If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
What about the agony of those yacht owners, deprived of their beloved vessels by the Ukrainian war? The mood in the Proper Hotels was very down, I hear.
What certain posters on here would struggle with is that in the very wealthy parts of the Cote d'Azur -those areas around Cap ferrat and up to Monaco-the most conspicuous wealth is that shown by Ukrainians.
I heard the same on a call in to a Tom Swarbrick phone in a while ago. The country has received $380bn in aid since the start of the war which is roughly the entire Russian annual budget; and more than their defense spend through the war.
Perhaps it's not all gone where it should ?
Serious question - how accurate is that $380 billion number? And how much has Ukraine actually received? Half? A third? Or less?
The vast majority of the US Military Aid, for example, aiui goes to the US military industrial complex and is counted at the full cost of the new equipment the US forces are getting as replacements, rather than the out of date cast-offs being sent to Ukraine.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
He's not finished, just going to grind on until the next GE. He's just not what we need to get out of this national funk we're in but to be fair, there's not a current politicial party or politician that I find inspiring anyway.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
It reads like the Judge has been a bit of a pedantic d**k. Ruling that the protection only covers artefacts on the surface not buried. Does that mean that when he brings them to the surface by ploughing, which will damage them, that they are then protected? DT BTL is hilariously confused, surely the origin of "Conservative" is "conserve"? (I jest)
I'm also surprised that you could economically grow crops on Baggy point.
The comic thing here is that after literal centuries of trying to protect stuff, the legal responsibility for such is confused. Process State at work.
The answer is - clear simple law on defining a protected piece of land, what is protected and by whom.
I would suspect that the main reason that this hasn't been sorted out is the problem of who then pays for maintaining land. Clear lines of responsibility would mean clear lines of responsibility.
The landowner is in this case National Trust. If the land has "irreplaceable artefacts" under the surface then a dig needs to be coordinated with them ASAP.
Reading the piece, it doesn't seem to me to be about digs; it's mainly about a farmer who wants to do what he wants with his land without regulating bodies interfering.
A tenant farmer has fought the case to Appeal Court level, and is imo arguing on dots and tittles. The claim afaics is that archaeological remains only count if they are on the surface, which seems illogical.
He previously received ~£200k of grants to maintain some of his fields. The piece is not clear whether it is the same fields.
I'd punt that the Telegraph are on it either to stir up farmers or stir up dust in their campaign against the NT.
Even if the archaeological remains are undferground, then they are NT property. And the argument about them being on the surface would mutatis mutandis fail to answer that point. Simple as that. (They're not gold, so no chance of them beign Treasure Trove, even if that law is still in force - not sure about England).
I agree it's just DT's weekly hate-the-NT session. Plus DT's daily wind up the farmers session.
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.
There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.
The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.
I suppose I come from the privileged position of the best bus service anywhere in the UK, and therefore look at trams as the natural next step. 250 people every 5 mins with 1 minute stops makes a substantial difference, with bus overload on Princes Street etc
But for the rest of the UK, I understand why buses should come first:
That is interesting for London. The initial privatisation led to all shapes and colours of buses ploughing their own furrows but the uplift fits Ken Livingstone making them red again and under TfL control, but still privately operated. (Some London buses are run by the Paris bus company. You can tell by their logo of a diagonal squiggly line which for us cognoscenti is the River Seine.)
The RATP one that is also a face? I did not know that about London buses!
Yes, it is not just trains and water that have the Chancellor of the Exchequer writing subsidy cheques to her foreign peers.
I was in town with my wife yesterday driving along the main street and I approached a pedestrian crossing on green, with pedestrians waiting on either side, when a young woman on her mobile stepped out straight in front of me absolutely oblivious of her surroundings
I did stop and she 'jumped' out of her skin and made a beeline into the nearest shop with everyone looking on incredulously
It was all captured on my in car dash cam and you have to hope she learned a lesson from it, but I doubt it
She was very lucky that I anticipated her walking out in front of me
Isn't that one for an "I'm here, wake up!" toot, which is iirc the only valid reason for hooting?
Ashley Neal's learning point yesterday was quite interesting about Zebra Crossings with various complications such as if it's out because of road works.
She did get a 'toot' that woke her up and why she jumped out of her skin !!!!!!!!!!!
Great !!
My favourite is still the Hornster, that a Transport Charity chap put on his cycle as a PR stunt. He used a horn from a train, and an air supply from a scuba diver's tank.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
The nation (As a whole) spends a bonkers proportion of it's income on (not particularly good or spacious) housing. Probably one reason why the economy has been so shit - if cash is being spent on property, and those receiving cash are spending that received cash on more property then it's not going into business capital, retail and so on...
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
I think some of it is because when it comes to politics - and particularly the government - people in general are more energised by lampooning and slagging off things than they are in defending them. It's an easier and more enjoyable option.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
What about the agony of those yacht owners, deprived of their beloved vessels by the Ukrainian war? The mood in the Proper Hotels was very down, I hear.
What certain posters on here would struggle with is that in the very wealthy parts of the Cote d'Azur -those areas around Cap ferrat and up to Monaco-the most conspicuous wealth is that shown by Ukrainians.
I heard the same on a call in to a Tom Swarbrick phone in a while ago. The country has received $380bn in aid since the start of the war which is roughly the entire Russian annual budget; and more than their defense spend through the war.
Perhaps it's not all gone where it should ?
Serious question - how accurate is that $380 billion number? And how much has Ukraine actually received? Half? A third? Or less?
The vast majority of the US Military Aid, for example, aiui goes to the US military industrial complex and is counted at the full cost of the new equipment the US forces are getting as replacements, rather than the out of date cast-offs being sent to Ukraine.
Someone here will know more detail on this.
One recalls the UK MoD and how it valued goods, even at full price for spares for aircraft such as Vulcans that were going out of service in a few months. ISTR that that caused some embarrassment when a warehouse fire wrote off some Olympus spares of no use for anything but V-bombers, but MoD's own valuation made it look very, very bad money wise.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
Going with the times maybe change the middle word to "baby"?
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
Then build some more!
It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
What about the agony of those yacht owners, deprived of their beloved vessels by the Ukrainian war? The mood in the Proper Hotels was very down, I hear.
What certain posters on here would struggle with is that in the very wealthy parts of the Cote d'Azur -those areas around Cap ferrat and up to Monaco-the most conspicuous wealth is that shown by Ukrainians.
I heard the same on a call in to a Tom Swarbrick phone in a while ago. The country has received $380bn in aid since the start of the war which is roughly the entire Russian annual budget; and more than their defense spend through the war.
