Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Why is it?
QED
That's not an argument.
If its literally their backyard, they own it, they can veto people building on land they own.
If its not, its none of their bloody business.
In Japan NIMBYs have no more input whether their neighbours can build a home than they do whether their neighbours go to McDonalds, or the cinema, or buy a candlestick or anything else.
Because, again, its none of their bloody business.
In a democracy it is their business. That's why we hold elections and let representatives decide laws. We also don't treat the country as an undifferentiated mass but have various forms of local government.
In a liberal democracy its none of their business.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Why is it?
QED
That's not an argument.
If its literally their backyard, they own it, they can veto people building on land they own.
If its not, its none of their bloody business.
In Japan NIMBYs have no more input whether their neighbours can build a home than they do whether their neighbours go to McDonalds, or the cinema, or buy a candlestick or anything else.
Because, again, its none of their bloody business.
In a democracy it is their business. That's why we hold elections and let representatives decide laws. We also don't treat the country as an undifferentiated mass but have various forms of local government.
In a liberal democracy its none of their business.
You're really a theocrat rather than a democrat.
No, I'm a liberal.
I support liberal democracy.
Telling other people what to do with their stuff is illiberal. That applies to land as much as everything else.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
It’s not that it’s not due to population growth, it’s that that growth is unevenly distributed. You can’t just move a school or GP surgery because the kids crammed into existing housing move to a new build 20 miles away.
So why shouldn't central government which is taking the taxes from migrants (and everyone else) for that matter pay for the new schools and GP surgeries?
Central government issues the visas that cause population growth. Central government takes their income tax. Central government takes their national insurance. Central government takes the VAT. Central government takes duties.
Why should it not use its funds to pay for the externalities of its choices?
You can't have it both ways. Either new housing in a given area is irrelevant to local demand for services or it isn't.
No, new housing in a given area is irrelevant to national demand for services.
The Treasury should pay for the National Health Service. The Department for Education should pay for schools.
Do you really not see the problem? The distribution of people affects the distribution of demand for local services. New development affects the distribution of people.
The Grauniad is utterly insane if they think we don't need housing construction.
There simply aren't enough houses in the country. We need millions more, not hundreds of thousands more.
We need villages to become towns, towns to become cities and cities to become bigger. We need new towns. We need massive, mammoth house building.
Any NIMBYs need to go to hell. No tolerance for their BS.
1. It's not The Guardian saying we don't need more houses, it's a barrister writing in The Guardian, a paper which often publishes views outside the Overton window.
2. How do you answer the assertion in the article, supported by OECD data, that the UK has in fact about the average number of homes per capita when compared with the rest of the developed world?
Like you, my position has been that we need more housing, but now I wonder. It's not as if we have 10,000s of people on the streets or living in temporary camps. The vast majority of people are housed right now. Arguably, building more houses would just lead to more empty houses.
The issue seems to be our wealth inequality, particularly between the over-45s and the under-45s, which distorts the housing market.
So, I (living on a pension, 100% equity in a large house) could afford to buy a 3-bed house locally, without a mortgage (but I could easily get a competitive mortgage if needed which I can service with the rental income), whereas a young working family on low-pay cannot get a look-in because they can't save enough to get a deposit.
Thus, controlling rents would seem to be a way to go. At implementation fix the level at the rents being charged at the time the bill was published. Freeze rents for 10 years and allow inflation to do its work.
Of course the BLT landlords would squeal as would free-marketeers, but let them squeal - they can always sell up if they think they can more money elsewhere.
In time, lower real rents mean a lower cost to the taxpayer for Housing Benefit and Universal Credit too as an added fiscal benefit (and indeed every new home-owner is a potential future Housing Benefit claimant avoided).
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
It’s not that it’s not due to population growth, it’s that that growth is unevenly distributed. You can’t just move a school or GP surgery because the kids crammed into existing housing move to a new build 20 miles away.
So why shouldn't central government which is taking the taxes from migrants (and everyone else) for that matter pay for the new schools and GP surgeries?
Central government issues the visas that cause population growth. Central government takes their income tax. Central government takes their national insurance. Central government takes the VAT. Central government takes duties.
Why should it not use its funds to pay for the externalities of its choices?
You can't have it both ways. Either new housing in a given area is irrelevant to local demand for services or it isn't.
No, new housing in a given area is irrelevant to national demand for services.
The Treasury should pay for the National Health Service. The Department for Education should pay for schools.
Do you really not see the problem? The distribution of people affects the distribution of demand for local services. New development affects the distribution of people.
So what?
Visas come from central government, not local ones. Overwhelming majority of taxes go to the Treasury, not local.
Give me one good reason why central government issue the visas, take the taxes, but then not pay for the population growth it has caused?
Why should a minority of home buyers face the bill for the government's policies?
Local government should get a block grant from the Treasury for every new house built.
Dig deep treasury, for the WASPI women. PHSO due to report tomorrow. WASPI women already threatening further court action if they are not happy with the outcome.
Looks like blanket ‘compensation’ won’t happen. So what has the fight been for and where does it go ?
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
It’s not that it’s not due to population growth, it’s that that growth is unevenly distributed. You can’t just move a school or GP surgery because the kids crammed into existing housing move to a new build 20 miles away.
So why shouldn't central government which is taking the taxes from migrants (and everyone else) for that matter pay for the new schools and GP surgeries?
Central government issues the visas that cause population growth. Central government takes their income tax. Central government takes their national insurance. Central government takes the VAT. Central government takes duties.
Why should it not use its funds to pay for the externalities of its choices?
You can't have it both ways. Either new housing in a given area is irrelevant to local demand for services or it isn't.
No, new housing in a given area is irrelevant to national demand for services.
The Treasury should pay for the National Health Service. The Department for Education should pay for schools.
Do you really not see the problem? The distribution of people affects the distribution of demand for local services. New development affects the distribution of people.
So what?
Visas come from central government, not local ones. Overwhelming majority of taxes go to the Treasury, not local.
Give me one good reason why central government issue the visas, take the taxes, but then not pay for the population growth it has caused?
Why should a minority of home buyers face the bill for the government's policies?
Local government should get a block grant from the Treasury for every new house built.
As an alternative, how about taxing planning gain with the proceeds going to local rather than central government?
Is that...real? I mean it isn't a spoof or anything?
So I’m currently writing a paper on some research I have been getting my group to do, involving anti cancer properties from some novel capsaicinoids (think capsaicin and other compounds from chillies, but made more potent by modifications). I did my lit review last week, found around 15 papers that looked relevant for the background/intro and then screened them down to 6 which are relevant. I then played with Chatgpt. It produced a thousand words of fluff around the subject. No detail, no references, no actual science. I can see why it scares the crap out of our resident journalist - it seems competent at spitting out fluff already. But for serious scientific argument? I could use the basic structure and modify, but to be honest I wrote the draft intro over a couple of hours and it includes around twenty accurate citations. It may (and surely will get better). But at the moment it’s miles away from replacing me (long may that continue…)
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Why is it?
QED
That's not an argument.
If its literally their backyard, they own it, they can veto people building on land they own.
If its not, its none of their bloody business.
In Japan NIMBYs have no more input whether their neighbours can build a home than they do whether their neighbours go to McDonalds, or the cinema, or buy a candlestick or anything else.
Because, again, its none of their bloody business.
There are restricted zones of development in Japan which control what can be built there. 'If you are planning to purchase real estate properties or to build new homes in Japan, it is recommended that you understand Land Use Zones and the details of all the categories, because the neighborhood environment and what you can build may be different in each Land Use Zone.' https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/news/land-use-zones-in-japan/
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Fair point. The EU Referendum didn't of course specify what form of Brexit we'd be taking by voting Leave. And look at the mess that left us in - which kind of supports your point.
The Grauniad is utterly insane if they think we don't need housing construction.
There simply aren't enough houses in the country. We need millions more, not hundreds of thousands more.
We need villages to become towns, towns to become cities and cities to become bigger. We need new towns. We need massive, mammoth house building.
Any NIMBYs need to go to hell. No tolerance for their BS.
1. It's not The Guardian saying we don't need more houses, it's a barrister writing in The Guardian, a paper which often publishes views outside the Overton window.
