"It really helps to start a couple of hundred years ago. If you go back before the industrial revolution .. if you go back before deep water navigation .... the United Kingdom or as it was known 'England' really did not matter all that much. It was a relatively smallish population on a relatively largish island off the coast of Europe and most of the mainland countries especially France had far larger populations and were far more significant.
But when deep water navigation was invented by the Iberians ..." and so it continues.
That's a history out of Peanuts, written by Charlie Brown, for Readers' Digest Simplified Version, for use in the Kindergarten.
But I see he's a "political writer".
I don't see why should we take this person even slightly seriously, if he makes so many basic errors on the most basic of basics. Sorry.
Did he really just say that London was a Europe-only financial hub since we joined the EU?
Dear Lord, the man is an ignoramus beyond redemption.
"...the installation of a 2m x 1m skylight on a flat roof to make a dingy flat lighter generated an astonishing fuss. The redoubtable red-trousered resisters approached this small pane of glass – visible only to the occupant – with all the fire and fury required to thwart a nuclear power plant."
Watching the government try and actually make planning easier, is going to be funny to watch.
I wish them all the luck in the World, housing is undoubtedly the UK’s single biggest issue at the moment, but the NIMBY and developer interests are very well entrenched indeed.
Coming down heavy on second home owners, especially ones kept empty for much of the year, is a quicker way to get more housing units onto the market.
Planning is IMHO a relatively small part of the problem, and if they think more relaxed planning is going to resolve the housing crisis by itself, they're in for a disappointment.
The ugly truth is that housebuilding has outpaced population and household growth over the last 20 years, and house prices and rents have gone through the roof regardless.
So a bonfire of planning regulations could mean you piss off all the Green-belt NIMBYs for no discernible benefit for your core vote in the cities (even if the counter-factual would be even worse). Politically disastrous.
You would need to build an extreme volume of high density housing in the cities so that you entirely disrupt the market there. That might be possible with council housing as in the 1960s, but even then I assume there isn't enough capacity in the construction sector to make it happen.
The problem is that we don't need the kind of housing developers want to build (four bedroom houses in the green belt) and we do need stuff housing developers don't want to build (Viennese style public housing flats). Sure, some of what people call NIMBYism is that - but a lot of it is also "yes, I want my kids to be able to afford a house here too - but you're not planning to build that kind of house so why should I support you?".
In St A, where I live, we have had a load of luxury flats go up and a number of new housing blocks - all private development, all very pricey. That won't lower rents or house prices.
If supply gets near demand, then prices will fall.
There's a similar debate in the US about this.
Bottom line is that all the evidence tends to show the increase in supply leads to lower prices (which ought to be obvious). But when you have inefficient markets, regional variations, and a large mismatch between new build and demand growth, it's not at all obvious to the individual.
As you say, the key is getting enough new housing built. The rest is just detail.
"...the installation of a 2m x 1m skylight on a flat roof to make a dingy flat lighter generated an astonishing fuss. The redoubtable red-trousered resisters approached this small pane of glass – visible only to the occupant – with all the fire and fury required to thwart a nuclear power plant."
Watching the government try and actually make planning easier, is going to be funny to watch.
I wish them all the luck in the World, housing is undoubtedly the UK’s single biggest issue at the moment, but the NIMBY and developer interests are very well entrenched indeed.
Coming down heavy on second home owners, especially ones kept empty for much of the year, is a quicker way to get more housing units onto the market.
Planning is IMHO a relatively small part of the problem, and if they think more relaxed planning is going to resolve the housing crisis by itself, they're in for a disappointment.
The ugly truth is that housebuilding has outpaced population and household growth over the last 20 years, and house prices and rents have gone through the roof regardless.
So a bonfire of planning regulations could mean you piss off all the Green-belt NIMBYs for no discernible benefit for your core vote in the cities (even if the counter-factual would be even worse). Politically disastrous.
You would need to build an extreme volume of high density housing in the cities so that you entirely disrupt the market there. That might be possible with council housing as in the 1960s, but even then I assume there isn't enough capacity in the construction sector to make it happen.
The problem is that we don't need the kind of housing developers want to build (four bedroom houses in the green belt) and we do need stuff housing developers don't want to build (Viennese style public housing flats). Sure, some of what people call NIMBYism is that - but a lot of it is also "yes, I want my kids to be able to afford a house here too - but you're not planning to build that kind of house so why should I support you?".
In St A, where I live, we have had a load of luxury flats go up and a number of new housing blocks - all private development, all very pricey. That won't lower rents or house prices.
If supply gets near demand, then prices will fall.
Housing isn't a commodity like that, though. Because the option is live somewhere or be homeless, and that second one isn't an option. The other issue is private landlords and developers with rent seeking / profit motive thoughts. If a flat is newly built and gets bought by a landlord, that landlord will need it to not only pay the cost of the mortgage but also to make a profit. So the rent is higher than it needs to be, but the landlord has a systemic advantage at buying the property quickly because he is asset rich, which can be financialised into capital. Whereas a first time buyer is not asset or capital rich. A similar issue with developers - if their profits are protected by law (which they are) they can argue that making a large 4-5 bedroom house is more efficient for their profits than building a single occupancy home or flat, and only build those and keep the prices high where only landlords or rich professionals can afford to purchase them.
If the government don't want to build public housing the other option would be to just scrap buy to let, meaning that it is harder to commodify newly bought properties by renting them out. Or by introducing more protections for tenants. Because if you make the market worse for landlords it doesn't destroy the property, it just makes it unprofitable and therefore the landlord will sell - increasing supply that way without the group of people who increase rent seeking behaviour into the market (private landlords).
In places that do not have a housing shortage, you can see the lower prices, and the landlords having to compete on quality.
If you try and force landlords out of existence, you may satisfy part of the demand for buying properties, but the result will be even more sky high prices on the rental properties that remain.
Housing is a commodity - an essential one. If you increase supply to the point that there is an excess, prices will tumble.
Thanks @148grss for a really interesting piece. Lots of good detail on the results.
I'm a fellow lefty but firmly a democrat and have reluctantly accepted that our country isn't currently as left wing as I am.
Your language of bullying Labour leaves me wondering - what importance does democracy have in your vision? Do you accept the idea that unless the Green party can sell their policies to enough of the public they shouldn't run the country? And that, acknowledging the massive flaws with FPTP, a very centrist Labour party is the only party with democratic legitimacy right now?
Bullying is the colloquial term I use for organising, campaigning against and lobbying. And the left, unlike the capital rich right, needs to do that from grass roots rather than one rich person getting a meeting with a minister.
And as for democratic legitimacy, part of my argument is that in the UK that legitimacy is weak - the vast majority of people did not vote for this Labour party. If you want a majority of voters you could do so on a coalition of Lab/LD/Green (roughly 52% of the vote), which in my mind would be to the left of this government. You could also find a majority in Lab/Con/Ref - which is what we don't want to happen but if you listen to the likes of Blair is more than likely what this government will do - pander to the right.
I think democracy is good - that's why I'm an anarchist. In my ideal world I do not like the idea of representative democracy because it disempowers the many in favour of a few. Direct democracy is more democratic. Within the Overton window of what is possible, it's also why I prefer PR - a PR government would be that Red/Yellow/Green coalition above; which would be much more left wing. I'm not going to use my one picture to post this graph, but on Yougovs twitter we can see some polling of what the country may have done (with the caveat that hypothetical polling is always problematic) if they didn't have to vote tactically:
At the end of the day I think voting is probably one of the least important aspects of democratic engagement under FPTP. Engage in democracy by emailing your MP. Engage in democracy by signing petitions. Engage in democracy by protesting the government when it passes an unpopular policy. Engage in democracy by, in my words, "bullying" the government to be better. There's a good example going around online now - people in the locker room just asking Keir Starmer why he isn't doing more on Palestine. They aren't being aggressive, they aren't being rude, but they are asking someone in power to do something and it clearly is making him uncomfortable. And that's good - people with power should be uncomfortable when presented with people who don't have power making demands on their power.
FWIW my views, policy wise, aren't a million miles from yours. I'm quite left-wing in many ways. I'd be quite happy, in theory, to see a Lab/LD/Green coalition. I would've been pleased, in theory, to see the LDs become the official opposition.
I do find the enduring splitting of the non-Tory 'progressive' vote frustrating, particularly the factionalism over on the left. It's all a bit Judean People's Front/People's Front of Judea for me. It's something the Tories pragmatically avoided until Big Nige came along and blew everything apart, we should try and minimise it on the left. But we don't.
After the last 14 years I just want competent government by people who are more like me and the majority of people in this country, not poshos and trustafarian SPADs and insiders constantly playing out psychodramas rooted in what happened at Eton or Winchester or wherever, using the rest of us, and the services we rely on, as pawns in their petty power games while shovelling money into their and their donor's pockets.
I don't get this obsession on the left with Gaza/Israel/Palestine/Judea and Samaria (delete according to preference) at all. I don't favour any side. It's a terrible conflict with its roots going back millennia, and since 1948 both sides have committed terrible acts. We could write a few thousand words on the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement and stroke our chins about the trauma of the Holocaust and the need for a Jewish homeland. We could cogitate on whether Israel is essentially a white settler state imposed in the Muslim heartland. Fascinating, illuminating, but it won't change anything.
It needs a strong international community to impose a two state solution. That doesn't look very likely in the near future. But all we can do is work towards that. This split let IDS back in. It probably got Magic Grandad back in.
Labour needs a good balance of the working-class and middle-class people who make up the majority of the people who live in this country to identify with it, and the policies it puts forward. It cannot be captured by the esoteric fantasies of the idealistically pure, naïve theorists like Owen Jones and the like. People who've never been skint in their life. Most people, sadly but there you go, don't care about Gaza. They don't care about the Uighurs. Or Ukraine. Or whoever's butchering each other in failing states across the world. Making issues such as this at the heart of a policy offer doesn't appeal to most people. Yes, our government should do what it can in the context of the international community. But splitting the left vote on this stuff is insane. What, really, can Starmer do about Palestine? Not a lot.
I took a brief break from the proceedings in Parliament today to speak on behalf of residents in Great Barr at the Planning Inquiry in relation to the proposed development at Peak House Farm."
LOL
Someone should start a book on how many Lab MPs will be caught opposing development in their own constituencies in the next 12 months.
@Eabhal, you only have to look at the stats on how many 20-35 year olds are living with their parents in comparison to previous decades to see that there is massive pent up demand for housing.
These people deserve their own homes. I bet many of them would love to move into a tiny new build apartment - it would be an improvement on having to squeeze into their teenage bedroom in their parent’s house.
The number of households in the UK is being artificially constrained because the people that would love to buy their own property and start a family can’t - the properties don’t exist for them to move into. That is in turn having knock on effects on when people are choosing to have children & causing other social tensions.
This looks madly brilliant. "Miss Merkel; Morte al castello"
OK, this is quite something - Italian TV network Rai2 running a comedy whodunnit 'if Angela Merkel investigated crime in her retirement.' What's next: Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson as odd couple comedy wheeler-dealers? https://x.com/MarkGaleotti/status/1810970026662383805
I can deffo see Theresa May doing this, solving crimes in a small English town with good commuter links to London. With Boris Johnson as the eccentric lovable rogue with a Jaaaag and a cravat who seduces the laydeez but never pays for a round. And Rishi Patel as the comedy sidekick who hacks into mainframes...badly. There will be a duck pond and a pub with rafters and a collection of foreign banknotes pinned to the all. Jumpers for goalposts, jumpers for goalposts...
@Eabhal, you only have to look at the stats on how many 20-35 year olds are living with their parents in comparison to previous decades to see that there is massive pent up demand for housing.
These people deserve their own homes. I bet many of them would love to move into a tiny new build apartment - it would be an improvement on having to squeeze into their teenage bedroom in their parent’s house.
The number of households in the UK is being artificially constrained because the people that would love to buy their own property and start a family can’t - the properties don’t exist for them to move into. That is in turn having knock on effects on when people are choosing to have children & causing other social tensions.
Well said.
The households figure says absolutely nothing about demand. Anyone who uses it is being wilfully ignorant of the truth, or lying. Not sure which is worse.
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
If building more properties would decrease the value of housing - that housing has to be made without profit in mind. It must be aimed at those who cannot afford housing in a "free market". It must set rents lower than market rates to influence the rest of the market.
We cannot do this in this country without fucking over a huge number of people because we replaced real terms wage growth with asset growth - those who bought properties in the late 80s - late 90s have seen wages stagnate but can rely on their house being flogged off at some point paying for their retirement. If you collapse the housing market, those people are suddenly fucked. So any solution to the housing crisis must come with redistribution and social safety nets in mind.
This looks madly brilliant. "Miss Merkel; Morte al castello"
OK, this is quite something - Italian TV network Rai2 running a comedy whodunnit 'if Angela Merkel investigated crime in her retirement.' What's next: Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson as odd couple comedy wheeler-dealers? https://x.com/MarkGaleotti/status/1810970026662383805
I can deffo see Theresa May doing this, solving crimes in a small English town with good commuter links to London. With Boris Johnson as the eccentric lovable rogue with a Jaaaag and a cravat who seduces the laydeez but never pays for a round. And Rishi Patel as the comedy sidekick who hacks into mainframes...badly. There will be a duck pond and a pub with rafters and a collection of foreign banknotes pinned to the all. Jumpers for goalposts, jumpers for goalposts...
When I was fitting up Theresa May as a future Churchwarden or Mothers' Union Enrolling Member recently, or some community pillar, I admit I did consider adding a potential Miss Marple to the list.
Thanks all for the kind words - I know I have a tendency to write long comments here, so thought it best to do a full header to explain my relatively happy feelings from the outcomes of the election.
I can’t stay here long today due to work, but to answer a few questions:
1) I think Bristol Central shows that Greens will mostly be targeting urban seats - whilst we do have a surprising amount of support from otherwise conservative voters in rural areas, that is not where our members are from. On the other hand I know we won those seats without hiding our lefty credentials, so maybe some of those voters are more open to left wing policies than previously thought and just have a tribal hatred of Labour.
2) On tactical voting, there is a graph floating around that I did wonder whether I should include here and write a bit about showing that if people didn’t have to vote tactically the share for Labour would be less, not more. So the tactical anti-Tory vote was already part of why Labour did so well.
3) On policy specific questions - I’m kinda tired of saying here that I disagree with the underlying assumptions of neoliberalism where private investment and balancing the budget are the most important things. When it comes to funding and taxation and such I hold a position much closer to MMT. When it comes to “how do we afford x” that is my position.
4) On NATO specifically - it’s currently a necessary evil and arguably preferable to the alternative (much like my view of the EU).
5) My name comes from the assigned username I was given at university - random numbers and letters that I still remember and therefore use.
Thanks. The nearer a socialist alternative gets to actual power, the more it will be examined.
I think the chances that voters will vote consistently for MMT economics, once it is explained, in a manifesto that could be that of a governing party is about Zero. It will have the appearance of being the mirror image of Reform's economics.
Just suppose for a moment that the chief underlying assumption of what you call 'neoliberalism' is that more people on planet earth should have more access to rising prosperity and stuff like water, food, housing and education and the possibility of living in a reasonably free and peaceful society? And that the ways to achieve it with a deeply imperfect humanity is that everyone should have a vote, and empirically based policies are the chief instrument of change.
That isn't the chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism. The chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism is that it is better for things to be in the hands of the private sector and that a rising tide lifts all boats - it is trickle down economics. And it doesn't work. Neoliberalism doesn't really care about democracy - the first real testing ground for neoliberalism was Chile under Pinochet. It was packaged for the Western audience, who were used to things like autonomy and freedom, by suggesting it was a freedom based ideology - but freedom for the market and the capitalist only.
If you are a worker or poor - your freedoms reduced under neoliberalism. Establishment political parties looked more similar, unions were crushed, the social safety net was deconstructed. Multiple states went from owning their own assets and being able to make money off of them and subsidise any losses with taxation and debt, to selling off their assets, losing long term revenue, and creating a layer of rent seekers in between those assets and the public who depend on those services. All it is is a parasitic transference of wealth from the poor to the rich - because to get into that layer of rent seekers you had to have money already to buy them up when they were being sold off (usually on the cheap).
Thanks. 'neoliberalism' as a word has a problem in that there appears to be little or no common ground about its meaning, except that it is broadly a free market capitalist movement with a preference for a smaller state.
Well, we live in a very large state economy, with an overwhelming weight of regulation and law applying to every bit of human activity from the local Duck Pond Charity to the doings of BP.