Perhaps it's not all gone where it should ?
Serious question - how accurate is that $380 billion number? And how much has Ukraine actually received? Half? A third? Or less?
The vast majority of the US Military Aid, for example, aiui goes to the US military industrial complex and is counted at the full cost of the new equipment the US forces are getting as replacements, rather than the out of date cast-offs being sent to Ukraine.
Someone here will know more detail on this.
One recalls the UK MoD and how it valued goods, even at full price for spares for aircraft such as Vulcans that were going out of service in a few months. ISTR that that caused some embarrassment when a warehouse fire wrote off some Olympus spares of no use for anything but V-bombers, but MoD's own valuation made it look very, very bad money wise.
I was in town with my wife yesterday driving along the main street and I approached a pedestrian crossing on green, with pedestrians waiting on either side, when a young woman on her mobile stepped out straight in front of me absolutely oblivious of her surroundings
I did stop and she 'jumped' out of her skin and made a beeline into the nearest shop with everyone looking on incredulously
It was all captured on my in car dash cam and you have to hope she learned a lesson from it, but I doubt it
She was very lucky that I anticipated her walking out in front of me
Isn't that one for an "I'm here, wake up!" toot, which is iirc the only valid reason for hooting?
Ashley Neal's learning point yesterday was quite interesting about Zebra Crossings with various complications such as if it's out because of road works.
On zebra crossings, saw my second instant of car going through a zebra crossing despite a pushchair this week. This morning the pushchair was still just on the pavement, the previous one the couple with pushchair were a metre or so onto the zebra crossing. Driving standards are definitely deteriorating.
So basically PR now benefits the Tories and Reform most as well as the Greens with the LDs little changed.
FPTP though massively benefits Labour now
FPTP benefits the winning party, rather than specifically Labour.
Not necessarily. There have been several elections in which the party benefitting was the one in second place - and a gross distortion is quite likely in an election where the vote shares for any of the pairs LibDem and Tory, LibDem and Labour, or Reform and Tory, or Reform and Labour, were very close
It benefit parties with more concentrated support rather than those with broader, but shallower appeal (the opposite of what we should want given only a choice between that or the opposite).
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
The nation (As a whole) spends a bonkers proportion of it's income on (not particularly good or spacious) housing. Probably one reason why the economy has been so shit - if cash is being spent on property, and those receiving cash are spending that received cash on more property then it's not going into business capital, retail and so on...
Definitely. Reducing property's share of both balance sheet and P/L would be rocking good news.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
I think some of it is because when it comes to politics - and particularly the government - people in general are more energised by lampooning and slagging off things than they are in defending them. It's an easier and more enjoyable option.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
F1: Likely won't be up today but I've been writing the post-season betting review. I was quite pleased to discover how to add a trend line, but the graph is not one that remotely needs it. It's one of the most lopsided I can remember.
...
I still can't believe McLaren buggered up Piastri's race in Silverstone and ruined my 29 bet.
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.
There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.
The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.
I think the point of adding trams when the site is in development is because if you don’t implement it now it will never be done in this country
Nothing will ever be added in this country until we deal with the Process State. Which is not about using process to achieve the ends we want.
Consider the case of a Housing Association that wanted to build some low cost accommodation. Because they merged with another HA, the name changed. So, it was demanded that all the reports on the project be redone.
No one can tell me that wasn't a legal hack to delay the project.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
£100 a month on clothes! Wow, I do not buy enough socks.
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.
There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.
The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.
I suppose I come from the privileged position of the best bus service anywhere in the UK, and therefore look at trams as the natural next step. 250 people every 5 mins with 1 minute stops makes a substantial difference, with bus overload on Princes Street etc
But for the rest of the UK, I understand why buses should come first:
That is interesting for London. The initial privatisation led to all shapes and colours of buses ploughing their own furrows but the uplift fits Ken Livingstone making them red again and under TfL control, but still privately operated. (Some London buses are run by the Paris bus company. You can tell by their logo of a diagonal squiggly line which for us cognoscenti is the River Seine.)
London buses were always all red in the 80s and 90s. What Ken did was to introduce simpler, lower fares.
Basically FPTP is the only one that doesn’t ensure a coalition of chaos?
We have a coalition of chaos, but it's just entirely internal to the Labour Party.
This is a key point. FPTP doesn't avoid coalitions - it just hides them within the Big Two parties and makes it much more difficult for the electorate to affect them (you don't get the ability to discriminate between candidates of the same party like you do with STV, for example, or open list PR).
It's very reminiscent of the way monopolists aim to avoid free market influences.
Interesting point. Every majority government is actually some sort of coalition between the various factions and shades of opinion in the winning party and this is only right because their voters are not a monolithic bloc either. Very few voters will like/dislike all of the policies or share/reject all of the values of any political party. It's more of a soup than a cheese-plate.
An issue then is how does the internal coalition reflect voter opinion? Eg under Keir Starmer little influence is being granted to the left of his party. They are (very) junior partners in this Labour coalition government. They probably have less influence than the Conservatives who are not even part of the coalition. Is this democratic? Yes and no would be my answer. It depends how you look at it.
When the internal coalitions fracture, as when one faction takes over, is when the parties suffer. It’s happened in recent years to Labour, the SNP, and most recently to the Conservatives.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
Then build some more!
It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.
Scene : Malmesbury's Britain
Husband: Disaster! Wife: What? Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box! Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth? Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.
“Best is from late Robert Anton Wilson the arch psychonaut explorer who had one trip so terrifying he ran out of his house, jumped on his motorcycle and rode out into the California Desert, kept going until he ran out of gas then slept in a ditch beneath the open skies, when he came to, he realised not only was he completely lost but he'd never owned, had access to or even ridden a motorbike.”
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
What about the agony of those yacht owners, deprived of their beloved vessels by the Ukrainian war? The mood in the Proper Hotels was very down, I hear.
What certain posters on here would struggle with is that in the very wealthy parts of the Cote d'Azur -those areas around Cap ferrat and up to Monaco-the most conspicuous wealth is that shown by Ukrainians.
I heard the same on a call in to a Tom Swarbrick phone in a while ago. The country has received $380bn in aid since the start of the war which is roughly the entire Russian annual budget; and more than their defense spend through the war.
Perhaps it's not all gone where it should ?
Serious question - how accurate is that $380 billion number? And how much has Ukraine actually received? Half? A third? Or less?