2. How do you answer the assertion in the article, supported by OECD data, that the UK has in fact about the average number of homes per capita when compared with the rest of the developed world?
Like you, my position has been that we need more housing, but now I wonder. It's not as if we have 10,000s of people on the streets or living in temporary camps. The vast majority of people are housed right now. Arguably, building more houses would just lead to more empty houses.
The issue seems to be our wealth inequality, particularly between the over-45s and the under-45s, which distorts the housing market.
So, I (living on a pension, 100% equity in a large house) could afford to buy a 3-bed house locally, without a mortgage (but I could easily get a competitive mortgage if needed which I can service with the rental income), whereas a young working family on low-pay cannot get a look-in because they can't save enough to get a deposit.
Thus, controlling rents would seem to be a way to go. At implementation fix the level at the rents being charged at the time the bill was published. Freeze rents for 10 years and allow inflation to do its work.
Of course the BLT landlords would squeal as would free-marketeers, but let them squeal - they can always sell up if they think they can more money elsewhere.
In time, lower real rents mean a lower cost to the taxpayer for Housing Benefit and Universal Credit too as an added fiscal benefit (and indeed every new home-owner is a potential future Housing Benefit claimant avoided).
It's certainly more complicated than national supply/demand.
The number of spare bedrooms in the UK has increased by 2 million over the last decade, even while the population has increased. So, at the very least, we're building the wrong kind of housing in the wrong place.
You could plaster Benbecula with homes and it isn't going to do anything for the housing crisis in Manchester.
The Grauniad is utterly insane if they think we don't need housing construction.
There simply aren't enough houses in the country. We need millions more, not hundreds of thousands more.
We need villages to become towns, towns to become cities and cities to become bigger. We need new towns. We need massive, mammoth house building.
Any NIMBYs need to go to hell. No tolerance for their BS.
1. It's not The Guardian saying we don't need more houses, it's a barrister writing in The Guardian, a paper which often publishes views outside the Overton window.
2. How do you answer the assertion in the article, supported by OECD data, that the UK has in fact about the average number of homes per capita when compared with the rest of the developed world?
Like you, my position has been that we need more housing, but now I wonder. It's not as if we have 10,000s of people on the streets or living in temporary camps. The vast majority of people are housed right now. Arguably, building more houses would just lead to more empty houses.
The issue seems to be our wealth inequality, particularly between the over-45s and the under-45s, which distorts the housing market.
So, I (living on a pension, 100% equity in a large house) could afford to buy a 3-bed house locally, without a mortgage (but I could easily get a competitive mortgage if needed which I can service with the rental income), whereas a young working family on low-pay cannot get a look-in because they can't save enough to get a deposit.
Thus, controlling rents would seem to be a way to go. At implementation fix the level at the rents being charged at the time the bill was published. Freeze rents for 10 years and allow inflation to do its work.
Of course the BLT landlords would squeal as would free-marketeers, but let them squeal - they can always sell up if they think they can more money elsewhere.
In time, lower real rents mean a lower cost to the taxpayer for Housing Benefit and Universal Credit too as an added fiscal benefit (and indeed every new home-owner is a potential future Housing Benefit claimant avoided).
"About the average" is wildly insufficient.
Marginal differences make a massive difference.
To re-quote Dickens: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”
Saying you have "about" enough ≠ you have enough.
France has about the same population as us, but about 9 million extra homes. That's the shortfall we need to address.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Any rejoin will require us to give up our ability to Brexit again. The EU isn't going to let us do the hokey-cokey ad nauseum.
Telling people they can never, ever leave would kill a rejoin referendum stone dead.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Fair point. The EU Referendum didn't of course specify what form of Brexit we'd be taking by voting Leave. And look at the mess that left us in - which kind of supports your point.
Yes, it absolutely does. Brexit was all things to every Brexit voter. Even poor old @RochdalePioneers who voted leave, never forget, had his version of Brexit in mind.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Any rejoin will require us to give up our ability to Brexit again. The EU isn't going to let us do the hokey-cokey ad nauseum.
Telling people they can never, ever leave would kill a rejoin referendum stone dead.
Many of the most vociferous rejoiners will go off the idea as soon as the EU becomes right-coded, which it will.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
It’s not that it’s not due to population growth, it’s that that growth is unevenly distributed. You can’t just move a school or GP surgery because the kids crammed into existing housing move to a new build 20 miles away.
So why shouldn't central government which is taking the taxes from migrants (and everyone else) for that matter pay for the new schools and GP surgeries?
Central government issues the visas that cause population growth. Central government takes their income tax. Central government takes their national insurance. Central government takes the VAT. Central government takes duties.
Why should it not use its funds to pay for the externalities of its choices?
As I’ve already said, on one level I agree with what you are saying.
But you’re still like the economist who prefers his theory over reality.
There is currently no money for central government to provide adequate services.
At the same time there is market failure in the housing market such that big developers can make significant profit building fairly crap homes. Forcing the developers to also pay for services intervenes to address that market failure in a pretty blunt way, but it seems like the least worst option at the moment.
And it’s not a tax on new homeowners. You can bet that those new builds will be priced at whatever the market can bear regardless, so this isn’t a cost that will be passed onto buyers. Instead it is bringing private profit back into the public sphere. Which is a good thing right now given how broken our public services are.
The Grauniad is utterly insane if they think we don't need housing construction.
There simply aren't enough houses in the country. We need millions more, not hundreds of thousands more.
We need villages to become towns, towns to become cities and cities to become bigger. We need new towns. We need massive, mammoth house building.
Any NIMBYs need to go to hell. No tolerance for their BS.
1. It's not The Guardian saying we don't need more houses, it's a barrister writing in The Guardian, a paper which often publishes views outside the Overton window.
2. How do you answer the assertion in the article, supported by OECD data, that the UK has in fact about the average number of homes per capita when compared with the rest of the developed world?
Like you, my position has been that we need more housing, but now I wonder. It's not as if we have 10,000s of people on the streets or living in temporary camps. The vast majority of people are housed right now. Arguably, building more houses would just lead to more empty houses.
The issue seems to be our wealth inequality, particularly between the over-45s and the under-45s, which distorts the housing market.
So, I (living on a pension, 100% equity in a large house) could afford to buy a 3-bed house locally, without a mortgage (but I could easily get a competitive mortgage if needed which I can service with the rental income), whereas a young working family on low-pay cannot get a look-in because they can't save enough to get a deposit.
Thus, controlling rents would seem to be a way to go. At implementation fix the level at the rents being charged at the time the bill was published. Freeze rents for 10 years and allow inflation to do its work.
Of course the BLT landlords would squeal as would free-marketeers, but let them squeal - they can always sell up if they think they can more money elsewhere.
In time, lower real rents mean a lower cost to the taxpayer for Housing Benefit and Universal Credit too as an added fiscal benefit (and indeed every new home-owner is a potential future Housing Benefit claimant avoided).
The 'price cap' on energy hasn't reduced the cost of energy to the consumer, it has increased it, as companies just 'charge the cap'. The market is distorted; small providers have collapsed, and the big boys just carve up what's left.
It was profoundly frightening when politicians started to speak of 'price caps' for milk and bread, because that would have had precisely the same effect on food - when at the moment the competitiveness of our food market and the relative cheapness of our food as a result is the envy of most of the world.
'Rent controls' would work exactly the same way. It would result in big providers ending up with a virtual monopoly, and the price of housing would increase over the long term. Just another effing stupid socialist misery-infliction idea. When all is said and done, there's a very cosy relationship between corporations and socialist policies.
The Grauniad is utterly insane if they think we don't need housing construction.
There simply aren't enough houses in the country. We need millions more, not hundreds of thousands more.
We need villages to become towns, towns to become cities and cities to become bigger. We need new towns. We need massive, mammoth house building.
Any NIMBYs need to go to hell. No tolerance for their BS.
1. It's not The Guardian saying we don't need more houses, it's a barrister writing in The Guardian, a paper which often publishes views outside the Overton window.
2. How do you answer the assertion in the article, supported by OECD data, that the UK has in fact about the average number of homes per capita when compared with the rest of the developed world?