Welfare state, education, NHS, all in state managed hands. We are nowhere close to your sort of neoliberal society, nor are we going t be.
Thanks @148grss for a really interesting piece. Lots of good detail on the results.
I'm a fellow lefty but firmly a democrat and have reluctantly accepted that our country isn't currently as left wing as I am.
Your language of bullying Labour leaves me wondering - what importance does democracy have in your vision? Do you accept the idea that unless the Green party can sell their policies to enough of the public they shouldn't run the country? And that, acknowledging the massive flaws with FPTP, a very centrist Labour party is the only party with democratic legitimacy right now?
Bullying is the colloquial term I use for organising, campaigning against and lobbying. And the left, unlike the capital rich right, needs to do that from grass roots rather than one rich person getting a meeting with a minister.
And as for democratic legitimacy, part of my argument is that in the UK that legitimacy is weak - the vast majority of people did not vote for this Labour party. If you want a majority of voters you could do so on a coalition of Lab/LD/Green (roughly 52% of the vote), which in my mind would be to the left of this government. You could also find a majority in Lab/Con/Ref - which is what we don't want to happen but if you listen to the likes of Blair is more than likely what this government will do - pander to the right.
I think democracy is good - that's why I'm an anarchist. In my ideal world I do not like the idea of representative democracy because it disempowers the many in favour of a few. Direct democracy is more democratic. Within the Overton window of what is possible, it's also why I prefer PR - a PR government would be that Red/Yellow/Green coalition above; which would be much more left wing. I'm not going to use my one picture to post this graph, but on Yougovs twitter we can see some polling of what the country may have done (with the caveat that hypothetical polling is always problematic) if they didn't have to vote tactically:
At the end of the day I think voting is probably one of the least important aspects of democratic engagement under FPTP. Engage in democracy by emailing your MP. Engage in democracy by signing petitions. Engage in democracy by protesting the government when it passes an unpopular policy. Engage in democracy by, in my words, "bullying" the government to be better. There's a good example going around online now - people in the locker room just asking Keir Starmer why he isn't doing more on Palestine. They aren't being aggressive, they aren't being rude, but they are asking someone in power to do something and it clearly is making him uncomfortable. And that's good - people with power should be uncomfortable when presented with people who don't have power making demands on their power.
Thanks, makes sense, I agree, with the caveat that whilst Labour's legitimacy is weak it is stronger than the alternatives. Which in itself is a problem - weak legitimacy opens the doors to antidemocratic alternatives.
Wholeheartedly agree that democracy is (much) more than voting, good reminder, thanks.
@Eabhal, you only have to look at the stats on how many 20-35 year olds are living with their parents in comparison to previous decades to see that there is massive pent up demand for housing.
These people deserve their own homes. I bet many of them would love to move into a tiny new build apartment - it would be an improvement on having to squeeze into their teenage bedroom in their parent’s house.
The number of households in the UK is being artificially constrained because the people that would love to buy their own property and start a family can’t - the properties don’t exist for them to move into. That is in turn having knock on effects on when people are choosing to have children & causing other social tensions.
I agree. But the private sector has failed at providing this and is incapable of doing so. Whereas going full Vienna would solve this problem. Decent public housing with amenities literally on the doorstep.
"...the installation of a 2m x 1m skylight on a flat roof to make a dingy flat lighter generated an astonishing fuss. The redoubtable red-trousered resisters approached this small pane of glass – visible only to the occupant – with all the fire and fury required to thwart a nuclear power plant."
Watching the government try and actually make planning easier, is going to be funny to watch.
I wish them all the luck in the World, housing is undoubtedly the UK’s single biggest issue at the moment, but the NIMBY and developer interests are very well entrenched indeed.
Coming down heavy on second home owners, especially ones kept empty for much of the year, is a quicker way to get more housing units onto the market.
Planning is IMHO a relatively small part of the problem, and if they think more relaxed planning is going to resolve the housing crisis by itself, they're in for a disappointment.
The ugly truth is that housebuilding has outpaced population and household growth over the last 20 years, and house prices and rents have gone through the roof regardless.
So a bonfire of planning regulations could mean you piss off all the Green-belt NIMBYs for no discernible benefit for your core vote in the cities (even if the counter-factual would be even worse). Politically disastrous.
You would need to build an extreme volume of high density housing in the cities so that you entirely disrupt the market there. That might be possible with council housing as in the 1960s, but even then I assume there isn't enough capacity in the construction sector to make it happen.
That is an outright lie.
The truth is that housebuilding has not outpaced population growth and demographic change in the past 20 years, as you damn well know, but you keep repeating this absurd lie.
There isn't a single county in the entire country with sufficient empty housing. Because demographic changes and population growth mean we have insufficient housing.
Incidentally we've had insufficient housing for a long time, even if we did get a small period where housing outpaced demographic changes and population growth, we'd need much more of that and for longer to reverse the housing shortage. Its like reducing the waiting list time from 24 months to 23 months, its simply less bad it doesn't mean problem is solved.
Please don't call me a liar. I'm just posting the stats published by the government.
It might be that they are lying of course. If that's the case, you should send your MP an email and complain.
England population growth, 2001 - 2021: 14% England households growth, 2001 - 2021: 14% England dwelling stock growth, 2001 - 2021: 19%
Woah, tyranny of percentages. The fact that X has increased by 14% and Y has increased by 14% does not mean that they have increased by the same absolute amount. To give a made-up example that I have just made up:
Households: Increase of 3.1 million Dwellings: Increase of 3.7 million
Good response but it may be tautological: you can't have a household without a dwelling. Try change in number of people vs change in number of occupants per square foot. That will take account of people being squeezed into spare rooms and the really weird phenom of renting part of a room (ie shared rooms) which I saw in London before I gave up
Conversely, try change in the number of homeless, although that's an unreliable stat I think.
Thanks all for the kind words - I know I have a tendency to write long comments here, so thought it best to do a full header to explain my relatively happy feelings from the outcomes of the election.
I can’t stay here long today due to work, but to answer a few questions:
1) I think Bristol Central shows that Greens will mostly be targeting urban seats - whilst we do have a surprising amount of support from otherwise conservative voters in rural areas, that is not where our members are from. On the other hand I know we won those seats without hiding our lefty credentials, so maybe some of those voters are more open to left wing policies than previously thought and just have a tribal hatred of Labour.
2) On tactical voting, there is a graph floating around that I did wonder whether I should include here and write a bit about showing that if people didn’t have to vote tactically the share for Labour would be less, not more. So the tactical anti-Tory vote was already part of why Labour did so well.
3) On policy specific questions - I’m kinda tired of saying here that I disagree with the underlying assumptions of neoliberalism where private investment and balancing the budget are the most important things. When it comes to funding and taxation and such I hold a position much closer to MMT. When it comes to “how do we afford x” that is my position.
4) On NATO specifically - it’s currently a necessary evil and arguably preferable to the alternative (much like my view of the EU).
5) My name comes from the assigned username I was given at university - random numbers and letters that I still remember and therefore use.
Thanks. The nearer a socialist alternative gets to actual power, the more it will be examined.
I think the chances that voters will vote consistently for MMT economics, once it is explained, in a manifesto that could be that of a governing party is about Zero. It will have the appearance of being the mirror image of Reform's economics.
Just suppose for a moment that the chief underlying assumption of what you call 'neoliberalism' is that more people on planet earth should have more access to rising prosperity and stuff like water, food, housing and education and the possibility of living in a reasonably free and peaceful society? And that the ways to achieve it with a deeply imperfect humanity is that everyone should have a vote, and empirically based policies are the chief instrument of change.
That isn't the chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism. The chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism is that it is better for things to be in the hands of the private sector and that a rising tide lifts all boats - it is trickle down economics. And it doesn't work. Neoliberalism doesn't really care about democracy - the first real testing ground for neoliberalism was Chile under Pinochet. It was packaged for the Western audience, who were used to things like autonomy and freedom, by suggesting it was a freedom based ideology - but freedom for the market and the capitalist only.
If you are a worker or poor - your freedoms reduced under neoliberalism. Establishment political parties looked more similar, unions were crushed, the social safety net was deconstructed. Multiple states went from owning their own assets and being able to make money off of them and subsidise any losses with taxation and debt, to selling off their assets, losing long term revenue, and creating a layer of rent seekers in between those assets and the public who depend on those services. All it is is a parasitic transference of wealth from the poor to the rich - because to get into that layer of rent seekers you had to have money already to buy them up when they were being sold off (usually on the cheap).
This is the debate which started in the UK under Thatcher. It's an almost completely pointless one, as you're arguing one extreme against the other, 'neoliberal' one.
While I agree with you that the default Thatcherite dogma - that the market will always sort things out - is both misguided, and was (at least partially) accepted by the Blair/Brown governments, and has persisted to this day, the solution is one of pragmatism, rather than your idea that the state can do everything.
"in Palestine are only because of the losses to Independent candidates who ran predominantly on a platform that discussed Gaza, but I think it is a factor. The way Labour campaigned and spoke about Palestine before the election and how they are acting now after the election are very different"
Is there any evidence they've changed their position post election? It would be good if they had but I haven't heard any mention of anything.
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
If building more properties would decrease the value of housing - that housing has to be made without profit in mind. It must be aimed at those who cannot afford housing in a "free market". It must set rents lower than market rates to influence the rest of the market.
We cannot do this in this country without fucking over a huge number of people because we replaced real terms wage growth with asset growth - those who bought properties in the late 80s - late 90s have seen wages stagnate but can rely on their house being flogged off at some point paying for their retirement. If you collapse the housing market, those people are suddenly fucked. So any solution to the housing crisis must come with redistribution and social safety nets in mind.
If there's an oligopoly/monopoly then the developers have an incentive to constrain supply to keep prices high.
If however there is competition then making any profit is better than making no profit so better to produce homes yourself than stand back and see someone else beat you to the market and make the profit instead of you.
Our planning system hands the power to the oligopoly of developers that can play the system, if you have consent and others don't then you can feed supply at a rate that suits you. Remove the requirement to get planning consent, and suddenly if you don't build a house then anyone else can instead.
As for those who lose out on assets going down in value (or see unearned gains wiped out). All investments can go down as well as up. They deserve no more sympathy than those who invested in Woolworths or Blockbuster.
@Eabhal, you only have to look at the stats on how many 20-35 year olds are living with their parents in comparison to previous decades to see that there is massive pent up demand for housing.
These people deserve their own homes. I bet many of them would love to move into a tiny new build apartment - it would be an improvement on having to squeeze into their teenage bedroom in their parent’s house.
The number of households in the UK is being artificially constrained because the people that would love to buy their own property and start a family can’t - the properties don’t exist for them to move into. That is in turn having knock on effects on when people are choosing to have children & causing other social tensions.
At work, one of the juniors was living in a shared 3 bed flat. Unregistered HMO. The landlord came in and divided the living room into 2 more bedrooms. So now she lives in a family of 5, according to the statistics.
@Eabhal, you only have to look at the stats on how many 20-35 year olds are living with their parents in comparison to previous decades to see that there is massive pent up demand for housing.
These people deserve their own homes. I bet many of them would love to move into a tiny new build apartment - it would be an improvement on having to squeeze into their teenage bedroom in their parent’s house.
The number of households in the UK is being artificially constrained because the people that would love to buy their own property and start a family can’t - the properties don’t exist for them to move into. That is in turn having knock on effects on when people are choosing to have children & causing other social tensions.
I don't disagree at all. I'm not sure where you have got that idea from.
All I've done is point out that the number of houses has increased faster than the population and households, yet it hasn't made much of a difference to the housing crisis in our cities.
My concern is that unless economic (and therefore housing) demand is spread around the country more equally, no level of supply will solve this issue. To take an extreme and silly example - building 1,000,000 houses on Benbecula will not solve the problems in Edinburgh. (Unless Benbecula becomes a new Singapore...)
Two ways you can solve this. One is to invest in towns so there are jobs, instagrammable high streets, a critical mass of possible sexual partners, yoga. They need to relatively much more attractive. Another would be to increase access to of city centres with better transport links.
@Eabhal, you only have to look at the stats on how many 20-35 year olds are living with their parents in comparison to previous decades to see that there is massive pent up demand for housing.
These people deserve their own homes. I bet many of them would love to move into a tiny new build apartment - it would be an improvement on having to squeeze into their teenage bedroom in their parent’s house.
The number of households in the UK is being artificially constrained because the people that would love to buy their own property and start a family can’t - the properties don’t exist for them to move into. That is in turn having knock on effects on when people are choosing to have children & causing other social tensions.
I don't disagree at all. I'm not sure where you have got that idea from.
All I've done is point out that the number of houses has increased faster than the population and households, yet it hasn't made much of a difference to the housing crisis in our cities.
My concern is that unless economic (and therefore housing) demand is spread around the country more equally, no level of supply will solve this issue. To take an extreme and silly example - building 1,000,000 houses on Benbecula will not solve the problems in Edinburgh.
Two ways you can solve this. One is to invest in towns so there are jobs, instagrammable high streets, a critical mass of possible sexual partners, yoga. They need to relatively much more attractive. Another would be to increase access to of city centres with better transport links.
Because it hasn't grown faster than demand.
Population is an irrelevant stat because demographic changes. Households is an irrelevant stat because households don't mean jack.
If a million houses were built anywhere then people would move there, businesses would invest there, growth would happen there. There isn't a single location in the entire country where supply exceeds demand (measured as 10% vacant houses).
"...the installation of a 2m x 1m skylight on a flat roof to make a dingy flat lighter generated an astonishing fuss. The redoubtable red-trousered resisters approached this small pane of glass – visible only to the occupant – with all the fire and fury required to thwart a nuclear power plant."
Watching the government try and actually make planning easier, is going to be funny to watch.
I wish them all the luck in the World, housing is undoubtedly the UK’s single biggest issue at the moment, but the NIMBY and developer interests are very well entrenched indeed.
Coming down heavy on second home owners, especially ones kept empty for much of the year, is a quicker way to get more housing units onto the market.
Planning is IMHO a relatively small part of the problem, and if they think more relaxed planning is going to resolve the housing crisis by itself, they're in for a disappointment.
The ugly truth is that housebuilding has outpaced population and household growth over the last 20 years, and house prices and rents have gone through the roof regardless.
So a bonfire of planning regulations could mean you piss off all the Green-belt NIMBYs for no discernible benefit for your core vote in the cities (even if the counter-factual would be even worse). Politically disastrous.
You would need to build an extreme volume of high density housing in the cities so that you entirely disrupt the market there. That might be possible with council housing as in the 1960s, but even then I assume there isn't enough capacity in the construction sector to make it happen.
The problem is that we don't need the kind of housing developers want to build (four bedroom houses in the green belt) and we do need stuff housing developers don't want to build (Viennese style public housing flats). Sure, some of what people call NIMBYism is that - but a lot of it is also "yes, I want my kids to be able to afford a house here too - but you're not planning to build that kind of house so why should I support you?".
In St A, where I live, we have had a load of luxury flats go up and a number of new housing blocks - all private development, all very pricey. That won't lower rents or house prices.
If supply gets near demand, then prices will fall.
There's a similar debate in the US about this.
Bottom line is that all the evidence tends to show the increase in supply leads to lower prices (which ought to be obvious). But when you have inefficient markets, regional variations, and a large mismatch between new build and demand growth, it's not at all obvious to the individual.
As you say, the key is getting enough new housing built. The rest is just detail.
It's a bit like US healthcare. The system is so weird and distorted by a zillion rules that it is nothing to do with a market, and nothing to do with state provision either. When you try and explain to Americans, from outside, how it could work... "But why should my employer be let off the hook of paying for my healthcare?" etc....
It's a bit like trying to explain air to fish.
I recall the blank horror when I suggested to a LEA bod that we should have spare space in schools. because running at 99% capacity guarantees failures. "This Does Not Compute".....
Thanks all for the kind words - I know I have a tendency to write long comments here, so thought it best to do a full header to explain my relatively happy feelings from the outcomes of the election.
I can’t stay here long today due to work, but to answer a few questions:
1) I think Bristol Central shows that Greens will mostly be targeting urban seats - whilst we do have a surprising amount of support from otherwise conservative voters in rural areas, that is not where our members are from. On the other hand I know we won those seats without hiding our lefty credentials, so maybe some of those voters are more open to left wing policies than previously thought and just have a tribal hatred of Labour.
2) On tactical voting, there is a graph floating around that I did wonder whether I should include here and write a bit about showing that if people didn’t have to vote tactically the share for Labour would be less, not more. So the tactical anti-Tory vote was already part of why Labour did so well.