The vast majority of the US Military Aid, for example, aiui goes to the US military industrial complex and is counted at the full cost of the new equipment the US forces are getting as replacements, rather than the out of date cast-offs being sent to Ukraine.
Someone here will know more detail on this.
Military accounting does seem rather weird. A HIMARS truck doesn’t cost $100m, it cost about $5m two decades ago, but the new one that will replace its capability, of the 2025 model, costs $100m. That’s where a lot of the talked-about money ends up. Ukraine gets the old one, and the US Army gets the new one.
Obviously ammunition is actually being made and sent, as is a lot of transport and labour, but the big-ticket items are very much overvalued in discussions about aid, and the difference is indeed going straight to the military industrial complex supporting jobs in your Congressman’s district.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Money isn't a matter of moral value, just economic value. A nurse always contributes more in that sense to society than a footballer. But the ridiculous wages of a footballer provides a shedload of cash via tax which can then pay nurses.
Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit: "You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"
That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.
There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.
I think he's saying our values are distiorted and read PB for a few days and try to argue with him. All we hear is that public sector workers are scroungers....the government are robbing millionaire farmers blind....we want white babies....
..............actually that was when I realised I was in the wrong place...
If that's all you hear, you seem to be listening to about 1 poster.
I skim read it and the mood since the change of government has turned much uglier. Compassion has disappeared and in your face racism such as the 'white babies' has become endemic. One brilliant post by the firestopper but then drowned out by the new emboldened Faragists. You must have noticed.......
PB is always a lot less interesting after lunch. Lunch seems to be bad for the discourse.
PB can often be interesting but if you look at it as a newspaper-opinion pieces and up to date political news-when the opinion diverges too much from your own or indeed any civilised persons (white babies) and the politics is thin then it's just annoying.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
He's not finished, just going to grind on until the next GE. He's just not what we need to get out of this national funk we're in but to be fair, there's not a current politicial party or politician that I find inspiring anyway.
“Working his notice” is a brilliant description of Starmer. That is EXACTLY what he’s doing, and all he’s doing. He’s a placeholder
Interesting article by John Redwood on how to grow the economy. Tip to Rachel: learn from Joe Biden. Not sure what to make of the Vulcan. Obviously bright but possessed of a tin ear.
"It is a pity Rachel Reeve did not look across the Atlantic, to a Democratic president much to her liking, and copy some of his better ideas. During his four years in office Joe Biden allowed more oil and gas drilling – on top of the 50 per cent increase under Donald Trump – permitting more cheaper energy to be made available to American business.
"He had a strong onshoring policy for more industrial investment, again building on Trump’s successful push for more home-based industry. Like his predecessor, Biden used tariffs and bans against China where he thought they were competing unfairly or undermining American national security interests."
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
He's not finished, just going to grind on until the next GE. He's just not what we need to get out of this national funk we're in but to be fair, there's not a current politicial party or politician that I find inspiring anyway.
“Working his notice” is a brilliant description of Starmer. That is EXACTLY what he’s doing, and all he’s doing. He’s a placeholder
which is at least an improvement on actively making everything worse, as the last lot did.
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.
There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.
The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.
I suppose I come from the privileged position of the best bus service anywhere in the UK, and therefore look at trams as the natural next step. 250 people every 5 mins with 1 minute stops makes a substantial difference, with bus overload on Princes Street etc
But for the rest of the UK, I understand why buses should come first:
That is interesting for London. The initial privatisation led to all shapes and colours of buses ploughing their own furrows but the uplift fits Ken Livingstone making them red again and under TfL control, but still privately operated. (Some London buses are run by the Paris bus company. You can tell by their logo of a diagonal squiggly line which for us cognoscenti is the River Seine.)
London buses were always all red in the 80s and 90s. What Ken did was to introduce simpler, lower fares.
Blue buses and green ones and all sorts of other liveries immediately followed privatisation.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
“Best is from late Robert Anton Wilson the arch psychonaut explorer who had one trip so terrifying he ran out of his house, jumped on his motorcycle and rode out into the California Desert, kept going until he ran out of gas then slept in a ditch beneath the open skies, when he came to, he realised not only was he completely lost but he'd never owned, had access to or even ridden a motorbike.”
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
Serious question - how accurate is that $380 billion number? And how much has Ukraine actually received? Half? A third? Or less?
The vast majority of the US Military Aid, for example, aiui goes to the US military industrial complex and is counted at the full cost of the new equipment the US forces are getting as replacements, rather than the out of date cast-offs being sent to Ukraine.
Someone here will know more detail on this.
About a third of everything the US gives to Ukraine is straight cash aka "Budget Support". The asset value of the hardware ("Military Support") is probably subject to multiple rounds of politically motivated manipulation in the DoD so fuck knows.
Their are certainly a lot of Ukrainians getting very rich off the SMO either by skimming aid or sanctions busting trade with Russia. I saw as many Bentaygas in Zvirinyets' as I ever have in W1.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
He's not finished, just going to grind on until the next GE. He's just not what we need to get out of this national funk we're in but to be fair, there's not a current politicial party or politician that I find inspiring anyway.
“Working his notice” is a brilliant description of Starmer. That is EXACTLY what he’s doing, and all he’s doing. He’s a placeholder
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Money isn't a matter of moral value, just economic value. A nurse always contributes more in that sense to society than a footballer. But the ridiculous wages of a footballer provides a shedload of cash via tax which can then pay nurses.
Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit: "You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"
That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.
There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.
I think he's saying our values are distiorted and read PB for a few days and try to argue with him. All we hear is that public sector workers are scroungers....the government are robbing millionaire farmers blind....we want white babies....
..............actually that was when I realised I was in the wrong place...
If that's all you hear, you seem to be listening to about 1 poster.
I skim read it and the mood since the change of government has turned much uglier. Compassion has disappeared and in your face racism such as the 'white babies' has become endemic. One brilliant post by the firestopper but then drowned out by the new emboldened Faragists. You must have noticed.......
PB is always a lot less interesting after lunch. Lunch seems to be bad for the discourse.
PB can often be interesting but if you look at it as a newspaper-opinion pieces and up to date political news-when the opinion diverges too much from your own or indeed any civilised persons (white babies) and the politics is thin then it's just annoying.