Like you, my position has been that we need more housing, but now I wonder. It's not as if we have 10,000s of people on the streets or living in temporary camps. The vast majority of people are housed right now. Arguably, building more houses would just lead to more empty houses.
The issue seems to be our wealth inequality, particularly between the over-45s and the under-45s, which distorts the housing market.
So, I (living on a pension, 100% equity in a large house) could afford to buy a 3-bed house locally, without a mortgage (but I could easily get a competitive mortgage if needed which I can service with the rental income), whereas a young working family on low-pay cannot get a look-in because they can't save enough to get a deposit.
Thus, controlling rents would seem to be a way to go. At implementation fix the level at the rents being charged at the time the bill was published. Freeze rents for 10 years and allow inflation to do its work.
Of course the BLT landlords would squeal as would free-marketeers, but let them squeal - they can always sell up if they think they can more money elsewhere.
In time, lower real rents mean a lower cost to the taxpayer for Housing Benefit and Universal Credit too as an added fiscal benefit (and indeed every new home-owner is a potential future Housing Benefit claimant avoided).
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Fair point. The EU Referendum didn't of course specify what form of Brexit we'd be taking by voting Leave. And look at the mess that left us in - which kind of supports your point.
The Rejoin referendum will be after terms are negotiated so similar to the one in the Early Seventies.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Fair point. The EU Referendum didn't of course specify what form of Brexit we'd be taking by voting Leave. And look at the mess that left us in - which kind of supports your point.
The Rejoin referendum will be after terms are negotiated so similar to the one in the Early Seventies.
The one in the 1970s was like Cameron's. It was a choice between remaining on 'new' terms or leaving.
If you want to live in an Islamic theocracy go live in Iran or Saudi
Yep. If we'd have let that go it would have been sharia law at the Old Bailey by Christmas. Except there wouldn't be a Christmas.
How far do you reckon we'd get if we suggested NR put some atheist messaging up in the name of inclusion? Yet surely atheists still outnumber Muslims.
In the UK, for the moment, maybe. Globally they certainly don't.
Over 50% in the UK still believe in the God of Abraham too, combining Christians, Muslims and Jews
Those three religions have very different interpretations of the God of Abraham. Indeed, within each of those three, there are very different interpretations of the God of Abraham. I don’t think you can just add them up like that.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Any rejoin will require us to give up our ability to Brexit again. The EU isn't going to let us do the hokey-cokey ad nauseum.
Telling people they can never, ever leave would kill a rejoin referendum stone dead.
Many of the most vociferous rejoiners will go off the idea as soon as the EU becomes right-coded, which it will.
Nah, form is temporary, class is permanent. It might help win over a few Conservatives though.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
It’s not that it’s not due to population growth, it’s that that growth is unevenly distributed. You can’t just move a school or GP surgery because the kids crammed into existing housing move to a new build 20 miles away.
So why shouldn't central government which is taking the taxes from migrants (and everyone else) for that matter pay for the new schools and GP surgeries?
Central government issues the visas that cause population growth. Central government takes their income tax. Central government takes their national insurance. Central government takes the VAT. Central government takes duties.
Why should it not use its funds to pay for the externalities of its choices?
As I’ve already said, on one level I agree with what you are saying.
But you’re still like the economist who prefers his theory over reality.
There is currently no money for central government to provide adequate services.
At the same time there is market failure in the housing market such that big developers can make significant profit building fairly crap homes. Forcing the developers to also pay for services intervenes to address that market failure in a pretty blunt way, but it seems like the least worst option at the moment.
And it’s not a tax on new homeowners. You can bet that those new builds will be priced at whatever the market can bear regardless, so this isn’t a cost that will be passed onto buyers. Instead it is bringing private profit back into the public sphere. Which is a good thing right now given how broken our public services are.
There is a shortfall of housing and your solution is to tax housing. That makes the problem worse not better.
That's like saying there's a shortfall of dentistry, so the solution is to tax dentists more in response.
We need millions more houses. Free the market and allow construction to happen and we can solve it.
Central government needs to own up to the consequences of its policies. If it gives millions of visas that's perfectly fine but then it needs to pay for the infrastructure, not expect young people buying a house to pay for its choices.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Any rejoin will require us to give up our ability to Brexit again. The EU isn't going to let us do the hokey-cokey ad nauseum.
Telling people they can never, ever leave would kill a rejoin referendum stone dead.
A future prospective Conservative Government could offer a rejoin referendum. Yes they would jettison uber-Leavers to some mad party of the right, but they would more than make up those losses from centrist Lib-Lab switchers.How about former -Remainer Alexander Johnson leading the charge?
Because of their base, Labour couldn't offer such a prospectus.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Any rejoin will require us to give up our ability to Brexit again. The EU isn't going to let us do the hokey-cokey ad nauseum.
Telling people they can never, ever leave would kill a rejoin referendum stone dead.
Many of the most vociferous rejoiners will go off the idea as soon as the EU becomes right-coded, which it will.
Nah, form is temporary, class is permanent. It might help win over a few Conservatives though.
The concept of the EU is antithetical to Anglosphere progressive politics on race.
Is that...real? I mean it isn't a spoof or anything?
So I’m currently writing a paper on some research I have been getting my group to do, involving anti cancer properties from some novel capsaicinoids (think capsaicin and other compounds from chillies, but made more potent by modifications). I did my lit review last week, found around 15 papers that looked relevant for the background/intro and then screened them down to 6 which are relevant. I then played with Chatgpt. It produced a thousand words of fluff around the subject. No detail, no references, no actual science. I can see why it scares the crap out of our resident journalist - it seems competent at spitting out fluff already. But for serious scientific argument? I could use the basic structure and modify, but to be honest I wrote the draft intro over a couple of hours and it includes around twenty accurate citations. It may (and surely will get better). But at the moment it’s miles away from replacing me (long may that continue…)
Aside from my thoughts on using ChatGPT like that - there was a recent paper analysing it's use as a peer review tool. It's already being found in upto 17% of peer reviews. The analysis was mostly using keywords which ChatGPT is 'fond' of using, but which rarely occur in regular reviews - but it was interesting to see the growth over time and how the review deadline time increased it's use.
I can probably dig out the paper if you're interested.
One of the side-projects my team is (or was- IT director has reallocated our time) working on was a background researcher 'agent'. It did all sorts of things to find you good references, relevant information, well cited papers etc. Didn't 'do the research' as such, but it sure gave you a good head start in just 30-60 seconds compared to doing it by yourself or asking an RA to do it. Even had a slider for "This is just casual background info" to "I really, really want accurate information" depending how much time/money you wanted to spend getting your result.
But now - cast aside as someone needs an Excel imported in a different way. Woo.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Any rejoin will require us to give up our ability to Brexit again. The EU isn't going to let us do the hokey-cokey ad nauseum.
Telling people they can never, ever leave would kill a rejoin referendum stone dead.
Many of the most vociferous rejoiners will go off the idea as soon as the EU becomes right-coded, which it will.
Nah, form is temporary, class is permanent. It might help win over a few Conservatives though.
Hilarious how you and a few like thinkers actually believe this very telling remark is some sort of zinger.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Any rejoin will require us to give up our ability to Brexit again. The EU isn't going to let us do the hokey-cokey ad nauseum.
Telling people they can never, ever leave would kill a rejoin referendum stone dead.
A future prospective Conservative Government could offer a rejoin referendum. Yes they would jettison uber-Leavers to some mad party of the right, but they would more than make up those losses from centrist Lib-Lab switchers.How about former -Remainer Alexander Johnson leading the charge?
Because of their base, Labour couldn't offer such a prospectus.
If the Tories pushed rejoin they would be down to single figures, as they were in 2019 in the EU elections.
Most of their voters would defect to Farage's party who would become the main opposition to Labour (most of whose voters would still not vote Tory as they are economically leftwing).
They might win over a few voters from the LDs but that is it. The only parties whose base would mostly agree with a rejoin policy at present are the LDs, SNP and Greens
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Any rejoin will require us to give up our ability to Brexit again. The EU isn't going to let us do the hokey-cokey ad nauseum.
Telling people they can never, ever leave would kill a rejoin referendum stone dead.
Many of the most vociferous rejoiners will go off the idea as soon as the EU becomes right-coded, which it will.