3) On policy specific questions - I’m kinda tired of saying here that I disagree with the underlying assumptions of neoliberalism where private investment and balancing the budget are the most important things. When it comes to funding and taxation and such I hold a position much closer to MMT. When it comes to “how do we afford x” that is my position.
4) On NATO specifically - it’s currently a necessary evil and arguably preferable to the alternative (much like my view of the EU).
5) My name comes from the assigned username I was given at university - random numbers and letters that I still remember and therefore use.
Thanks. The nearer a socialist alternative gets to actual power, the more it will be examined.
I think the chances that voters will vote consistently for MMT economics, once it is explained, in a manifesto that could be that of a governing party is about Zero. It will have the appearance of being the mirror image of Reform's economics.
Just suppose for a moment that the chief underlying assumption of what you call 'neoliberalism' is that more people on planet earth should have more access to rising prosperity and stuff like water, food, housing and education and the possibility of living in a reasonably free and peaceful society? And that the ways to achieve it with a deeply imperfect humanity is that everyone should have a vote, and empirically based policies are the chief instrument of change.
That isn't the chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism. The chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism is that it is better for things to be in the hands of the private sector and that a rising tide lifts all boats - it is trickle down economics. And it doesn't work. Neoliberalism doesn't really care about democracy - the first real testing ground for neoliberalism was Chile under Pinochet. It was packaged for the Western audience, who were used to things like autonomy and freedom, by suggesting it was a freedom based ideology - but freedom for the market and the capitalist only.
If you are a worker or poor - your freedoms reduced under neoliberalism. Establishment political parties looked more similar, unions were crushed, the social safety net was deconstructed. Multiple states went from owning their own assets and being able to make money off of them and subsidise any losses with taxation and debt, to selling off their assets, losing long term revenue, and creating a layer of rent seekers in between those assets and the public who depend on those services. All it is is a parasitic transference of wealth from the poor to the rich - because to get into that layer of rent seekers you had to have money already to buy them up when they were being sold off (usually on the cheap).
Thanks. 'neoliberalism' as a word has a problem in that there appears to be little or no common ground about its meaning, except that it is broadly a free market capitalist movement with a preference for a smaller state.
Well, we live in a very large state economy, with an overwhelming weight of regulation and law applying to every bit of human activity from the local Duck Pond Charity to the doings of BP.
Welfare state, education, NHS, all in state managed hands. We are nowhere close to your sort of neoliberal society, nor are we going t be.
Entire councils are essentially run by private profit seeking companies - like Capita. Entire sections of our security and prisons are run by G4S. School Academisation, whilst not technically allowing schools to be run for profit, have shifted ownership and responsibilities of schools from local councils to private companies. The same is already happening in the NHS; my local GP practice hosts private clinics and basically all consultants have a greater share of their workload going towards private work that is still based within publicly owned hospitals. Our public housing stock has been sold off bit by bit, first with right to buy, then with housing associations (again, technically not for profit organisations, but without the ability to secure the same level of debt a government can, and with someone at the top who is paid very handsomely indeed). All of these are examples of the clear march of neoliberalism.
Farage' s comment on the "little guy's yesterday shows why REFORM will not replace the Tories with him at the helm. His schtick does well to win over 15-20% but in order to win over the next batch of seats and get 30% he needs to know which battles to pick and be a bit smarter about espousing every opinion he holds.
It was a strange target for an attack - it might have worked if Hoyle had only just become speaker, but his predecessor was in post five years / four PMs / two general elections ago.
What's next? Bashing the Tories because Stephen Dorrell was a crap health secretary?
If he's wanting to make himself seem out of touch, he's going about it the right way.
@Eabhal, you only have to look at the stats on how many 20-35 year olds are living with their parents in comparison to previous decades to see that there is massive pent up demand for housing.
These people deserve their own homes. I bet many of them would love to move into a tiny new build apartment - it would be an improvement on having to squeeze into their teenage bedroom in their parent’s house.
The number of households in the UK is being artificially constrained because the people that would love to buy their own property and start a family can’t - the properties don’t exist for them to move into. That is in turn having knock on effects on when people are choosing to have children & causing other social tensions.
I agree. But the private sector has failed at providing this and is incapable of doing so. Whereas going full Vienna would solve this problem. Decent public housing with amenities literally on the doorstep.
Errr.. they are building flats on every square inch of land available in London, for example. What is notable is that because there is competition in building between areas, supply strikes don't seem to happen.
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
If building more properties would decrease the value of housing - that housing has to be made without profit in mind. It must be aimed at those who cannot afford housing in a "free market". It must set rents lower than market rates to influence the rest of the market.
We cannot do this in this country without fucking over a huge number of people because we replaced real terms wage growth with asset growth - those who bought properties in the late 80s - late 90s have seen wages stagnate but can rely on their house being flogged off at some point paying for their retirement. If you collapse the housing market, those people are suddenly fucked. So any solution to the housing crisis must come with redistribution and social safety nets in mind.
If there's an oligopoly/monopoly then the developers have an incentive to constrain supply to keep prices high.
If however there is competition then making any profit is better than making no profit so better to produce homes yourself than stand back and see someone else beat you to the market and make the profit instead of you.
Our planning system hands the power to the oligopoly of developers that can play the system, if you have consent and others don't then you can feed supply at a rate that suits you. Remove the requirement to get planning consent, and suddenly if you don't build a house then anyone else can instead.
As for those who lose out on assets going down in value (or see unearned gains wiped out). All investments can go down as well as up. They deserve no more sympathy than those who invested in Woolworths or Blockbuster.
On your last point - I agree if we are talking about landlords and private asset companies and the like. That isn't the problem, though. The problem lies with the fact that workers of the 80s and 90s were told "look, you won't be able to get wage increases to cover your costs and save for your retirement, but don't worry - house prices will go up forever so as long as you treat them like an asset, constantly move up the housing ladder to get bigger and more expensive houses, you'll be fine; and also you'll get a nice pay out when your parents pop their clogs, so don't worry so much".
To then turn around to them and go "we were wrong, you're fucked and we definitely aren't going to give you any money to make up for the lost wage growth that never happened either" would be catastrophic - more so than what happened with Truss.
Truss' issues started when the average mortgage haver felt interest rates go up. Anyone who does what you suggest will have to deal with an entire generation of people suddenly being in negative equity - having paid for a property that is no longer worth what they paid, and therefore can't be flogged when the eventual need to downsize and retire comes along.
@148grss - congrats on your first article. I enjoyed reading it, althPugh I don’t personally get behind this characterisation of Starmer as centre-right, nor do I think it is plausible to describe Starmer as being personally unpopular.
Thanks all for the kind words - I know I have a tendency to write long comments here, so thought it best to do a full header to explain my relatively happy feelings from the outcomes of the election.
I can’t stay here long today due to work, but to answer a few questions:
1) I think Bristol Central shows that Greens will mostly be targeting urban seats - whilst we do have a surprising amount of support from otherwise conservative voters in rural areas, that is not where our members are from. On the other hand I know we won those seats without hiding our lefty credentials, so maybe some of those voters are more open to left wing policies than previously thought and just have a tribal hatred of Labour.
2) On tactical voting, there is a graph floating around that I did wonder whether I should include here and write a bit about showing that if people didn’t have to vote tactically the share for Labour would be less, not more. So the tactical anti-Tory vote was already part of why Labour did so well.
3) On policy specific questions - I’m kinda tired of saying here that I disagree with the underlying assumptions of neoliberalism where private investment and balancing the budget are the most important things. When it comes to funding and taxation and such I hold a position much closer to MMT. When it comes to “how do we afford x” that is my position.
4) On NATO specifically - it’s currently a necessary evil and arguably preferable to the alternative (much like my view of the EU).
5) My name comes from the assigned username I was given at university - random numbers and letters that I still remember and therefore use.
Thanks. The nearer a socialist alternative gets to actual power, the more it will be examined.
I think the chances that voters will vote consistently for MMT economics, once it is explained, in a manifesto that could be that of a governing party is about Zero. It will have the appearance of being the mirror image of Reform's economics.
Just suppose for a moment that the chief underlying assumption of what you call 'neoliberalism' is that more people on planet earth should have more access to rising prosperity and stuff like water, food, housing and education and the possibility of living in a reasonably free and peaceful society? And that the ways to achieve it with a deeply imperfect humanity is that everyone should have a vote, and empirically based policies are the chief instrument of change.
That isn't the chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism. The chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism is that it is better for things to be in the hands of the private sector and that a rising tide lifts all boats - it is trickle down economics. And it doesn't work. Neoliberalism doesn't really care about democracy - the first real testing ground for neoliberalism was Chile under Pinochet. It was packaged for the Western audience, who were used to things like autonomy and freedom, by suggesting it was a freedom based ideology - but freedom for the market and the capitalist only.
If you are a worker or poor - your freedoms reduced under neoliberalism. Establishment political parties looked more similar, unions were crushed, the social safety net was deconstructed. Multiple states went from owning their own assets and being able to make money off of them and subsidise any losses with taxation and debt, to selling off their assets, losing long term revenue, and creating a layer of rent seekers in between those assets and the public who depend on those services. All it is is a parasitic transference of wealth from the poor to the rich - because to get into that layer of rent seekers you had to have money already to buy them up when they were being sold off (usually on the cheap).
Thanks. 'neoliberalism' as a word has a problem in that there appears to be little or no common ground about its meaning, except that it is broadly a free market capitalist movement with a preference for a smaller state.
Well, we live in a very large state economy, with an overwhelming weight of regulation and law applying to every bit of human activity from the local Duck Pond Charity to the doings of BP.
Welfare state, education, NHS, all in state managed hands. We are nowhere close to your sort of neoliberal society, nor are we going t be.
Entire councils are essentially run by private profit seeking companies - like Capita. Entire sections of our security and prisons are run by G4S. School Academisation, whilst not technically allowing schools to be run for profit, have shifted ownership and responsibilities of schools from local councils to private companies. The same is already happening in the NHS; my local GP practice hosts private clinics and basically all consultants have a greater share of their workload going towards private work that is still based within publicly owned hospitals. Our public housing stock has been sold off bit by bit, first with right to buy, then with housing associations (again, technically not for profit organisations, but without the ability to secure the same level of debt a government can, and with someone at the top who is paid very handsomely indeed). All of these are examples of the clear march of neoliberalism.
@Eabhal, you only have to look at the stats on how many 20-35 year olds are living with their parents in comparison to previous decades to see that there is massive pent up demand for housing.
These people deserve their own homes. I bet many of them would love to move into a tiny new build apartment - it would be an improvement on having to squeeze into their teenage bedroom in their parent’s house.
The number of households in the UK is being artificially constrained because the people that would love to buy their own property and start a family can’t - the properties don’t exist for them to move into. That is in turn having knock on effects on when people are choosing to have children & causing other social tensions.
At work, one of the juniors was living in a shared 3 bed flat. Unregistered HMO. The landlord came in and divided the living room into 2 more bedrooms. So now she lives in a family of 5, according to the statistics.
It's not a happy family.
At company X, we dscovered a summer placement student was living at the office for the last couple of weeks. Most of us just thought he was working really long hours trying to impress us. First in, last out...
(IIRC, he booked himself into accommodation for the full summer, but a snafu meant he had to leave early (not his fault). And being a shy sort, instead of asking the company for help, he spent a night in the office. Then another. Then another... IASTR a couple of the security guards (outside employees) got sacked for allowing him.)
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Yet more Hamas apologism.
War is hell, but if Hamas are using the areas as bases then they are legitimate military targets and its not a war crime to hit out at Hamas. Hamas using innocents as human shields is a war crime.
Russia striking non-military targets deliberately, which Ukraine is not using as a military base, is a war crime too.
It is Hamas and Russia that are the war criminals here.
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
If building more properties would decrease the value of housing - that housing has to be made without profit in mind. It must be aimed at those who cannot afford housing in a "free market". It must set rents lower than market rates to influence the rest of the market.
We cannot do this in this country without fucking over a huge number of people because we replaced real terms wage growth with asset growth - those who bought properties in the late 80s - late 90s have seen wages stagnate but can rely on their house being flogged off at some point paying for their retirement. If you collapse the housing market, those people are suddenly fucked. So any solution to the housing crisis must come with redistribution and social safety nets in mind.
If there's an oligopoly/monopoly then the developers have an incentive to constrain supply to keep prices high.
If however there is competition then making any profit is better than making no profit so better to produce homes yourself than stand back and see someone else beat you to the market and make the profit instead of you.
Our planning system hands the power to the oligopoly of developers that can play the system, if you have consent and others don't then you can feed supply at a rate that suits you. Remove the requirement to get planning consent, and suddenly if you don't build a house then anyone else can instead.
As for those who lose out on assets going down in value (or see unearned gains wiped out). All investments can go down as well as up. They deserve no more sympathy than those who invested in Woolworths or Blockbuster.
On your last point - I agree if we are talking about landlords and private asset companies and the like. That isn't the problem, though. The problem lies with the fact that workers of the 80s and 90s were told "look, you won't be able to get wage increases to cover your costs and save for your retirement, but don't worry - house prices will go up forever so as long as you treat them like an asset, constantly move up the housing ladder to get bigger and more expensive houses, you'll be fine; and also you'll get a nice pay out when your parents pop their clogs, so don't worry so much".
To then turn around to them and go "we were wrong, you're fucked and we definitely aren't going to give you any money to make up for the lost wage growth that never happened either" would be catastrophic - more so than what happened with Truss.
Truss' issues started when the average mortgage haver felt interest rates go up. Anyone who does what you suggest will have to deal with an entire generation of people suddenly being in negative equity - having paid for a property that is no longer worth what they paid, and therefore can't be flogged when the eventual need to downsize and retire comes along.
All investments can go down as well as up. Everyone is warned of that before they even apply for a mortgage.
Why should investments in housing be any more immune to losing value than investments in Blockbuster or Woolworths?
@148grss - congrats on your first article. I enjoyed reading it, althPugh I don’t personally get behind this characterisation of Starmer as centre-right, nor do I think it is plausible to describe Starmer as being personally unpopular.
And (whilst I accept the political compass isn't the best or only tool to show where people or parties stand) this Labour manifesto is clearly on the centre right:
@Eabhal, you only have to look at the stats on how many 20-35 year olds are living with their parents in comparison to previous decades to see that there is massive pent up demand for housing.
These people deserve their own homes. I bet many of them would love to move into a tiny new build apartment - it would be an improvement on having to squeeze into their teenage bedroom in their parent’s house.
The number of households in the UK is being artificially constrained because the people that would love to buy their own property and start a family can’t - the properties don’t exist for them to move into. That is in turn having knock on effects on when people are choosing to have children & causing other social tensions.
At work, one of the juniors was living in a shared 3 bed flat. Unregistered HMO. The landlord came in and divided the living room into 2 more bedrooms. So now she lives in a family of 5, according to the statistics.
It's not a happy family.
At company X, we dscovered a summer placement student was living at the office for the last couple of weeks. Most of us just thought he was working really long hours trying to impress us. First in, last out...
(IIRC, he booked himself into accommodation for the full summer, but a snafu meant he had to leave early (not his fault). And being a shy sort, instead of asking the company for help, he spent a night in the office. Then another. Then another... IASTR a couple of the security guards (outside employees) got sacked for allowing him.)
I've watched as slum landlording has moved steadily up the income scale. The thing that happened to the junior (above) has happened, previously. to plenty of people in, say, low paid parts of the building trade. Not to juniors in banks, renting in a shiny new flat.
I can recall being told, here, that my description a house where every room (including one bathroom) was full of bunk beds for adults was "fantasy". That's how the Deliveroo rider who bought your takeaway last night lives, probably.
@148grss - congrats on your first article. I enjoyed reading it, althPugh I don’t personally get behind this characterisation of Starmer as centre-right, nor do I think it is plausible to describe Starmer as being personally unpopular.
And (whilst I accept the political compass isn't the best or only tool to show where people or parties stand) this Labour manifesto is clearly on the centre right:
Just another thought before I go - I wonder if the increase in uni participation is part of the reason why you have such extreme housing crises in the cities?
1) You have many more students fighting for flats in uni cities (along with all the other residents)
2) More people being moved from their home towns to the cities, falling in love with the vibe (and the jobs) and not heading home. For example, approx 80% of the people at my school who didn't go are still in the town they grew up in, while about 10% of those who went to uni have returned.
(Also - it's fun being the person arguing against the consensus on an issue. You have to take some unnecessarily vicious hits from the usual suspects, but we wouldn't want PB to be an echo chamber so it's worth it. I agree with the underlying supply/demand economics but, as ever, I think issue is just a little bit more complex).
