrastructure, etc; decarbonising all at rapid speed.
The reason most Remainers want to Rejoin is #values - economics they think is a useful lever to get there, which is why they keep banging on about it.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
Well, it is very unlikely to happen, and I am not sure even I would vote in favour in the short term due to more instability and divisiveness.
As to whether it would shifty the dial, it would IMO almost certainly do so. Cutting ourselves off from the world's largest market in such an untapered and unmitigated way was dumb. Rejoin might improve inward investment and business confidence generally and boost exports and trade generally.
All of these things are "might". Now that the damage has been done there "might" also be a number of negative consequences economically moving back again too.
The reason most Remainers want to Rejoin is #values - economics they think is a useful lever to get there, which is why they keep banging on about it.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
I can very safely say I'm not in that category. All about the economics for me.
I'm just nostalgic for the good old days of burgundy passports.
London and the SE voted Remain. Everywhere else voted Leave, bar Scotland and Northern Ireland, where large parts of the population see their future freed from London, but inside the EU.
Yes, I think because of the '52/48' (which sounds, is, close) it's sometimes not appreciated the extent to which England outside its capital city wanted to leave the EU. If you turn it into FPTP constituencies it was a landslide.
The UK is not broken beyond repair and nor is it a 'middle-poor' Western country.
The UK has the sixth-largest national economy in the world in nominal GDP and tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Our economy constitutes 2.3% of world GDP and we are the 8th easiest place to do business in the world. Standard of living here is perfectly comparable to France, Germany or the Netherlands. Employment is very high as is our HDI.
The problem is nominal GDP per capita, where because of our larger population we do slip down the rankings and there is wider regional inequality as our economy is so globalised and focused on London. But, we shouldn't be too hyberbolic about it: Manchester has hugely re-generated in the last 25 years.
More investment (over 20-30 years) in infrastructure, skills, education and R&D in the industries of the future is needed - we spend far too much on flat-tyres like pensions, debt and the NHS, that consume all our national income - and services carries us.
To hit services and London would be madness.
We all live per capita. So saying we’re the 6th largest doesn’t mean anything.
I agree with much of your post, but it is are still in denial of the main issue.
No we don't. Per capita is an artificial divider of the total size of the whole economy and crudely allocates it per head of population. Just because some people are very wealthy doesn't mean everyone feels a piece of it. We live according to our personal income and our cost of living equation, which wildly varies.
You are obsessed with British decline and think its all entirely down to Brexit.
It's bonkers as well as being very boring.
I didn’t mention Brexit. Stop sniffing your own farts.
It's possible you could move it on services a bit more.
To do that you'd need to rejoin EU full-fat: euro, everything, and argue for completing the single market in services in full from the inside and, over 10-15 years, harmonise lots of tax, law, worker/social and financial/insurance regulations across the EU, which would motorise London to become the European capital for all services and even more of a global hub.
That would come at a high political cost - removing a lot of decisions from Westminster and making them in Brussels with Germany/France instead - but would probably raise the size of the UK economy overall through a mix of population growth and agglomeration in London/SE through leveraging our comparative advantage in a wider single market.
But, it would do this by making London v. the rest of the UK even more unequal, sucking in lots more workers from EU and around the world, and would probably accentuate its cultural differences wrt. rUK as well.
The UK is not broken beyond repair and nor is it a 'middle-poor' Western country.
The UK has the sixth-largest national economy in the world in nominal GDP and tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Our economy constitutes 2.3% of world GDP and we are the 8th easiest place to do business in the world. Standard of living here is perfectly comparable to France, Germany or the Netherlands. Employment is very high as is our HDI.
The problem is nominal GDP per capita, where because of our larger population we do slip down the rankings and there is wider regional inequality as our economy is so globalised and focused on London. But, we shouldn't be too hyberbolic about it: Manchester has hugely re-generated in the last 25 years.
More investment (over 20-30 years) in infrastructure, skills, education and R&D in the industries of the future is needed - we spend far too much on flat-tyres like pensions, debt and the NHS, that consume all our national income - and services carries us.
To hit services and London would be madness.
We all live per capita. So saying we’re the 6th largest doesn’t mean anything.
I agree with much of your post, but it is are still in denial of the main issue.
No we don't. Per capita is an artificial divider of the total size of the whole economy and crudely allocates it per head of population. Just because some people are very wealthy doesn't mean everyone feels a piece of it. We live according to our personal income and our cost of living equation, which wildly varies.
You are obsessed with British decline and think its all entirely down to Brexit.
It's bonkers as well as being very boring.
I didn’t mention Brexit. Stop sniffing your own farts.
We all know what you meant by "the main issue".
It's not necessary to smell your farts; I can see you wrinkling your nose and clenching your buttocks as you prepare to release one.
The UK is not broken beyond repair and nor is it a 'middle-poor' Western country.
The UK has the sixth-largest national economy in the world in nominal GDP and tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Our economy constitutes 2.3% of world GDP and we are the 8th easiest place to do business in the world. Standard of living here is perfectly comparable to France, Germany or the Netherlands. Employment is very high as is our HDI.
The problem is nominal GDP per capita, where because of our larger population we do slip down the rankings and there is wider regional inequality as our economy is so globalised and focused on London. But, we shouldn't be too hyberbolic about it: Manchester has hugely re-generated in the last 25 years.
More investment (over 20-30 years) in infrastructure, skills, education and R&D in the industries of the future is needed - we spend far too much on flat-tyres like pensions, debt and the NHS, that consume all our national income - and services carries us.
To hit services and London would be madness.
We all live per capita. So saying we’re the 6th largest doesn’t mean anything.
I agree with much of your post, but it is are still in denial of the main issue.
No we don't. Per capita is an artificial divider of the total size of the whole economy and crudely allocates it per head of population. Just because some people are very wealthy doesn't mean everyone feels a piece of it. We live according to our personal income and our cost of living equation, which wildly varies.
