O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
The problem is, though, that that means that the quickest way to make people feel richer is for home prices to rise relative to incomes. That will make lots of older voters happy and rich, while screwing those who are younger.
Yes but an expensive house might make oldies feel rich but they can't spend it. (OK, a few will act on the equity release adverts.) The intergenerational trickle-down aspect is not very useful either, if you die in your 80s and leave money to your children who by now are in their 60s. High house prices are a blight on the economy.
Perhaps all this focus on new homes in general is wrong. There should be a laser focus on retirement apartments/high quality supported accommodation, and a cultural shift to moving out of your family home when you retire.
Would make the provision of social care much more efficient too. Two birds.
"Boomer Barracks". You heard it here first.
One of our problems now, with one bedroom devoted to 're-enablement' or similar is that, in a two bed-bungalow, we have no space for guests, such a 'children' or grandchildren.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
Sure is. Her speech last night was good. Lots of interesting ideas in there. A future PM IMO.
I am not sure I see ideas. Her critique of where we are is reasonably sound. She is extremely cautious about new spending commitments, and rightly so. She is right in saying additional public expenditure has to come from growth which generates the new taxes.
So we need more growth: how? We need new investment: from where and incentivised how? We need to keep borrowing under control: agreed. How do we achieve these desirable objectives? That is the bit that is missing for me. Given that she will be Chancellor in a few months I would like a clearer idea of what she plans to do.
The part towards the end where she talks about skills, labour security and the link with labour mobility is interesting. Not sure it was widely reported in the media.
(As an aside, the Sky coverage last night was bizarre: we had Beth Rigby and A.N. Other journalist telling viewers what Rachel was saying while she was speaking live. Thankful her speech was live on YouTube, so I switched over. The YouTube stream was a bit crappy but better than the Sky News dynamic duo)
What I saw was a list of new institutions which are supposed to come up with the ideas. Her employment changes seemed to be to remove the 1 year qualifying period for UD claims and additional rights for those on zero hour contracts. I certainly agree with the latter but the risk is that churn is increased even more to prevent the acquisition of those right.
She then got distracted into both green objectives and perceived discrimination against female entrepreneurs. No doubt both worthy in themselves but somewhat unlikely to be game changers on investment or productivity or growth. She also seemed to note but then rather reject the evidence of additional growth being generated by clusters on the basis that all parts of the country must share in this growth.
I don't have a problem with a more dynamic state looking to facilitate growth. I would like to see specific proposals about how this is to be achieved. The article by Hamish McRae downthread showed how reversing Brown's pension grab might help increase investment in UK business. The extent to which are own savings are not being directed to our own businesses is a disgrace and a punch to our own gut.
I have suggested that both capital investment and training investment should be further incentivised by the tax system with more than 100% write offs.
I don't see anything in her proposals that contains this sort of specific. She may be scared of Hunt pinching them again.
Unfair dismissal rights are currently two years. Absurd. Needs reform, as is a massive disincentive to change jobs, which is the point she made rather well.
Re: Hunt pinching them. Absolutely. She will say very little in terms of detail until the manifesto is published. And rightly so. As the nondoms stuff demonstrated, the opposition would be mad to release detailed policies this far from an election.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
The problem is, though, that that means that the quickest way to make people feel richer is for home prices to rise relative to incomes. That will make lots of older voters happy and rich, while screwing those who are younger.
Yes but an expensive house might make oldies feel rich but they can't spend it. (OK, a few will act on the equity release adverts.) The intergenerational trickle-down aspect is not very useful either, if you die in your 80s and leave money to your children who by now are in their 60s. High house prices are a blight on the economy.
Perhaps all this focus on new homes in general is wrong. There should be a laser focus on retirement apartments/high quality supported accommodation, and a cultural shift to moving out of your family home when you retire.
Would make the provision of social care much more efficient too. Two birds.
"Boomer Barracks". You heard it here first.
One of our problems now, with one bedroom devoted to 're-enablement' or similar is that, in a two bed-bungalow, we have no space for guests, such a 'children' or grandchildren.
Exactly and why should the state effectively tell pensioners where they should live
Indeed, in our case our home has been our family home for nearly 50 years and it may well see one of children and his family live in it sometime in the future
Although I don't like Mogg at all, I do give him credit for being the only one who was honest about voter ID.
It was very helpful he said it out loud. Far too many on here swallowed the idea that this was about voter fraud.
Amazing when there was so little actual evidence of it.
Since when has evidence played any part in the decision making of Sunak and Braverman?
Yes, it was a classic example of a cure for which there was no known disease.
Actually there was a known disease, let's be honest.
The recommendation for voter ID came from the Electoral Commission itself in 2012 not from any Party and was in response to a spate of voter fraud cases and fear of more in the future.
However, the way it's been implemented, targeting in person voting and not postal, is utterly hamfisted.
It's been done in many places which are definitely democratic, so the idea it was inherently some moral outrage was overblown and distracted from the specifics being badly done and the glaring omissions.
I'd go so far as to say the focus on generic criticism as if requiring ID would always be an outrage helped the government present it as not a big deal and avoid some more significant points.
Not that no-one will have raised specifics, but by and large it was an example of poor tactics in holding them to account by going overbroad in criticism.
I’m trying to think of counties which don’t use ID for voting. Does anyone have a list?
Countries presumably!
Though most countries do have mandatory ID cards, something that we as a country irrationally oppose.
For the 12,556,445th time
Opposing the U.K. ID card was rational. This is because the problem with every proposal and the attempted implementation was the insane database nonsense that came with it.
The attempt to link everything to everything else, with terrible security would have made the NHS big IT projects look good. And provided one stop shopping for data thieves. And been utterly incompatible with GDPR….
I would suggest that an ID project could work. The high level requirements -
1) photo id card, credit card format 2) id code unique per person, with checksums etc 3) privacy secured method of verifying id - free to anyone. So anyone can verify an id shown to them. 4) anyone suggesting any Minority Report shit, get nail gunned. To the ceiling. With rusty nails.
Good thought. But how can this work in a culture in which process trumps things working properly and trust in civil competence is low. Perhaps this is an idea to implement once some state management basics work well, like answering the phone, replying to emails, being accessible to the general public, the NHS runs coordinated systems that heal people, and IT setups work well enough that you can buy a sausage roll in Greggs without system collapse.
So I should pencil in ID cards for the second Thursday after Never, then?
I must get started on my plans for reforming the country.
Yes. One interesting political problem with universal ID cards for everyone living in the UK is often overlooked. We have scant data on how many people are living in the UK without a right to do so. The general incompetence of the Home Office and civil admin generally suggests that the number will be substantial. Numbers like 1.2 million are around. I have no idea.
Firstly universal ID cards points out starkly this hidden fact. Secondly the government would have neither the will nor the resource nor the legal infrastructure to deal with it by mass deportation.
Prediction: RFK Jr will sink without a trace come November (1-2% of vote compared to average of around 12% in current 5-way polling). He's probably artificially high in the polls because people see 'Jr' and think he must be the candidate who is below retirement age.
I disagree, he is already as you say around 10% in some polls.
With Biden and Trump both net negative in the polls in approval ratings and Trump having criminal cases to come RFK Jr could get the highest 3rd party vote since Perot.
Appealing to Trumpites who won't vote for Trump if convicted in court and who like RFK Jr's vaccine mandate and lockdown opposition and to Democrats disillusioned with Biden's failure to do enough to oppose Israel in Gaza
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
My main memory of him was his threat to respond to Brexit by preventing aeroplanes from UK airspace from flying over Ireland - which struck me as a) wildly disproportionately bellicose, and b) weirdly blind to the amount of Irish air traffic which crosses the UK.
Although I don't like Mogg at all, I do give him credit for being the only one who was honest about voter ID.
It was very helpful he said it out loud. Far too many on here swallowed the idea that this was about voter fraud.
Amazing when there was so little actual evidence of it.
Since when has evidence played any part in the decision making of Sunak and Braverman?
Yes, it was a classic example of a cure for which there was no known disease.
Actually there was a known disease, let's be honest.
The recommendation for voter ID came from the Electoral Commission itself in 2012 not from any Party and was in response to a spate of voter fraud cases and fear of more in the future.
However, the way it's been implemented, targeting in person voting and not postal, is utterly hamfisted.