Just another thought before I go - I wonder if the increase in uni participation is part of the reason why you have such extreme housing crises in the cities?
1) You have many more students fighting for flats in uni cities (along with all the other residents)
2) More people being moved from their home towns to the cities, falling in love with the vibe (and the jobs) and not heading home. For example, approx 80% of the people at my school who didn't go are still in the town they grew up in, while about 10% of those who went to uni have returned.
We have an extreme housing crisis everywhere, not just cities though.
You keep making out like other places don't have a housing shortage, but there isn't anywhere in the country without a chronic housing shortage.
The entire country lacks sufficient houses. Some places the shortage is more acute than others, but its a shortage everywhere.
If there were places with a surplus of housing it would relieve pressure elsewhere as people would move to fill those vacancies, and investment would follow, but there isn't.
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
If building more properties would decrease the value of housing - that housing has to be made without profit in mind. It must be aimed at those who cannot afford housing in a "free market". It must set rents lower than market rates to influence the rest of the market.
We cannot do this in this country without fucking over a huge number of people because we replaced real terms wage growth with asset growth - those who bought properties in the late 80s - late 90s have seen wages stagnate but can rely on their house being flogged off at some point paying for their retirement. If you collapse the housing market, those people are suddenly fucked. So any solution to the housing crisis must come with redistribution and social safety nets in mind.
If there's an oligopoly/monopoly then the developers have an incentive to constrain supply to keep prices high.
If however there is competition then making any profit is better than making no profit so better to produce homes yourself than stand back and see someone else beat you to the market and make the profit instead of you.
Our planning system hands the power to the oligopoly of developers that can play the system, if you have consent and others don't then you can feed supply at a rate that suits you. Remove the requirement to get planning consent, and suddenly if you don't build a house then anyone else can instead.
As for those who lose out on assets going down in value (or see unearned gains wiped out). All investments can go down as well as up. They deserve no more sympathy than those who invested in Woolworths or Blockbuster.
On your last point - I agree if we are talking about landlords and private asset companies and the like. That isn't the problem, though. The problem lies with the fact that workers of the 80s and 90s were told "look, you won't be able to get wage increases to cover your costs and save for your retirement, but don't worry - house prices will go up forever so as long as you treat them like an asset, constantly move up the housing ladder to get bigger and more expensive houses, you'll be fine; and also you'll get a nice pay out when your parents pop their clogs, so don't worry so much".
To then turn around to them and go "we were wrong, you're fucked and we definitely aren't going to give you any money to make up for the lost wage growth that never happened either" would be catastrophic - more so than what happened with Truss.
Truss' issues started when the average mortgage haver felt interest rates go up. Anyone who does what you suggest will have to deal with an entire generation of people suddenly being in negative equity - having paid for a property that is no longer worth what they paid, and therefore can't be flogged when the eventual need to downsize and retire comes along.
All investments can go down as well as up. Everyone is warned of that before they even apply for a mortgage.
Why should investments in housing be any more immune to losing value than investments in Blockbuster or Woolworths?
Workers in the 80s and 90s weren't told that house prices would always go up. The housing crash that took prices in 1998 to their 1988 numbers (so a major fall with 10 years inflation) comes to mind.
Buying your own home meant that after 20-25 years you owned it outright - no rent for retirement. If you were careful where and what you bought and a bit lucky, you could beat Government bonds in terms of getting your money back with a small gain.
The inevitable property price rise (at double digits per year, compound) is a phenomenon of the last 25-30 years.
@148grss - congrats on your first article. I enjoyed reading it, althPugh I don’t personally get behind this characterisation of Starmer as centre-right, nor do I think it is plausible to describe Starmer as being personally unpopular.
And (whilst I accept the political compass isn't the best or only tool to show where people or parties stand) this Labour manifesto is clearly on the centre right:
That is an absurd compass, putting "workers party GB" as closer to the centre than Labour or the Lib Dems.
I mean, all of this demands a definition of where the centre is. I think for a lot of people who live in the West things like capitalism and private ownership of certain things is such a given that the "baseline" for what they believe is already pretty economically right wing.
I can already envisage what's going to happen at the next election: there are going to be a lot of calls for a French-style candidate dropping procedure to take place, so that only one left-of-centre candidate faces the Tories or Reform in seats where one of the latter two have a good chance of winning the seat. So, for example, Labour and the LDs could be requested to step down by Greens in Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire where the next election will probably be a close-run thing between the Greens and Tories.
Thanks all for the kind words - I know I have a tendency to write long comments here, so thought it best to do a full header to explain my relatively happy feelings from the outcomes of the election.
I can’t stay here long today due to work, but to answer a few questions:
1) I think Bristol Central shows that Greens will mostly be targeting urban seats - whilst we do have a surprising amount of support from otherwise conservative voters in rural areas, that is not where our members are from. On the other hand I know we won those seats without hiding our lefty credentials, so maybe some of those voters are more open to left wing policies than previously thought and just have a tribal hatred of Labour.
2) On tactical voting, there is a graph floating around that I did wonder whether I should include here and write a bit about showing that if people didn’t have to vote tactically the share for Labour would be less, not more. So the tactical anti-Tory vote was already part of why Labour did so well.
3) On policy specific questions - I’m kinda tired of saying here that I disagree with the underlying assumptions of neoliberalism where private investment and balancing the budget are the most important things. When it comes to funding and taxation and such I hold a position much closer to MMT. When it comes to “how do we afford x” that is my position.
4) On NATO specifically - it’s currently a necessary evil and arguably preferable to the alternative (much like my view of the EU).
5) My name comes from the assigned username I was given at university - random numbers and letters that I still remember and therefore use.
Thanks. The nearer a socialist alternative gets to actual power, the more it will be examined.
I think the chances that voters will vote consistently for MMT economics, once it is explained, in a manifesto that could be that of a governing party is about Zero. It will have the appearance of being the mirror image of Reform's economics.
Just suppose for a moment that the chief underlying assumption of what you call 'neoliberalism' is that more people on planet earth should have more access to rising prosperity and stuff like water, food, housing and education and the possibility of living in a reasonably free and peaceful society? And that the ways to achieve it with a deeply imperfect humanity is that everyone should have a vote, and empirically based policies are the chief instrument of change.
That isn't the chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism. The chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism is that it is better for things to be in the hands of the private sector and that a rising tide lifts all boats - it is trickle down economics. And it doesn't work. Neoliberalism doesn't really care about democracy - the first real testing ground for neoliberalism was Chile under Pinochet. It was packaged for the Western audience, who were used to things like autonomy and freedom, by suggesting it was a freedom based ideology - but freedom for the market and the capitalist only.
If you are a worker or poor - your freedoms reduced under neoliberalism. Establishment political parties looked more similar, unions were crushed, the social safety net was deconstructed. Multiple states went from owning their own assets and being able to make money off of them and subsidise any losses with taxation and debt, to selling off their assets, losing long term revenue, and creating a layer of rent seekers in between those assets and the public who depend on those services. All it is is a parasitic transference of wealth from the poor to the rich - because to get into that layer of rent seekers you had to have money already to buy them up when they were being sold off (usually on the cheap).
Thanks. 'neoliberalism' as a word has a problem in that there appears to be little or no common ground about its meaning, except that it is broadly a free market capitalist movement with a preference for a smaller state.
Well, we live in a very large state economy, with an overwhelming weight of regulation and law applying to every bit of human activity from the local Duck Pond Charity to the doings of BP.
Welfare state, education, NHS, all in state managed hands. We are nowhere close to your sort of neoliberal society, nor are we going t be.
Entire councils are essentially run by private profit seeking companies - like Capita. Entire sections of our security and prisons are run by G4S. School Academisation, whilst not technically allowing schools to be run for profit, have shifted ownership and responsibilities of schools from local councils to private companies. The same is already happening in the NHS; my local GP practice hosts private clinics and basically all consultants have a greater share of their workload going towards private work that is still based within publicly owned hospitals. Our public housing stock has been sold off bit by bit, ..
There would, of course, have been nothing wrong with that, had the local authority owners been allowed to retain and re-invest the proceeds. Indeed the economic benefits would have been far greater than they were.
Instead, your 'neoliberal' central governments awarded themselves enormous bungs, at the expense of local government, with which to bribe successive electorates.
That wasn't really neoliberal economics; more of a con trick.
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Russia bombs a school. A depraved evil act of a terror state according to our media and mainstream politicians..
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Far from. Any such attack is heinous.
But there are differences. Despite what a few nutters claim. when Russia attack a hospital, school or other structure in Ukraine, it's fairly clear it was them, and that it was targeted. In Palestine, the truth is much more nebulous. As we saw in that initial hospital attack where, according to Hamas, 500 died. Which was always b/s that some people wanted to believe.
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
That’s not how it works. If I’m a developer and I build a collection of 8 houses on a plot of land, I am very, very, very slightly decreasing the value of housing by increasing supply, but I’m also building 8 houses I can sell for shit loads of money.
Within a free market, businesses have an incentive to make a product people want for a profit, even if by doing so, the increase in the supply slightly pushes down the price. Lots of businesses acting individually to make money then has a large impact on supply and prices fall until they reach some equilibrium. Well… in theory, if there are no cartels, etc.
"in Palestine are only because of the losses to Independent candidates who ran predominantly on a platform that discussed Gaza, but I think it is a factor. The way Labour campaigned and spoke about Palestine before the election and how they are acting now after the election are very different"
Is there any evidence they've changed their position post election? It would be good if they had but I haven't heard any mention of anything.
I mean, they look like they aren't going to block the ICC warrants, as Attorney General they brought in a Jewish lawyer who had previously condemned anti BDS legislation and demanded Israel follow UN rulings. They aren't doing what I would want them to do - immediately stopping arm sales and recognising Palestine - but they have certainly changed their tune from "of course Israel has the right to withhold power from Gaza". Whether or not this was always going to be the case or a reaction to the election is to be seen in the long term - Starmer's refusal to answer the question about Muslim voters leaving the Labour party is evidence against my hypothesis, for example. But we'll see.
"in Palestine are only because of the losses to Independent candidates who ran predominantly on a platform that discussed Gaza, but I think it is a factor. The way Labour campaigned and spoke about Palestine before the election and how they are acting now after the election are very different"
Is there any evidence they've changed their position post election? It would be good if they had but I haven't heard any mention of anything.
I mean, they look like they aren't going to block the ICC warrants, as Attorney General they brought in a Jewish lawyer who had previously condemned anti BDS legislation and demanded Israel follow UN rulings. They aren't doing what I would want them to do - immediately stopping arm sales and recognising Palestine - but they have certainly changed their tune from "of course Israel has the right to withhold power from Gaza". Whether or not this was always going to be the case or a reaction to the election is to be seen in the long term - Starmer's refusal to answer the question about Muslim voters leaving the Labour party is evidence against my hypothesis, for example. But we'll see.
Didn't you support the Houthis killing innocent seamen?
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
That’s not how it works. If I’m a developer and I build a collection of 8 houses on a plot of land, I am very, very, very slightly decreasing the value of housing by increasing supply, but I’m also building 8 houses I can sell for shit loads of money.
Within a free market, businesses have an incentive to make a product people want for a profit, even if by doing so, the increase in the supply slightly pushes down the price. Lots of businesses acting individually to make money then has a large impact on supply and prices fall until they reach some equilibrium. Well… in theory, if there are no cartels, etc.
Exactly.
The problem is that whereas in countries without our planning system house are built one or eight at a time, here we have acted to restrict planning and then grant consent to cartels hundreds of houses at a time.
And cartels do what cartels do.
Remove the planning system, the cartels would be destroyed.
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Russia bombs a school. A depraved evil act of a terror state according to our media and mainstream politicians..
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Yup. And Netanyahu's useful idiots swallow every excuse he comes out with. The Israelis lie and lie - remember the attack on the UN convoy that they initially tried to blame on a Hamas "side bomb", for example - and, having expelled all foreign journalists, they usually get away with it.
"It really helps to start a couple of hundred years ago. If you go back before the industrial revolution .. if you go back before deep water navigation .... the United Kingdom or as it was known 'England' really did not matter all that much. It was a relatively smallish population on a relatively largish island off the coast of Europe and most of the mainland countries especially France had far larger populations and were far more significant.
But when deep water navigation was invented by the Iberians ..." and so it continues.
That's a history out of Peanuts, written by Charlie Brown, for Readers' Digest Simplified Version, for use in the Kindergarten.
But I see he's a "political writer".
I don't see why should we take this person even slightly seriously, if he makes so many basic errors on the most basic of basics. Sorry.
It's not really clear what you are objecting to. Of course a three line summary of five centuries' history will include some oversimplifications and distortions.
He could have done his summary without oversimplifications and distortions, and including the things relevant to his analysis.
It's like a presentation of a mathematical argument, where the first line is "1 + 1 = 6".
Credibility is lost, as highlighted by my note of his later assertion that London was a Europe-only financial centre after we joined the EU, which is pure baloney. Compare that ignorance, for example, to Alistair Cooke on the USA back in the day.
He doesn't know the subject he is opinionating about. He should stick to stuff inside the USA, and perhaps Asia - at least he has a qualification on the latter.
Visit the Youtube video, and he is being called out in the comments. The defence being put forward is 'Ignore the trolls; we love you, Peter.'
Thanks all for the kind words - I know I have a tendency to write long comments here, so thought it best to do a full header to explain my relatively happy feelings from the outcomes of the election.
I can’t stay here long today due to work, but to answer a few questions:
1) I think Bristol Central shows that Greens will mostly be targeting urban seats - whilst we do have a surprising amount of support from otherwise conservative voters in rural areas, that is not where our members are from. On the other hand I know we won those seats without hiding our lefty credentials, so maybe some of those voters are more open to left wing policies than previously thought and just have a tribal hatred of Labour.
2) On tactical voting, there is a graph floating around that I did wonder whether I should include here and write a bit about showing that if people didn’t have to vote tactically the share for Labour would be less, not more. So the tactical anti-Tory vote was already part of why Labour did so well.
3) On policy specific questions - I’m kinda tired of saying here that I disagree with the underlying assumptions of neoliberalism where private investment and balancing the budget are the most important things. When it comes to funding and taxation and such I hold a position much closer to MMT. When it comes to “how do we afford x” that is my position.
4) On NATO specifically - it’s currently a necessary evil and arguably preferable to the alternative (much like my view of the EU).
5) My name comes from the assigned username I was given at university - random numbers and letters that I still remember and therefore use.
Thanks. The nearer a socialist alternative gets to actual power, the more it will be examined.
I think the chances that voters will vote consistently for MMT economics, once it is explained, in a manifesto that could be that of a governing party is about Zero. It will have the appearance of being the mirror image of Reform's economics.
Just suppose for a moment that the chief underlying assumption of what you call 'neoliberalism' is that more people on planet earth should have more access to rising prosperity and stuff like water, food, housing and education and the possibility of living in a reasonably free and peaceful society? And that the ways to achieve it with a deeply imperfect humanity is that everyone should have a vote, and empirically based policies are the chief instrument of change.
That isn't the chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism. The chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism is that it is better for things to be in the hands of the private sector and that a rising tide lifts all boats - it is trickle down economics. And it doesn't work. Neoliberalism doesn't really care about democracy - the first real testing ground for neoliberalism was Chile under Pinochet. It was packaged for the Western audience, who were used to things like autonomy and freedom, by suggesting it was a freedom based ideology - but freedom for the market and the capitalist only.
If you are a worker or poor - your freedoms reduced under neoliberalism. Establishment political parties looked more similar, unions were crushed, the social safety net was deconstructed. Multiple states went from owning their own assets and being able to make money off of them and subsidise any losses with taxation and debt, to selling off their assets, losing long term revenue, and creating a layer of rent seekers in between those assets and the public who depend on those services. All it is is a parasitic transference of wealth from the poor to the rich - because to get into that layer of rent seekers you had to have money already to buy them up when they were being sold off (usually on the cheap).
Thanks. 'neoliberalism' as a word has a problem in that there appears to be little or no common ground about its meaning, except that it is broadly a free market capitalist movement with a preference for a smaller state.
Well, we live in a very large state economy, with an overwhelming weight of regulation and law applying to every bit of human activity from the local Duck Pond Charity to the doings of BP.
Welfare state, education, NHS, all in state managed hands. We are nowhere close to your sort of neoliberal society, nor are we going t be.