You are obsessed with British decline and think its all entirely down to Brexit.
It's bonkers as well as being very boring.
I didn’t mention Brexit. Stop sniffing your own farts.
We all know what you meant by "the main issue".
It's not necessary to smell your farts; I can see you wrinkling your nose and clenching your buttocks as you prepare to release one.
I’m afraid your Brexdar is as faulty as your wokefinding stick.
The “main issue” is stark regional inequality which is hidden by averages, and indeed claims of being the 6th largest economy in the world.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
HS2 says that by the time government procurement processes and appeals have happened it would cost £240 billion, take 75 years and stop in a random field somewhere near Widnes.
I can dig a tunnel between the two in a few seconds.
{picks up manual for Casaba Howitzer}
The civil service should be on the case of how to apply AI to the issue of infrastructure delivery. So 75 years becomes 7 months. Loads of things could become possible - building a million council houses, building new railway lines, new water and power infrastructure, etc; decarbonising all at rapid speed.
Ai as it is currently, won't do anything of those things.
You need to tackle the planning culture. You also need to tackle the special "Infrastructure Inflation" - which is way higher than other inflation.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Money laundering aside (I know that happens) cafes, tattoo parlours and salons are staying open because you have to attend them. Clothes shops are about middling because you don't have to attend them, but many like to try on their clothes before they buy. More shops should have business models where benefiting by being there in person is a key part of the offering.
Yes, it was only a matter of time for Wilko - I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did. They sold very little that couldn't be bought more easily and conveniently on the internet, and their profit margins on the rest must have been microscopic. As you say, town centres need to focus on services and leisure rather than shops that sell goods.
I don't know. Whenever I've been in the local-ish Wilko it has seemed busy enough but chatter on the interwebs has told of massive gaps on the shelves, and staff cuts. My guess is that its owners got into trouble with the pandemic and rising interest rates and tried to cut their way to growth, which never works.
I do not know if it applies in this case but the government should take a close look at debt-leveraged PE takeovers that allow corporate raiders to stack the deck. Heads, we take a profit (and probably overseas to reduce tax); tails, we've loaded all the debt onto the company so if it fails, we walk away unscathed.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
A chap I knew, looked at building a factory in the North, during the early 2000s. The local politicians didn’t want it - they were worried by the idea that “poshing the area” would cause political changes.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha….
Yeah because home counties gated estates are full of factories. Sounds like an old wives tale.
I thought it was the woke who were wanting to ban the classics for offending someone or other. Who would have thought the anti-wokists were a bunch of hypocrites and authoritarians? I'm sure none of us saw that coming.
One of Douglas Murray's concerns in his criticisms of the progressive left and its culture war antics was that it would eventually lead to a reaction from the right and the weight of popular opinion would fall behind it. And this is how it may be playing out. The experience of the Republicans seems to be that, rather than 'appeals to reason and common sense', it is more effective to just replicate the same tactics as the left. In politics, it isn't realistic to try and hold the right to a higher standard than the left, because it is all about winning power.
“Look what you made me do” sounds an awful lot like the language used by those abusing their partners.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
Actually, I do know there is a difference. My putting it that way was to imply the fuller statement "I don't give a rat's arse if you are happy to attract legal attention even after the reminder, but I do think it's a bit much to cause grief and hassle for OGH".
Incidentally: doesn't coughing up personal data cause GDPR issues? Or is there some exemption? Just out of curiosity.
Yeah might do, the trick is to wait for a court order to disclose the info
Which I suppose means at least some expenditure of grief, hassle and money anyway (to check with the lawyer if the court order is kosher GDPR-wise: I'd not have a clue otherwise, it could be TV Licensing for all I knew).
The UK is not broken beyond repair and nor is it a 'middle-poor' Western country.
The UK has the sixth-largest national economy in the world in nominal GDP and tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Our economy constitutes 2.3% of world GDP and we are the 8th easiest place to do business in the world. Standard of living here is perfectly comparable to France, Germany or the Netherlands. Employment is very high as is our HDI.
The problem is nominal GDP per capita, where because of our larger population we do slip down the rankings and there is wider regional inequality as our economy is so globalised and focused on London. But, we shouldn't be too hyberbolic about it: Manchester has hugely re-generated in the last 25 years.
More investment (over 20-30 years) in infrastructure, skills, education and R&D in the industries of the future is needed - we spend far too much on flat-tyres like pensions, debt and the NHS, that consume all our national income - and services carries us.
To hit services and London would be madness.
We all live per capita. So saying we’re the 6th largest doesn’t mean anything.
I agree with much of your post, but it is are still in denial of the main issue.
No we don't. Per capita is an artificial divider of the total size of the whole economy and crudely allocates it per head of population. Just because some people are very wealthy doesn't mean everyone feels a piece of it. We live according to our personal income and our cost of living equation, which wildly varies.
You are obsessed with British decline and think its all entirely down to Brexit.
It's bonkers as well as being very boring.
I didn’t mention Brexit. Stop sniffing your own farts.
We all know what you meant by "the main issue".
It's not necessary to smell your farts; I can see you wrinkling your nose and clenching your buttocks as you prepare to release one.
I’m afraid your Brexdar is as faulty as your wokefinding stick.
The “main issue” is stark regional inequality which is hidden by averages, and indeed claims of being the 6th largest economy in the world.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
A chap I knew, looked at building a factory in the North, during the early 2000s. The local politicians didn’t want it - they were worried by the idea that “poshing the area” would cause political changes.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha….
Yep, good old caring lefties. Who needs jobs if they are in the private sector? We should all be employed by the state.
The idea was to distribute growth to other cities, it would have made sense at the time. If you have cities competing with each other for investment then someone has to be a loser.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
A chap I knew, looked at building a factory in the North, during the early 2000s. The local politicians didn’t want it - they were worried by the idea that “poshing the area” would cause political changes.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha….