It's been done in many places which are definitely democratic, so the idea it was inherently some moral outrage was overblown and distracted from the specifics being badly done and the glaring omissions.
I'd go so far as to say the focus on generic criticism as if requiring ID would always be an outrage helped the government present it as not a big deal and avoid some more significant points.
Not that no-one will have raised specifics, but by and large it was an example of poor tactics in holding them to account by going overbroad in criticism.
I’m trying to think of counties which don’t use ID for voting. Does anyone have a list?
Countries presumably!
Though most countries do have mandatory ID cards, something that we as a country irrationally oppose.
For the 12,556,445th time
Opposing the U.K. ID card was rational. This is because the problem with every proposal and the attempted implementation was the insane database nonsense that came with it.
The attempt to link everything to everything else, with terrible security would have made the NHS big IT projects look good. And provided one stop shopping for data thieves. And been utterly incompatible with GDPR….
I would suggest that an ID project could work. The high level requirements -
1) photo id card, credit card format 2) id code unique per person, with checksums etc 3) privacy secured method of verifying id - free to anyone. So anyone can verify an id shown to them. 4) anyone suggesting any Minority Report shit, get nail gunned. To the ceiling. With rusty nails.
Good thought. But how can this work in a culture in which process trumps things working properly and trust in civil competence is low. Perhaps this is an idea to implement once some state management basics work well, like answering the phone, replying to emails, being accessible to the general public, the NHS runs coordinated systems that heal people, and IT setups work well enough that you can buy a sausage roll in Greggs without system collapse.
So I should pencil in ID cards for the second Thursday after Never, then?
I must get started on my plans for reforming the country.
Yes. One interesting political problem with universal ID cards for everyone living in the UK is often overlooked. We have scant data on how many people are living in the UK without a right to do so. The general incompetence of the Home Office and civil admin generally suggests that the number will be substantial. Numbers like 1.2 million are around. I have no idea.
Firstly universal ID cards points out starkly this hidden fact. Secondly the government would have neither the will nor the resource nor the legal infrastructure to deal with it by mass deportation.
The way to get round that is to throw the ID cards around - the passport database is already full of problem entries, for example. So just mail an ID card to everyone with a passport. No need to check....
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
My main memory of him was his threat to respond to Brexit by preventing aeroplanes from UK airspace from flying over Ireland - which struck me as a) wildly disproportionately bellicose, and b) weirdly blind to the amount of Irish air traffic which crosses the UK.
It is amazing how many flights from Dublin fly over our home here in North Wales to worldwide destinations
A lot of NIMBYism is really residents asking who will provide the necessary additional schools, doctors, dentists and, as in this case, railway stations.
Build the infrastructure first. Layout the roads and the plots. Sell blocks of plots to different developers. That way first to complete wins, not last.
No. Use the @BartholomewRoberts approach. Lay down some broad codes, let the farmers sell the land and get rich, then let the developers develop to those codes and they get rich.
I would combine this with a slight relaxation of some of the building codes.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
Sure is. Her speech last night was good. Lots of interesting ideas in there. A future PM IMO.
I am not sure I see ideas. Her critique of where we are is reasonably sound. She is extremely cautious about new spending commitments, and rightly so. She is right in saying additional public expenditure has to come from growth which generates the new taxes.
So we need more growth: how? We need new investment: from where and incentivised how? We need to keep borrowing under control: agreed. How do we achieve these desirable objectives? That is the bit that is missing for me. Given that she will be Chancellor in a few months I would like a clearer idea of what she plans to do.
The part towards the end where she talks about skills, labour security and the link with labour mobility is interesting. Not sure it was widely reported in the media.
(As an aside, the Sky coverage last night was bizarre: we had Beth Rigby and A.N. Other journalist telling viewers what Rachel was saying while she was speaking live. Thankful her speech was live on YouTube, so I switched over. The YouTube stream was a bit crappy but better than the Sky News dynamic duo)
What I saw was a list of new institutions which are supposed to come up with the ideas. Her employment changes seemed to be to remove the 1 year qualifying period for UD claims and additional rights for those on zero hour contracts. I certainly agree with the latter but the risk is that churn is increased even more to prevent the acquisition of those right.
She then got distracted into both green objectives and perceived discrimination against female entrepreneurs. No doubt both worthy in themselves but somewhat unlikely to be game changers on investment or productivity or growth. She also seemed to note but then rather reject the evidence of additional growth being generated by clusters on the basis that all parts of the country must share in this growth.
I don't have a problem with a more dynamic state looking to facilitate growth. I would like to see specific proposals about how this is to be achieved. The article by Hamish McRae downthread showed how reversing Brown's pension grab might help increase investment in UK business. The extent to which are own savings are not being directed to our own businesses is a disgrace and a punch to our own gut.
I have suggested that both capital investment and training investment should be further incentivised by the tax system with more than 100% write offs.
I don't see anything in her proposals that contains this sort of specific. She may be scared of Hunt pinching them again.
The real reason why everything Reeves (OK though she is) says is either boring or micro detail or hopey changey, is that Labour intend to run a country and society on precisely the same lines as we have now. There is no plan to either open up or shift along the Overton window or to think anything new. Gradualist change and greater competence are both the only options in reality, and electorally. This is probably right but of course staggeringly boring.
Even the non-lunatic rightist (leave Truss out of it) economics outfits don't really have a plan. Not once you have asked them how to cut state expenditure and taxes by, say, 5-10%.
Fine Gael are effectively the Tories sister party in Ireland so probably not from Sunak, also a centre right PM of Indian heritage
Actually FG are members of the EPP, which the Tories notoriously withdrew from. There is no party in Ireland as right wing as the current UK Tories, and FG certainly would reject the comparison, being more Christian Democrat than Conservative. That being said, there was more of a fellow feeling when Cameron was Tory leader, but before he withdrew from the EPP in 2009.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Im Irish, I dont hate the English. My kids are in the 1 in 6 Britons with Irish blood. Why should I hate them.
If the Poles can have civil relations with the Germans given what they have been through why should it be ok for the Irish to hate their neighbours ?
A lot of NIMBYism is really residents asking who will provide the necessary additional schools, doctors, dentists and, as in this case, railway stations.
Build the infrastructure first. Layout the roads and the plots. Sell blocks of plots to different developers. That way first to complete wins, not last.
No. Use the @BartholomewRoberts approach. Lay down some broad codes, let the farmers sell the land and get rich, then let the developers develop to those codes and they get rich.
Both can work. For the larger developments, have the council build the main roads and utilities out first, and start charging council tax immediately (at 5x the usual rate) until the developer completes the properties - but also allow much smaller developments down to a single dwelling to be built in large defined areas to very loose rules.
A lot of NIMBYism is really residents asking who will provide the necessary additional schools, doctors, dentists and, as in this case, railway stations.
Build the infrastructure first. Layout the roads and the plots. Sell blocks of plots to different developers. That way first to complete wins, not last.
No. Use the @BartholomewRoberts approach. Lay down some broad codes, let the farmers sell the land and get rich, then let the developers develop to those codes and they get rich.
Why the need to give a few farmers a massive unearned windfall ?
Give the LAs compulsory purchase powers in selected areas without having to pay planning gain. Councils then replace their housing stock (which was sold off at a discount) at a discount to market prices.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Fine Gael are effectively the Tories sister party in Ireland so probably not from Sunak, also a centre right PM of Indian heritage
Actually FG are members of the EPP, which the Tories notoriously withdrew from. There is no party in Ireland as right wing as the current UK Tories, and FG certainly would reject the comparison, being more Christian Democrat than Conservative. That being said, there was more of a fellow feeling when Cameron was Tory leader, but before he withdrew from the EPP in 2009.
Sinn Fein are fascist thats to the right of anyone else.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
"Based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times."
?
Really?
Are you talking about Northern Ireland, the bit that's part of the UK? I don't recall a long and bloody history of violence by the British in Ireland over the last 50 years. (Which I make it is back to 1974).
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
My main memory of him was his threat to respond to Brexit by preventing aeroplanes from UK airspace from flying over Ireland - which struck me as a) wildly disproportionately bellicose, and b) weirdly blind to the amount of Irish air traffic which crosses the UK.