Nah, form is temporary, class is permanent. It might help win over a few Conservatives though.
The concept of the EU is antithetical to Anglosphere progressive politics on race.
It depends what you mean by "progressive politics". "Anglosphere race politics" is confected by @williamglenn nonsense. What does that even mean? (I know what you are suggesting, I conclude it is a nebulous notion).
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Any rejoin will require us to give up our ability to Brexit again. The EU isn't going to let us do the hokey-cokey ad nauseum.
Telling people they can never, ever leave would kill a rejoin referendum stone dead.
A future prospective Conservative Government could offer a rejoin referendum. Yes they would jettison uber-Leavers to some mad party of the right, but they would more than make up those losses from centrist Lib-Lab switchers.How about former -Remainer Alexander Johnson leading the charge?
Because of their base, Labour couldn't offer such a prospectus.
If the Tories pushed rejoin they would be down to single figures, as they were in 2019 in the EU elections.
Most of their voters would defect to Farage's party who would become the main opposition to Labour (most of whose voters would still not vote Tory as they are economically leftwing).
They might win over a few voters from the LDs but that is it. The only parties whose base would mostly agree with a rejoin policy at present are the LDs, SNP and Greens
The Grauniad is utterly insane if they think we don't need housing construction.
There simply aren't enough houses in the country. We need millions more, not hundreds of thousands more.
We need villages to become towns, towns to become cities and cities to become bigger. We need new towns. We need massive, mammoth house building.
Any NIMBYs need to go to hell. No tolerance for their BS.
1. It's not The Guardian saying we don't need more houses, it's a barrister writing in The Guardian, a paper which often publishes views outside the Overton window.
2. How do you answer the assertion in the article, supported by OECD data, that the UK has in fact about the average number of homes per capita when compared with the rest of the developed world?
Like you, my position has been that we need more housing, but now I wonder. It's not as if we have 10,000s of people on the streets or living in temporary camps. The vast majority of people are housed right now. Arguably, building more houses would just lead to more empty houses.
The issue seems to be our wealth inequality, particularly between the over-45s and the under-45s, which distorts the housing market.
So, I (living on a pension, 100% equity in a large house) could afford to buy a 3-bed house locally, without a mortgage (but I could easily get a competitive mortgage if needed which I can service with the rental income), whereas a young working family on low-pay cannot get a look-in because they can't save enough to get a deposit.
Thus, controlling rents would seem to be a way to go. At implementation fix the level at the rents being charged at the time the bill was published. Freeze rents for 10 years and allow inflation to do its work.
Of course the BLT landlords would squeal as would free-marketeers, but let them squeal - they can always sell up if they think they can more money elsewhere.
In time, lower real rents mean a lower cost to the taxpayer for Housing Benefit and Universal Credit too as an added fiscal benefit (and indeed every new home-owner is a potential future Housing Benefit claimant avoided).
Personally, I don't blame the BTL landlords - successive governments have made it financially attractive to create that class of investor. If we'd had rent controls all along we wouldn't have had the BTL boom.
Secondly, I support the need for continued new housing because the population continues to grow. What level of homes per person we need though is the question - presumably not much above 500 per 1000 people, given most of us still chose to live as couples or families.
The article you link to says the stats in the Guardian piece are out of date but it does not give us the updated figures, so what can we make of that?
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Any rejoin will require us to give up our ability to Brexit again. The EU isn't going to let us do the hokey-cokey ad nauseum.
Telling people they can never, ever leave would kill a rejoin referendum stone dead.
A future prospective Conservative Government could offer a rejoin referendum. Yes they would jettison uber-Leavers to some mad party of the right, but they would more than make up those losses from centrist Lib-Lab switchers.How about former -Remainer Alexander Johnson leading the charge?
Because of their base, Labour couldn't offer such a prospectus.
If the Tories pushed rejoin they would be down to single figures, as they were in 2019 in the EU elections.
Most of their voters would defect to Farage's party who would become the main opposition to Labour (most of whose voters would still not vote Tory as they are economically leftwing).
They might win over a few voters from the LDs but that is it. The only parties whose base would mostly agree with a rejoin policy at present are the LDs, SNP and Greens
I am.not suggesting for 2024, but maybe 2028.
They would still get replaced by Reform.
The only party who could ever advocate rejoin the full EU or even just EEA and free movement again is Labour but then probably only under PR and reliant on LD and Green support to govern. Under FPTP the redwall marginal seats would veto it.
The Tories might then eventually accept that in 2 or 3 decades if their voters by then also accepted it but they would never be the ones delivering it
The Grauniad is utterly insane if they think we don't need housing construction.
There simply aren't enough houses in the country. We need millions more, not hundreds of thousands more.
We need villages to become towns, towns to become cities and cities to become bigger. We need new towns. We need massive, mammoth house building.
Any NIMBYs need to go to hell. No tolerance for their BS.
1. It's not The Guardian saying we don't need more houses, it's a barrister writing in The Guardian, a paper which often publishes views outside the Overton window.
2. How do you answer the assertion in the article, supported by OECD data, that the UK has in fact about the average number of homes per capita when compared with the rest of the developed world?
Like you, my position has been that we need more housing, but now I wonder. It's not as if we have 10,000s of people on the streets or living in temporary camps. The vast majority of people are housed right now. Arguably, building more houses would just lead to more empty houses.
The issue seems to be our wealth inequality, particularly between the over-45s and the under-45s, which distorts the housing market.
So, I (living on a pension, 100% equity in a large house) could afford to buy a 3-bed house locally, without a mortgage (but I could easily get a competitive mortgage if needed which I can service with the rental income), whereas a young working family on low-pay cannot get a look-in because they can't save enough to get a deposit.
Thus, controlling rents would seem to be a way to go. At implementation fix the level at the rents being charged at the time the bill was published. Freeze rents for 10 years and allow inflation to do its work.
Of course the BLT landlords would squeal as would free-marketeers, but let them squeal - they can always sell up if they think they can more money elsewhere.
In time, lower real rents mean a lower cost to the taxpayer for Housing Benefit and Universal Credit too as an added fiscal benefit (and indeed every new home-owner is a potential future Housing Benefit claimant avoided).
It's certainly more complicated than national supply/demand.
The number of spare bedrooms in the UK has increased by 2 million over the last decade, even while the population has increased. So, at the very least, we're building the wrong kind of housing in the wrong place.
You could plaster Benbecula with homes and it isn't going to do anything for the housing crisis in Manchester.
Spare bedrooms is an irrelevant statistic.
It's the circle of life that people get a home they need, get a bit older, their kids leave home, then they continue living until they die and someone else moves into the home who may need all those rooms once more. Until their kids get older and the cycle continues.
Build more 3 plus bedroom homes and the problem is solved. Then young adults and migrants alike can have a home of their own, while existing homeowners can continue to live where they've put down roots.
Or should old people be forced to live 3 couples sharing a 3 bedroom house rather than each having their own home?
Plus of course studies where people work from home are classed as spare rooms.
The Grauniad is utterly insane if they think we don't need housing construction.
There simply aren't enough houses in the country. We need millions more, not hundreds of thousands more.
We need villages to become towns, towns to become cities and cities to become bigger. We need new towns. We need massive, mammoth house building.
Any NIMBYs need to go to hell. No tolerance for their BS.
1. It's not The Guardian saying we don't need more houses, it's a barrister writing in The Guardian, a paper which often publishes views outside the Overton window.
2. How do you answer the assertion in the article, supported by OECD data, that the UK has in fact about the average number of homes per capita when compared with the rest of the developed world?
Like you, my position has been that we need more housing, but now I wonder. It's not as if we have 10,000s of people on the streets or living in temporary camps. The vast majority of people are housed right now. Arguably, building more houses would just lead to more empty houses.
The issue seems to be our wealth inequality, particularly between the over-45s and the under-45s, which distorts the housing market.
So, I (living on a pension, 100% equity in a large house) could afford to buy a 3-bed house locally, without a mortgage (but I could easily get a competitive mortgage if needed which I can service with the rental income), whereas a young working family on low-pay cannot get a look-in because they can't save enough to get a deposit.