Yeah because home counties gated estates are full of factories. Sounds like an old wives tale.
Malmesbury is full of such tales. He’s the thinking man’s guy-in-the-pub.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
I don't think any country is "beyond repair". Look at Eastern Europe in the 1990's, or even in an extreme example Germany and Japan in the mid 40's, but in all those cases it took a massive shock to the system and some massive investment to get them out of the mess they were in.
It's not broken beyond repair but it's broken beyond what the politicians are willing to risk doing wrt to slashing pensioner benefits and healthcare provision for the old and funnelling that money into investment and tax cuts for working age people. That's how the UK shifts back to a path of sustainable growth but no politician, blue or red team, seems brave enough to say it. The UK economy is the emperor with no clothes.
Other Western European countries seem able to care for their elderly and be rich at the same time.
Other western countries don't have the same liability of defined benefit pensions as the UK.
Which is irreversible ancient history, because the liability for DB pensions arises out of contracts of employment signed up to when God was a boy. you mustn't go thinking OAPs and DBPs have anything in common beyond a name. OAPs is benefits which the govt could reduce to £0.00 a year tomorrow, with legal impunity. DBPs are a contractual right which the govt will be successfully sued for if it withholds or alters them, and I would think would also see its credit rating plummet to the low Bs if it tried such a thing
Disclaimer: no DB rights, actual or in prospect.
Defined Benefit Pensions absolutely have a contractual right to be paid.
What they don't have a contractual right towards though is being under taxed.
A defined benefit pension on £30k gets taxed at 20% A newly qualified teacher on £30k paying the graduate tax and national insurance gets taxed more than double that, at 41%
A defined benefit pension of £95k per annum gets taxed at 40%
Equalise taxes and remove exceptions so that absolutely everyone, no matter their source of income, pays the same tax rate if they have the same income.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
HS2 says that by the time government procurement processes and appeals have happened it would cost £240 billion, take 75 years and stop in a random field somewhere near Widnes.
I can dig a tunnel between the two in a few seconds.
{picks up manual for Casaba Howitzer}
The civil service should be on the case of how to apply AI to the issue of infrastructure delivery. So 75 years becomes 7 months. Loads of things could become possible - building a million council houses, building new railway lines, new water and power infrastructure, etc; decarbonising all at rapid speed.
How would AI achieve any of that? Not even Leon foresees AI bricklaying. AI might put a handful of architects out of work but that's not the bottleneck.
One of the principle problems with NHS waiting lists is the NHS. It has a structure and ethos designed for the 1950s.
Labour will, like they did before, hose money at it from borrowing. The hose will be eagerly and greedily picked up by the BMA who do not think that £120k a year for a job where you can also have an additional private practice is enough for someone in the safest job in the known universe.
What is the answer? An acceptance by the British people that the NHS is not and never has been "the envy of the world" and that it needs substantial reform and that certain aspects of our lives we need to take responsibility for ourselves.
Additionally the medical profession needs to understand that if they want to earn megabucks they need to take some career risks and not expect the taxpayer (where the average person earns £28k year) to feather bed them just because they have the letters Dr in front of their names.
The NHS's structure is very different to what it was in the 1950s. The main reason for long waiting lists is that the UK spends less on healthcare than comparable countries.
"The NHS's structure is very different to what it was in the 1950s" No shit Sherlock! The question is as to whether the structures put in place then (such as the generous provisions that allow hospital consultants to also have private practice alongside the security of their NHS contracts), ie legacy issues, still cause problems today. Answer - Yes
On waiting times, yours is a a somewhat simplistic analysis. The UK health spending per capita is 18% below EU average (if this is what you call comparable countries), and this is regrettable in my view, but the relationship to waiting times is very much more complex and a lot of it is structural and due to inefficiencies of the NHS bureaucracy. It is unlikely that without significant reform there would be a great improvement in waiting times.
Incidentally, you will be interested to know, that outside our insular NHS bubble all health systems across Europe are struggling with staffing levels.
So, you agree that we spend nearly a fifth less than the EU average, but you think the problems are structural? Why don't you try spending a fifth less on everything in your life and then see whether structural changes can compensate?
I have made efficiencies in my own business to that extent and taken haircuts to my own income. Apologists for the NHS bureaucracy boast that it doesn't make profits as though that is a good thing. Therefore it should need less spend surely?
I am slightly taking the piss. I don't know whether you have ever worked in or around the NHS? I have, and I am sad to say that it is the most inefficient organisation I have ever had dealings with. Even by public sector standards.
I am a public sector employee in higher education. I have worked with the NHS extensively. I have also worked with the private sector. I have not seen a large or consistent difference in efficiency between them. Some areas of both are more efficient, some less efficient.
I am all for improving efficiency in the NHS and my own research is often focused on that. I could write pages on how the NHS could be better. Government policy should try to make the NHS more efficient. But, of course, the devil is in the details. Often, it's Government reform that creates the inefficiencies. It's not technically the NHS, but the re-organisation of Public Health England in the middle of the pandemic into the UK Health Security Agency was one experience I lived through that was monumentally stupid. At present, NHS England are looking to make 40% reductions in headcount following a merger with NHS Digital, NHSx etc., creating turmoil that's delayed programmes. NHSx was only created recently by a Conservative government and now it's being swallowed up again.
So, organisational structures matter, sure. But having 18% less money per capita matters hugely too. You want better health services, spend more money. Other countries in Europe manage it; so can we.
The UK is not broken beyond repair and nor is it a 'middle-poor' Western country.
The UK has the sixth-largest national economy in the world in nominal GDP and tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Our economy constitutes 2.3% of world GDP and we are the 8th easiest place to do business in the world. Standard of living here is perfectly comparable to France, Germany or the Netherlands. Employment is very high as is our HDI.