I cannot remember the last time you contributed a comment that was in any way insightful, illuminating, educational, witty, unexpected, gracious, smart, amusing, elegant, perceptive, articulate, wry, sensitive, piercing, subtle, or intelligent
Your commentary is the equivalent of flatulence. You don’t comment, you fart. You come on here occasionally, and you fart, then you absent-mindedly walk away again
As such, I’m not sure you’re entitled to critique the wider PB discourse
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
Yeah, my impression so far is that Starmer is doing a reasonable job of playing the poor hand he has been dealt. He is a grinder, and I appreciate that after the showmanship of previous PMs, but I do wish he would be a bit braver and make more use of the large majority he has to play with. People like vision and action; even when things don't work out as planned, they appreciate the effort.
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.
There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.
The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.
I think the point of adding trams when the site is in development is because if you don’t implement it now it will never be done in this country
Nothing will ever be added in this country until we deal with the Process State. Which is not about using process to achieve the ends we want.
Consider the case of a Housing Association that wanted to build some low cost accommodation. Because they merged with another HA, the name changed. So, it was demanded that all the reports on the project be redone.
No one can tell me that wasn't a legal hack to delay the project.
On the last point (steering clear of the other as imo there *are* distinctives for trams over buses) a Planning Permission is not linked to the owner of the site.
If reports needed redoing there would have to be an objective reason, which would be a timeout of relevance (I have often seen 2 years as the LPA view). I think whether that would stick would depend on circumstances, and would normally perhaps be a problem where the Application (or further application for Detailed PP over PP in principle). If the PP has been granted, that is probably that.
Another reason may be copyright issues by the author of the report as to its further usage - which depends on the original and sale agreements. Architects and other consultants are quite favourable to receiving another lot of fees for little or no extra work.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
He's not finished, just going to grind on until the next GE. He's just not what we need to get out of this national funk we're in but to be fair, there's not a current politicial party or politician that I find inspiring anyway.
“Working his notice” is a brilliant description of Starmer. That is EXACTLY what he’s doing, and all he’s doing. He’s a placeholder
We're all doing that.
I’m sadly sure that’s true of you; as someone just back from Colombia where I encountered the most miraculous city on earth, I can safely say it ain’t true of all
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
I think some of it is because when it comes to politics - and particularly the government - people in general are more energised by lampooning and slagging off things than they are in defending them. It's an easier and more enjoyable option.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
What about the agony of those yacht owners, deprived of their beloved vessels by the Ukrainian war? The mood in the Proper Hotels was very down, I hear.
What certain posters on here would struggle with is that in the very wealthy parts of the Cote d'Azur -those areas around Cap ferrat and up to Monaco-the most conspicuous wealth is that shown by Ukrainians.
I heard the same on a call in to a Tom Swarbrick phone in a while ago. The country has received $380bn in aid since the start of the war which is roughly the entire Russian annual budget; and more than their defense spend through the war.
Perhaps it's not all gone where it should ?
Isn't that figure military aid equivalent? So when the US donates them a bunch of old artillery it's measured at the US purchase price which hugely inflates the dollar figure and allows US senators show how great they are for basically no money spent given that the old equipment was going to be replaced anyway and now the US military doesn't need to maintain expensive secure storage sites.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
Then build some more!
It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.
Scene : Malmesbury's Britain
Husband: Disaster! Wife: What? Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box! Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth? Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?
Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.
Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
I agree with your analysis. I disagree that WFA was an error - they just haven't sold why throwing money at wealthy pensioners can be better directed. Comms again.
And I think early unforced errors are inevitable when a party is out of power for 14 years. Is still make errors in my job, and I've been doing it for a lot longer than the government. What is different is that in my job there is a process to catch most of my errors before anyone else notices, but Labour hasn't worked it out fully yet.
Yeah, my impression so far is that Starmer is doing a reasonable job of playing the poor hand he has been dealt. He is a grinder, and I appreciate that after the showmanship of previous PMs, but I do wish he would be a bit braver and make more use of the large majority he has to play with. People like vision and action; even when things don't work out as planned, they appreciate the effort.
Do they? The British people don't fucking appreciate anything except tattoos and fucking Greggs as far as I can see.
Most of the country are in a perpetual state of roiling fumingness with whoever is in government at the time; unable to come to terms with the nation's diminishing status and standard of living. The remainder are in a cynical, detached, possibly Pregabalin fuelled semi-ambulatory vegetative state.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
Then build some more!
It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.
Scene : Malmesbury's Britain
Husband: Disaster! Wife: What? Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box! Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth? Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?
Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.
Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.
The planning system and the developers are but a part of a larger ecosystem. If you (as I have advocated) prevented local monopolies on building then another part of the system would block the increased rate in building. Probably.
The current rate of building is a stable optimum for a wide range of interests.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
“Best is from late Robert Anton Wilson the arch psychonaut explorer who had one trip so terrifying he ran out of his house, jumped on his motorcycle and rode out into the California Desert, kept going until he ran out of gas then slept in a ditch beneath the open skies, when he came to, he realised not only was he completely lost but he'd never owned, had access to or even ridden a motorbike.”
What objective proof do you have that PB exists?
(ducks)
What has it to do with ducks, philosophically?
On existence and observation, these are quite amusing and known as the Berkeley Limericks - apologies if you are familiar. We are talking early in the 20C. The first is from a Chaplain at Oxford University called Ronald Knox, who did various other things such as a Radio Broadcast in 1926 of a fake revolution in London, which gave Orson Welles his idea for the "War of the Worlds" radio hoax.
There once was a man who said "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad."
Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd. I am always about in the Quad. And that's why the tree Will continue to be Since observed by Yours faithfully, God
If objects depend on our seeing So that trees, unobserved, would cease tree-ing, Then my question is: Who Is the one who sees you And assures your persistence in being?
Dear Sir, You reason most oddly. To be's to be seen for the bod'ly. But for spirits like me, To be is to see. Sincerely, The one who is godly.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
What about the agony of those yacht owners, deprived of their beloved vessels by the Ukrainian war? The mood in the Proper Hotels was very down, I hear.
What certain posters on here would struggle with is that in the very wealthy parts of the Cote d'Azur -those areas around Cap ferrat and up to Monaco-the most conspicuous wealth is that shown by Ukrainians.
I heard the same on a call in to a Tom Swarbrick phone in a while ago. The country has received $380bn in aid since the start of the war which is roughly the entire Russian annual budget; and more than their defense spend through the war.
Perhaps it's not all gone where it should ?
Isn't that figure military aid equivalent? So when the US donates them a bunch of old artillery it's measured at the US purchase price which hugely inflates the dollar figure and allows US senators show how great they are for basically no money spent given that the old equipment was going to be replaced anyway and now the US military doesn't need to maintain expensive secure storage sites.