Entire councils are essentially run by private profit seeking companies - like Capita. Entire sections of our security and prisons are run by G4S. School Academisation, whilst not technically allowing schools to be run for profit, have shifted ownership and responsibilities of schools from local councils to private companies. The same is already happening in the NHS; my local GP practice hosts private clinics and basically all consultants have a greater share of their workload going towards private work that is still based within publicly owned hospitals. Our public housing stock has been sold off bit by bit, ..
There would, of course, have been nothing wrong with that, had the local authority owners been allowed to retain and re-invest the proceeds. Indeed the economic benefits would have been far greater than they were.
Instead, your 'neoliberal' central governments awarded themselves enormous bungs, at the expense of local government, with which to bribe successive electorates.
That wasn't really neoliberal economics; more of a con trick.
Of course that's neoliberal economics - because the point of neoliberalism isn't to re-invest the proceeds into other government services because a basis belief of neoliberalism is that the government shouldn't do these things, only the private sector should. Then "when the money runs out" comes the ability to legitimise another massive round of austerity and selling off of assets again.
I'm no expert on housing, but I do find it odd that the influence of airbnb is rarely mentioned.
Although we're not at Barcelona levels yet, it strikes me that in 'popular' areas of the country the significant volume of flats and houses that are now 'owned' by airbnb hosts must affect both the availability and the price of property. Perhaps we need to have a debate about the relative merits of property to live in vs. property to have a holiday in.
@Eabhal, you only have to look at the stats on how many 20-35 year olds are living with their parents in comparison to previous decades to see that there is massive pent up demand for housing.
These people deserve their own homes. I bet many of them would love to move into a tiny new build apartment - it would be an improvement on having to squeeze into their teenage bedroom in their parent’s house.
The number of households in the UK is being artificially constrained because the people that would love to buy their own property and start a family can’t - the properties don’t exist for them to move into. That is in turn having knock on effects on when people are choosing to have children & causing other social tensions.
I don't disagree at all. I'm not sure where you have got that idea from.
All I've done is point out that the number of houses has increased faster than the population and households, yet it hasn't made much of a difference to the housing crisis in our cities.
My concern is that unless economic (and therefore housing) demand is spread around the country more equally, no level of supply will solve this issue. To take an extreme and silly example - building 1,000,000 houses on Benbecula will not solve the problems in Edinburgh. (Unless Benbecula becomes a new Singapore...)
Two ways you can solve this. One is to invest in towns so there are jobs, instagrammable high streets, a critical mass of possible sexual partners, yoga. They need to relatively much more attractive. Another would be to increase access to of city centres with better transport links.
1) The number of houses has not grown faster than the population: Population growth since 2000 has run at 0.6% / annum. Housing growth has run at 0.5%. So even on a percentage basis (which as Barty points out is not actually the correct comparison, because household composition has changed as the population has aged, plus the percentage change hides the absolute value of the unmet housing demand) the ratios have been getting worse over time and not better year on year on year.
2) The number of households is constrained by the number of houses! So you cannot use that as a proxy for the demand for dwellings.
We are building about 0.5% of our existing housing stock per year. That implies that UK houses have to last 200 years just to keep the numbers steady. If you want to expand housing supply then houses have to remain standing even longer! Unless we build more houses people are going to continue to be cursed to remain crammed into terrible housing.
If supply gets near demand, then prices will fall.
There seems to be this weird belief across politics that somehow you can build more houses, increasing supply, so that first-time buyers can afford a home, but also not bring down prices across the board. We seem to want to makes houses cheaper for some people, and yet maintain the prices for others. It's nuts. If we ever build enough homes in this country then in real terms at least prices will plummet.
The "sweet spot" would be house prices rising each year, above zero (so no negative equity) but by less than inflation (so becoming more affordable).
House prices in money terms (as opposed to real terms) can afford to fall 4-5% per year without any serious danger of negative equity on a repayment mortgage. That should be the target.
That doesn't seem to happen, though. The structure of the market encourages wilder swings in prices, in part because mortgage lenders understandably do not want to provide large amounts of credit secured on a depreciating asset. So any fall in prices sees a decline in credit availability, and it's mainly the availability of credit that is supporting high prices. So then you have a price crash and negative equity.
It's not an easy situation for a government to manage. How do they do the right thing, get to a better situation for the country, and still win the next election?
I'm no expert on housing, but I do find it odd that the influence of airbnb is rarely mentioned.
Although we're not at Barcelona levels yet, it strikes me that in 'popular' areas of the country the significant volume of flats and houses that are now 'owned' by airbnb hosts must affect both the availability and the price of property. Perhaps we need to have a debate about the relative merits of property to live in vs. property to have a holiday in.
No doubt about that in places such as parts of central Edinburgh. There is also the issue of whether such accommodation degrades the market after a certain point - effectively blocks and streets become so nasty they are unattractive places to actually live, and tend to be removed from the owner occupier market some more.
Edit: and in small places, add Taz' later point re needing enough locals to do the work, keep the place running, etc.
@148grss - congrats on your first article. I enjoyed reading it, althPugh I don’t personally get behind this characterisation of Starmer as centre-right, nor do I think it is plausible to describe Starmer as being personally unpopular.
And (whilst I accept the political compass isn't the best or only tool to show where people or parties stand) this Labour manifesto is clearly on the centre right:
Politicians aren’t popular. Starmer is more popular than most politicians.
On the political compass, they have nothing in the left most 25% or the bottom most 25% of that figure. Maybe that graph should be re-drawn with a different origin point, at which point Labour would not look so centre-right.
I took a brief break from the proceedings in Parliament today to speak on behalf of residents in Great Barr at the Planning Inquiry in relation to the proposed development at Peak House Farm."
LOL
Someone should start a book on how many Lab MPs will be caught opposing development in their own constituencies in the next 12 months.
His objections seem to have substance. For example, the affordable housing percentage is well below expectations for London.
So, I would say it is a reasonable interpretation that he is seeking to make a developer build an appropriate scheme, rather than being 'a hypocrite opposing development' which will be the standard Telegraph line from this point every day.
If supply gets near demand, then prices will fall.
There seems to be this weird belief across politics that somehow you can build more houses, increasing supply, so that first-time buyers can afford a home, but also not bring down prices across the board. We seem to want to makes houses cheaper for some people, and yet maintain the prices for others. It's nuts. If we ever build enough homes in this country then in real terms at least prices will plummet.
The "sweet spot" would be house prices rising each year, above zero (so no negative equity) but by less than inflation (so becoming more affordable).
House prices in money terms (as opposed to real terms) can afford to fall 4-5% per year without any serious danger of negative equity on a repayment mortgage. That should be the target.
That doesn't seem to happen, though. The structure of the market encourages wilder swings in prices, in part because mortgage lenders understandably do not want to provide large amounts of credit secured on a depreciating asset. So any fall in prices sees a decline in credit availability, and it's mainly the availability of credit that is supporting high prices. So then you have a price crash and negative equity.
It's not an easy situation for a government to manage. How do they do the right thing, get to a better situation for the country, and still win the next election?
By being better than the alternative.
House prices crashed in the late eighties/early 90s and the Tories were subsequently re-elected after that crash.
The aftermath of the crash was that housing was more affordable and we had a record high of people able to afford their own home.
An explosion in construction followed by a crash now while the Tories are deeply unpopular would fix the market conditions, make property affordable, address inequalities and they certainly could be re-elected.
If you live rent-free and mortgage-free in a property then seeing its value fall may notionally reduce your "wealth" but you still live rent-free and mortgage-free. Whereas those who can now afford their own home are now in a better position.
@148grss - congrats on your first article. I enjoyed reading it, althPugh I don’t personally get behind this characterisation of Starmer as centre-right, nor do I think it is plausible to describe Starmer as being personally unpopular.
And (whilst I accept the political compass isn't the best or only tool to show where people or parties stand) this Labour manifesto is clearly on the centre right:
That is an absurd compass, putting "workers party GB" as closer to the centre than Labour or the Lib Dems.
I mean, all of this demands a definition of where the centre is. I think for a lot of people who live in the West things like capitalism and private ownership of certain things is such a given that the "baseline" for what they believe is already pretty economically right wing.
I'm no expert on housing, but I do find it odd that the influence of airbnb is rarely mentioned.
Although we're not at Barcelona levels yet, it strikes me that in 'popular' areas of the country the significant volume of flats and houses that are now 'owned' by airbnb hosts must affect both the availability and the price of property. Perhaps we need to have a debate about the relative merits of property to live in vs. property to have a holiday in.
For us we like to visit Seahouses. It has been very noticeable over the last 5 years the growth in property moving over to AirBNB or cottages for rent.
There will come a tipping point where it gets too many and the impact that will have on people being able to live in the locale and support the shops and pubs and restaurants that service the incomers.
A balance is needed which neither the Airbnb'ers want nor the anti-growth coalitions ranting about tourists seem to want.
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Russia bombs a school. A depraved evil act of a terror state according to our media and mainstream politicians..
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Absolutely!
Russia is bombing civilians deliberately.
Israel is targeting Hamas.
Its not Israel's fault that Hamas uses human shields. Ukraine aren't doing that.
I see the Lancet has hypothesised that there may be as many as 180k dead Gazans. Bit of a dilemma for the IDF simps, should they go with ‘look how many dead women and kids Hamas are responsible for!’ or ‘the most moral army in the world has inadvertently killed much fewer than even the 40k that has been claimed, though we can’t tell you how many’.
@148grss - congrats on your first article. I enjoyed reading it, althPugh I don’t personally get behind this characterisation of Starmer as centre-right, nor do I think it is plausible to describe Starmer as being personally unpopular.
And (whilst I accept the political compass isn't the best or only tool to show where people or parties stand) this Labour manifesto is clearly on the centre right:
Politicians aren’t popular. Starmer is more popular than most politicians.
On the political compass, they have nothing in the left most 25% or the bottom most 25% of that figure. Maybe that graph should be re-drawn with a different origin point, at which point Labour would not look so centre-right.
Not sure about that as a basic point of statistical principle. The graph has to be based on averaging (x, y) over the whole range of available policies on offer, surely, and deleting some is iffy.
I'm no expert on housing, but I do find it odd that the influence of airbnb is rarely mentioned.
Although we're not at Barcelona levels yet, it strikes me that in 'popular' areas of the country the significant volume of flats and houses that are now 'owned' by airbnb hosts must affect both the availability and the price of property. Perhaps we need to have a debate about the relative merits of property to live in vs. property to have a holiday in.
No doubt about that in places such as parts of central Edinburgh. There is also the issue of whether such accommodation degrades the market after a certain point - effectively blocks and streets become so nasty they are unattractive places to actually live, and tend to be removed from the owner occupier market some more.
Yes, same in Brighton. But it's not just the glamorous cities. I suspect airbnb has distorted the Cornish housing market, for example, even more.
"in Palestine are only because of the losses to Independent candidates who ran predominantly on a platform that discussed Gaza, but I think it is a factor. The way Labour campaigned and spoke about Palestine before the election and how they are acting now after the election are very different"
Is there any evidence they've changed their position post election? It would be good if they had but I haven't heard any mention of anything.
I mean, they look like they aren't going to block the ICC warrants, as Attorney General they brought in a Jewish lawyer who had previously condemned anti BDS legislation and demanded Israel follow UN rulings. They aren't doing what I would want them to do - immediately stopping arm sales and recognising Palestine - but they have certainly changed their tune from "of course Israel has the right to withhold power from Gaza". Whether or not this was always going to be the case or a reaction to the election is to be seen in the long term - Starmer's refusal to answer the question about Muslim voters leaving the Labour party is evidence against my hypothesis, for example. But we'll see.
They said they’d respect the ICC warrants before the election.
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Russia bombs a school. A depraved evil act of a terror state according to our media and mainstream politicians..
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Absolutely!
Russia is bombing civilians deliberately.
Israel is targeting Hamas.
Its not Israel's fault that Hamas uses human shields. Ukraine aren't doing that.
I see the Lancet has hypothesised that there may be as many as 180k dead Gazans. Bit of a dilemma for the IDF simps, should they go with ‘look how many dead women and kids Hamas are responsible for!’ or ‘the most moral army in the world has inadvertently killed much fewer than even the 40k that has been claimed, though we can’t tell you how many’.
Its Hamas's fault.
There being casualties isn't a reason not to wage war, its a reason not to wage unjust wars or commit war crimes.
Targeting Hamas is neither unjust, nor a war crime. Hamas using human shields and what they did on 7 October is both.
If supply gets near demand, then prices will fall.
There seems to be this weird belief across politics that somehow you can build more houses, increasing supply, so that first-time buyers can afford a home, but also not bring down prices across the board. We seem to want to makes houses cheaper for some people, and yet maintain the prices for others. It's nuts. If we ever build enough homes in this country then in real terms at least prices will plummet.
The "sweet spot" would be house prices rising each year, above zero (so no negative equity) but by less than inflation (so becoming more affordable).
House prices in money terms (as opposed to real terms) can afford to fall 4-5% per year without any serious danger of negative equity on a repayment mortgage. That should be the target.
That doesn't seem to happen, though. The structure of the market encourages wilder swings in prices, in part because mortgage lenders understandably do not want to provide large amounts of credit secured on a depreciating asset. So any fall in prices sees a decline in credit availability, and it's mainly the availability of credit that is supporting high prices. So then you have a price crash and negative equity.
It's not an easy situation for a government to manage. How do they do the right thing, get to a better situation for the country, and still win the next election?
The number of voters who don’t have a house and would like to buy one, is considerably higher than the number of voters that might be affected by negative equity even if prices were to fall by say 20% over the life of a Parliament.
What screws people, is what happened in 1992-3, with a combination of recession leading to job losses, as well as falling house prices and inflexible lenders, which forced a large number of sellers to realise the paper losses on their property.
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Russia bombs a school. A depraved evil act of a terror state according to our media and mainstream politicians..
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Yup. And Netanyahu's useful idiots swallow every excuse he comes out with. The Israelis lie and lie - remember the attack on the UN convoy that they initially tried to blame on a Hamas "side bomb", for example - and, having expelled all foreign journalists, they usually get away with it.
According to Israel's own account, they were targeting a single individual. They don't at times appear to place a greatly different value on human life than do Hamas.
The Israeli military said it was reviewing reports that civilians were harmed. It said the incident occurred when it struck with “precise munition” a Hamas fighter who took part in the 7 October raid on Israel that precipitated the Israeli assault on Gaza...
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
That’s not how it works. If I’m a developer and I build a collection of 8 houses on a plot of land, I am very, very, very slightly decreasing the value of housing by increasing supply, but I’m also building 8 houses I can sell for shit loads of money.
Within a free market, businesses have an incentive to make a product people want for a profit, even if by doing so, the increase in the supply slightly pushes down the price. Lots of businesses acting individually to make money then has a large impact on supply and prices fall until they reach some equilibrium. Well… in theory, if there are no cartels, etc.
Exactly.
The problem is that whereas in countries without our planning system house are built one or eight at a time, here we have acted to restrict planning and then grant consent to cartels hundreds of houses at a time.
And cartels do what cartels do.
Remove the planning system, the cartels would be destroyed.
I live in London. Houses are still often built 8 at a time, or fewer, here.
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
That’s not how it works. If I’m a developer and I build a collection of 8 houses on a plot of land, I am very, very, very slightly decreasing the value of housing by increasing supply, but I’m also building 8 houses I can sell for shit loads of money.
Within a free market, businesses have an incentive to make a product people want for a profit, even if by doing so, the increase in the supply slightly pushes down the price. Lots of businesses acting individually to make money then has a large impact on supply and prices fall until they reach some equilibrium. Well… in theory, if there are no cartels, etc.
Exactly.
The problem is that whereas in countries without our planning system house are built one or eight at a time, here we have acted to restrict planning and then grant consent to cartels hundreds of houses at a time.
And cartels do what cartels do.
Remove the planning system, the cartels would be destroyed.
I live in London. Houses are still often built 8 at a time, or fewer, here.
I'd like to see some data on that as the national data is that its overwhelmingly large developments that get consent.
Is that 8 by small developers or by the cartel who can game the planning system?
Where I live there's multiple developments going on, but its the same developers again and again, the ones who are able to play and game the planning system.
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Russia bombs a school. A depraved evil act of a terror state according to our media and mainstream politicians..
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Absolutely!
Russia is bombing civilians deliberately.
Israel is targeting Hamas.
Its not Israel's fault that Hamas uses human shields. Ukraine aren't doing that.
I see the Lancet has hypothesised that there may be as many as 180k dead Gazans. Bit of a dilemma for the IDF simps, should they go with ‘look how many dead women and kids Hamas are responsible for!’ or ‘the most moral army in the world has inadvertently killed much fewer than even the 40k that has been claimed, though we can’t tell you how many’.