The problem is nominal GDP per capita, where because of our larger population we do slip down the rankings and there is wider regional inequality as our economy is so globalised and focused on London. But, we shouldn't be too hyberbolic about it: Manchester has hugely re-generated in the last 25 years.
More investment (over 20-30 years) in infrastructure, skills, education and R&D in the industries of the future is needed - we spend far too much on flat-tyres like pensions, debt and the NHS, that consume all our national income - and services carries us.
To hit services and London would be madness.
We all live per capita. So saying we’re the 6th largest doesn’t mean anything.
I agree with much of your post, but it is are still in denial of the main issue.
No we don't. Per capita is an artificial divider of the total size of the whole economy and crudely allocates it per head of population. Just because some people are very wealthy doesn't mean everyone feels a piece of it. We live according to our personal income and our cost of living equation, which wildly varies.
You are obsessed with British decline and think its all entirely down to Brexit.
It's bonkers as well as being very boring.
I didn’t mention Brexit. Stop sniffing your own farts.
We all know what you meant by "the main issue".
It's not necessary to smell your farts; I can see you wrinkling your nose and clenching your buttocks as you prepare to release one.
I’m afraid your Brexdar is as faulty as your wokefinding stick.
The “main issue” is stark regional inequality which is hidden by averages, and indeed claims of being the 6th largest economy in the world.
And I suspect the causal link went the other way, at least in part. Large parts of the country where life wasn't great before 2016, pushing the Brexit button because they were promised that would make things better.
That it's probably made things worse is just one of those ironies that litter history.
(And if we're going to trade #values, what was the UKIP van that drove around Romford playing The Great Escape and The Dumbusters March on a loop if not #values?)
The reason most Remainers want to Rejoin is #values - economics they think is a useful lever to get there, which is why they keep banging on about it.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
I can very safely say I'm not in that category. All about the economics for me.
WE WOULD HAVE TO JOIN THE EURO if we joined, which is the definition of an economic disaster for a deficit country like us.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Sorry, which cafes are these?
The ones which very obviously have quite high overheads (town centre rents and rates), and equally obviously hardly any customers. I won't give any particular examples.
Tons of this in London. Places set up to repel customers rather than attract them. Fronts for drugs vice and money laundering. It's by definition impossible to measure but I bet the dark economy if it were a Footsie sector would dwarf most of the others. It's probably a big chunk of the City too.
The main thing service-sellers want is access to a deep, talented labour pool.
Not - in my case - to access “cheap labour” - but rather to access a critical mass of diverse skill-sets.
The removal of that makes it harder to compete.
Not all services are the same.
It depends if the service you're selling is high-efficiency, high-skill high-wage, or if the service you're selling is to get a dozen guys to wash your car for a fiver.
We need more of the former, we don't need the latter.
London and the SE voted Remain. Everywhere else voted Leave, bar Scotland and Northern Ireland, where large parts of the population see their future freed from London, but inside the EU.
Yes, I think because of the '52/48' (which sounds, is, close) it's sometimes not appreciated the extent to which England outside its capital city wanted to leave the EU. If you turn it into FPTP constituencies it was a landslide.
Yes and no. Yes they voted to leave the EU but no, they were not voting to leave the EU per se, they just wanted their towns and lives to get better and Brexit was the snake-oil that would achieve those things. At least Dominic Cummings acknowledged that, which is why he and Gove were so keen on levelling up.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
HS2 says that by the time government procurement processes and appeals have happened it would cost £240 billion, take 75 years and stop in a random field somewhere near Widnes.
I can dig a tunnel between the two in a few seconds.
{picks up manual for Casaba Howitzer}
The civil service should be on the case of how to apply AI to the issue of infrastructure delivery. So 75 years becomes 7 months. Loads of things could become possible - building a million council houses, building new railway lines, new water and power infrastructure, etc; decarbonising all at rapid speed.
How would AI achieve any of that? Not even Leon foresees AI bricklaying. AI might put a handful of architects out of work but that's not the bottleneck.
Much of the recent talk of revolutionary AI, is very reminiscent of the talk of revolutionary blockchain from a couple of years ago.
The way to build millions more houses, is to utilise the technology that now lets you build houses in factories, for which government’s role is to sort out the planning and financing issues with such properties. Just as happened after WWII.
The UK is not broken beyond repair and nor is it a 'middle-poor' Western country.
The UK has the sixth-largest national economy in the world in nominal GDP and tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Our economy constitutes 2.3% of world GDP and we are the 8th easiest place to do business in the world. Standard of living here is perfectly comparable to France, Germany or the Netherlands. Employment is very high as is our HDI.
The problem is nominal GDP per capita, where because of our larger population we do slip down the rankings and there is wider regional inequality as our economy is so globalised and focused on London. But, we shouldn't be too hyberbolic about it: Manchester has hugely re-generated in the last 25 years.
More investment (over 20-30 years) in infrastructure, skills, education and R&D in the industries of the future is needed - we spend far too much on flat-tyres like pensions, debt and the NHS, that consume all our national income - and services carries us.
To hit services and London would be madness.
We all live per capita. So saying we’re the 6th largest doesn’t mean anything.
I agree with much of your post, but it is are still in denial of the main issue.
No we don't. Per capita is an artificial divider of the total size of the whole economy and crudely allocates it per head of population. Just because some people are very wealthy doesn't mean everyone feels a piece of it. We live according to our personal income and our cost of living equation, which wildly varies.
You are obsessed with British decline and think its all entirely down to Brexit.
It's bonkers as well as being very boring.
I didn’t mention Brexit. Stop sniffing your own farts.
We all know what you meant by "the main issue".
It's not necessary to smell your farts; I can see you wrinkling your nose and clenching your buttocks as you prepare to release one.
I’m afraid your Brexdar is as faulty as your wokefinding stick.
The “main issue” is stark regional inequality which is hidden by averages, and indeed claims of being the 6th largest economy in the world.