You are forgetting - and now the reserve stockpile is run down/old weapons used up, there is a need for bring forward the development/production of a new weapons. Kerrrrrrching!
Yeah, my impression so far is that Starmer is doing a reasonable job of playing the poor hand he has been dealt. He is a grinder, and I appreciate that after the showmanship of previous PMs, but I do wish he would be a bit braver and make more use of the large majority he has to play with. People like vision and action; even when things don't work out as planned, they appreciate the effort.
Do they? The British people don't fucking appreciate anything except tattoos and fucking Greggs as far as I can see.
Most of the country are in a perpetual state of roiling fumingness with whoever is in government at the time; unable to come to terms with the nation's diminishing status and standard of living. The remainder are in a cynical, detached, possibly Pregabalin fuelled semi-ambulatory vegetative state.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
I agree with your analysis. I disagree that WFA was an error - they just haven't sold why throwing money at wealthy pensioners can be better directed. Comms again.
And I think early unforced errors are inevitable when a party is out of power for 14 years. Is still make errors in my job, and I've been doing it for a lot longer than the government. What is different is that in my job there is a process to catch most of my errors before anyone else notices, but Labour hasn't worked it out fully yet.
But have you got this job though by saying for years that the previous incumbent in the post was utterly shite - then having no idea what to do when the Board chucked him out on your say so and decided to give you a chance instead?
It's not just making mistakes - it's really seeming to be in entirely the wrong profession.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes
Interesting post from one of the posters, earlier on here, about the Chinese national arrested with drone technology, near a U.S. base. That might start to head in the direction if some sort of explanation for the goings-on.
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.
There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.
The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.
I suppose I come from the privileged position of the best bus service anywhere in the UK, and therefore look at trams as the natural next step. 250 people every 5 mins with 1 minute stops makes a substantial difference, with bus overload on Princes Street etc
But for the rest of the UK, I understand why buses should come first:
That is interesting for London. The initial privatisation led to all shapes and colours of buses ploughing their own furrows but the uplift fits Ken Livingstone making them red again and under TfL control, but still privately operated. (Some London buses are run by the Paris bus company. You can tell by their logo of a diagonal squiggly line which for us cognoscenti is the River Seine.)
London buses were always all red in the 80s and 90s. What Ken did was to introduce simpler, lower fares.
Blue buses and green ones and all sorts of other liveries immediately followed privatisation.
Which routes? Some of the routes on the London fringes, out towards Kent, perhaps, which have since been brought into TfL, but I don't recall seeing a non-red London bus in London proper (within the north and south circular, say).
Yeah, my impression so far is that Starmer is doing a reasonable job of playing the poor hand he has been dealt. He is a grinder, and I appreciate that after the showmanship of previous PMs, but I do wish he would be a bit braver and make more use of the large majority he has to play with. People like vision and action; even when things don't work out as planned, they appreciate the effort.
Do they? The British people don't fucking appreciate anything except tattoos and fucking Greggs as far as I can see.
Most of the country are in a perpetual state of roiling fumingness with whoever is in government at the time; unable to come to terms with the nation's diminishing status and standard of living. The remainder are in a cynical, detached, possibly Pregabalin fuelled semi-ambulatory vegetative state.
Interesting post from one of the posters, earlier on here, about the Chinese national arrested with drone technology, near a U.S. base. That might start to head in the direction if some sort of explanation for the goings-on.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
Yeah, my impression so far is that Starmer is doing a reasonable job of playing the poor hand he has been dealt. He is a grinder, and I appreciate that after the showmanship of previous PMs, but I do wish he would be a bit braver and make more use of the large majority he has to play with. People like vision and action; even when things don't work out as planned, they appreciate the effort.
That's 'Rejoin' and he's keeping that up his sleeve (but this time with the full monty)
Yeah, my impression so far is that Starmer is doing a reasonable job of playing the poor hand he has been dealt. He is a grinder, and I appreciate that after the showmanship of previous PMs, but I do wish he would be a bit braver and make more use of the large majority he has to play with. People like vision and action; even when things don't work out as planned, they appreciate the effort.
Do they? The British people don't fucking appreciate anything except tattoos and fucking Greggs as far as I can see.
Most of the country are in a perpetual state of roiling fumingness with whoever is in government at the time; unable to come to terms with the nation's diminishing status and standard of living. The remainder are in a cynical, detached, possibly Pregabalin fuelled semi-ambulatory vegetative state.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
Then build some more!
It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.
Scene : Malmesbury's Britain
Husband: Disaster! Wife: What? Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box! Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth? Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?
Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.
Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.
If everybody with a bit of land was able to build up to say four houses on it, the developers would soon be finding their "land bank" was nothing very special.
So they'd soon be selling it off in parcels able to build, oh, say four houses. To people who would have no interest in sitting on it for decades.
Labour costs would still go up though.
And you might have to have some rules saying the four houses would have one with four bedrooms, one with only three, one with only two - and a one-bed starter home.
“Best is from late Robert Anton Wilson the arch psychonaut explorer who had one trip so terrifying he ran out of his house, jumped on his motorcycle and rode out into the California Desert, kept going until he ran out of gas then slept in a ditch beneath the open skies, when he came to, he realised not only was he completely lost but he'd never owned, had access to or even ridden a motorbike.”
What objective proof do you have that PB exists?
(ducks)
What has it to do with ducks, philosophically?
On existence and observation, these are quite amusing and known as the Berkeley Limericks - apologies if you are familiar. We are talking early in the 20C. The first is from a Chaplain at Oxford University called Ronald Knox, who did various other things such as a Radio Broadcast in 1926 of a fake revolution in London, which gave Orson Welles his idea for the "War of the Worlds" radio hoax.
There once was a man who said "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad."
Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd. I am always about in the Quad. And that's why the tree Will continue to be Since observed by Yours faithfully, God
If objects depend on our seeing So that trees, unobserved, would cease tree-ing, Then my question is: Who Is the one who sees you And assures your persistence in being?
Dear Sir, You reason most oddly. To be's to be seen for the bod'ly. But for spirits like me, To be is to see. Sincerely, The one who is godly.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
Then build some more!
It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.
Scene : Malmesbury's Britain
Husband: Disaster! Wife: What? Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box! Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth? Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?
Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.
Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.
If everybody with a bit of land was able to build up to say four houses on it, the developers would soon be finding their "land bank" was nothing very special.
So they'd soon be selling it off in parcels able to build, oh, say four houses. To people who would have no interest in sitting on it for decades.
Labour costs would still go up though.
And you might have to have some rules saying the four houses would have one with four bedrooms, one with only three, one with only two - and a one-bed starter home.