Also completely forgetting that affluent, parasitic Ireland, which spends a ridiculous 0.3% of GDP on defence, relies entirely on the UK and the RAF - and UK taxpayers - to defend that Irish airspace
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
As ever republic apologists just ignore the grim details. Irish republicans have killed more Irish Catholics than anyone else. Though laundries run by nuns give them a run for their money.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
My main memory of him was his threat to respond to Brexit by preventing aeroplanes from UK airspace from flying over Ireland - which struck me as a) wildly disproportionately bellicose, and b) weirdly blind to the amount of Irish air traffic which crosses the UK.
Also completely forgetting that affluent, parasitic Ireland, which spends a ridiculous 0.3% of GDP on defence, relies entirely on the UK and the RAF - and UK taxpayers - to defend that Irish airspace
Is that really the case?!! I can't believe I've not heard this revelation before!
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
Using the logic of many people here when it comes to places like Iran or Palestine - the British people voted for successive governments that oppressed Ireland and the Irish people; if they didn't want the IRA bombing them they should have voted them out (they eventually did and the violence stopped).
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
The problem is, though, that that means that the quickest way to make people feel richer is for home prices to rise relative to incomes. That will make lots of older voters happy and rich, while screwing those who are younger.
Yes but an expensive house might make oldies feel rich but they can't spend it. (OK, a few will act on the equity release adverts.) The intergenerational trickle-down aspect is not very useful either, if you die in your 80s and leave money to your children who by now are in their 60s. High house prices are a blight on the economy.
Perhaps all this focus on new homes in general is wrong. There should be a laser focus on retirement apartments/high quality supported accommodation, and a cultural shift to moving out of your family home when you retire.
Would make the provision of social care much more efficient too. Two birds.
By a strange coincidence, I have just written the same thing on another chat, along with the suggestion that it could be worth considering a reduction in stamp duty for those making the move as a form of encouragement to do so.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
As an Englishman living in Ireland, I'm glad that most Irish people have a more enlightened approach.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
"Based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times."
?
Really?
Are you talking about Northern Ireland, the bit that's part of the UK? I don't recall a long and bloody history of violence by the British in Ireland over the last 50 years. (Which I make it is back to 1974).
Northern Ireland is a part of the island of Ireland and will, one day, be part of the Republic of Ireland (I have no doubt) - the Troubles were a continuation of the violence that started with the hundreds of years of violence and occupation imposed on the island of Ireland by the British state.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
Using the logic of many people here when it comes to places like Iran or Palestine - the British people voted for successive governments that oppressed Ireland and the Irish people; if they didn't want the IRA bombing them they should have voted them out (they eventually did and the violence stopped).
How do you explain the Irish Civil War ? Nobody died ?
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
My main memory of him was his threat to respond to Brexit by preventing aeroplanes from UK airspace from flying over Ireland - which struck me as a) wildly disproportionately bellicose, and b) weirdly blind to the amount of Irish air traffic which crosses the UK.
Also completely forgetting that affluent, parasitic Ireland, which spends a ridiculous 0.3% of GDP on defence, relies entirely on the UK and the RAF - and UK taxpayers - to defend that Irish airspace
Their defence spending should be about €11 Bn. That's enough for a defence system of their west coast.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
Using the logic of many people here when it comes to places like Iran or Palestine - the British people voted for successive governments that oppressed Ireland and the Irish people; if they didn't want the IRA bombing them they should have voted them out (they eventually did and the violence stopped).
When did the UK government oppress Ireland? Genuinely curious as to what you believe about this.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Im Irish, I dont hate the English. My kids are in the 1 in 6 Britons with Irish blood. Why should I hate them.
If the Poles can have civil relations with the Germans given what they have been through why should it be ok for the Irish to hate their neighbours ?
Knuckle dragger.
I'm not saying any Irish person has to hate the English or England, the British or the UK. I'm just saying if they do they get a free pass. And yeah, I would understand if say holocaust survivors in Poland or elsewhere still had an irrational hatred of Germany.
"Reeves went on to confirm that Labour would retain the government’s fiscal rule that debt should fall in the fifth year of the forecast."
This is from the NS comment on the Mais speech. A question for the experts (which I am not). This 'debt will fall in/by year 5' stuff, common to Tory and Labour. Is this a fixed target (ie starting in say April 2023 or whatever, and if so when did it start) or is this in fact a new dodge of a moving target, whereby every year the policy remains an aspiration for a further 5 years ahead, and so can never fail?
I have a strange feeling this is a new piece of conjuring. Am I right?
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
My main memory of him was his threat to respond to Brexit by preventing aeroplanes from UK airspace from flying over Ireland - which struck me as a) wildly disproportionately bellicose, and b) weirdly blind to the amount of Irish air traffic which crosses the UK.
Also completely forgetting that affluent, parasitic Ireland, which spends a ridiculous 0.3% of GDP on defence, relies entirely on the UK and the RAF - and UK taxpayers - to defend that Irish airspace
Their defence spending should be about €11 Bn. That's enough for a defence system of their west coast.
They aren't permanently frightened and paranoid and don't really feel the need for such socially ineffective government spending.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
My main memory of him was his threat to respond to Brexit by preventing aeroplanes from UK airspace from flying over Ireland - which struck me as a) wildly disproportionately bellicose, and b) weirdly blind to the amount of Irish air traffic which crosses the UK.
Also completely forgetting that affluent, parasitic Ireland, which spends a ridiculous 0.3% of GDP on defence, relies entirely on the UK and the RAF - and UK taxpayers - to defend that Irish airspace
Is that really the case?!! I can't believe I've not heard this revelation before!
Are you - a Scot Nat - actually criticising someone for repeating an argument, and returning to a talking point? Really???
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Im Irish, I dont hate the English. My kids are in the 1 in 6 Britons with Irish blood. Why should I hate them.
If the Poles can have civil relations with the Germans given what they have been through why should it be ok for the Irish to hate their neighbours ?
Knuckle dragger.
I'm not saying any Irish person has to hate the English or England, the British or the UK. I'm just saying if they do they get a free pass. And yeah, I would understand if say holocaust survivors in Poland or elsewhere still had an irrational hatred of Germany.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
"Based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times."
?
Really?
Are you talking about Northern Ireland, the bit that's part of the UK? I don't recall a long and bloody history of violence by the British in Ireland over the last 50 years. (Which I make it is back to 1974).
Northern Ireland is a part of the island of Ireland and will, one day, be part of the Republic of Ireland (I have no doubt) - the Troubles were a continuation of the violence that started with the hundreds of years of violence and occupation imposed on the island of Ireland by the British state.
NI is not likely to be joining the rest of Ireland any time soon - RoI don't want to pay the benefits bill.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
Vartwatkar.
Unfortunately, Sinn Fein will probably make him look like a picnic.
Something has gone wrong with the inevitable march of Sinn Fein towards government. I'm not sure what, but it becomes possible that it won't happen.
Mother-in-law has noticed that there's been a few more stories of people of a certain generation passing away, dredging up memories of the past Sinn Fein would prefer stayed buried.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Im Irish, I dont hate the English. My kids are in the 1 in 6 Britons with Irish blood. Why should I hate them.
If the Poles can have civil relations with the Germans given what they have been through why should it be ok for the Irish to hate their neighbours ?
Knuckle dragger.
I'm not saying any Irish person has to hate the English or England, the British or the UK. I'm just saying if they do they get a free pass. And yeah, I would understand if say holocaust survivors in Poland or elsewhere still had an irrational hatred of Germany.
Do I get a free pass to hate Germans for 1914-18 and 1939-45?
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Im Irish, I dont hate the English. My kids are in the 1 in 6 Britons with Irish blood. Why should I hate them.
If the Poles can have civil relations with the Germans given what they have been through why should it be ok for the Irish to hate their neighbours ?
Knuckle dragger.
I'm not saying any Irish person has to hate the English or England, the British or the UK. I'm just saying if they do they get a free pass. And yeah, I would understand if say holocaust survivors in Poland or elsewhere still had an irrational hatred of Germany.
Do I get a free pass to hate Germans for 1914-18 and 1939-45?
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
I heard the Harrods bomb while unloading my car in Islington. Four miles as the crow flies. An eerie dull thud, unlike any other.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
My main memory of him was his threat to respond to Brexit by preventing aeroplanes from UK airspace from flying over Ireland - which struck me as a) wildly disproportionately bellicose, and b) weirdly blind to the amount of Irish air traffic which crosses the UK.