The reason most Remainers want to Rejoin is #values - economics they think is a useful lever to get there, which is why they keep banging on about it.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
I can very safely say I'm not in that category. All about the economics for me.
WE WOULD HAVE TO JOIN THE EURO if we joined, which is the definition of an economic disaster for a deficit country like us.
Isn't being a deficit country ultimately a disaster? Albeit one that the UK has ducked for decades by flogging off the silver, burning the furniture and eating the seedcorn.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
UK GDP growth 1960-1979: 80%. UK GDP growth 1980-1999: 52%. UK GDP growth 2000-2019: 43%.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
A chap I knew, looked at building a factory in the North, during the early 2000s. The local politicians didn’t want it - they were worried by the idea that “poshing the area” would cause political changes.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha….
Yep, good old caring lefties. Who needs jobs if they are in the private sector? We should all be employed by the state.
The idea was to distribute growth to other cities, it would have made sense at the time. If you have cities competing with each other for investment then someone has to be a loser.
Though all it did was hold back the service industry of Brum, without any long term benefit to North or Welsh valleys.
Levelling up is actually much harder than levelling down.
The reason most Remainers want to Rejoin is #values - economics they think is a useful lever to get there, which is why they keep banging on about it.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
I can very safely say I'm not in that category. All about the economics for me.
WE WOULD HAVE TO JOIN THE EURO if we joined, which is the definition of an economic disaster for a deficit country like us.
A benefit, it'd eliminate currency risk for us as a business. We've got more euros than sterling anyway.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
A chap I knew, looked at building a factory in the North, during the early 2000s. The local politicians didn’t want it - they were worried by the idea that “poshing the area” would cause political changes.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha….
Yeah because home counties gated estates are full of factories. Sounds like an old wives tale.
There's actually quite a lot of small industrial all over the south and west.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
HS2 says that by the time government procurement processes and appeals have happened it would cost £240 billion, take 75 years and stop in a random field somewhere near Widnes.
I can dig a tunnel between the two in a few seconds.
{picks up manual for Casaba Howitzer}
The civil service should be on the case of how to apply AI to the issue of infrastructure delivery. So 75 years becomes 7 months. Loads of things could become possible - building a million council houses, building new railway lines, new water and power infrastructure, etc; decarbonising all at rapid speed.
How would AI achieve any of that? Not even Leon foresees AI bricklaying. AI might put a handful of architects out of work but that's not the bottleneck.
Much of the recent talk of revolutionary AI, is very reminiscent of the talk of revolutionary blockchain from a couple of years ago.
The way to build millions more houses, is to utilise the technology that now lets you build houses in factories, for which government’s role is to sort out the planning and financing issues with such properties. Just as happened after WWII.
The block in the system isn't building the houses, per se.
It's using the planning permissions being granted.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
HS2 says that by the time government procurement processes and appeals have happened it would cost £240 billion, take 75 years and stop in a random field somewhere near Widnes.
I can dig a tunnel between the two in a few seconds.
{picks up manual for Casaba Howitzer}
The civil service should be on the case of how to apply AI to the issue of infrastructure delivery. So 75 years becomes 7 months. Loads of things could become possible - building a million council houses, building new railway lines, new water and power infrastructure, etc; decarbonising all at rapid speed.
How would AI achieve any of that? Not even Leon foresees AI bricklaying. AI might put a handful of architects out of work but that's not the bottleneck.
Much of the recent talk of revolutionary AI, is very reminiscent of the talk of revolutionary blockchain from a couple of years ago.
The way to build millions more houses, is to utilise the technology that now lets you build houses in factories, for which government’s role is to sort out the planning and financing issues with such properties. Just as happened after WWII.
Yeah but the systems that they have created (planning) are getting to be beyond human understanding due to extreme complexity and contradictions which get worse with every legislative change. It is the same with the tax system. It is nowhere near there yet but I have an instinct that AI is ultimately going to evolve to address this. My belief that it will solve it is no more or less rational than someone else's belief that it won't.
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
This is completely unrealistic and ignores the very, very real issues with content licencing, residual payment deals for talent and the complexity of international content purchasing/sales. 9/10 times when the BBC procures a TV show it only purchases UK linear and streaming rights which it may then resell to Netflix.
If was going to make a BBC streaming service I'd do £6.99 per month for all non-live content. So no MOTD live or on catchup, but you do get Peaky Blinders and the recent back catalogue and make that available to cord cutters who live in the pure streaming world.
My point was that the BBC should have been working on this for the past decade, given how obvious it was going to be. The big dramas are more difficult, for the reasons you suggest of residual payments and licensing; but the soaps, comedy shows, and all the daytime crap, would be much easier.
Funding pretty much the whole production of something, but leaving out secondary streaming rights, would be a dereliction of duty for a commercial entity in recent times.
MOTD is the one programme that will never be allowed on an international iPlayer though. At least not unless they edit out all of the Premier League content that’s sold abroad separately.
But that's the point, the BBC rarely funds anywhere near the entirety of anything these days. Most of their content is licenced from the big UK players who are funded independently and they then sell domestic and international rights separately. The market has moved on a huge amount since then and taking it back to when everything was centrally approved by the BBC2 controller with BBC budgets would destroy the success of UK TV and movie production.
The BBC don't leave out streaming rights or international streaming rights, they simply can't afford to compete with Netflix and Amazon for them and it being a capitalist industry, there's little regard for sentiment when selling a product, it will go to the highest bidder.
I think we’re violently agreeing here. I’m contrasting the approach of the BBC over, say, Disney, who have managed to hold on to the rights for most of their content, and even the older stuff has ended up on their streaming service.
If BBC Worldwide, at the height of Top Gear’s popularity, had launched an international iPlayer with TG as an exclusive, they would likely be successful by now - but instead, they stuck with the old-world view of overseas licensing to TV networks, and they’re now like the guy trying to sell music CDs when everyone else has moved through Napster to Spotify.