Since the cost of labour is tightly tied to the cost of housing (surprise!) a reduction in house prices would bring down the cost of a lot of things.
“Best is from late Robert Anton Wilson the arch psychonaut explorer who had one trip so terrifying he ran out of his house, jumped on his motorcycle and rode out into the California Desert, kept going until he ran out of gas then slept in a ditch beneath the open skies, when he came to, he realised not only was he completely lost but he'd never owned, had access to or even ridden a motorbike.”
What objective proof do you have that PB exists?
(ducks)
What has it to do with ducks, philosophically?
On existence and observation, these are quite amusing and known as the Berkeley Limericks - apologies if you are familiar. We are talking early in the 20C. The first is from a Chaplain at Oxford University called Ronald Knox, who did various other things such as a Radio Broadcast in 1926 of a fake revolution in London, which gave Orson Welles his idea for the "War of the Worlds" radio hoax.
There once was a man who said "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad."
Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd. I am always about in the Quad. And that's why the tree Will continue to be Since observed by Yours faithfully, God
If objects depend on our seeing So that trees, unobserved, would cease tree-ing, Then my question is: Who Is the one who sees you And assures your persistence in being?
Dear Sir, You reason most oddly. To be's to be seen for the bod'ly. But for spirits like me, To be is to see. Sincerely, The one who is godly.
Berkeley has never been well refuted, and for all I know he is right. Everyone agrees that your experience dwells in the mind not in the outside world, and it follows that what you experience appears to be what there is unless some further evidence is available to show that there is something else too.
It troubled Kant, who believed something similar but not identical and was very keen to say he didn't follow Berkeley, as he was obviously wrong but it was tricky to say why.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
Yeah, my impression so far is that Starmer is doing a reasonable job of playing the poor hand he has been dealt. He is a grinder, and I appreciate that after the showmanship of previous PMs, but I do wish he would be a bit braver and make more use of the large majority he has to play with. People like vision and action; even when things don't work out as planned, they appreciate the effort.
That's 'Rejoin' and he's keeping that up his sleeve (but this time with the full monty)
“Best is from late Robert Anton Wilson the arch psychonaut explorer who had one trip so terrifying he ran out of his house, jumped on his motorcycle and rode out into the California Desert, kept going until he ran out of gas then slept in a ditch beneath the open skies, when he came to, he realised not only was he completely lost but he'd never owned, had access to or even ridden a motorbike.”
What objective proof do you have that PB exists?
(ducks)
What has it to do with ducks, philosophically?
On existence and observation, these are quite amusing and known as the Berkeley Limericks - apologies if you are familiar. We are talking early in the 20C. The first is from a Chaplain at Oxford University called Ronald Knox, who did various other things such as a Radio Broadcast in 1926 of a fake revolution in London, which gave Orson Welles his idea for the "War of the Worlds" radio hoax.
There once was a man who said "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad."
Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd. I am always about in the Quad. And that's why the tree Will continue to be Since observed by Yours faithfully, God
If objects depend on our seeing So that trees, unobserved, would cease tree-ing, Then my question is: Who Is the one who sees you And assures your persistence in being?
Dear Sir, You reason most oddly. To be's to be seen for the bod'ly. But for spirits like me, To be is to see. Sincerely, The one who is godly.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes
“Best is from late Robert Anton Wilson the arch psychonaut explorer who had one trip so terrifying he ran out of his house, jumped on his motorcycle and rode out into the California Desert, kept going until he ran out of gas then slept in a ditch beneath the open skies, when he came to, he realised not only was he completely lost but he'd never owned, had access to or even ridden a motorbike.”
What objective proof do you have that PB exists?
(ducks)
What has it to do with ducks, philosophically?
On existence and observation, these are quite amusing and known as the Berkeley Limericks - apologies if you are familiar. We are talking early in the 20C. The first is from a Chaplain at Oxford University called Ronald Knox, who did various other things such as a Radio Broadcast in 1926 of a fake revolution in London, which gave Orson Welles his idea for the "War of the Worlds" radio hoax.
There once was a man who said "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad."
Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd. I am always about in the Quad. And that's why the tree Will continue to be Since observed by Yours faithfully, God
If objects depend on our seeing So that trees, unobserved, would cease tree-ing, Then my question is: Who Is the one who sees you And assures your persistence in being?
Dear Sir, You reason most oddly. To be's to be seen for the bod'ly. But for spirits like me, To be is to see. Sincerely, The one who is godly.
I always thought the answer was simple: the universe is a consensus amongst its particles as to what is true at any given moment. If the universe is computationally irreducible, (ie you can't model it you have to run it) then "time" is the minimum period necessary for the universe to work out the next step.
So if the tree falls, the sound it makes is "heard" by every other particle in the universe. There is no need for a human observer.
"Putin’s regime is not yet at [economic collapse] but it would only take one more change in the Middle East to bring matters to a head. If the Saudis again decide to flood the world with cheap crude to recoup market share – as many predict – oil will fall below $40 and Russia will spin out of economic control.
I think a large part of the reason that US diplomacy is so cackhanded is because of treating ambassadorships as patronage appointments for the unqualified.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
The nation (As a whole) spends a bonkers proportion of it's income on (not particularly good or spacious) housing. Probably one reason why the economy has been so shit - if cash is being spent on property, and those receiving cash are spending that received cash on more property then it's not going into business capital, retail and so on...
The report I posted upthread provides a plan which government could adopt tomorrow. If I were running for office I'd make it my manifesto.
The dozen most promising locations they identify for new building would provide 5-600k new homes, and create a surplus value of well over £50bn. (They identify a further 38 potential new towns.)
CREATING NEW TOWNS FAST AND WELL https://www.britainremade.co.uk/newtowns ...SHOVEL-READY NEW TOWNS The government has set an ambitious target for delivering 1.5 million homes by 2029. This means that a first wave of new town sites is needed that does not need to wait for time-consuming planning of new large-scale infrastructure before construction can begin.
This paper is built around locations where transport infrastructure is either in place, already under construction, or approved for construction. While some would require further upgrades to realise their full potential, such as building new tram networks, thousands of houses could be delivered now in each of our twelve new town locations with what is already available. The requirements to get going are local elements, GPs surgeries, primary schools and link roads, which are unavoidable in any large-scale development. Further infrastructure upgrades can be delivered alongside the construction of the first homes and can be paid for by the value surplus that each home provides...