No dilemma at all for the IDF Ultras. It will simply be "that nasty Hamas made them do it" and they uncritically lap up any shit the IDF puts on their platter and repeat it.
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
If building more properties would decrease the value of housing - that housing has to be made without profit in mind. It must be aimed at those who cannot afford housing in a "free market". It must set rents lower than market rates to influence the rest of the market.
We cannot do this in this country without fucking over a huge number of people because we replaced real terms wage growth with asset growth - those who bought properties in the late 80s - late 90s have seen wages stagnate but can rely on their house being flogged off at some point paying for their retirement. If you collapse the housing market, those people are suddenly fucked. So any solution to the housing crisis must come with redistribution and social safety nets in mind.
Supply is so constrained that we're not remotely close to the point of building enough to crash the market. For now, we should be concentrating on getting as many new properties built as possible, using whatever means we can.
Personally, I support public sector housebuilding on the basis that it provides counter-cyclical support for the building trade, thus avoiding the sort of stop-go capacity destruction we've experienced over the past 40 years. I also support those who aspire to have Vienna-style public housing. And those who support building new tenements and mansion blocks. And those who want Edwardian terraces, or 1930s-style suburban semis. And those who favour Poundbury-style urban villages, Milton Keynes-style soft modernism, or Nine Elms-style residential towers.
Once we've built a couple of million new dwellings, we can reassess - but I suspect there's enough demand to support building closer to 5m without collapsing the market.
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Russia bombs a school. A depraved evil act of a terror state according to our media and mainstream politicians..
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Yup. And Netanyahu's useful idiots swallow every excuse he comes out with. The Israelis lie and lie - remember the attack on the UN convoy that they initially tried to blame on a Hamas "side bomb", for example - and, having expelled all foreign journalists, they usually get away with it.
According to Israel's own account, they were targeting a single individual. They don't at times appear to place a greatly different value on human life than do Hamas.
The Israeli military said it was reviewing reports that civilians were harmed. It said the incident occurred when it struck with “precise munition” a Hamas fighter who took part in the 7 October raid on Israel that precipitated the Israeli assault on Gaza...
If that individual was the target and he was Hamas then he's a perfectly legitimate target.
What else should Israel do?
That's totally different to both Hamas and Russia targeting innocents for the hell of it.
"It really helps to start a couple of hundred years ago. If you go back before the industrial revolution .. if you go back before deep water navigation .... the United Kingdom or as it was known 'England' really did not matter all that much. It was a relatively smallish population on a relatively largish island off the coast of Europe and most of the mainland countries especially France had far larger populations and were far more significant.
But when deep water navigation was invented by the Iberians ..." and so it continues.
That's a history out of Peanuts, written by Charlie Brown, for Readers' Digest Simplified Version, for use in the Kindergarten.
But I see he's a "political writer".
I don't see why should we take this person even slightly seriously, if he makes so many basic errors on the most basic of basics. Sorry.
Indeed. The secret to our wealth was large flocks of sheep, for which the secret was the absence of wolves, for which the secret was being an island and hunting them all down by the later 1100s, for which the secret was the cash reward on offer for anyone who produced a dead one.
So, the claim that young people were flocking in their droves to Reform, as repeatedly touted on here by @Leon turns out to be complete and utter rubbish. Why should we be surprised?
That YouGov analysis is an interesting read, according to their analysis Voting Labour positively correlates with level of education and salary, not sure how that aligns with the PB subset
No that wasn't entirely true in 2024, certainly on salary level. This year it was the Tories and LDs who did best with upper middle class ABs relative to the rest of their voters and the LDs did better with middle class C1s than working class C2s and DEs. Labour did almost as well with DEs as ABs and better with DEs than lower middle class C1s.
"Those with a higher household income were more likely to vote Labour than those with a lower household income. A third (32-34%) of those income groups below £50,000 voted for Labour compared to four in ten (40%) of those in household income groups making £50,000 a year or more."
£50k-70k 40% Labour £70k+ 40% Labour
On that chart the LDs did best with those with the highest household income relative to their vote and got their lowest share with those with the lowest income. So LDs vote was more dependent on social class than Labour's vote.
Now yes Labour's vote is less working class and more middle class than it was in the last century now but Labour did better amongst those earning under £20k than middle earners on £20k-£20k.
Yougov has the Tories doing best in terms of middle income earners from £20k to £50k.
Again Yougov too has Reform now a working class party in terms of its support base, indeed closer to what Labour used to be ie doing best poorer and average earners and worst amongst the highest earners. The Greens too do best with the poorest voters but unlike Reform as well with wealthy voters as average earners https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/49978-how-britain-voted-in-the-2024-general-election
And versus Con+Reform, High education 42% Labour vs 26% Con+Ref Income >£50k 40% Labour vs 33% Con+Ref
Low education 28% Labour vs 54% Con+Ref Income <£50k 33% Labour vs 41% Con+Ref
Though Con+Ref have a lead with OAPs, so probably also wealth.
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Russia bombs a school. A depraved evil act of a terror state according to our media and mainstream politicians..
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Absolutely!
Russia is bombing civilians deliberately.
Israel is targeting Hamas.
Its not Israel's fault that Hamas uses human shields. Ukraine aren't doing that.
I see the Lancet has hypothesised that there may be as many as 180k dead Gazans. Bit of a dilemma for the IDF simps, should they go with ‘look how many dead women and kids Hamas are responsible for!’ or ‘the most moral army in the world has inadvertently killed much fewer than even the 40k that has been claimed, though we can’t tell you how many’.
Its Hamas's fault.
There being casualties isn't a reason not to wage war, its a reason not to wage unjust wars or commit war crimes.
Targeting Hamas is neither unjust, nor a war crime. Hamas using human shields and what they did on 7 October is both.
The over-caffeinated PB arbiter of the rules of war has spoken, prick up your ears ICJ.
@148grss - congrats on your first article. I enjoyed reading it, althPugh I don’t personally get behind this characterisation of Starmer as centre-right, nor do I think it is plausible to describe Starmer as being personally unpopular.
And (whilst I accept the political compass isn't the best or only tool to show where people or parties stand) this Labour manifesto is clearly on the centre right:
Politicians aren’t popular. Starmer is more popular than most politicians.
On the political compass, they have nothing in the left most 25% or the bottom most 25% of that figure. Maybe that graph should be re-drawn with a different origin point, at which point Labour would not look so centre-right.
Most people aren't anarchists - and no political parties are anarchist? I personally fall within the bottom left four squares (literally redid the test after looking this up). But it shouldn't be a surprise that most political parties in the UK do not advocate the abolition of private property, for example.
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
If building more properties would decrease the value of housing - that housing has to be made without profit in mind. It must be aimed at those who cannot afford housing in a "free market". It must set rents lower than market rates to influence the rest of the market.
We cannot do this in this country without fucking over a huge number of people because we replaced real terms wage growth with asset growth - those who bought properties in the late 80s - late 90s have seen wages stagnate but can rely on their house being flogged off at some point paying for their retirement. If you collapse the housing market, those people are suddenly fucked. So any solution to the housing crisis must come with redistribution and social safety nets in mind.
Supply is so constrained that we're not remotely close to the point of building enough to crash the market. For now, we should be concentrating on getting as many new properties built as possible, using whatever means we can.
Personally, I support public sector housebuilding on the basis that it provides counter-cyclical support for the building trade, thus avoiding the sort of stop-go capacity destruction we've experienced over the past 40 years. I also support those who aspire to have Vienna-style public housing. And those who support building new tenements and mansion blocks. And those who want Edwardian terraces, or 1930s-style suburban semis. And those who favour Poundbury-style urban villages, Milton Keynes-style soft modernism, or Nine Elms-style residential towers.
Once we've built a couple of million new dwellings, we can reassess - but I suspect there's enough demand to support building closer to 5m without collapsing the market.
The whole discussion seems to forget that public sector housebuilding is active in the UK under Labour and then the SNP - in Scotland anyway. Not enough, sure, I've seen an estimate that about 2x is needed, but it is (a) done and (b) helps, especially in those not, erm, able to explore the executive-house-with-4-beds-and-3-cars market so beloved of commercial builders.
"...the installation of a 2m x 1m skylight on a flat roof to make a dingy flat lighter generated an astonishing fuss. The redoubtable red-trousered resisters approached this small pane of glass – visible only to the occupant – with all the fire and fury required to thwart a nuclear power plant."
Watching the government try and actually make planning easier, is going to be funny to watch.
I wish them all the luck in the World, housing is undoubtedly the UK’s single biggest issue at the moment, but the NIMBY and developer interests are very well entrenched indeed.
Coming down heavy on second home owners, especially ones kept empty for much of the year, is a quicker way to get more housing units onto the market.
Planning is IMHO a relatively small part of the problem, and if they think more relaxed planning is going to resolve the housing crisis by itself, they're in for a disappointment.
The ugly truth is that housebuilding has outpaced population and household growth over the last 20 years, and house prices and rents have gone through the roof regardless.
So a bonfire of planning regulations could mean you piss off all the Green-belt NIMBYs for no discernible benefit for your core vote in the cities (even if the counter-factual would be even worse). Politically disastrous.
You would need to build an extreme volume of high density housing in the cities so that you entirely disrupt the market there. That might be possible with council housing as in the 1960s, but even then I assume there isn't enough capacity in the construction sector to make it happen.
The problem is that we don't need the kind of housing developers want to build (four bedroom houses in the green belt) and we do need stuff housing developers don't want to build (Viennese style public housing flats). Sure, some of what people call NIMBYism is that - but a lot of it is also "yes, I want my kids to be able to afford a house here too - but you're not planning to build that kind of house so why should I support you?".
In St A, where I live, we have had a load of luxury flats go up and a number of new housing blocks - all private development, all very pricey. That won't lower rents or house prices.
If supply gets near demand, then prices will fall.
Not possible.
Housing demand is insatiable. We all want to live alone or with our families. Once we have achieved that, we all want a second home in the Cotswolds. Demand might start to simmer down at what - 3 dwellings per household?
We also want to live somewhere nice. That’s Edinburgh, or maybe Bath. Perhaps the Isle of Skye, if you’re English and looking to retire. It is not Middlesbrough, where you can buy a 5 bedroom house for £200,000.
So until there are 30 million detached houses in the nice bits, housing demand will always outstrip supply.
Except that this isn’t how house prices and demand work in other countries. The ones without housing shortages.
Significantly because holding property is more expensive, largely because of property taxes. Which is why finance is more to blame for the crisis than planning, with developers also more to blame.
@148grss - congrats on your first article. I enjoyed reading it, althPugh I don’t personally get behind this characterisation of Starmer as centre-right, nor do I think it is plausible to describe Starmer as being personally unpopular.
And (whilst I accept the political compass isn't the best or only tool to show where people or parties stand) this Labour manifesto is clearly on the centre right:
Politicians aren’t popular. Starmer is more popular than most politicians.
On the political compass, they have nothing in the left most 25% or the bottom most 25% of that figure. Maybe that graph should be re-drawn with a different origin point, at which point Labour would not look so centre-right.
Most people aren't anarchists - and no political parties are anarchist? I personally fall within the bottom left four squares (literally redid the test after looking this up). But it shouldn't be a surprise that most political parties in the UK do not advocate the abolition of private property, for example.
The march of Labour to the top right is very marked.
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
That’s not how it works. If I’m a developer and I build a collection of 8 houses on a plot of land, I am very, very, very slightly decreasing the value of housing by increasing supply, but I’m also building 8 houses I can sell for shit loads of money.
Within a free market, businesses have an incentive to make a product people want for a profit, even if by doing so, the increase in the supply slightly pushes down the price. Lots of businesses acting individually to make money then has a large impact on supply and prices fall until they reach some equilibrium. Well… in theory, if there are no cartels, etc.
See why the companies making TVs don't stage a sellers strike when the price falls.
Biden arguing for air defences for Ukraine. Weak, weak, weak.
How about some F-16s and long range missiles that can hit back at where the Russians are launching from? Amidst all the ongoing conflicts the west seems to consistently be on the back foot. The only contrary example would be Israel bombing the heck out of Gaza whilst Hamas hide in tunnels. Why do we insist on fighting our enemies on their own terms?
"...the installation of a 2m x 1m skylight on a flat roof to make a dingy flat lighter generated an astonishing fuss. The redoubtable red-trousered resisters approached this small pane of glass – visible only to the occupant – with all the fire and fury required to thwart a nuclear power plant."
Watching the government try and actually make planning easier, is going to be funny to watch.
I wish them all the luck in the World, housing is undoubtedly the UK’s single biggest issue at the moment, but the NIMBY and developer interests are very well entrenched indeed.
Coming down heavy on second home owners, especially ones kept empty for much of the year, is a quicker way to get more housing units onto the market.
Planning is IMHO a relatively small part of the problem, and if they think more relaxed planning is going to resolve the housing crisis by itself, they're in for a disappointment.
The ugly truth is that housebuilding has outpaced population and household growth over the last 20 years, and house prices and rents have gone through the roof regardless.
So a bonfire of planning regulations could mean you piss off all the Green-belt NIMBYs for no discernible benefit for your core vote in the cities (even if the counter-factual would be even worse). Politically disastrous.
You would need to build an extreme volume of high density housing in the cities so that you entirely disrupt the market there. That might be possible with council housing as in the 1960s, but even then I assume there isn't enough capacity in the construction sector to make it happen.
The problem is that we don't need the kind of housing developers want to build (four bedroom houses in the green belt) and we do need stuff housing developers don't want to build (Viennese style public housing flats). Sure, some of what people call NIMBYism is that - but a lot of it is also "yes, I want my kids to be able to afford a house here too - but you're not planning to build that kind of house so why should I support you?".
In St A, where I live, we have had a load of luxury flats go up and a number of new housing blocks - all private development, all very pricey. That won't lower rents or house prices.
If supply gets near demand, then prices will fall.
Not possible.
Housing demand is insatiable. We all want to live alone or with our families. Once we have achieved that, we all want a second home in the Cotswolds. Demand might start to simmer down at what - 3 dwellings per household?
We also want to live somewhere nice. That’s Edinburgh, or maybe Bath. Perhaps the Isle of Skye, if you’re English and looking to retire. It is not Middlesbrough, where you can buy a 5 bedroom house for £200,000.
So until there are 30 million detached houses in the nice bits, housing demand will always outstrip supply.
Except that this isn’t how house prices and demand work in other countries. The ones without housing shortages.
Significantly because holding property is more expensive, largely because of property taxes. Which is why finance is more to blame for the crisis than planning, with developers also more to blame.
The planning system is responsible for the developers acting as they do.
Developers are acting rationally in their own interests based on the law as it is. Change the law and open it up to competition and they'd have no choice but to act differently, or see rivals build homes instead, but currently small developers can't play the planning system like the large ones can.
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
That’s not how it works. If I’m a developer and I build a collection of 8 houses on a plot of land, I am very, very, very slightly decreasing the value of housing by increasing supply, but I’m also building 8 houses I can sell for shit loads of money.
Within a free market, businesses have an incentive to make a product people want for a profit, even if by doing so, the increase in the supply slightly pushes down the price. Lots of businesses acting individually to make money then has a large impact on supply and prices fall until they reach some equilibrium. Well… in theory, if there are no cartels, etc.
Exactly.
The problem is that whereas in countries without our planning system house are built one or eight at a time, here we have acted to restrict planning and then grant consent to cartels hundreds of houses at a time.
And cartels do what cartels do.
Remove the planning system, the cartels would be destroyed.
I live in London. Houses are still often built 8 at a time, or fewer, here.
I'd like to see some data on that as the national data is that its overwhelmingly large developments that get consent.
Is that 8 by small developers or by the cartel who can game the planning system?
Where I live there's multiple developments going on, but its the same developers again and again, the ones who are able to play and game the planning system.
I don’t know who the developers are. I do see little blocks of land being built on. An old petrol station near me became a small terrace of about 6 houses. A brownfield site became a collection of ~12. This is all welcome. An old council estate was torn down and is being replaced with a mid-rise block: looks tastefully done. I know a couple of people who have or are building single houses on available plots. Other sites, like an old bowling green and my old offices, remain undeveloped because of intense NIMBYism.
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Russia bombs a school. A depraved evil act of a terror state according to our media and mainstream politicians..
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Absolutely!
Russia is bombing civilians deliberately.
Israel is targeting Hamas.
Its not Israel's fault that Hamas uses human shields. Ukraine aren't doing that.