Disney+ is yet to break even. Other parts of Disney are subsidising it.
Yes, from talking to friends who subscribe to various streaming services, a consolidation would be good for consumers and probably necessary for streamers who might not be profitable. We've seen it even here with PBers detailing their efforts to juggle services in order to watch sport while keeping children onside. It costs too much to subscribe to everything.
Disney+ are putting up fees, cracking down on password sharing and looking at introducing ads, like Netflix.
I enjoy both Disney+ and Netflix, but they're companies burning through investment while they try to win the streaming wars and work out the best model to do this...
Chatter is that Apple might buy Disney. Might even make sense (if the competition authorities allowed it).
That rumour has been doing the rounds ever since Disney bought Pixar. I don't see Apple spending the $150-170bn it would take to get Disney, not that they don't have it, just that shareholders would probably prefer the cash in a dividend than destroying $100-120bn in value by purchasing Disney.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
HS2 says that by the time government procurement processes and appeals have happened it would cost £240 billion, take 75 years and stop in a random field somewhere near Widnes.
I can dig a tunnel between the two in a few seconds.
{picks up manual for Casaba Howitzer}
The civil service should be on the case of how to apply AI to the issue of infrastructure delivery. So 75 years becomes 7 months. Loads of things could become possible - building a million council houses, building new railway lines, new water and power infrastructure, etc; decarbonising all at rapid speed.
How would AI achieve any of that? Not even Leon foresees AI bricklaying. AI might put a handful of architects out of work but that's not the bottleneck.
Much of the recent talk of revolutionary AI, is very reminiscent of the talk of revolutionary blockchain from a couple of years ago.
The way to build millions more houses, is to utilise the technology that now lets you build houses in factories, for which government’s role is to sort out the planning and financing issues with such properties. Just as happened after WWII.
Yeah but the systems that they have created (planning) are getting to be beyond human understanding due to extreme complexity and contradictions which get worse with every legislative change. It is the same with the tax system. It is nowhere near there yet but I have an instinct that AI is ultimately going to evolve to address this. My belief that it will solve it is no more or less rational than someone else's belief that it won't.
To demonstrate the rationality of your belief, you’d have to show your working.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
HS2 says that by the time government procurement processes and appeals have happened it would cost £240 billion, take 75 years and stop in a random field somewhere near Widnes.
I can dig a tunnel between the two in a few seconds.
{picks up manual for Casaba Howitzer}
The civil service should be on the case of how to apply AI to the issue of infrastructure delivery. So 75 years becomes 7 months. Loads of things could become possible - building a million council houses, building new railway lines, new water and power infrastructure, etc; decarbonising all at rapid speed.
How would AI achieve any of that? Not even Leon foresees AI bricklaying. AI might put a handful of architects out of work but that's not the bottleneck.
Much of the recent talk of revolutionary AI, is very reminiscent of the talk of revolutionary blockchain from a couple of years ago.
The way to build millions more houses, is to utilise the technology that now lets you build houses in factories, for which government’s role is to sort out the planning and financing issues with such properties. Just as happened after WWII.
The block in the system isn't building the houses, per se.
It's using the planning permissions being granted.
Yes, it’s mainly that the high costs of planning mean that most permissions end up with a small number of large developers, who can then manage the building pipeline for their own ends.
PP needs to come with a timeline that’s not negotiable from the developer’s end, enforced with a big stick, and developments need to be better shared out among both constructors and individual buyer/builders.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
HS2 says that by the time government procurement processes and appeals have happened it would cost £240 billion, take 75 years and stop in a random field somewhere near Widnes.
I can dig a tunnel between the two in a few seconds.
{picks up manual for Casaba Howitzer}
The civil service should be on the case of how to apply AI to the issue of infrastructure delivery. So 75 years becomes 7 months. Loads of things could become possible - building a million council houses, building new railway lines, new water and power infrastructure, etc; decarbonising all at rapid speed.
How would AI achieve any of that? Not even Leon foresees AI bricklaying. AI might put a handful of architects out of work but that's not the bottleneck.
Much of the recent talk of revolutionary AI, is very reminiscent of the talk of revolutionary blockchain from a couple of years ago.
The way to build millions more houses, is to utilise the technology that now lets you build houses in factories, for which government’s role is to sort out the planning and financing issues with such properties. Just as happened after WWII.
Wooden and prefabricated homes abroad can be built to a much higher standard than the bricks and mortar in this country.
I recently stayed with relatives in the Rockies in Alberta. They have all extremes of weather we don't face and their homes are much higher standard, and get shipped in and put up in days not months.
My host likes to joke that he's a "high elevation Williams" (hillbilly) as he lives in a wooden shack in the hills. Which is as much a wonderful bit of understatement for calling their wooden home a shack, as it is for calling the Rocky Mountains the hills.
We could do with building more stuff with wood and prefabricated in this country.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
UK GDP growth 1960-1979: 80%. UK GDP growth 1980-1999: 52%. UK GDP growth 2000-2019: 43%.
Hehe. Oh dear. I think that might need quite a bit of context! Selective statistics are not very helpful. Eg. Take a look at Germany's GDP since 2018. If we use that we can say our government has done a marvellous job by comparison lol.
Let me tell you. The UK in the 1970s was a basketcase. Fact. I was there.
London and the SE voted Remain. Everywhere else voted Leave, bar Scotland and Northern Ireland, where large parts of the population see their future freed from London, but inside the EU.
Yes, I think because of the '52/48' (which sounds, is, close) it's sometimes not appreciated the extent to which England outside its capital city wanted to leave the EU. If you turn it into FPTP constituencies it was a landslide.
Yes and no. Yes they voted to leave the EU but no, they were not voting to leave the EU per se, they just wanted their towns and lives to get better and Brexit was the snake-oil that would achieve those things. At least Dominic Cummings acknowledged that, which is why he and Gove were so keen on levelling up.