Thus, controlling rents would seem to be a way to go. At implementation fix the level at the rents being charged at the time the bill was published. Freeze rents for 10 years and allow inflation to do its work.
Of course the BLT landlords would squeal as would free-marketeers, but let them squeal - they can always sell up if they think they can more money elsewhere.
In time, lower real rents mean a lower cost to the taxpayer for Housing Benefit and Universal Credit too as an added fiscal benefit (and indeed every new home-owner is a potential future Housing Benefit claimant avoided).
It's certainly more complicated than national supply/demand.
The number of spare bedrooms in the UK has increased by 2 million over the last decade, even while the population has increased. So, at the very least, we're building the wrong kind of housing in the wrong place.
You could plaster Benbecula with homes and it isn't going to do anything for the housing crisis in Manchester.
I'm looking for a house in Ireland. There are two of us, and we share a bedroom, so we only *need* one bedroom, but generally we've been looking at houses with three bedrooms.
A bedroom for us, a bedroom for use as an office for working from home, and a bedroom for people to visit us.
It's definitely a luxury for us to be able to afford this, rather than a small one bedroom flat, but is that such a bad thing? It will improve our quality of life to have the extra rooms, and so that would seem like something governments should support rather than fight against.
Is that...real? I mean it isn't a spoof or anything?
So I’m currently writing a paper on some research I have been getting my group to do, involving anti cancer properties from some novel capsaicinoids (think capsaicin and other compounds from chillies, but made more potent by modifications). I did my lit review last week, found around 15 papers that looked relevant for the background/intro and then screened them down to 6 which are relevant. I then played with Chatgpt. It produced a thousand words of fluff around the subject. No detail, no references, no actual science. I can see why it scares the crap out of our resident journalist - it seems competent at spitting out fluff already. But for serious scientific argument? I could use the basic structure and modify, but to be honest I wrote the draft intro over a couple of hours and it includes around twenty accurate citations. It may (and surely will get better). But at the moment it’s miles away from replacing me (long may that continue…)
Claude 3 is significantly better than ChatGPT. And GPT4 - which is the basis of ChatGPT - will likely be superseded this summer by GPT5. Which some claim is a huge leap in capability, some even claim it is AGI
I wonder what first attracted her to the 49 year old bachelor Marquess she married in 2009, with the castle and estate in Cheshire and country house in Norfolk and £60 million net worth?
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
It’s not that it’s not due to population growth, it’s that that growth is unevenly distributed. You can’t just move a school or GP surgery because the kids crammed into existing housing move to a new build 20 miles away.
So why shouldn't central government which is taking the taxes from migrants (and everyone else) for that matter pay for the new schools and GP surgeries?
Central government issues the visas that cause population growth. Central government takes their income tax. Central government takes their national insurance. Central government takes the VAT. Central government takes duties.
Why should it not use its funds to pay for the externalities of its choices?
As I’ve already said, on one level I agree with what you are saying.
But you’re still like the economist who prefers his theory over reality.
There is currently no money for central government to provide adequate services.
At the same time there is market failure in the housing market such that big developers can make significant profit building fairly crap homes. Forcing the developers to also pay for services intervenes to address that market failure in a pretty blunt way, but it seems like the least worst option at the moment.
And it’s not a tax on new homeowners. You can bet that those new builds will be priced at whatever the market can bear regardless, so this isn’t a cost that will be passed onto buyers. Instead it is bringing private profit back into the public sphere. Which is a good thing right now given how broken our public services are.
There is a shortfall of housing and your solution is to tax housing. That makes the problem worse not better.
That's like saying there's a shortfall of dentistry, so the solution is to tax dentists more in response.
We need millions more houses. Free the market and allow construction to happen and we can solve it.
Central government needs to own up to the consequences of its policies. If it gives millions of visas that's perfectly fine but then it needs to pay for the infrastructure, not expect young people buying a house to pay for its choices.
We need millions more houses. 100% agree.
But if those houses are built without adequate services and infrastructure we will simply create another problem, just as significant for the future prosperity of the country.
So the services are needed. If there is a better solution than making developers contribute to paying for them I’m all ears. But I haven’t heard one so far.
And I’m not at all convinced that this tax on housing is the bottleneck in the supply.
My father would put christian on the census he is a total atheist the census is worthless
I put myself down as a Muslim on the census......
My point exactly, what you say on the census does not indicate belief
It should do, though admittedly some Trump supporters and nationalist rightwingers call themselves evangelical Christians or conservative Catholic Christians mainly to differentiate themselves from Muslims and secular non religious urban liberals
On the subject of the census many 100,000 identify as being a jedi....you really think they believe in the force? Of course not....but you believe everyone who says jew, muslim or christian believes in the beard in the sky
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Any rejoin will require us to give up our ability to Brexit again. The EU isn't going to let us do the hokey-cokey ad nauseum.
Telling people they can never, ever leave would kill a rejoin referendum stone dead.
A future prospective Conservative Government could offer a rejoin referendum. Yes they would jettison uber-Leavers to some mad party of the right, but they would more than make up those losses from centrist Lib-Lab switchers.How about former -Remainer Alexander Johnson leading the charge?
Because of their base, Labour couldn't offer such a prospectus.
If the Tories pushed rejoin they would be down to single figures, as they were in 2019 in the EU elections.
Most of their voters would defect to Farage's party who would become the main opposition to Labour (most of whose voters would still not vote Tory as they are economically leftwing).
They might win over a few voters from the LDs but that is it. The only parties whose base would mostly agree with a rejoin policy at present are the LDs, SNP and Greens
I am.not suggesting for 2024, but maybe 2028.
They would still get replaced by Reform.
The only party who could ever advocate rejoin the full EU or even just EEA and free movement again is Labour but then probably only under PR and reliant on LD and Green support to govern. Under FPTP the redwall marginal seats would veto it.
The Tories might then eventually accept that in 2 or 3 decades if their voters by then also accepted it but they would never be the ones delivering it
Two or three decades means I won't have to worry about it. But the absurdity of Brexit will eventually dawn on the majority of Conservative voters. With people of my age and older dead and buried, more objective younger voters will realise the folly of my generation.
My father would put christian on the census he is a total atheist the census is worthless
I put myself down as a Muslim on the census......
My point exactly, what you say on the census does not indicate belief
It should do, though admittedly some Trump supporters and rightwingers call themselves evangelical Christians or conservative Catholics mainly to differentiate themselves from Muslims and secular non religious urban liberals
Why should it....clue ask intrusive questions people tell you shit to shut you up.
Speaking of photos here’s one. Do we have any horticulturalists on the site? Or er palm/cactusologists?
THIS is just growing, fervently, in my hotel garden, amongst the green iguanas and the Andean squirrels
What is it? All I know is that it is quite magnificent
I’m gonna see if an AI app can identify it. An interesting use-case
A yucca?
A Traveller’s Palm it seems. Not a true palm tree but very distinctive. It grows in one plane making it kind of 2D
There are 2 examples here in my hotel garden
That Advocaat extinguisher looks nasty.
I’m staying at entirely the wrong hotel. It has no pool and no aircon, and it is “feels like” 44C here in Palomino. Excruciatingly hot (hence the chilled white wine as coolant and anaesthetic)
I got carried away by the 9.3 rating on booking.com next to a reasonable price - usually a great sign. However I now realise that rating is given by all the eager young people who come here to do Buddhist chanting and endless daily yoga sessions. I’m in a kind of Woke Colombian Ashram
The girls are pretty, tanned and lithe, but oddly unsexy. All that Woke yoga. The men are hermaphrodites with good teeth
They speak Globish, fractured basic English “ok guys now breakfast”
I like the squirrels and the iguanas. I shall move on tomorrow
I quite like the voyage of discovery that is involved in nearly very nice hotels. Generally its no problem, but it can be odd. Monkeys ransacking the room in Zimbabwe, lots of small lizards lurking everywhere in Laos, a room in Naples that hadn't bothered to be rain proof, and a place in Vietnam where the rattle of cockroaches was quite bad (that one I really objected to, the rest were fine-ish)
I've not been to Colombia other than Bogata airport for a brief stop. I genuinely think that the most beautiful girl ever to exist was a stewardess on that flight though. More amazing even than Salma Hayek. I was struck dumb, obviously. (I can deal with 'quite stunning', but the categories beyond that cause me to trip over my tongue)
Colombian girls are on average rather pretty, possibly the prettiest girls I’ve seen in Latin America. There isn’t much obesity - yet - they are a huge genetic mix, all shades of black to brown to white, it seems to work. They have really good teeth, no idea why, is Colombia famed for its dentists?
lol anyhow it it quite noticeable. A pretty and mammacious girl will attend you in a shop and then flash this dazzling smile, it is most becoming, Shakira is Colombian for a reason
And they all look healthy. The food may be banal but it is healthy. Tons of fruit all the time
NB
USA (GDP per capita, $70,000), life expectancy: 77
Colombia (GDP per capita, $7,000), life expectancy: 78
I think given how Mr Obama and then Mr Biden have extended some basics of healthcare to the 10s of millions of Usonians have been denied it since forever, that USA life expectancy number may be due for a significant improvement over the next 10-20 years.