I see the Lancet has hypothesised that there may be as many as 180k dead Gazans. Bit of a dilemma for the IDF simps, should they go with ‘look how many dead women and kids Hamas are responsible for!’ or ‘the most moral army in the world has inadvertently killed much fewer than even the 40k that has been claimed, though we can’t tell you how many’.
Its Hamas's fault.
There being casualties isn't a reason not to wage war, its a reason not to wage unjust wars or commit war crimes.
Targeting Hamas is neither unjust, nor a war crime. Hamas using human shields and what they did on 7 October is both.
The over-caffeinated PB arbiter of the rules of war has spoken, prick up your ears ICJ.
Well, Barty is correct in those statements, and I don't think the ICJ would disagree with them. Where Barty makes a ridiculous leap of logic is to think:
"And therefore nothing Israel does while targeting Hamas can ever be a war crime, or even criticised"
I tend to agree with Barty. Reform planning and building regulations, undermine the housing oligopoly, and the market should do the rest.
I also note that the housing issue is particularly acute in English-speaking countries. And I wonder if there is something about the operation of common law (and maybe mortgage markets) that conspire to worsen the issue.
As an aside, there’s no necessary contradiction between and MP objecting to a local development, and a pro-housing policy. It’s not like developers are renowned for their sympathy to local considerations! Objections are in themselves kind of a downstream issue from the structural factors that incent both shit developments and the “objection industry”.
"It really helps to start a couple of hundred years ago. If you go back before the industrial revolution .. if you go back before deep water navigation .... the United Kingdom or as it was known 'England' really did not matter all that much. It was a relatively smallish population on a relatively largish island off the coast of Europe and most of the mainland countries especially France had far larger populations and were far more significant.
But when deep water navigation was invented by the Iberians ..." and so it continues.
That's a history out of Peanuts, written by Charlie Brown, for Readers' Digest Simplified Version, for use in the Kindergarten.
But I see he's a "political writer".
I don't see why should we take this person even slightly seriously, if he makes so many basic errors on the most basic of basics. Sorry.
Indeed. The secret to our wealth was large flocks of sheep, for which the secret was the absence of wolves, for which the secret was being an island and hunting them all down by the later 1100s, for which the secret was the cash reward on offer for anyone who produced a dead one.
Being an island?
All dead by 1199?
If you're not talking about Wight, but about *North* Island, 1680 is more correct ...
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Russia bombs a school. A depraved evil act of a terror state according to our media and mainstream politicians..
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Yup. And Netanyahu's useful idiots swallow every excuse he comes out with. The Israelis lie and lie - remember the attack on the UN convoy that they initially tried to blame on a Hamas "side bomb", for example - and, having expelled all foreign journalists, they usually get away with it.
According to Israel's own account, they were targeting a single individual. They don't at times appear to place a greatly different value on human life than do Hamas.
The Israeli military said it was reviewing reports that civilians were harmed. It said the incident occurred when it struck with “precise munition” a Hamas fighter who took part in the 7 October raid on Israel that precipitated the Israeli assault on Gaza...
If that individual was the target and he was Hamas then he's a perfectly legitimate target.
What else should Israel do?
That's totally different to both Hamas and Russia targeting innocents for the hell of it.
The rules of war require proportionality in so far as possible.
A bonfire of planning regulations will make little difference as it is things like nutrient neutrality which is driven by other acts which are sacred cows to the progressive left that will hold up building.
Thanks all for the kind words - I know I have a tendency to write long comments here, so thought it best to do a full header to explain my relatively happy feelings from the outcomes of the election.
I can’t stay here long today due to work, but to answer a few questions:
1) I think Bristol Central shows that Greens will mostly be targeting urban seats - whilst we do have a surprising amount of support from otherwise conservative voters in rural areas, that is not where our members are from. On the other hand I know we won those seats without hiding our lefty credentials, so maybe some of those voters are more open to left wing policies than previously thought and just have a tribal hatred of Labour.
2) On tactical voting, there is a graph floating around that I did wonder whether I should include here and write a bit about showing that if people didn’t have to vote tactically the share for Labour would be less, not more. So the tactical anti-Tory vote was already part of why Labour did so well.
3) On policy specific questions - I’m kinda tired of saying here that I disagree with the underlying assumptions of neoliberalism where private investment and balancing the budget are the most important things. When it comes to funding and taxation and such I hold a position much closer to MMT. When it comes to “how do we afford x” that is my position.
4) On NATO specifically - it’s currently a necessary evil and arguably preferable to the alternative (much like my view of the EU).
5) My name comes from the assigned username I was given at university - random numbers and letters that I still remember and therefore use.
Thanks. The nearer a socialist alternative gets to actual power, the more it will be examined.
I think the chances that voters will vote consistently for MMT economics, once it is explained, in a manifesto that could be that of a governing party is about Zero. It will have the appearance of being the mirror image of Reform's economics.
Just suppose for a moment that the chief underlying assumption of what you call 'neoliberalism' is that more people on planet earth should have more access to rising prosperity and stuff like water, food, housing and education and the possibility of living in a reasonably free and peaceful society? And that the ways to achieve it with a deeply imperfect humanity is that everyone should have a vote, and empirically based policies are the chief instrument of change.
That isn't the chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism. The chief underlying assumption of neoliberalism is that it is better for things to be in the hands of the private sector and that a rising tide lifts all boats - it is trickle down economics. And it doesn't work. Neoliberalism doesn't really care about democracy - the first real testing ground for neoliberalism was Chile under Pinochet. It was packaged for the Western audience, who were used to things like autonomy and freedom, by suggesting it was a freedom based ideology - but freedom for the market and the capitalist only.
If you are a worker or poor - your freedoms reduced under neoliberalism. Establishment political parties looked more similar, unions were crushed, the social safety net was deconstructed. Multiple states went from owning their own assets and being able to make money off of them and subsidise any losses with taxation and debt, to selling off their assets, losing long term revenue, and creating a layer of rent seekers in between those assets and the public who depend on those services. All it is is a parasitic transference of wealth from the poor to the rich - because to get into that layer of rent seekers you had to have money already to buy them up when they were being sold off (usually on the cheap).
Thanks. 'neoliberalism' as a word has a problem in that there appears to be little or no common ground about its meaning, except that it is broadly a free market capitalist movement with a preference for a smaller state.
Well, we live in a very large state economy, with an overwhelming weight of regulation and law applying to every bit of human activity from the local Duck Pond Charity to the doings of BP.
Welfare state, education, NHS, all in state managed hands. We are nowhere close to your sort of neoliberal society, nor are we going t be.
Entire councils are essentially run by private profit seeking companies - like Capita. Entire sections of our security and prisons are run by G4S. School Academisation, whilst not technically allowing schools to be run for profit, have shifted ownership and responsibilities of schools from local councils to private companies. The same is already happening in the NHS; my local GP practice hosts private clinics and basically all consultants have a greater share of their workload going towards private work that is still based within publicly owned hospitals. Our public housing stock has been sold off bit by bit, ..
There would, of course, have been nothing wrong with that, had the local authority owners been allowed to retain and re-invest the proceeds. Indeed the economic benefits would have been far greater than they were.
Instead, your 'neoliberal' central governments awarded themselves enormous bungs, at the expense of local government, with which to bribe successive electorates.
That wasn't really neoliberal economics; more of a con trick.
Of course that's neoliberal economics - because the point of neoliberalism isn't to re-invest the proceeds into other government services because a basis belief of neoliberalism is that the government shouldn't do these things, only the private sector should. Then "when the money runs out" comes the ability to legitimise another massive round of austerity and selling off of assets again.
Except they did invest the proceeds - into financing current spending on government services.
The dogma was that Thatcher wanted to reduce influence of government. In reality she significantly expanded central government's power and reach.
Of course it didn't help that those arguing against housing sales did so from your POV that they simply shouldn't have happened - rather than mine that councils should have been allowed to retain the proceeds to reinvest in more housing stock.
I had a call from our car’s security tracking centre in the middle of the night saying they had a theft alert. Looked outside and it was gone.
Called the police and got a CRN. Had a call back an hour later from Lewisham police saying they had a tracking fix on the car and would go and investigate.
Called the police contact number this morning. No record of any car being tracked or found. Finally spoke to the car pound who said the police had set off to find the car in the tracked location then got diverted elsewhere. Finally got round to looking this morning by which time it had gone. They won’t bother looking actively for it now.
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Russia bombs a school. A depraved evil act of a terror state according to our media and mainstream politicians..
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Yup. And Netanyahu's useful idiots swallow every excuse he comes out with. The Israelis lie and lie - remember the attack on the UN convoy that they initially tried to blame on a Hamas "side bomb", for example - and, having expelled all foreign journalists, they usually get away with it.
According to Israel's own account, they were targeting a single individual. They don't at times appear to place a greatly different value on human life than do Hamas.
The Israeli military said it was reviewing reports that civilians were harmed. It said the incident occurred when it struck with “precise munition” a Hamas fighter who took part in the 7 October raid on Israel that precipitated the Israeli assault on Gaza...
If that individual was the target and he was Hamas then he's a perfectly legitimate target.
What else should Israel do?
That's totally different to both Hamas and Russia targeting innocents for the hell of it.
The rules of war require proportionality in so far as possible.
Absolutely, require proportionality but not a refusal to engage.
If this was the most proportional way to get a legitimate target, then it was a legitimate strike.
What Hamas did in 7 October, what Russia does regularly in Ukraine, the deliberate targeting of innocents, is a completely different matter.
Zeihan’s video is quite silly, but he does capture something very simple.
Britain’s wealth is based on London’s position as a financial centre. Manufacturing largely hasn’t figured since the 1980s.
London prospered as a Eurodollar hub from the 1970s, after some ill-considered US regulation, and then as Europe’s financial centre. Also, essentially as Africa’s, the Middle East’s, and India’s financial centre. And a home for Russian money besides.
Cameron/Osborne hoped to position London as a Chinese financial centre too.
Now that the UK is outside the EU and Dubai has picked up the Russian and much of the Indian business. The Chinese gambit was short-lived and ultimately killed off by the US (remember the Huawei saga?).
We face some massive questions about our future economic model.
One model is to simply age gracefully (or disgracefully, if you like) into decline, like Japan.
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Russia bombs a school. A depraved evil act of a terror state according to our media and mainstream politicians..
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Absolutely!
Russia is bombing civilians deliberately.
Israel is targeting Hamas.
Its not Israel's fault that Hamas uses human shields. Ukraine aren't doing that.
I see the Lancet has hypothesised that there may be as many as 180k dead Gazans. Bit of a dilemma for the IDF simps, should they go with ‘look how many dead women and kids Hamas are responsible for!’ or ‘the most moral army in the world has inadvertently killed much fewer than even the 40k that has been claimed, though we can’t tell you how many’.
Its Hamas's fault.
There being casualties isn't a reason not to wage war, its a reason not to wage unjust wars or commit war crimes.
Targeting Hamas is neither unjust, nor a war crime. Hamas using human shields and what they did on 7 October is both.
The over-caffeinated PB arbiter of the rules of war has spoken, prick up your ears ICJ.
The rules of war are as follows:
If you are a small or medium size nation observe them or else.
If you are a top 10 military power nation and in Western Europe observe them or else as your own countries lawyers and courts will spend the next 40 years crawling over every detail and complaint, vexatious or otherwise.
If you are a top 10 military power nation outside europe. Try not to get caught but it dosen't really matter unless you lose.
BBC reporting Israels latest war crime - they've bombed a school housing displaced civilians and killed at least 29 people, including children.
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
Russia bombs a school. A depraved evil act of a terror state according to our media and mainstream politicians..
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Yup. And Netanyahu's useful idiots swallow every excuse he comes out with. The Israelis lie and lie - remember the attack on the UN convoy that they initially tried to blame on a Hamas "side bomb", for example - and, having expelled all foreign journalists, they usually get away with it.
According to Israel's own account, they were targeting a single individual. They don't at times appear to place a greatly different value on human life than do Hamas.
The Israeli military said it was reviewing reports that civilians were harmed. It said the incident occurred when it struck with “precise munition” a Hamas fighter who took part in the 7 October raid on Israel that precipitated the Israeli assault on Gaza...
It becomes easier to understand the Israel/Gaza situation when you remember:
1) Hamas don't care about dead Palestinians and like dead Israelis:
2) Israel gets really mad about dead Israelis and doesn't care about dead Palestinians:
3) Hamas' admirers in the West care about dead Palestinians, but even if not fully paid up anti- Semites a la Chris Williamson have a sneaking feeling dead Israelis have it coming because they were Israelis and therefore complicit in dead Palestinians.
4) So the Israelis ignore them.
And the result, always, is therefore more dead Palestinians.
If building more houses would decrease the value of housing - why would private developers, who depend on the individual price of houses being above their costs to create profit, want to create more houses?
That’s not how it works. If I’m a developer and I build a collection of 8 houses on a plot of land, I am very, very, very slightly decreasing the value of housing by increasing supply, but I’m also building 8 houses I can sell for shit loads of money.
Within a free market, businesses have an incentive to make a product people want for a profit, even if by doing so, the increase in the supply slightly pushes down the price. Lots of businesses acting individually to make money then has a large impact on supply and prices fall until they reach some equilibrium. Well… in theory, if there are no cartels, etc.
Exactly.
The problem is that whereas in countries without our planning system house are built one or eight at a time, here we have acted to restrict planning and then grant consent to cartels hundreds of houses at a time.
And cartels do what cartels do.
Remove the planning system, the cartels would be destroyed.
I live in London. Houses are still often built 8 at a time, or fewer, here.
I'd like to see some data on that as the national data is that its overwhelmingly large developments that get consent.
Is that 8 by small developers or by the cartel who can game the planning system?
Where I live there's multiple developments going on, but its the same developers again and again, the ones who are able to play and game the planning system.
I don’t know who the developers are. I do see little blocks of land being built on. An old petrol station near me became a small terrace of about 6 houses. A brownfield site became a collection of ~12. This is all welcome. An old council estate was torn down and is being replaced with a mid-rise block: looks tastefully done. I know a couple of people who have or are building single houses on available plots. Other sites, like an old bowling green and my old offices, remain undeveloped because of intense NIMBYism.
In planning conversation, these are either what are known as "windfall sites", or may be in local housing site analysis in support of Local Plans as smaller sites.
They would not normally be tackled by medium or large developers ... not worth the candle.
Comments
Dear Lord, the man is an ignoramus beyond redemption.
Bottom line is that all the evidence tends to show the increase in supply leads to lower prices (which ought to be obvious). But when you have inefficient markets, regional variations, and a large mismatch between new build and demand growth, it's not at all obvious to the individual.
As you say, the key is getting enough new housing built. The rest is just detail.
If you try and force landlords out of existence, you may satisfy part of the demand for buying properties, but the result will be even more sky high prices on the rental properties that remain.
Housing is a commodity - an essential one. If you increase supply to the point that there is an excess, prices will tumble.
I do find the enduring splitting of the non-Tory 'progressive' vote frustrating, particularly the factionalism over on the left. It's all a bit Judean People's Front/People's Front of Judea for me. It's something the Tories pragmatically avoided until Big Nige came along and blew everything apart, we should try and minimise it on the left. But we don't.
After the last 14 years I just want competent government by people who are more like me and the majority of people in this country, not poshos and trustafarian SPADs and insiders constantly playing out psychodramas rooted in what happened at Eton or Winchester or wherever, using the rest of us, and the services we rely on, as pawns in their petty power games while shovelling money into their and their donor's pockets.
I don't get this obsession on the left with Gaza/Israel/Palestine/Judea and Samaria (delete according to preference) at all. I don't favour any side. It's a terrible conflict with its roots going back millennia, and since 1948 both sides have committed terrible acts. We could write a few thousand words on the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement and stroke our chins about the trauma of the Holocaust and the need for a Jewish homeland. We could cogitate on whether Israel is essentially a white settler state imposed in the Muslim heartland. Fascinating, illuminating, but it won't change anything.
It needs a strong international community to impose a two state solution. That doesn't look very likely in the near future. But all we can do is work towards that. This split let IDS back in. It probably got Magic Grandad back in.
Labour needs a good balance of the working-class and middle-class people who make up the majority of the people who live in this country to identify with it, and the policies it puts forward. It cannot be captured by the esoteric fantasies of the idealistically pure, naïve theorists like Owen Jones and the like. People who've never been skint in their life. Most people, sadly but there you go, don't care about Gaza. They don't care about the Uighurs. Or Ukraine. Or whoever's butchering each other in failing states across the world. Making issues such as this at the heart of a policy offer doesn't appeal to most people. Yes, our government should do what it can in the context of the international community. But splitting the left vote on this stuff is insane. What, really, can Starmer do about Palestine? Not a lot.