Yeah, my impression so far is that Starmer is doing a reasonable job of playing the poor hand he has been dealt. He is a grinder, and I appreciate that after the showmanship of previous PMs, but I do wish he would be a bit braver and make more use of the large majority he has to play with. People like vision and action; even when things don't work out as planned, they appreciate the effort.
Do they? The British people don't fucking appreciate anything except tattoos and fucking Greggs as far as I can see.
You forgot vapes. (When they can't get cheap fags from their Polish mate.)
"Putin’s regime is not yet at [economic collapse] but it would only take one more change in the Middle East to bring matters to a head. If the Saudis again decide to flood the world with cheap crude to recoup market share – as many predict – oil will fall below $40 and Russia will spin out of economic control.
The Ukraine war may end in Riyadh."
AEP - Telegraph
Some of us have been saying this for months.
But now AEP is saying it, it’s unlikely to happen.
2020 - Starmer elected as Labour leader. Most of PB thought he was a boring dud who would never be PM. 2021 - Starmer/Labour gets slaughtered in the Hartlepool by-election. The PB cognoscenti were proved right - Starmer is both a dud and an electoral liability. Probably won't make it to the GE. 2022-2024 - Labour wins the odd by-election against the odds. 2024 - the dud/Labour wins a huge majority in the GE. 2024 second half - Starmer is definitely a dud, and hopeless. 2029 - who knows?
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
In a word, she flatly denied that the need for housebuilding is directly linked to population growth caused by inward migration. This was as close as it gets to the lie direct.
Discussion and analysis here by Black Belt Barrister, using a whole 13 minutes you will never get back, but his point is well made. It's a Trevor Philips/Rayner interview:
"Putin’s regime is not yet at [economic collapse] but it would only take one more change in the Middle East to bring matters to a head. If the Saudis again decide to flood the world with cheap crude to recoup market share – as many predict – oil will fall below $40 and Russia will spin out of economic control.
The Ukraine war may end in Riyadh."
AEP - Telegraph
Looks like the Saudis will be cutting back production then.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
Then build some more!
It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.
Scene : Malmesbury's Britain
Husband: Disaster! Wife: What? Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box! Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth? Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?
Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.
Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.
I was picking through some Scottish housebuilding data last week - it's completely bonkers.
Last 10 years, number of homes has increased by 6%, population up 2%. Nominal wages up 25%, house prices up 36%.
Midlothian is our YIMBYiest council - 15% increase in houses. Yet also has the highest increase in house prices at 67%. Meanwhile Inverclyde has only built 1% more, and house prices only up 13%.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
Then build some more!
It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.
Scene : Malmesbury's Britain
Husband: Disaster! Wife: What? Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box! Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth? Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?
Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.
Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.
If everybody with a bit of land was able to build up to say four houses on it, the developers would soon be finding their "land bank" was nothing very special.
So they'd soon be selling it off in parcels able to build, oh, say four houses. To people who would have no interest in sitting on it for decades.
Labour costs would still go up though.
And you might have to have some rules saying the four houses would have one with four bedrooms, one with only three, one with only two - and a one-bed starter home.
Since the cost of labour is tightly tied to the cost of housing (surprise!) a reduction in house prices would bring down the cost of a lot of things.
Including building houses!
You've clearly never worked with Devon builders.
Their costs - like time's arrow - travel in only one direction.
Yeah, my impression so far is that Starmer is doing a reasonable job of playing the poor hand he has been dealt. He is a grinder, and I appreciate that after the showmanship of previous PMs, but I do wish he would be a bit braver and make more use of the large majority he has to play with. People like vision and action; even when things don't work out as planned, they appreciate the effort.
Do they? The British people don't fucking appreciate anything except tattoos and fucking Greggs as far as I can see.
"Putin’s regime is not yet at [economic collapse] but it would only take one more change in the Middle East to bring matters to a head. If the Saudis again decide to flood the world with cheap crude to recoup market share – as many predict – oil will fall below $40 and Russia will spin out of economic control.
The Ukraine war may end in Riyadh."
AEP - Telegraph
I know it's hard to second-guess Trump, but the US President always wants cheap oil. Might he be willing to offer more to the Saudis in return for it, what with having no qualms about the nasty business with the journalist?
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
I agree with your analysis. I disagree that WFA was an error - they just haven't sold why throwing money at wealthy pensioners can be better directed. Comms again.
And I think early unforced errors are inevitable when a party is out of power for 14 years. Is still make errors in my job, and I've been doing it for a lot longer than the government. What is different is that in my job there is a process to catch most of my errors before anyone else notices, but Labour hasn't worked it out fully yet.
But have you got this job though by saying for years that the previous incumbent in the post was utterly shite - then having no idea what to do when the Board chucked him out on your say so and decided to give you a chance instead?
It's not just making mistakes - it's really seeming to be in entirely the wrong profession.
There is an element of that too. Hence my 'timidly conservative' - just doing the same as before but slightly differently and less incompetently.
Just the same as Brexit - none of the proponents had any idea what to do with it (and still don't).
I don't think this is going to be the best government of my lifetime, but a sense of balance says that it is far from the worst. It's far too soon to tell whether it stays poor-to-middling or improves as it finds its feet and starts to get some of the boring stuff done.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Money isn't a matter of moral value, just economic value. A nurse always contributes more in that sense to society than a footballer. But the ridiculous wages of a footballer provides a shedload of cash via tax which can then pay nurses.
Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit: "You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"
That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.
There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.
I think he's saying our values are distiorted and read PB for a few days and try to argue with him. All we hear is that public sector workers are scroungers....the government are robbing millionaire farmers blind....we want white babies....
..............actually that was when I realised I was in the wrong place...
If that's all you hear, you seem to be listening to about 1 poster.
I skim read it and the mood since the change of government has turned much uglier. Compassion has disappeared and in your face racism such as the 'white babies' has become endemic. One brilliant post by the firestopper but then drowned out by the new emboldened Faragists. You must have noticed.......
PB is always a lot less interesting after lunch. Lunch seems to be bad for the discourse.
PB can often be interesting but if you look at it as a newspaper-opinion pieces and up to date political news-when the opinion diverges too much from your own or indeed any civilised persons (white babies) and the politics is thin then it's just annoying.
I cannot remember the last time you contributed a comment that was in any way insightful, illuminating, educational, witty, unexpected, gracious, smart, amusing, elegant, perceptive, articulate, wry, sensitive, piercing, subtle, or intelligent
Your commentary is the equivalent of flatulence. You don’t comment, you fart. You come on here occasionally, and you fart, then you absent-mindedly walk away again
As such, I’m not sure you’re entitled to critique the wider PB discourse
Thank goodness you posted this at noon. Any earlier and we would all have assumed you were already on the piss.