Also completely forgetting that affluent, parasitic Ireland, which spends a ridiculous 0.3% of GDP on defence, relies entirely on the UK and the RAF - and UK taxpayers - to defend that Irish airspace
Their defence spending should be about €11 Bn. That's enough for a defence system of their west coast.
They aren't permanently frightened and paranoid and don't really feel the need for such socially ineffective government spending.
Nah we've just become parasites. We steal everyone's tax revenues, dont pay for our defence and run round sanctimoniously lecturing the world while contributing nothing .
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
The problem is, though, that that means that the quickest way to make people feel richer is for home prices to rise relative to incomes. That will make lots of older voters happy and rich, while screwing those who are younger.
Yes but an expensive house might make oldies feel rich but they can't spend it. (OK, a few will act on the equity release adverts.) The intergenerational trickle-down aspect is not very useful either, if you die in your 80s and leave money to your children who by now are in their 60s. High house prices are a blight on the economy.
Perhaps all this focus on new homes in general is wrong. There should be a laser focus on retirement apartments/high quality supported accommodation, and a cultural shift to moving out of your family home when you retire.
Would make the provision of social care much more efficient too. Two birds.
By a strange coincidence, I have just written the same thing on another chat, along with the suggestion that it could be worth considering a reduction in stamp duty for those making the move as a form of encouragement to do so.
I would eliminate stamp duty for those people trading down: it would encourage a large number of people to move to smaller properties.
As was suggested yesterday, the senior CS doing their own thing without reference to the ministers actually in charge. And as soon as Hunt found out the decision was quickly sent back down the line to be undone.
At this point it’s almost deliberate, with the permenant staff determined to undermine the elected representatives by generating negative headlines.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
As an Englishman living in Ireland, I'm glad that most Irish people have a more enlightened approach.
When I visited Dublin Castle last year I was amazed to find it seems scarcely changed from when the British were there - coats of arms, life-size portraits of British monarchs etc etc - you had to look pretty hard to find anything to remind you it wasn't a British royal palace - photos of Irish presidents are displayed in a small and quite dingy corridor. Says something about the Irish that they have left all this in place - most other ex-colonies would have got rid of it years ago.
It probably had virtually nothing to do with "demand" to do it online and everything to do with saving money and overhead.
No-one phones HMRC for fun.
That's not true - I once phoned an HMRC helpline when in a meeting at HMRC to demonstrate that their helpline was telling people very different information from what was the law.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
Using the logic of many people here when it comes to places like Iran or Palestine - the British people voted for successive governments that oppressed Ireland and the Irish people; if they didn't want the IRA bombing them they should have voted them out (they eventually did and the violence stopped).
When did the UK government oppress Ireland? Genuinely curious as to what you believe about this.
One example, the Great Hunger: During the occupation of Ireland, the British state changed the laws on landlording and essentially used multiple wars as an opportunity to steal land, giving it instead to landowners based in England. Landlording rules in Ireland were so bad that, essentially, there was no incentive for tenants (the Irish people who had lived on that land for multiple generations) to improve the lands they lived on because the British landlords would just up the rent or, indeed, kick those people off of the land. This attitude of landlordism became so bad that when the potato blight hit Europe, as it did hit the entirety of Europe, when it got to Ireland there was an especially negative impact. Potatoes were easy to grow without improving land, and they are highly nutritious so they could be a good crop to feed the family whilst paying your rent / taxes with other crops. So when the potato blight hit Ireland the main food crop was wiped out.
Did the British state reduce rents or taxes on the Irish? No - the island of Ireland in fact produced food that could have fed the inhabitants of the island but the British landlords and the British state instead demanded it and sent horse flour over for the Irish to eat. Did the British state give the island of Ireland aid? Not really - indeed, at one point Victoria was almost embarrassed by the Ottoman Sultan who offered to send ships and ships of food to Ireland when she herself had sent barely anything, and wrote to him saying that he didn't need to do such a thing when hundred of thousands were starving. The island of Ireland's population reduced by 2-3 million (which with a total population of around 8.5 million prior to the Great Hunger means a loss of between 25-40% of its population) through starvation or forced migration - a population that was reached again on the island in the early 2020s.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
"Based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times."
?
Really?
Are you talking about Northern Ireland, the bit that's part of the UK? I don't recall a long and bloody history of violence by the British in Ireland over the last 50 years. (Which I make it is back to 1974).
Northern Ireland is a part of the island of Ireland and will, one day, be part of the Republic of Ireland (I have no doubt) - the Troubles were a continuation of the violence that started with the hundreds of years of violence and occupation imposed on the island of Ireland by the British state.
There have been Protestant settlers in northern Ireland for longer than the USA has been a nation
It probably had virtually nothing to do with "demand" to do it online and everything to do with saving money and overhead.
No-one phones HMRC for fun.
That's not true - I once phoned an HMRC helpline when in a meeting at HMRC to demonstrate that their helpline was telling people very different information from what was the law.
That was fun....
Congratulations on getting through before the end of the meeting :-)
Speaking of archaic people with bizarre beliefs - hello @148grss - I believe that yesterday I mentioned I am in the land of the Kogi. These people. The descendants of the pre-Columbian Tayrano/Muisca people. They are tiny and wear white and paint their faces. Arguably the last intact pre-Columbian culture, the last microscopic remnant of the Aztec, Inca, Maya, Moche, Toltec, all of them
Traditionally, the Kogi - who don’t tell the time, count numbers, or have a written language - choose particular sons at birth and make them live in caves without natural light for the first nine years. This gives these so called “mamas” - “sun people” - incredible spiritual insight. They become revered priests
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
The problem is, though, that that means that the quickest way to make people feel richer is for home prices to rise relative to incomes. That will make lots of older voters happy and rich, while screwing those who are younger.
Yes but an expensive house might make oldies feel rich but they can't spend it. (OK, a few will act on the equity release adverts.) The intergenerational trickle-down aspect is not very useful either, if you die in your 80s and leave money to your children who by now are in their 60s. High house prices are a blight on the economy.
Perhaps all this focus on new homes in general is wrong. There should be a laser focus on retirement apartments/high quality supported accommodation, and a cultural shift to moving out of your family home when you retire.
Would make the provision of social care much more efficient too. Two birds.
By a strange coincidence, I have just written the same thing on another chat, along with the suggestion that it could be worth considering a reduction in stamp duty for those making the move as a form of encouragement to do so.
I would eliminate stamp duty for those people trading down: it would encourage a large number of people to move to smaller properties.
Whilst I don't disagree with the principle - what's the definition of 'trading down'? Size or Value? Essentially - do you want to encourage moving to smaller properties, or encourage moving to cheaper properties? (ie In which direction of the 2 bed flat in Camden vs 5 bed detached manor house in the country - both at the same value, do you want to encourage the movement).
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
One thing I've never quite understood on house prices. Imagine lenders were no longer allowed to lend more than, say 3x salary. What would happen to house prices? Would they remain high? Or would they fall following a catastrophic drop in the number of transactions? If the latter, is not access to higher-than-historic levels of debt a greater driver of house price than the supply-side?
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
Using the logic of many people here when it comes to places like Iran or Palestine - the British people voted for successive governments that oppressed Ireland and the Irish people; if they didn't want the IRA bombing them they should have voted them out (they eventually did and the violence stopped).
When did the UK government oppress Ireland? Genuinely curious as to what you believe about this.
One example, the Great Hunger: During the occupation of Ireland, the British state changed the laws on landlording and essentially used multiple wars as an opportunity to steal land, giving it instead to landowners based in England. Landlording rules in Ireland were so bad that, essentially, there was no incentive for tenants (the Irish people who had lived on that land for multiple generations) to improve the lands they lived on because the British landlords would just up the rent or, indeed, kick those people off of the land. This attitude of landlordism became so bad that when the potato blight hit Europe, as it did hit the entirety of Europe, when it got to Ireland there was an especially negative impact. Potatoes were easy to grow without improving land, and they are highly nutritious so they could be a good crop to feed the family whilst paying your rent / taxes with other crops. So when the potato blight hit Ireland the main food crop was wiped out.