One aspect of USA society which is coming out of the third world.
It's not been unusual for many Americans to self-ration even lifesaving medication such as insulin, or suffer untreated, because they cannot access or afford it.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
It’s not that it’s not due to population growth, it’s that that growth is unevenly distributed. You can’t just move a school or GP surgery because the kids crammed into existing housing move to a new build 20 miles away.
So why shouldn't central government which is taking the taxes from migrants (and everyone else) for that matter pay for the new schools and GP surgeries?
Central government issues the visas that cause population growth. Central government takes their income tax. Central government takes their national insurance. Central government takes the VAT. Central government takes duties.
Why should it not use its funds to pay for the externalities of its choices?
As I’ve already said, on one level I agree with what you are saying.
But you’re still like the economist who prefers his theory over reality.
There is currently no money for central government to provide adequate services.
At the same time there is market failure in the housing market such that big developers can make significant profit building fairly crap homes. Forcing the developers to also pay for services intervenes to address that market failure in a pretty blunt way, but it seems like the least worst option at the moment.
And it’s not a tax on new homeowners. You can bet that those new builds will be priced at whatever the market can bear regardless, so this isn’t a cost that will be passed onto buyers. Instead it is bringing private profit back into the public sphere. Which is a good thing right now given how broken our public services are.
There is a shortfall of housing and your solution is to tax housing. That makes the problem worse not better.
That's like saying there's a shortfall of dentistry, so the solution is to tax dentists more in response.
We need millions more houses. Free the market and allow construction to happen and we can solve it.
Central government needs to own up to the consequences of its policies. If it gives millions of visas that's perfectly fine but then it needs to pay for the infrastructure, not expect young people buying a house to pay for its choices.
We need millions more houses. 100% agree.
But if those houses are built without adequate services and infrastructure we will simply create another problem, just as significant for the future prosperity of the country.
So the services are needed. If there is a better solution than making developers contribute to paying for them I’m all ears. But I haven’t heard one so far.
And I’m not at all convinced that this tax on housing is the bottleneck in the supply.
You see last week I'd have agreed with you but now I'm thinking who is going to occupy the 'millions more houses' and where are they living currently?
The Grauniad is utterly insane if they think we don't need housing construction.
There simply aren't enough houses in the country. We need millions more, not hundreds of thousands more.
We need villages to become towns, towns to become cities and cities to become bigger. We need new towns. We need massive, mammoth house building.
Any NIMBYs need to go to hell. No tolerance for their BS.
1. It's not The Guardian saying we don't need more houses, it's a barrister writing in The Guardian, a paper which often publishes views outside the Overton window.
2. How do you answer the assertion in the article, supported by OECD data, that the UK has in fact about the average number of homes per capita when compared with the rest of the developed world?
Like you, my position has been that we need more housing, but now I wonder. It's not as if we have 10,000s of people on the streets or living in temporary camps. The vast majority of people are housed right now. Arguably, building more houses would just lead to more empty houses.
The issue seems to be our wealth inequality, particularly between the over-45s and the under-45s, which distorts the housing market.
So, I (living on a pension, 100% equity in a large house) could afford to buy a 3-bed house locally, without a mortgage (but I could easily get a competitive mortgage if needed which I can service with the rental income), whereas a young working family on low-pay cannot get a look-in because they can't save enough to get a deposit.
Thus, controlling rents would seem to be a way to go. At implementation fix the level at the rents being charged at the time the bill was published. Freeze rents for 10 years and allow inflation to do its work.
Of course the BLT landlords would squeal as would free-marketeers, but let them squeal - they can always sell up if they think they can more money elsewhere.
In time, lower real rents mean a lower cost to the taxpayer for Housing Benefit and Universal Credit too as an added fiscal benefit (and indeed every new home-owner is a potential future Housing Benefit claimant avoided).
It's certainly more complicated than national supply/demand.
The number of spare bedrooms in the UK has increased by 2 million over the last decade, even while the population has increased. So, at the very least, we're building the wrong kind of housing in the wrong place.
You could plaster Benbecula with homes and it isn't going to do anything for the housing crisis in Manchester.
Spare bedrooms is an irrelevant statistic.
It's the circle of life that people get a home they need, get a bit older, their kids leave home, then they continue living until they die and someone else moves into the home who may need all those rooms once more. Until their kids get older and the cycle continues.
Build more 3 plus bedroom homes and the problem is solved. Then young adults and migrants alike can have a home of their own, while existing homeowners can continue to live where they've put down roots.
Or should old people be forced to live 3 couples sharing a 3 bedroom house rather than each having their own home?
Plus of course studies where people work from home are classed as spare rooms.
The total number of bedrooms available in the UK is increasing faster than the population.
If your concern is solving the housing crisis, building lots of half empty or entirely empty homes is not very clever.
On the subject of the census many 100,000 identify as being a jedi....you really think they believe in the force? Of course not....but you believe everyone who says jew, muslim or christian believes in the beard in the sky
"I find your lack of faith disturbing!" - Darth Vader.
I wonder what first attracted her to the 49 year old bachelor Marquess she married in 2009, with the castle and estate in Cheshire and country house in Norfolk and £60 million net worth?
In my home town (rural Scotland), the population is declining. A major local employer went bust in the early 2010s, and a large proportion of the Polish population, working on the farms, have headed back to Europe.
Despite this, pressure on public services has grown. The local cottage hospital closed, the GP is a disaster, roads falling apart. Despite a large fall in the number of children, it's very difficult for the schools to employ enough teachers.
There are also serious problems with flooding from a major river.
Yet there is an absolutely enormous house building programme going on (on the flood plain). The council has not invested in any additional services, and the new estates are entirely car dependent with no safe route to the town centre, a mile away. The houses are regularly flooded just from standing water.
While the new estates are LTNs themselves, the people living there rat run through neighbouring estates. House prices have now fallen significantly in this an relatively poor part of the country, eroding what little wealth people have here.
I suggest that it is entirely rational to oppose additional development. Meanwhile, the value of my flat in Edinburgh has increased by 35% in 5 years despite loads of new flats and rampant YIMBYism.
On the subject of the census many 100,000 identify as being a jedi....you really think they believe in the force? Of course not....but you believe everyone who says jew, muslim or christian believes in the beard in the sky
"I find your lack of faith disturbing!" - Darth Vader.
When Darth vader actually exists as a non fictional person I will worry till then I am good
I wonder what first attracted her to the 49 year old bachelor Marquess she married in 2009, with the castle and estate in Cheshire and country house in Norfolk and £60 million net worth?
I remember when I was teaching about Edward IV's reign and said, to an all-female class, 'I wonder what it was about this tall, handsome, muscular, fabulously wealthy and incredibly powerful man that attracted the birds?'
One of them fixed me with a steely glare and said, 'His intellect, sir.'
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Why is it?
QED
That's not an argument.
If its literally their backyard, they own it, they can veto people building on land they own.
If its not, its none of their bloody business.
In Japan NIMBYs have no more input whether their neighbours can build a home than they do whether their neighbours go to McDonalds, or the cinema, or buy a candlestick or anything else.
Because, again, its none of their bloody business.
In a democracy it is their business. That's why we hold elections and let representatives decide laws. We also don't treat the country as an undifferentiated mass but have various forms of local government.