These people deserve their own homes. I bet many of them would love to move into a tiny new build apartment - it would be an improvement on having to squeeze into their teenage bedroom in their parent’s house.
The number of households in the UK is being artificially constrained because the people that would love to buy their own property and start a family can’t - the properties don’t exist for them to move into. That is in turn having knock on effects on when people are choosing to have children & causing other social tensions.
The households figure says absolutely nothing about demand. Anyone who uses it is being wilfully ignorant of the truth, or lying. Not sure which is worse.
If building more properties would decrease the value of housing - that housing has to be made without profit in mind. It must be aimed at those who cannot afford housing in a "free market". It must set rents lower than market rates to influence the rest of the market.
We cannot do this in this country without fucking over a huge number of people because we replaced real terms wage growth with asset growth - those who bought properties in the late 80s - late 90s have seen wages stagnate but can rely on their house being flogged off at some point paying for their retirement. If you collapse the housing market, those people are suddenly fucked. So any solution to the housing crisis must come with redistribution and social safety nets in mind.
Well, we live in a very large state economy, with an overwhelming weight of regulation and law applying to every bit of human activity from the local Duck Pond Charity to the doings of BP.
Welfare state, education, NHS, all in state managed hands. We are nowhere close to your sort of neoliberal society, nor are we going t be.
Wholeheartedly agree that democracy is (much) more than voting, good reminder, thanks.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city
Conversely, try change in the number of homeless, although that's an unreliable stat I think.
It's an almost completely pointless one, as you're arguing one extreme against the other, 'neoliberal' one.
While I agree with you that the default Thatcherite dogma - that the market will always sort things out - is both misguided, and was (at least partially) accepted by the Blair/Brown governments, and has persisted to this day, the solution is one of pragmatism, rather than your idea that the state can do everything.
148grss
"in Palestine are only because of the losses to Independent candidates who ran predominantly on a platform that discussed Gaza, but I think it is a factor. The way Labour campaigned and spoke about Palestine before the election and how they are acting now after the election are very different"
Is there any evidence they've changed their position post election? It would be good if they had but I haven't heard any mention of anything.
If however there is competition then making any profit is better than making no profit so better to produce homes yourself than stand back and see someone else beat you to the market and make the profit instead of you.
Our planning system hands the power to the oligopoly of developers that can play the system, if you have consent and others don't then you can feed supply at a rate that suits you. Remove the requirement to get planning consent, and suddenly if you don't build a house then anyone else can instead.
As for those who lose out on assets going down in value (or see unearned gains wiped out). All investments can go down as well as up. They deserve no more sympathy than those who invested in Woolworths or Blockbuster.
It's not a happy family.
All I've done is point out that the number of houses has increased faster than the population and households, yet it hasn't made much of a difference to the housing crisis in our cities.
My concern is that unless economic (and therefore housing) demand is spread around the country more equally, no level of supply will solve this issue. To take an extreme and silly example - building 1,000,000 houses on Benbecula will not solve the problems in Edinburgh. (Unless Benbecula becomes a new Singapore...)
Two ways you can solve this. One is to invest in towns so there are jobs, instagrammable high streets, a critical mass of possible sexual partners, yoga. They need to relatively much more attractive. Another would be to increase access to of city centres with better transport links.
John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch
Under-appreciated stat from last week’s election:
Labour won its lowest ever share of the vote in deprived areas (<50% for the first time), and its highest ever share in affluent areas.
The result is a dramatic flattening of the class gradient in Labour support.
https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1810970476916645902
Population is an irrelevant stat because demographic changes.
Households is an irrelevant stat because households don't mean jack.
If a million houses were built anywhere then people would move there, businesses would invest there, growth would happen there. There isn't a single location in the entire country where supply exceeds demand (measured as 10% vacant houses).
Will SKS issue an immediate condemnation & call it a depraved act, like he did when Russia bombed a hospital yesterday?
It's a bit like trying to explain air to fish.
I recall the blank horror when I suggested to a LEA bod that we should have spare space in schools. because running at 99% capacity guarantees failures. "This Does Not Compute".....
What's next? Bashing the Tories because Stephen Dorrell was a crap health secretary?
If he's wanting to make himself seem out of touch, he's going about it the right way.
To then turn around to them and go "we were wrong, you're fucked and we definitely aren't going to give you any money to make up for the lost wage growth that never happened either" would be catastrophic - more so than what happened with Truss.
Truss' issues started when the average mortgage haver felt interest rates go up. Anyone who does what you suggest will have to deal with an entire generation of people suddenly being in negative equity - having paid for a property that is no longer worth what they paid, and therefore can't be flogged when the eventual need to downsize and retire comes along.
(IIRC, he booked himself into accommodation for the full summer, but a snafu meant he had to leave early (not his fault). And being a shy sort, instead of asking the company for help, he spent a night in the office. Then another. Then another... IASTR a couple of the security guards (outside employees) got sacked for allowing him.)
War is hell, but if Hamas are using the areas as bases then they are legitimate military targets and its not a war crime to hit out at Hamas. Hamas using innocents as human shields is a war crime.
Russia striking non-military targets deliberately, which Ukraine is not using as a military base, is a war crime too.
It is Hamas and Russia that are the war criminals here.
Why should investments in housing be any more immune to losing value than investments in Blockbuster or Woolworths?
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/explore/public_figure/Keir_Starmer
And (whilst I accept the political compass isn't the best or only tool to show where people or parties stand) this Labour manifesto is clearly on the centre right:
https://www.politicalcompass.org/uk2024
I can recall being told, here, that my description a house where every room (including one bathroom) was full of bunk beds for adults was "fantasy". That's how the Deliveroo rider who bought your takeaway last night lives, probably.
1) You have many more students fighting for flats in uni cities (along with all the other residents)
2) More people being moved from their home towns to the cities, falling in love with the vibe (and the jobs) and not heading home. For example, approx 80% of the people at my school who didn't go are still in the town they grew up in, while about 10% of those who went to uni have returned.
(Also - it's fun being the person arguing against the consensus on an issue. You have to take some unnecessarily vicious hits from the usual suspects, but we wouldn't want PB to be an echo chamber so it's worth it. I agree with the underlying supply/demand economics but, as ever, I think issue is just a little bit more complex).
You keep making out like other places don't have a housing shortage, but there isn't anywhere in the country without a chronic housing shortage.
The entire country lacks sufficient houses. Some places the shortage is more acute than others, but its a shortage everywhere.
If there were places with a surplus of housing it would relieve pressure elsewhere as people would move to fill those vacancies, and investment would follow, but there isn't.
Buying your own home meant that after 20-25 years you owned it outright - no rent for retirement. If you were careful where and what you bought and a bit lucky, you could beat Government bonds in terms of getting your money back with a small gain.
The inevitable property price rise (at double digits per year, compound) is a phenomenon of the last 25-30 years.
Indeed the economic benefits would have been far greater than they were.
Instead, your 'neoliberal' central governments awarded themselves enormous bungs, at the expense of local government, with which to bribe successive electorates.
That wasn't really neoliberal economics; more of a con trick.
Israel does it. Nothing to see here guys.
Russia is bombing civilians deliberately.
Israel is targeting Hamas.
Its not Israel's fault that Hamas uses human shields. Ukraine aren't doing that.
But there are differences. Despite what a few nutters claim. when Russia attack a hospital, school or other structure in Ukraine, it's fairly clear it was them, and that it was targeted. In Palestine, the truth is much more nebulous. As we saw in that initial hospital attack where, according to Hamas, 500 died. Which was always b/s that some people wanted to believe.
Within a free market, businesses have an incentive to make a product people want for a profit, even if by doing so, the increase in the supply slightly pushes down the price. Lots of businesses acting individually to make money then has a large impact on supply and prices fall until they reach some equilibrium. Well… in theory, if there are no cartels, etc.
The problem is that whereas in countries without our planning system house are built one or eight at a time, here we have acted to restrict planning and then grant consent to cartels hundreds of houses at a time.
And cartels do what cartels do.
Remove the planning system, the cartels would be destroyed.
It's like a presentation of a mathematical argument, where the first line is "1 + 1 = 6".
Credibility is lost, as highlighted by my note of his later assertion that London was a Europe-only financial centre after we joined the EU, which is pure baloney. Compare that ignorance, for example, to Alistair Cooke on the USA back in the day.
He doesn't know the subject he is opinionating about. He should stick to stuff inside the USA, and perhaps Asia - at least he has a qualification on the latter.
Visit the Youtube video, and he is being called out in the comments. The defence being put forward is 'Ignore the trolls; we love you, Peter.'
Although we're not at Barcelona levels yet, it strikes me that in 'popular' areas of the country the significant volume of flats and houses that are now 'owned' by airbnb hosts must affect both the availability and the price of property. Perhaps we need to have a debate about the relative merits of property to live in vs. property to have a holiday in.
2) The number of households is constrained by the number of houses! So you cannot use that as a proxy for the demand for dwellings.
We are building about 0.5% of our existing housing stock per year. That implies that UK houses have to last 200 years just to keep the numbers steady. If you want to expand housing supply then houses have to remain standing even longer! Unless we build more houses people are going to continue to be cursed to remain crammed into terrible housing.
It's not an easy situation for a government to manage. How do they do the right thing, get to a better situation for the country, and still win the next election?
Edit: and in small places, add Taz' later point re needing enough locals to do the work, keep the place running, etc.
On the political compass, they have nothing in the left most 25% or the bottom most 25% of that figure. Maybe that graph should be re-drawn with a different origin point, at which point Labour would not look so centre-right.
So, I would say it is a reasonable interpretation that he is seeking to make a developer build an appropriate scheme, rather than being 'a hypocrite opposing development' which will be the standard Telegraph line from this point every day.
House prices crashed in the late eighties/early 90s and the Tories were subsequently re-elected after that crash.
The aftermath of the crash was that housing was more affordable and we had a record high of people able to afford their own home.
An explosion in construction followed by a crash now while the Tories are deeply unpopular would fix the market conditions, make property affordable, address inequalities and they certainly could be re-elected.
If you live rent-free and mortgage-free in a property then seeing its value fall may notionally reduce your "wealth" but you still live rent-free and mortgage-free. Whereas those who can now afford their own home are now in a better position.
There will come a tipping point where it gets too many and the impact that will have on people being able to live in the locale and support the shops and pubs and restaurants that service the incomers.
A balance is needed which neither the Airbnb'ers want nor the anti-growth coalitions ranting about tourists seem to want.
There being casualties isn't a reason not to wage war, its a reason not to wage unjust wars or commit war crimes.
Targeting Hamas is neither unjust, nor a war crime. Hamas using human shields and what they did on 7 October is both.
What screws people, is what happened in 1992-3, with a combination of recession leading to job losses, as well as falling house prices and inflexible lenders, which forced a large number of sellers to realise the paper losses on their property.
They don't at times appear to place a greatly different value on human life than do Hamas.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/10/israel-gaza-war-latest-today-khan-younis-strike-abassan-death-toll
...Footage broadcast by Al Jazeera showed children playing football in the school’s yard when a sudden boom shook the area, prompting shouts of “a strike, a strike!”
The Israeli military said it was reviewing reports that civilians were harmed. It said the incident occurred when it struck with “precise munition” a Hamas fighter who took part in the 7 October raid on Israel that precipitated the Israeli assault on Gaza...
Is that 8 by small developers or by the cartel who can game the planning system?
Where I live there's multiple developments going on, but its the same developers again and again, the ones who are able to play and game the planning system.
Personally, I support public sector housebuilding on the basis that it provides counter-cyclical support for the building trade, thus avoiding the sort of stop-go capacity destruction we've experienced over the past 40 years. I also support those who aspire to have Vienna-style public housing. And those who support building new tenements and mansion blocks. And those who want Edwardian terraces, or 1930s-style suburban semis. And those who favour Poundbury-style urban villages, Milton Keynes-style soft modernism, or Nine Elms-style residential towers.
Once we've built a couple of million new dwellings, we can reassess - but I suspect there's enough demand to support building closer to 5m without collapsing the market.
What else should Israel do?
That's totally different to both Hamas and Russia targeting innocents for the hell of it.
High education 42% Labour vs 26% Con+Ref
Income >£50k 40% Labour vs 33% Con+Ref
Low education 28% Labour vs 54% Con+Ref
Income <£50k 33% Labour vs 41% Con+Ref
Though Con+Ref have a lead with OAPs, so probably also wealth.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/uk2019
Most people aren't anarchists - and no political parties are anarchist? I personally fall within the bottom left four squares (literally redid the test after looking this up). But it shouldn't be a surprise that most political parties in the UK do not advocate the abolition of private property, for example.
Sources: Nationwide, CPIH inflation series.
October 2007 was when the "theoretical average mortgage" was most painful.
The true national house price inflation was a very late 90s to mid 2000s phenomena.
How about some F-16s and long range missiles that can hit back at where the Russians are launching from? Amidst all the ongoing conflicts the west seems to consistently be on the back foot. The only contrary example would be Israel bombing the heck out of Gaza whilst Hamas hide in tunnels. Why do we insist on fighting our enemies on their own terms?
Developers are acting rationally in their own interests based on the law as it is. Change the law and open it up to competition and they'd have no choice but to act differently, or see rivals build homes instead, but currently small developers can't play the planning system like the large ones can.
"And therefore nothing Israel does while targeting Hamas can ever be a war crime, or even criticised"
I also note that the housing issue is particularly acute in English-speaking countries. And I wonder if there is something about the operation of common law (and maybe mortgage markets) that conspire to worsen the issue.
As an aside, there’s no necessary contradiction between and MP objecting to a local development, and a pro-housing policy. It’s not like developers are renowned for their sympathy to local considerations! Objections are in themselves kind of a downstream issue from the structural factors that incent both shit developments and the “objection industry”.
All dead by 1199?
If you're not talking about Wight, but about *North* Island, 1680 is more correct ...
The dogma was that Thatcher wanted to reduce influence of government. In reality she significantly expanded central government's power and reach.
Of course it didn't help that those arguing against housing sales did so from your POV that they simply shouldn't have happened - rather than mine that councils should have been allowed to retain the proceeds to reinvest in more housing stock.
The electorate decisively rejected your argument.
I had a call from our car’s security tracking centre in the middle of the night saying they had a theft alert. Looked outside and it was gone.
Called the police and got a CRN. Had a call back an hour later from Lewisham police saying they had a tracking fix on the car and would go and investigate.
Called the police contact number this morning. No record of any car being tracked or found. Finally spoke to the car pound who said the police had set off to find the car in the tracked location then got diverted elsewhere. Finally got round to looking this morning by which time it had gone. They won’t bother looking actively for it now.
The thieves will of course get off scot free.
Another load of paperwork to do.
If this was the most proportional way to get a legitimate target, then it was a legitimate strike.
What Hamas did in 7 October, what Russia does regularly in Ukraine, the deliberate targeting of innocents, is a completely different matter.
Britain’s wealth is based on London’s position as a financial centre. Manufacturing largely hasn’t figured since the 1980s.
London prospered as a Eurodollar hub from the 1970s, after some ill-considered US regulation, and then as Europe’s financial centre. Also, essentially as Africa’s, the Middle East’s, and India’s financial centre. And a home for Russian money besides.
Cameron/Osborne hoped to position London as a Chinese financial centre too.
Now that the UK is outside the EU and Dubai has picked up the Russian and much of the Indian business. The Chinese gambit was short-lived and ultimately killed off by the US (remember the Huawei saga?).
We face some massive questions about our future economic model.
One model is to simply age gracefully (or disgracefully, if you like) into decline, like Japan.
It’s not obvious what another model looks like.
If you are a small or medium size nation observe them or else.
If you are a top 10 military power nation and in Western Europe observe them or else as your own countries lawyers and courts will spend the next 40 years crawling over every detail and complaint, vexatious or otherwise.
If you are a top 10 military power nation outside europe. Try not to get caught but it dosen't really matter unless you lose.
1) Hamas don't care about dead Palestinians and like dead Israelis:
2) Israel gets really mad about dead Israelis and doesn't care about dead Palestinians:
3) Hamas' admirers in the West care about dead Palestinians, but even if not fully paid up anti- Semites a la Chris Williamson have a sneaking feeling dead Israelis have it coming because they were Israelis and therefore complicit in dead Palestinians.
4) So the Israelis ignore them.
And the result, always, is therefore more dead Palestinians.
They would not normally be tackled by medium or large developers ... not worth the candle.