Did the British state reduce rents or taxes on the Irish? No - the island of Ireland in fact produced food that could have fed the inhabitants of the island but the British landlords and the British state instead demanded it and sent horse flour over for the Irish to eat. Did the British state give the island of Ireland aid? Not really - indeed, at one point Victoria was almost embarrassed by the Ottoman Sultan who offered to send ships and ships of food to Ireland when she herself had sent barely anything, and wrote to him saying that he didn't need to do such a thing when hundred of thousands were starving. The island of Ireland's population reduced by 2-3 million (which with a total population of around 8.5 million prior to the Great Hunger means a loss of between 25-40% of its population) through starvation or forced migration - a population that was reached again on the island in the early 2020s.
So we are back to the Victorian era? Thought so. You were talking about the last 50 years and 'living memory'.
A lot of nations did a lot of bad things. Does that give us all a grievance list to take around the world with us? Or should we not all grow up a bit?
Fine Gael are effectively the Tories sister party in Ireland so probably not from Sunak, also a centre right PM of Indian heritage
Actually FG are members of the EPP, which the Tories notoriously withdrew from. There is no party in Ireland as right wing as the current UK Tories, and FG certainly would reject the comparison, being more Christian Democrat than Conservative. That being said, there was more of a fellow feeling when Cameron was Tory leader, but before he withdrew from the EPP in 2009.
So? The EPP is still a centre right block which both FG are in and the Tories were in.
FF are if anything more socially conservative than the Tories but economically centrist, FG just as economically right of centre as the Tories albeit more Cameroon given their support for staying in the EU. Aontu also takes a harder line on abortion than the Tories
Prediction: RFK Jr will sink without a trace come November (1-2% of vote compared to average of around 12% in current 5-way polling). He's probably artificially high in the polls because people see 'Jr' and think he must be the candidate who is below retirement age.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
Using the logic of many people here when it comes to places like Iran or Palestine - the British people voted for successive governments that oppressed Ireland and the Irish people; if they didn't want the IRA bombing them they should have voted them out (they eventually did and the violence stopped).
When did the UK government oppress Ireland? Genuinely curious as to what you believe about this.
One example, the Great Hunger: During the occupation of Ireland, the British state changed the laws on landlording and essentially used multiple wars as an opportunity to steal land, giving it instead to landowners based in England. Landlording rules in Ireland were so bad that, essentially, there was no incentive for tenants (the Irish people who had lived on that land for multiple generations) to improve the lands they lived on because the British landlords would just up the rent or, indeed, kick those people off of the land. This attitude of landlordism became so bad that when the potato blight hit Europe, as it did hit the entirety of Europe, when it got to Ireland there was an especially negative impact. Potatoes were easy to grow without improving land, and they are highly nutritious so they could be a good crop to feed the family whilst paying your rent / taxes with other crops. So when the potato blight hit Ireland the main food crop was wiped out.
Did the British state reduce rents or taxes on the Irish? No - the island of Ireland in fact produced food that could have fed the inhabitants of the island but the British landlords and the British state instead demanded it and sent horse flour over for the Irish to eat. Did the British state give the island of Ireland aid? Not really - indeed, at one point Victoria was almost embarrassed by the Ottoman Sultan who offered to send ships and ships of food to Ireland when she herself had sent barely anything, and wrote to him saying that he didn't need to do such a thing when hundred of thousands were starving. The island of Ireland's population reduced by 2-3 million (which with a total population of around 8.5 million prior to the Great Hunger means a loss of between 25-40% of its population) through starvation or forced migration - a population that was reached again on the island in the early 2020s.
Actually when the famine hit, the Tories were in government and introduced relief efforts . When they were replaced by the Liberals, the Liberals removed all relief efforts and created the descent into hell.
Lord Trevelyan was the chap who did it and his ancestor form the BBC went all BLM slavery but could be arsed to face up her family' role in Ireland.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
Vartwatkar.
Unfortunately, Sinn Fein will probably make him look like a picnic.
To be fair to SF, Deputy Leader Michelle O'Neil attended King Charles' coronation, which would have been unthinkable for a senior SF figure decades ago. O'Neil is already FM in Northern Ireland of course while SF are still out of power in the Republic ironically
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
Using the logic of many people here when it comes to places like Iran or Palestine - the British people voted for successive governments that oppressed Ireland and the Irish people; if they didn't want the IRA bombing them they should have voted them out (they eventually did and the violence stopped).
When did the UK government oppress Ireland? Genuinely curious as to what you believe about this.
One example, the Great Hunger: During the occupation of Ireland, the British state changed the laws on landlording and essentially used multiple wars as an opportunity to steal land, giving it instead to landowners based in England. Landlording rules in Ireland were so bad that, essentially, there was no incentive for tenants (the Irish people who had lived on that land for multiple generations) to improve the lands they lived on because the British landlords would just up the rent or, indeed, kick those people off of the land. This attitude of landlordism became so bad that when the potato blight hit Europe, as it did hit the entirety of Europe, when it got to Ireland there was an especially negative impact. Potatoes were easy to grow without improving land, and they are highly nutritious so they could be a good crop to feed the family whilst paying your rent / taxes with other crops. So when the potato blight hit Ireland the main food crop was wiped out.
Did the British state reduce rents or taxes on the Irish? No - the island of Ireland in fact produced food that could have fed the inhabitants of the island but the British landlords and the British state instead demanded it and sent horse flour over for the Irish to eat. Did the British state give the island of Ireland aid? Not really - indeed, at one point Victoria was almost embarrassed by the Ottoman Sultan who offered to send ships and ships of food to Ireland when she herself had sent barely anything, and wrote to him saying that he didn't need to do such a thing when hundred of thousands were starving. The island of Ireland's population reduced by 2-3 million (which with a total population of around 8.5 million prior to the Great Hunger means a loss of between 25-40% of its population) through starvation or forced migration - a population that was reached again on the island in the early 2020s.
So we are back to the Victorian era? Thought so. You were talking about the last 50 years and 'living memory'.
A lot of nations did a lot of bad things. Does that give us all a grievance list to take around the world with us? Or should we not all grow up a bit?
I mean, you did say "when did the UK government oppress the Irish" not "in the last 50 years". For that I would point at the entirety of the Troubles. We can play semantics on whether NI is part of Ireland, but the people that were killed by Operation Banner wanted to be Irish and saw themselves as Irish and were killed as part of the continued occupation of land on the island of Ireland.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
One thing I've never quite understood on house prices. Imagine lenders were no longer allowed to lend more than, say 3x salary. What would happen to house prices? Would they remain high? Or would they fall following a catastrophic drop in the number of transactions? If the latter, is not access to higher-than-historic levels of debt a greater driver of house price than the supply-side?
Yes, it's a tidal wave of money created by central banks and governments to solve short-term problems. The more they print the higher the price of fixed assets such as land and houses.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
"Based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times."
?
Really?
Are you talking about Northern Ireland, the bit that's part of the UK? I don't recall a long and bloody history of violence by the British in Ireland over the last 50 years. (Which I make it is back to 1974).
Northern Ireland is a part of the island of Ireland and will, one day, be part of the Republic of Ireland (I have no doubt) - the Troubles were a continuation of the violence that started with the hundreds of years of violence and occupation imposed on the island of Ireland by the British state.
There have been Protestant settlers in northern Ireland for longer than the USA has been a nation
We dont think of ourselves as settlers, were natives.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
One thing I've never quite understood on house prices. Imagine lenders were no longer allowed to lend more than, say 3x salary. What would happen to house prices? Would they remain high? Or would they fall following a catastrophic drop in the number of transactions? If the latter, is not access to higher-than-historic levels of debt a greater driver of house price than the supply-side?
They'd fall wouldn't they.
Any of
1) Reducing max mortgage age (& possibly banning interest only) 2) Increasing supply over population LOL 3) Upping mortgage rates 4) Reducing max multiples 5) Reducing max LTV 6) Deflation
Causes a drop.
With the exception of 3) recently (Which has tempered rises a bit I think) the general trend has been for all the above to go the other way. Result, prices go up.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
My main memory of him was his threat to respond to Brexit by preventing aeroplanes from UK airspace from flying over Ireland - which struck me as a) wildly disproportionately bellicose, and b) weirdly blind to the amount of Irish air traffic which crosses the UK.