In a liberal democracy its none of their business.
You're really a theocrat rather than a democrat.
No, I'm a liberal.
I support liberal democracy.
Telling other people what to do with their stuff is illiberal. That applies to land as much as everything else.
You seem quite keen to impose your rules in the entire country.
My father would put christian on the census he is a total atheist the census is worthless
I put myself down as a Muslim on the census......
You should stop putting yourself down.
Is that not an islamaphobic comment suggesting by putting muslim on the census he is putting himself down?
I didn't read it like that. Perhaps you need to grow a sense of humour.
I wasn't being entirely serious with the response, I do not believe for a moment ben is islamaphobic. I was merely showing how things can be taken out of context for the worse of discourse. I apologise to Ben for using him however as an example
On the subject of the census many 100,000 identify as being a jedi....you really think they believe in the force? Of course not....but you believe everyone who says jew, muslim or christian believes in the beard in the sky
It always saddens me when people (not you) use their religion as a joke. It should be the most important thing to you, a very personal link and promise to God. Not a casual witticism on a form.
@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.
The extent of tactical voting is important only for those of us betting on LibDem seat numbers.
He was fun and interesting. Sure he was provocative and right wing and possibly pro-Putin (tho quite subtle about it) - I can see why his views might have outraged people, but then @148grss views are outrageous to me, but I don’t want him cancelled, quite the opposite
However I expect you have a solid moderators’ reason for cancelling him, and if so fair enuff
I didn't ban him, so I don't know.
I just want reassurance people aren’t being banned for provocative opinions.
You must be new here.
That reassurance doesn't exist. As @RodCrosby , @isam and @MrEd can testify, having provocative opinions is pretty much the only thing that gets you reliably banned. PB operates on pub rules: if it pisses @OGH or his helpers off you get thrown out. If you want to complain that you are being cancelled I understand that the Spectator pays complainants to complain about viscious[1] things on Twitter.
[1] Yes I know it's "vicious". But Rob Liddle is really oily and oozes dribble, so, y'know...
I could point out many seem to feel my opinions are provocative yet I am still here
Provocative but always interesting and that is coming from a LD whom I know you hate.
I don't hate lib dems I merely said it was the only party I would vote to keep out, not the same thing
Badly worded by me. I always get the impression we would get on. I know I could never convert you, but I feel I could make you less anti.
My problem with your party is merely one of honesty, your candidates come across as we will say what we need to get elected and then do what we want when elected. All politicians do it however your party seems completely fine with candidates giving different messages in different constituencies as long as they get voted in. At least other parties get there candidates to mostly sell a common view.
I would like to discuss with you, but don't have time at the moment, but I disagree and I'm happy to at a later date. It is an accusations often put to the LDs. One of the issues, particularly in the past was the Liberals had a wide spectrum of seats unlike other parties. The priorities in Bermondsey are very different to Richmond or St Ives. The basic philosophy though is the same throughout. I would be amazed if you couldn't find some hypocrisy, but generally they are pretty consistent.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
I take issue with almost all of these rejoin polls. None of them stipulate the scenario and the rules for our re entry. Most seem to be predicating on our old membership rights. But those have long gone, and are not coming back. I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
Any rejoin will require us to give up our ability to Brexit again. The EU isn't going to let us do the hokey-cokey ad nauseum.
Telling people they can never, ever leave would kill a rejoin referendum stone dead.
A future prospective Conservative Government could offer a rejoin referendum. Yes they would jettison uber-Leavers to some mad party of the right, but they would more than make up those losses from centrist Lib-Lab switchers.How about former -Remainer Alexander Johnson leading the charge?
Because of their base, Labour couldn't offer such a prospectus.
If the Tories pushed rejoin they would be down to single figures, as they were in 2019 in the EU elections.
Most of their voters would defect to Farage's party who would become the main opposition to Labour (most of whose voters would still not vote Tory as they are economically leftwing).
They might win over a few voters from the LDs but that is it. The only parties whose base would mostly agree with a rejoin policy at present are the LDs, SNP and Greens
I am.not suggesting for 2024, but maybe 2028.
They would still get replaced by Reform.
The only party who could ever advocate rejoin the full EU or even just EEA and free movement again is Labour but then probably only under PR and reliant on LD and Green support to govern. Under FPTP the redwall marginal seats would veto it.
The Tories might then eventually accept that in 2 or 3 decades if their voters by then also accepted it but they would never be the ones delivering it
Two or three decades means I won't have to worry about it. But the absurdity of Brexit will eventually dawn on the majority of Conservative voters. With people of my age and older dead and buried, more objective younger voters will realise the folly of my generation.
I’m still hoping that I shall live to see again what I have worked for all my adult life; Britain taking its rightful place at the heart of Europe.
Here’s one doing a backflip without all those huge hydraulics that Boston dynamics uses. So it looks much more like a human… even down to the way it gets it a bit wrong
@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.
The extent of tactical voting is important only for those of us betting on LibDem seat numbers.
He was fun and interesting. Sure he was provocative and right wing and possibly pro-Putin (tho quite subtle about it) - I can see why his views might have outraged people, but then @148grss views are outrageous to me, but I don’t want him cancelled, quite the opposite
However I expect you have a solid moderators’ reason for cancelling him, and if so fair enuff
I didn't ban him, so I don't know.
I just want reassurance people aren’t being banned for provocative opinions.
You must be new here.
That reassurance doesn't exist. As @RodCrosby , @isam and @MrEd can testify, having provocative opinions is pretty much the only thing that gets you reliably banned. PB operates on pub rules: if it pisses @OGH or his helpers off you get thrown out. If you want to complain that you are being cancelled I understand that the Spectator pays complainants to complain about viscious[1] things on Twitter.
[1] Yes I know it's "vicious". But Rob Liddle is really oily and oozes dribble, so, y'know...
I could point out many seem to feel my opinions are provocative yet I am still here
Provocative but always interesting and that is coming from a LD whom I know you hate.
I don't hate lib dems I merely said it was the only party I would vote to keep out, not the same thing
Badly worded by me. I always get the impression we would get on. I know I could never convert you, but I feel I could make you less anti.
My problem with your party is merely one of honesty, your candidates come across as we will say what we need to get elected and then do what we want when elected. All politicians do it however your party seems completely fine with candidates giving different messages in different constituencies as long as they get voted in. At least other parties get there candidates to mostly sell a common view.
I would like to discuss with you, but don't have time at the moment, but I disagree and I'm happy to at a later date. It is an accusations often put to the LDs. One of the issues, particularly in the past was the Liberals had a wide spectrum of seats unlike other parties. The priorities in Bermondsey are very different to Richmond or St Ives. The basic philosophy though is the same throughout. I would be amazed if you couldn't find some hypocrisy, but generally they are pretty consistent.
Comments
I support liberal democracy.
Telling other people what to do with their stuff is illiberal. That applies to land as much as everything else.
I also think that many people are not really saying yes to rejoin they are reacting to how bad the last few years have been and deciding that it’s leaving the EU that was the problem, neatly forgetting that the inflation shock was down to Ukraine, and paying for Covid dwarfs the losses of leaving.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted remain and would rejoin, but the polling is not being honest.
2. How do you answer the assertion in the article, supported by OECD data, that the UK has in fact about the average number of homes per capita when compared with the rest of the developed world?
Like you, my position has been that we need more housing, but now I wonder. It's not as if we have 10,000s of people on the streets or living in temporary camps. The vast majority of people are housed right now. Arguably, building more houses would just lead to more empty houses.
The issue seems to be our wealth inequality, particularly between the over-45s and the under-45s, which distorts the housing market.
So, I (living on a pension, 100% equity in a large house) could afford to buy a 3-bed house locally, without a mortgage (but I could easily get a competitive mortgage if needed which I can service with the rental income), whereas a young working family on low-pay cannot get a look-in because they can't save enough to get a deposit.
Thus, controlling rents would seem to be a way to go. At implementation fix the level at the rents being charged at the time the bill was published. Freeze rents for 10 years and allow inflation to do its work.
Of course the BLT landlords would squeal as would free-marketeers, but let them squeal - they can always sell up if they think they can more money elsewhere.