That's also a 'yes and no', I think. What you say does apply to many (probably most) Leave voters. However a reasonably large number DID just want to be out of the EU for its own sake, because they felt being in it meant us being 'told what to do by Brussels'.
The reason most Remainers want to Rejoin is #values - economics they think is a useful lever to get there, which is why they keep banging on about it.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
I can very safely say I'm not in that category. All about the economics for me.
WE WOULD HAVE TO JOIN THE EURO if we joined, which is the definition of an economic disaster for a deficit country like us.
Lol. Shouty Brexit apologist! NO WE MIGHT NOT! AND NO NOT DEFINITION OF ECONOMIC DISASTER YOU MUPPET.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
A chap I knew, looked at building a factory in the North, during the early 2000s. The local politicians didn’t want it - they were worried by the idea that “poshing the area” would cause political changes.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha….
Yep, good old caring lefties. Who needs jobs if they are in the private sector? We should all be employed by the state.
The idea was to distribute growth to other cities, it would have made sense at the time. If you have cities competing with each other for investment then someone has to be a loser.
Though all it did was hold back the service industry of Brum, without any long term benefit to North or Welsh valleys.
Levelling up is actually much harder than levelling down.
The phrase is a con trick imo. You can't level up.
The reason most Remainers want to Rejoin is #values - economics they think is a useful lever to get there, which is why they keep banging on about it.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
All the economic problems that Britain now has developed and worsened during decades of EU membership.
I do want Britain to rejoin the EU for a variety of reasons, but I think that Britain's economic problems and inequalities are entirely self-generated, and could be fixed, or deteriorate further independent of Britain's relationship to the EU. My main concern with a push to rejoin is that, in the lack of a national consensus, Britain will end up spending more time obsessions about its relationship with the EU, and doing nothing to address the problems that it faces.
Much as I dislike Brexit, and think it was a monumental mistake in conception and execution, I do not think it is an order zero issue that needs to be fixed as a precondition to fixing anything else.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Sorry, which cafes are these?
The ones which very obviously have quite high overheads (town centre rents and rates), and equally obviously hardly any customers. I won't give any particular examples.
Tons of this in London. Places set up to repel customers rather than attract them. Fronts for drugs vice and money laundering. It's by definition impossible to measure but I bet the dark economy if it were a Footsie sector would dwarf most of the others. It's probably a big chunk of the City too.
Would you like some heroin with your pie and mash, guv?
Comments
Disclaimer: no DB rights, actual or in prospect.
There was light rain, and nobody was about.
The kiosk looked empty.
As I approached, I said loudly, “Hello!”.
A bearded hipster roused himself sheepishly from the floor of the kiosk where he’d been sleeping.
Very nice man, good coffee.
He explained that he lived on a canal boat, times were tough, and nobody under 40 expected to buy a house anymore.
There’s a lot wonderfully and terrifyingly British about this story.
I enjoy both Disney+ and Netflix, but they're companies burning through investment while they try to win the streaming wars and work out the best model to do this. Holding them up as exemplars that the BBC should be copying doesn't really make sense. They don't offer a model that works and that the BBC could/should have been copying. No-one's yet worked out what that model should be.
But people get to make their own choices - they don't get to make Mike's choices for him.
4. Don't libel public figures. OGH has had correspondance [sic] from Carter Ruck in the past, and he didn't enjoy the experience. If you're putting OGH in danger of getting sued, you will be banned.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/1895932#Comment_1895932
Might even make sense (if the competition authorities allowed it).
https://www.oecd.org/els/public-pensions/PAG2021-country-profile-France.pdf
https://www.hoganlovells.com/~/media/hogan-lovells/pdf/2019/2019_08_14_german_pension_schemes__client_note.pdf?la=en
https://www.oecd.org/els/public-pensions/PAG2013-profile-Sweden.pdf
The Netherlands is interesting because they are phasing out DB pensions:
https://www.dentons.com/en/insights/articles/2023/june/2/new-dutch-pension-act-on-1-july-2023-major-reform-of-pension-system-act-now
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
Yes you will have to wait about a year to get your internet connected and you will regularly queue up for the standpipe when the water goes off, or work by candle light when the leccy goes off, but think of how chuffed we will all feel about those nationalised utilities even though the brothers keep taking the workers out on strike and the overflows into the sea are so much worse than ever. When we are bathing in the sea and the turds float past you (like in my childhood in Lyme Regis) you can be content in the knowledge that "we" own them! Yay!
The UK has the sixth-largest national economy in the world in nominal GDP and tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Our economy constitutes 2.3% of world GDP and we are the 8th easiest place to do business in the world. Standard of living here is perfectly comparable to France, Germany or the Netherlands. Employment is very high as is our HDI.
The problem is nominal GDP per capita, where because of our larger population we do slip down the rankings and there is wider regional inequality as our economy is so globalised and focused on London. But, we shouldn't be too hyberbolic about it: Manchester has hugely re-generated in the last 25 years.
More investment (over 20-30 years) in infrastructure, skills, education and R&D in the industries of the future is needed - we spend far too much on flat-tyres like pensions, debt and the NHS, that consume all our national income - and services carries us.
To hit services and London would be madness.
Incidentally: doesn't coughing up personal data cause GDPR issues? Or is there some exemption? Just out of curiosity.
I am slightly taking the piss. I don't know whether you have ever worked in or around the NHS? I have, and I am sad to say that it is the most inefficient organisation I have ever had dealings with. Even by public sector standards.
*perhaps excluding allowing private companies to benefit from public resources like clean air, green fields, community cohesion etc.
So saying we’re the 6th largest doesn’t mean anything.
I agree with much of your post, but it is are still in denial of the main issue.
It's typical of investment policy that the cheese paring started with the trans-Pennine rail plan. Particularly stupid, as it could have been delivered for a fraction of what HS2 (completed or not) will now cost - and would have generated a return on the investment much sooner.