Also completely forgetting that affluent, parasitic Ireland, which spends a ridiculous 0.3% of GDP on defence, relies entirely on the UK and the RAF - and UK taxpayers - to defend that Irish airspace
Their defence spending should be about €11 Bn. That's enough for a defence system of their west coast.
They aren't permanently frightened and paranoid and don't really feel the need for such socially ineffective government spending.
You should try that line on the locals when you visit Kharkiv in the summer
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
As an Englishman living in Ireland, I'm glad that most Irish people have a more enlightened approach.
Yes, very few Irish people hate the English. Most have got family ties to the UK. On the other hand there are anti-Irish bigots like @Leon on here who are clueless about modern Ireland and how, as an independent country, its interests differ from the UK's.
Prediction: RFK Jr will sink without a trace come November (1-2% of vote compared to average of around 12% in current 5-way polling). He's probably artificially high in the polls because people see 'Jr' and think he must be the candidate who is below retirement age.
He is. Unfortunately he is also an idiot.
Probably crossed wires, but RFK Jr is 70.
A spring chicken compared to Biden and Trump then.
If RFK Jr gets a big vote might also help his nephew Joe Kennedy III, a former Congressman and currently Biden's special envoy to NI, be a contender for the presidency in 2028.
Indeed if Biden is re elected Joe Kennedy III would be a contender to replace Blinken as Biden's Secretary of State
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
My father was listed injured, cuts and bruises, by an IRA incendiary device in Manchester in, iirc, 1975. Having decided he didn't want to cart potatoes round the post office he also needed to visit, he turned back from the food hall veg aisle where the device went off, seriously injuring another man, and that decision almost certainly saved him from worse injury.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Im Irish, I dont hate the English. My kids are in the 1 in 6 Britons with Irish blood. Why should I hate them.
If the Poles can have civil relations with the Germans given what they have been through why should it be ok for the Irish to hate their neighbours ?
Knuckle dragger.
I'm not saying any Irish person has to hate the English or England, the British or the UK. I'm just saying if they do they get a free pass. And yeah, I would understand if say holocaust survivors in Poland or elsewhere still had an irrational hatred of Germany.
Do I get a free pass to hate Germans for 1914-18 and 1939-45?
I mean all of the elites of Europe were responsible for the first World War, and the second World War was (in many ways) the outcome of the European failure to make a stable settlement after the first. But there is also a whole world of difference between periods of war and centuries of occupation. The lesson I learn from WW1 and WW2 is to hate the aristocracy and don't trust the right - take whatever lessons you want from it yourself.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
One thing I've never quite understood on house prices. Imagine lenders were no longer allowed to lend more than, say 3x salary. What would happen to house prices? Would they remain high? Or would they fall following a catastrophic drop in the number of transactions? If the latter, is not access to higher-than-historic levels of debt a greater driver of house price than the supply-side?
Yes demand for housing is, in most developed countries, closed matched to availability of financing. At least outside London and other major cities that feature large numbers of cash buyers.
If there was a regulation that said it’s only possible to borrow 3x your salary, then prices in a lot of the more expensive areas outside Zone 1 would fall due to a lack of demand.
The more likely regulation would be a minimum deposit % level, which would dampen some of the demand but in a way that would be seen as regressive.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
As an Englishman living in Ireland, I'm glad that most Irish people have a more enlightened approach.
Yes, very few Irish people hate the English. Most have got family ties to the UK. On the other hand there are anti-Irish bigots like @Leon on here who are clueless about modern Ireland and how, as an independent country, its interests differ from the UK's.
I'm an Englishman with an Irish grandmother. Again - I'm not saying that the Irish should or need to hate England, Britain, or the British. It just makes sense to me if they did.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
Using the logic of many people here when it comes to places like Iran or Palestine - the British people voted for successive governments that oppressed Ireland and the Irish people; if they didn't want the IRA bombing them they should have voted them out (they eventually did and the violence stopped).
When did the UK government oppress Ireland? Genuinely curious as to what you believe about this.
One example, the Great Hunger: During the occupation of Ireland, the British state changed the laws on landlording and essentially used multiple wars as an opportunity to steal land, giving it instead to landowners based in England. Landlording rules in Ireland were so bad that, essentially, there was no incentive for tenants (the Irish people who had lived on that land for multiple generations) to improve the lands they lived on because the British landlords would just up the rent or, indeed, kick those people off of the land. This attitude of landlordism became so bad that when the potato blight hit Europe, as it did hit the entirety of Europe, when it got to Ireland there was an especially negative impact. Potatoes were easy to grow without improving land, and they are highly nutritious so they could be a good crop to feed the family whilst paying your rent / taxes with other crops. So when the potato blight hit Ireland the main food crop was wiped out.
Did the British state reduce rents or taxes on the Irish? No - the island of Ireland in fact produced food that could have fed the inhabitants of the island but the British landlords and the British state instead demanded it and sent horse flour over for the Irish to eat. Did the British state give the island of Ireland aid? Not really - indeed, at one point Victoria was almost embarrassed by the Ottoman Sultan who offered to send ships and ships of food to Ireland when she herself had sent barely anything, and wrote to him saying that he didn't need to do such a thing when hundred of thousands were starving. The island of Ireland's population reduced by 2-3 million (which with a total population of around 8.5 million prior to the Great Hunger means a loss of between 25-40% of its population) through starvation or forced migration - a population that was reached again on the island in the early 2020s.
So we are back to the Victorian era? Thought so. You were talking about the last 50 years and 'living memory'.
A lot of nations did a lot of bad things. Does that give us all a grievance list to take around the world with us? Or should we not all grow up a bit?
I mean, you did say "when did the UK government oppress the Irish" not "in the last 50 years". For that I would point at the entirety of the Troubles. We can play semantics on whether NI is part of Ireland, but the people that were killed by Operation Banner wanted to be Irish and saw themselves as Irish and were killed as part of the continued occupation of land on the island of Ireland.
Its not an occupation. The majority of those in NI want to be part of the UK. That may change, but to call it occupation is ridiculous.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
As an Englishman living in Ireland, I'm glad that most Irish people have a more enlightened approach.
Yes, very few Irish people hate the English. Most have got family ties to the UK. On the other hand there are anti-Irish bigots like @Leon on here who are clueless about modern Ireland and how, as an independent country, its interests differ from the UK's.
I'm an Englishman with an Irish grandmother. Again - I'm not saying that the Irish should or need to hate England, Britain, or the British. It just makes sense to me if they did.
Ive met people who can talk out their arse, this is the first time Ive come across someone who can type out theirs too.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
As an Englishman living in Ireland, I'm glad that most Irish people have a more enlightened approach.
Yes, very few Irish people hate the English. Most have got family ties to the UK. On the other hand there are anti-Irish bigots like @Leon on here who are clueless about modern Ireland and how, as an independent country, its interests differ from the UK's.
I don’t dislike the Irish PEOPLE. Lovely folk - been there many times - I’ve been all over Ireland - I’ve actually heard Irish Gaelic spoken on Innishmore
The Irish political/journalistic elite? - yeah, I despise them. Still virulently Anglophobic (when it suits), rampant hypocrites (defence spending, corp tax) and morally smug and Wokeishly self-satisfied about how much better the Irish are compared to the racist English (a carefully curated self image now falling apart as the Irish kick back against mass immigration)
No doubt as a result of PB pointing out, at the start of this very thread, that the closure would hurt Conservative supporters. We can check this in the memoirs.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
Vartwatkar.
Unfortunately, Sinn Fein will probably make him look like a picnic.
To be fair to SF, Deputy Leader Michelle O'Neil attended King Charles' coronation, which would have been unthinkable for a senior SF figure decades ago. O'Neil is already FM in Northern Ireland of course while SF are still out of power in the Republic ironically
SF's aim now is to show it can operate an effective government both north and south of the border. They think - probably correctly - that if they can do this the chances of Irish unification - which is still their ultimate aim - will be increased, Their relationship with the UK will be guided by this, not knee-jerk Anglophobia.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
As an Englishman living in Ireland, I'm glad that most Irish people have a more enlightened approach.
Yes, very few Irish people hate the English. Most have got family ties to the UK. On the other hand there are anti-Irish bigots like @Leon on here who are clueless about modern Ireland and how, as an independent country, its interests differ from the UK's.