In time, lower real rents mean a lower cost to the taxpayer for Housing Benefit and Universal Credit too as an added fiscal benefit (and indeed every new home-owner is a potential future Housing Benefit claimant avoided).
Visas come from central government, not local ones.
Overwhelming majority of taxes go to the Treasury, not local.
Give me one good reason why central government issue the visas, take the taxes, but then not pay for the population growth it has caused?
Why should a minority of home buyers face the bill for the government's policies?
Local government should get a block grant from the Treasury for every new house built.
🚨 Sunak to Tory MPs tonight:
‘We are in the fight of our lives.
This battle will define us, when the going got tough, when the polls were against us did we dig deep and fight or did we turn in on ourselves?’
Narrator: Folks, they turned in on themselves...
It can't afford to please the WASPI women.
Over 50% in the UK still believe in the God of Abraham too, combining Christians, Muslims and Jews
1922 Committee just gave Rishi Sunak a full minute of desk banging.
@sturdyAlex
That means he has six weeks maximum. Them’s the desk banging rules.
Let us examine the evidence, shall we?
Theresa May -> "desk banging", 12 December -> vote of no confidence, January 15
Boris Johnson -> "desk banging", 6 Jun -> forced to resign, July 8
Liz Truss -> "desk banging", 12 October -> forced to resign, October 20
I then played with Chatgpt. It produced a thousand words of fluff around the subject. No detail, no references, no actual science. I can see why it scares the crap out of our resident journalist - it seems competent at spitting out fluff already. But for serious scientific argument? I could use the basic structure and modify, but to be honest I wrote the draft intro over a couple of hours and it includes around twenty accurate citations.
It may (and surely will get better). But at the moment it’s miles away from replacing me (long may that continue…)
https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/news/land-use-zones-in-japan/
The number of spare bedrooms in the UK has increased by 2 million over the last decade, even while the population has increased. So, at the very least, we're building the wrong kind of housing in the wrong place.
You could plaster Benbecula with homes and it isn't going to do anything for the housing crisis in Manchester.
Marginal differences make a massive difference.
To re-quote Dickens:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”
Saying you have "about" enough ≠ you have enough.
France has about the same population as us, but about 9 million extra homes. That's the shortfall we need to address.
Telling people they can never, ever leave would kill a rejoin referendum stone dead.
But you’re still like the economist who prefers his theory over reality.
There is currently no money for central government to provide adequate services.
At the same time there is market failure in the housing market such that big developers can make significant profit building fairly crap homes. Forcing the developers to also pay for services intervenes to address that market failure in a pretty blunt way, but it seems like the least worst option at the moment.
And it’s not a tax on new homeowners. You can bet that those new builds will be priced at whatever the market can bear regardless, so this isn’t a cost that will be passed onto buyers. Instead it is bringing private profit back into the public sphere. Which is a good thing right now given how broken our public services are.
It was profoundly frightening when politicians started to speak of 'price caps' for milk and bread, because that would have had precisely the same effect on food - when at the moment the competitiveness of our food market and the relative cheapness of our food as a result is the envy of most of the world.
'Rent controls' would work exactly the same way. It would result in big providers ending up with a virtual monopoly, and the price of housing would increase over the long term. Just another effing stupid socialist misery-infliction idea. When all is said and done, there's a very cosy relationship between corporations and socialist policies.
That's like saying there's a shortfall of dentistry, so the solution is to tax dentists more in response.
We need millions more houses. Free the market and allow construction to happen and we can solve it.
Central government needs to own up to the consequences of its policies. If it gives millions of visas that's perfectly fine but then it needs to pay for the infrastructure, not expect young people buying a house to pay for its choices.
Because of their base, Labour couldn't offer such a prospectus.
I can probably dig out the paper if you're interested.
One of the side-projects my team is (or was- IT director has reallocated our time) working on was a background researcher 'agent'. It did all sorts of things to find you good references, relevant information, well cited papers etc. Didn't 'do the research' as such, but it sure gave you a good head start in just 30-60 seconds compared to doing it by yourself or asking an RA to do it. Even had a slider for "This is just casual background info" to "I really, really want accurate information" depending how much time/money you wanted to spend getting your result.
But now - cast aside as someone needs an Excel imported in a different way. Woo.
Vi, count all the puns for me, please.
Most of their voters would defect to Farage's party who would become the main opposition to Labour (most of whose voters would still not vote Tory as they are economically leftwing).
They might win over a few voters from the LDs but that is it. The only parties whose base would mostly agree with a rejoin policy at present are the LDs, SNP and Greens
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/religion/bulletins/religionenglandandwales/census2021
https://jonn.substack.com/p/were-all-looking-for-the-guy-who
Personally, I don't blame the BTL landlords - successive governments have made it financially attractive to create that class of investor. If we'd had rent controls all along we wouldn't have had the BTL boom.
Secondly, I support the need for continued new housing because the population continues to grow. What level of homes per person we need though is the question - presumably not much above 500 per 1000 people, given most of us still chose to live as couples or families.
The article you link to says the stats in the Guardian piece are out of date but it does not give us the updated figures, so what can we make of that?
The only party who could ever advocate rejoin the full EU or even just EEA and free movement again is Labour but then probably only under PR and reliant on LD and Green support to govern. Under FPTP the redwall marginal seats would veto it.
The Tories might then eventually accept that in 2 or 3 decades if their voters by then also accepted it but they would never be the ones delivering it
It's the circle of life that people get a home they need, get a bit older, their kids leave home, then they continue living until they die and someone else moves into the home who may need all those rooms once more. Until their kids get older and the cycle continues.
Build more 3 plus bedroom homes and the problem is solved. Then young adults and migrants alike can have a home of their own, while existing homeowners can continue to live where they've put down roots.
Or should old people be forced to live 3 couples sharing a 3 bedroom house rather than each having their own home?
Plus of course studies where people work from home are classed as spare rooms.
A bedroom for us, a bedroom for use as an office for working from home, and a bedroom for people to visit us.
It's definitely a luxury for us to be able to afford this, rather than a small one bedroom flat, but is that such a bad thing? It will improve our quality of life to have the extra rooms, and so that would seem like something governments should support rather than fight against.
It’s coming
https://twitter.com/a_toots/status/1770448101771239691
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/20/rishi-sunak-urges-his-mps-to-present-unified-front-before-local-elections
Not in chez BJO
But if those houses are built without adequate services and infrastructure we will simply create another problem, just as significant for the future prosperity of the country.
So the services are needed. If there is a better solution than making developers contribute to paying for them I’m all ears. But I haven’t heard one so far.
And I’m not at all convinced that this tax on housing is the bottleneck in the supply.
One aspect of USA society which is coming out of the third world.
It's not been unusual for many Americans to self-ration even lifesaving medication such as insulin, or suffer untreated, because they cannot access or afford it.
If your concern is solving the housing crisis, building lots of half empty or entirely empty homes is not very clever.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/7th_Marquis_of_Colmondeley_2.jpg
In my home town (rural Scotland), the population is declining. A major local employer went bust in the early 2010s, and a large proportion of the Polish population, working on the farms, have headed back to Europe.
Despite this, pressure on public services has grown. The local cottage hospital closed, the GP is a disaster, roads falling apart. Despite a large fall in the number of children, it's very difficult for the schools to employ enough teachers.
There are also serious problems with flooding from a major river.
Yet there is an absolutely enormous house building programme going on (on the flood plain). The council has not invested in any additional services, and the new estates are entirely car dependent with no safe route to the town centre, a mile away. The houses are regularly flooded just from standing water.
While the new estates are LTNs themselves, the people living there rat run through neighbouring estates. House prices have now fallen significantly in this an relatively poor part of the country, eroding what little wealth people have here.
I suggest that it is entirely rational to oppose additional development. Meanwhile, the value of my flat in Edinburgh has increased by 35% in 5 years despite loads of new flats and rampant YIMBYism.
One of them fixed me with a steely glare and said, 'His intellect, sir.'
Here’s one doing a backflip without all those huge hydraulics that Boston dynamics uses. So it looks much more like a human… even down to the way it gets it a bit wrong
https://x.com/unitreerobotics/status/1770399004024852754?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
If you’re aren’t creeped out by this you have no fearful human soul. They are coming