The US is incredibly litigious - adding to transaction costs, has an appallingly wasteful healthcare system, deeply entrenched and racialised inequality, an opioid crisis, and an unstable political system.
We should aim to BEAT US living standards.
Thatcher was just the same, if not worse, in that respect.
{picks up manual for Casaba Howitzer}
You are obsessed with British decline and think its all entirely down to Brexit.
It's bonkers as well as being very boring.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha….
Either way, if someone very litigious decided to go after OGH on the grounds of what another poster said it would almost certainly close the site. He is not Mark Zuckerburg and does not have an army of lawyers.
Much better to keep the manufacturing in China and India, who don’t care about such things except for warm words at conferences.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
So keeping the post industrial decline worked out well, there.
Many people in the SNP believed that Labour did the same in parts of Scotland, incidentally. The seats where they counted the Labour vote with a pair of scales etc...
As to whether it would shifty the dial, it would IMO almost certainly do so. Cutting ourselves off from the world's largest market in such an untapered and unmitigated way was dumb. Rejoin might improve inward investment and business confidence generally and boost exports and trade generally.
All of these things are "might". Now that the damage has been done there "might" also be a number of negative consequences economically moving back again too.
Stop sniffing your own farts.
To do that you'd need to rejoin EU full-fat: euro, everything, and argue for completing the single market in services in full from the inside and, over 10-15 years, harmonise lots of tax, law, worker/social and financial/insurance regulations across the EU, which would motorise London to become the European capital for all services and even more of a global hub.
That would come at a high political cost - removing a lot of decisions from Westminster and making them in Brussels with Germany/France instead - but would probably raise the size of the UK economy overall through a mix of population growth and agglomeration in London/SE through leveraging our comparative advantage in a wider single market.
But, it would do this by making London v. the rest of the UK even more unequal, sucking in lots more workers from EU and around the world, and would probably accentuate its cultural differences wrt. rUK as well.
It's not necessary to smell your farts; I can see you wrinkling your nose and clenching your buttocks as you prepare to release one.
The “main issue” is stark regional inequality which is hidden by averages, and indeed claims of being the 6th largest economy in the world.
You need to tackle the planning culture. You also need to tackle the special "Infrastructure Inflation" - which is way higher than other inflation.
I do not know if it applies in this case but the government should take a close look at debt-leveraged PE takeovers that allow corporate raiders to stack the deck. Heads, we take a profit (and probably overseas to reduce tax); tails, we've loaded all the debt onto the company so if it fails, we walk away unscathed.
The main thing service-sellers want is access to a deep, talented labour pool.
Not - in my case - to access “cheap labour” - but rather to access a critical mass of diverse skill-sets.
The removal of that makes it harder to compete.
He’s the thinking man’s guy-in-the-pub.
What they don't have a contractual right towards though is being under taxed.
A defined benefit pension on £30k gets taxed at 20%
A newly qualified teacher on £30k paying the graduate tax and national insurance gets taxed more than double that, at 41%
A defined benefit pension of £95k per annum gets taxed at 40%
Equalise taxes and remove exceptions so that absolutely everyone, no matter their source of income, pays the same tax rate if they have the same income.
I am all for improving efficiency in the NHS and my own research is often focused on that. I could write pages on how the NHS could be better. Government policy should try to make the NHS more efficient. But, of course, the devil is in the details. Often, it's Government reform that creates the inefficiencies. It's not technically the NHS, but the re-organisation of Public Health England in the middle of the pandemic into the UK Health Security Agency was one experience I lived through that was monumentally stupid. At present, NHS England are looking to make 40% reductions in headcount following a merger with NHS Digital, NHSx etc., creating turmoil that's delayed programmes. NHSx was only created recently by a Conservative government and now it's being swallowed up again.
So, organisational structures matter, sure. But having 18% less money per capita matters hugely too. You want better health services, spend more money. Other countries in Europe manage it; so can we.
That it's probably made things worse is just one of those ironies that litter history.
(And if we're going to trade #values, what was the UKIP van that drove around Romford playing The Great Escape and The Dumbusters March on a loop if not #values?)
It depends if the service you're selling is high-efficiency, high-skill high-wage, or if the service you're selling is to get a dozen guys to wash your car for a fiver.
We need more of the former, we don't need the latter.
The way to build millions more houses, is to utilise the technology that now lets you build houses in factories, for which government’s role is to sort out the planning and financing issues with such properties. Just as happened after WWII.
UK GDP growth 1980-1999: 52%.
UK GDP growth 2000-2019: 43%.
Levelling up is actually much harder than levelling down.
Quite a bit in West London, of all places.
It's using the planning permissions being granted.
PP needs to come with a timeline that’s not negotiable from the developer’s end, enforced with a big stick, and developments need to be better shared out among both constructors and individual buyer/builders.
I recently stayed with relatives in the Rockies in Alberta. They have all extremes of weather we don't face and their homes are much higher standard, and get shipped in and put up in days not months.
My host likes to joke that he's a "high elevation Williams" (hillbilly) as he lives in a wooden shack in the hills. Which is as much a wonderful bit of understatement for calling their wooden home a shack, as it is for calling the Rocky Mountains the hills.
We could do with building more stuff with wood and prefabricated in this country.
Let me tell you. The UK in the 1970s was a basketcase. Fact. I was there.
I do want Britain to rejoin the EU for a variety of reasons, but I think that Britain's economic problems and inequalities are entirely self-generated, and could be fixed, or deteriorate further independent of Britain's relationship to the EU. My main concern with a push to rejoin is that, in the lack of a national consensus, Britain will end up spending more time obsessions about its relationship with the EU, and doing nothing to address the problems that it faces.
Much as I dislike Brexit, and think it was a monumental mistake in conception and execution, I do not think it is an order zero issue that needs to be fixed as a precondition to fixing anything else.