Actually quite a lot do. It's where Sinn Feins vote comes from.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
Using the logic of many people here when it comes to places like Iran or Palestine - the British people voted for successive governments that oppressed Ireland and the Irish people; if they didn't want the IRA bombing them they should have voted them out (they eventually did and the violence stopped).
When did the UK government oppress Ireland? Genuinely curious as to what you believe about this.
One example, the Great Hunger: During the occupation of Ireland, the British state changed the laws on landlording and essentially used multiple wars as an opportunity to steal land, giving it instead to landowners based in England. Landlording rules in Ireland were so bad that, essentially, there was no incentive for tenants (the Irish people who had lived on that land for multiple generations) to improve the lands they lived on because the British landlords would just up the rent or, indeed, kick those people off of the land. This attitude of landlordism became so bad that when the potato blight hit Europe, as it did hit the entirety of Europe, when it got to Ireland there was an especially negative impact. Potatoes were easy to grow without improving land, and they are highly nutritious so they could be a good crop to feed the family whilst paying your rent / taxes with other crops. So when the potato blight hit Ireland the main food crop was wiped out.
Did the British state reduce rents or taxes on the Irish? No - the island of Ireland in fact produced food that could have fed the inhabitants of the island but the British landlords and the British state instead demanded it and sent horse flour over for the Irish to eat. Did the British state give the island of Ireland aid? Not really - indeed, at one point Victoria was almost embarrassed by the Ottoman Sultan who offered to send ships and ships of food to Ireland when she herself had sent barely anything, and wrote to him saying that he didn't need to do such a thing when hundred of thousands were starving. The island of Ireland's population reduced by 2-3 million (which with a total population of around 8.5 million prior to the Great Hunger means a loss of between 25-40% of its population) through starvation or forced migration - a population that was reached again on the island in the early 2020s.
So we are back to the Victorian era? Thought so. You were talking about the last 50 years and 'living memory'.
A lot of nations did a lot of bad things. Does that give us all a grievance list to take around the world with us? Or should we not all grow up a bit?
The population of the island of Ireland has literally only just recovered from the Great Hunger. Add to the list the maintained ignorance of many British people to the reasons why it would be more then legitimate for any Irish people to hate them...
@MarqueeMark it wouldn't surprise me if Totnes became a three-way marginal
Strictly speaking there isn’t going to be a Totnes constituency any more. It is being subsumed by South Devon. But Electoral Calculus agrees with you: 37% Cons, 32% Lab, 31% LibDem.
I’m in the neighbouring Newton Abbot constituency and under the boundary changes it is a lot more marginal. A quite plausible Lab GAIN. I’d be delighted to see Anne Morris get the boot.
Clearly a seat that needs a steer on tactical voting.
I don’t think the outcome of the general election is going to be determined by tactical voting. Tories lose, Labour win. More or less tactical voting may effect the majority, but polling doesn’t suggest that tactics voting is critical.
Talking of our enduring love for Ireland and all things Irish, this is the sort of thing that hacks me off:
"The Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Leo Varadkar will step down before the next general election in the Republic of Ireland." (BBC)
In English it should read:
The Irish prime minister (Taoiseach) Leo Varadkar will step down before the next general election in the Republic of Ireland.
Time for the Irish prime minister to take his rightful place among nations, along with the French president and the German chancellor.
That's not true. The name of the position of Taoiseach is Taoiseach in English, as well as in Irish.
Edit: It's not unusual due English to take words from other languages, so I don't know why some people have such a problem with this.
It's different to Germany or France because they haven't had their native language replaced by English and so they don't much care how English people translate things
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Im Irish, I dont hate the English. My kids are in the 1 in 6 Britons with Irish blood. Why should I hate them.
If the Poles can have civil relations with the Germans given what they have been through why should it be ok for the Irish to hate their neighbours ?
Knuckle dragger.
I'm not saying any Irish person has to hate the English or England, the British or the UK. I'm just saying if they do they get a free pass. And yeah, I would understand if say holocaust survivors in Poland or elsewhere still had an irrational hatred of Germany.
Do I get a free pass to hate Germans for 1914-18 and 1939-45?
I mean all of the elites of Europe were responsible for the first World War, and the second World War was (in many ways) the outcome of the European failure to make a stable settlement after the first. But there is also a whole world of difference between periods of war and centuries of occupation. The lesson I learn from WW1 and WW2 is to hate the aristocracy and don't trust the right - take whatever lessons you want from it yourself.
So you think the Irish should hate the British for what the elites of the UK did, but that doesn't apply elsewhere?
Double standards, working from a set position of this country = bad.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
Using the logic of many people here when it comes to places like Iran or Palestine - the British people voted for successive governments that oppressed Ireland and the Irish people; if they didn't want the IRA bombing them they should have voted them out (they eventually did and the violence stopped).
When did the UK government oppress Ireland? Genuinely curious as to what you believe about this.
One example, the Great Hunger: During the occupation of Ireland, the British state changed the laws on landlording and essentially used multiple wars as an opportunity to steal land, giving it instead to landowners based in England. Landlording rules in Ireland were so bad that, essentially, there was no incentive for tenants (the Irish people who had lived on that land for multiple generations) to improve the lands they lived on because the British landlords would just up the rent or, indeed, kick those people off of the land. This attitude of landlordism became so bad that when the potato blight hit Europe, as it did hit the entirety of Europe, when it got to Ireland there was an especially negative impact. Potatoes were easy to grow without improving land, and they are highly nutritious so they could be a good crop to feed the family whilst paying your rent / taxes with other crops. So when the potato blight hit Ireland the main food crop was wiped out.
Did the British state reduce rents or taxes on the Irish? No - the island of Ireland in fact produced food that could have fed the inhabitants of the island but the British landlords and the British state instead demanded it and sent horse flour over for the Irish to eat. Did the British state give the island of Ireland aid? Not really - indeed, at one point Victoria was almost embarrassed by the Ottoman Sultan who offered to send ships and ships of food to Ireland when she herself had sent barely anything, and wrote to him saying that he didn't need to do such a thing when hundred of thousands were starving. The island of Ireland's population reduced by 2-3 million (which with a total population of around 8.5 million prior to the Great Hunger means a loss of between 25-40% of its population) through starvation or forced migration - a population that was reached again on the island in the early 2020s.
So we are back to the Victorian era? Thought so. You were talking about the last 50 years and 'living memory'.
A lot of nations did a lot of bad things. Does that give us all a grievance list to take around the world with us? Or should we not all grow up a bit?
The population of the island of Ireland has literally only just recovered from the Great Hunger. Add to the list the maintained ignorance of many British people to the reasons why it would be more then legitimate for any Irish people to hate them...
Oh good, calling me ignorant now. Good stuff. You have a very skewed view of history my friend.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
Vartwatkar.
Unfortunately, Sinn Fein will probably make him look like a picnic.
To be fair to SF, Deputy Leader Michelle O'Neil attended King Charles' coronation, which would have been unthinkable for a senior SF figure decades ago. O'Neil is already FM in Northern Ireland of course while SF are still out of power in the Republic ironically
SF's aim now is to show it can operate an effective government both north and south of the border. They think - probably correctly - that if they can do this the chances of Irish unification - which is still their ultimate aim - will be increased, Their relationship with the UK will be guided by this, not knee-jerk Anglophobia.
LOL as if. SF have to keep their knuckledraggers happy. Anglophilia is not on the cards.
@MarqueeMark it wouldn't surprise me if Totnes became a three-way marginal
Strictly speaking there isn’t going to be a Totnes constituency any more. It is being subsumed by South Devon. But Electoral Calculus agrees with you: 37% Cons, 32% Lab, 31% LibDem.
I’m in the neighbouring Newton Abbot constituency and under the boundary changes it is a lot more marginal. A quite plausible Lab GAIN. I’d be delighted to see Anne Morris get the boot.
Clearly a seat that needs a steer on tactical voting.
I don’t think the outcome of the general election is going to be determined by tactical voting. Tories lose, Labour win. More or less tactical voting may effect the majority, but polling doesn’t suggest that tactics voting is critical.
I suspect the level of tactical voting determines whether the Tories get 50 seats or 150 seats - now at both points it has zero impact on the actual result but long term implications for the future of the Tory party...
Fine Gael are effectively the Tories sister party in Ireland so probably not from Sunak, also a centre right PM of Indian heritage
Actually FG are members of the EPP, which the Tories notoriously withdrew from. There is no party in Ireland as right wing as the current UK Tories, and FG certainly would reject the comparison, being more Christian Democrat than Conservative. That being said, there was more of a fellow feeling when Cameron was Tory leader, but before he withdrew from the EPP in 2009.
FF are in the "Liberal" group Renew. I will wind up my fellow Lib Dems by suggesting we should be cheering for them in the European elections.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
As an Englishman living in Ireland, I'm glad that most Irish people have a more enlightened approach.
Yes, very few Irish people hate the English. Most have got family ties to the UK. On the other hand there are anti-Irish bigots like @Leon on here who are clueless about modern Ireland and how, as an independent country, its interests differ from the UK's.
Some of the stuff Leon says about Irish defence spending and corporate taxation is written about - using slightly less bigoted language - by Irish columnists in Irish newspapers.
Starmer is unfair when he accuses Sunak of not believing in Rwanda. Sunak does believe in Rwanda, which is a problem because if you believe in that you will believe anything.
The better question is not if the English and Irish have some historical justifications for hating each other, rather what possible benefit is there for doing so? Those without the hateful mindset will have much better lives.
Here, in a jungly guest house on the Caribbean coast in Palomino, Colombia, there is modest rejoicing
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
If any people have a right to hate the UK / Britain / England - it's the Irish. I can't even be bothered to go into the conversation as to whether or not Varadkar is Anglophobic or not; I am willing to defend the proposition that Irish people are allowed to hold nothing but disdain for the UK Government, the monarchy, and even its peoples, based on the long and bloody history of violence enacted on the Irish and the island of Ireland throughout the last half century going up to disgusting crimes committed within many of our life times.
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
Barely a generation ago the Irish were slaughtering British civilians on the streets of London. I know this because I actually SAW one bomb go off
Otherwise, good point
As ever republic apologists just ignore the grim details. Irish republicans have killed more Irish Catholics than anyone else. Though laundries run by nuns give them a run for their money.
The potato famine killed maybe a million. That beats your examples.
Comments
Re: Hunt pinching them. Absolutely. She will say very little in terms of detail until the manifesto is published. And rightly so. As the nondoms stuff demonstrated, the opposition would be mad to release detailed policies this far from an election.
Indeed, in our case our home has been our family home for nearly 50 years and it may well see one of children and his family live in it sometime in the future
Varadkar is an odious, Anglophobic Woke twat
Firstly universal ID cards points out starkly this hidden fact. Secondly the government would have neither the will nor the resource nor the legal infrastructure to deal with it by mass deportation.
With Biden and Trump both net negative in the polls in approval ratings and Trump having criminal cases to come RFK Jr could get the highest 3rd party vote since Perot.
Appealing to Trumpites who won't vote for Trump if convicted in court and who like RFK Jr's vaccine mandate and lockdown opposition and to Democrats disillusioned with Biden's failure to do enough to oppose Israel in Gaza
The colonial wars, the genocide, the occupations, the use of sectarian divisions, the war crimes etc. etc. And like it's hard to even be like "pffft, the past is in the past" when that only really stopped in the 90s. Barely a generation ago.
https://www.politico.eu/article/albania-pm-hits-back-after-being-accused-of-intimidating-female-journalist/
Did he "answer all questions patiently" ?
Judge for yourself:
https://twitter.com/xhemajl_rexha/status/1770037270604550414
Even the non-lunatic rightist (leave Truss out of it) economics outfits don't really have a plan. Not once you have asked them how to cut state expenditure and taxes by, say, 5-10%.
Unfortunately, Sinn Fein will probably make him look like a picnic.
If the Poles can have civil relations with the Germans given what they have been through why should it be ok for the Irish to hate their neighbours ?
Knuckle dragger.
Give the LAs compulsory purchase powers in selected areas without having to pay planning gain. Councils then replace their housing stock (which was sold off at a discount) at a discount to market prices.
Otherwise, good point
?
Really?
Are you talking about Northern Ireland, the bit that's part of the UK? I don't recall a long and bloody history of violence by the British in Ireland over the last 50 years. (Which I make it is back to 1974).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68616330
Strong and stable.
This is from the NS comment on the Mais speech. A question for the experts (which I am not). This 'debt will fall in/by year 5' stuff, common to Tory and Labour. Is this a fixed target (ie starting in say April 2023 or whatever, and if so when did it start) or is this in fact a new dodge of a moving target, whereby every year the policy remains an aspiration for a further 5 years ahead, and so can never fail?
I have a strange feeling this is a new piece of conjuring. Am I right?
No-one phones HMRC for fun.
Mother-in-law has noticed that there's been a few more stories of people of a certain generation passing away, dredging up memories of the past Sinn Fein would prefer stayed buried.
I regret thats what we've become.
At this point it’s almost deliberate, with the permenant staff determined to undermine the elected representatives by generating negative headlines.
We saw the same in 1996 and 1997.
That was fun....
Did the British state reduce rents or taxes on the Irish? No - the island of Ireland in fact produced food that could have fed the inhabitants of the island but the British landlords and the British state instead demanded it and sent horse flour over for the Irish to eat. Did the British state give the island of Ireland aid? Not really - indeed, at one point Victoria was almost embarrassed by the Ottoman Sultan who offered to send ships and ships of food to Ireland when she herself had sent barely anything, and wrote to him saying that he didn't need to do such a thing when hundred of thousands were starving. The island of Ireland's population reduced by 2-3 million (which with a total population of around 8.5 million prior to the Great Hunger means a loss of between 25-40% of its population) through starvation or forced migration - a population that was reached again on the island in the early 2020s.
"The Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Leo Varadkar will step down before the next general election in the Republic of Ireland." (BBC)
In English it should read:
The Irish prime minister (Taoiseach) Leo Varadkar will step down before the next general election in the Republic of Ireland.
Time for the Irish prime minister to take his rightful place among nations, along with the French president and the German chancellor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kogi_people
Traditionally, the Kogi - who don’t tell the time, count numbers, or have a written language - choose particular sons at birth and make them live in caves without natural light for the first nine years. This gives these so called “mamas” - “sun people” - incredible spiritual insight. They become revered priests
Thank god they don’t do that anymore, eh?
BUT WAIT: THEY DO
It seems the tradition is largely maintained
https://www.taironatrust.org/the-kogi/the-people.html
I am now obsessed - unlike me, I know - and determined to meet a Kogi. Maybe even one of the Mamas
What might they be like??? What an amazing place. Love it
A lot of nations did a lot of bad things. Does that give us all a grievance list to take around the world with us? Or should we not all grow up a bit?
FF are if anything more socially conservative than the Tories but economically centrist, FG just as economically right of centre as the Tories albeit more Cameroon given their support for staying in the EU. Aontu also takes a harder line on abortion than the Tories
Lord Trevelyan was the chap who did it and his ancestor form the BBC went all BLM slavery but could be arsed to face up her family' role in Ireland.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-64527709
Any of
1) Reducing max mortgage age (& possibly banning interest only)
2) Increasing supply over population LOL
3) Upping mortgage rates
4) Reducing max multiples
5) Reducing max LTV
6) Deflation
Causes a drop.
With the exception of 3) recently (Which has tempered rises a bit I think) the general trend has been for all the above to go the other way. Result, prices go up.
If RFK Jr gets a big vote might also help his nephew Joe Kennedy III, a former Congressman and currently Biden's special envoy to NI, be a contender for the presidency in 2028.
Indeed if Biden is re elected Joe Kennedy III would be a contender to replace Blinken as Biden's Secretary of State
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1975/jan/28/bomb-incidents
If there was a regulation that said it’s only possible to borrow 3x your salary, then prices in a lot of the more expensive areas outside Zone 1 would fall due to a lack of demand.
The more likely regulation would be a minimum deposit % level, which would dampen some of the demand but in a way that would be seen as regressive.
Edit: It's not unusual due English to take words from other languages, so I don't know why some people have such a problem with this.
The Irish political/journalistic elite? - yeah, I despise them. Still virulently Anglophobic (when it suits), rampant hypocrites (defence spending, corp tax) and morally smug and Wokeishly self-satisfied about how much better the Irish are compared to the racist English (a carefully curated self image now falling apart as the Irish kick back against mass immigration)
They’re worse than the SNP
Double standards, working from a set position of this country = bad.