2020 - Starmer elected as Labour leader. Most of PB thought he was a boring dud who would never be PM. 2021 - Starmer/Labour gets slaughtered in the Hartlepool by-election. The PB cognoscenti were proved right - Starmer is both a dud and an electoral liability. Probably won't make it to the GE. 2022-2024 - Labour wins the odd by-election against the odds. 2024 - the dud/Labour wins a huge majority in the GE. 2024 second half - Starmer is definitely a dud, and hopeless. 2029 - who knows?
2022-2024 - The Tories spectacularly self-destruct with an unprecedented series of self-inflicted disasters. 2024-2029 - Will the Tories continue to self-combust in opposition?
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes
That is stupendously dumb and clumsy
Yet it's been the unspoken position of the pro-immigration lobby for the last 25 years. They can just keep coming indefinitely.
So basically PR now benefits the Tories and Reform most as well as the Greens with the LDs little changed.
FPTP though massively benefits Labour now
FPTP benefits the winning party, rather than specifically Labour.
Not necessarily. There have been several elections in which the party benefitting was the one in second place - and a gross distortion is quite likely in an election where the vote shares for any of the pairs LibDem and Tory, LibDem and Labour, or Reform and Tory, or Reform and Labour, were very close
It benefit parties with more concentrated support rather than those with broader, but shallower appeal (the opposite of what we should want given only a choice between that or the opposite).
So basically PR now benefits the Tories and Reform most as well as the Greens with the LDs little changed.
FPTP though massively benefits Labour now
FPTP benefits the winning party, rather than specifically Labour.
Not necessarily. There have been several elections in which the party benefitting was the one in second place - and a gross distortion is quite likely in an election where the vote shares for any of the pairs LibDem and Tory, LibDem and Labour, or Reform and Tory, or Reform and Labour, were very close
It benefit parties with more concentrated support rather than those with broader, but shallower appeal (the opposite of what we should want given only a choice between that or the opposite).
Indeed. Plaid Cymru, for example, doesn’t win many national elections, but consistently does very well out of FPTP.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
Then build some more!
It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.
Scene : Malmesbury's Britain
Husband: Disaster! Wife: What? Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box! Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth? Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?
Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.
Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.
If everybody with a bit of land was able to build up to say four houses on it, the developers would soon be finding their "land bank" was nothing very special.
So they'd soon be selling it off in parcels able to build, oh, say four houses. To people who would have no interest in sitting on it for decades.
Labour costs would still go up though.
And you might have to have some rules saying the four houses would have one with four bedrooms, one with only three, one with only two - and a one-bed starter home.
Since the cost of labour is tightly tied to the cost of housing (surprise!) a reduction in house prices would bring down the cost of a lot of things.
Including building houses!
You've clearly never worked with Devon builders.
Their costs - like time's arrow - travel in only one direction.
Haha that's true, as my brother has found to his cost!
So basically PR now benefits the Tories and Reform most as well as the Greens with the LDs little changed.
FPTP though massively benefits Labour now
FPTP benefits the winning party, rather than specifically Labour.
Not necessarily. There have been several elections in which the party benefitting was the one in second place - and a gross distortion is quite likely in an election where the vote shares for any of the pairs LibDem and Tory, LibDem and Labour, or Reform and Tory, or Reform and Labour, were very close
It benefit parties with more concentrated support rather than those with broader, but shallower appeal (the opposite of what we should want given only a choice between that or the opposite).
I don't disbelieve you, but I'm surprised by this and struggling to think of any examples (of the primary beneficiary of FPTP being the party with the second-most votes.) Have you got any examples?
I do agree with your other point about concentrated support e.g. Plaid Cymru.
"Putin’s regime is not yet at [economic collapse] but it would only take one more change in the Middle East to bring matters to a head. If the Saudis again decide to flood the world with cheap crude to recoup market share – as many predict – oil will fall below $40 and Russia will spin out of economic control.
The Ukraine war may end in Riyadh."
AEP - Telegraph
Looks like the Saudis will be cutting back production then.
Nope.
By opening the taps, the Saudis will ultimately take out a lot of competing Russian production. That Russian production is already suffering degradation by dint of sanctions. This winter will see more wells closed down, not to be replaced. It will see pipelines of waxy crude turned into hundred-mile long candles. When the Soviet Union fell, that process caused many fields to be closed down for years, even decades.
The Saudis can take out a chunk of their competition for reducing world hydrocarbon markets. While they, like their fellow members of the GCC, invest in long-term renewables. By the time Russia gets opened up again, the market for their hydrocarbons will be even further reduced, the price further driven down.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
Then build some more!
It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.
Scene : Malmesbury's Britain
Husband: Disaster! Wife: What? Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box! Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth? Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?
Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.
Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.
I was picking through some Scottish housebuilding data last week - it's completely bonkers.
Last 10 years, number of homes has increased by 6%, population up 2%. Nominal wages up 25%, house prices up 36%.
Midlothian is our YIMBYiest council - 15% increase in houses. Yet also has the highest increase in house prices at 67%. Meanwhile Inverclyde has only built 1% more, and house prices only up 13%.
Your regular reminder that a percentage increase doesn't necassarily make up for a shortfall.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes
That is stupendously dumb and clumsy
Yet it's been the unspoken position of the pro-immigration lobby for the last 25 years. They can just keep coming indefinitely.
It's more that, to suggest that immigration has any costs/issues is considered "anti-immigration" or "pandering to the far right".
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
Then build some more!
It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.
Scene : Malmesbury's Britain
Husband: Disaster! Wife: What? Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box! Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth? Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?
Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.
Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.
If everybody with a bit of land was able to build up to say four houses on it, the developers would soon be finding their "land bank" was nothing very special.
So they'd soon be selling it off in parcels able to build, oh, say four houses. To people who would have no interest in sitting on it for decades.
Labour costs would still go up though.
And you might have to have some rules saying the four houses would have one with four bedrooms, one with only three, one with only two - and a one-bed starter home.
Since the cost of labour is tightly tied to the cost of housing (surprise!) a reduction in house prices would bring down the cost of a lot of things.
Including building houses!
You've clearly never worked with Devon builders.
Their costs - like time's arrow - travel in only one direction.
Haha that's true, as my brother has found to his cost!
Increasing costs means that everyone has to put their prices up. Prices have actually fallen, in the past.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes
That is stupendously dumb and clumsy
Yet it's been the unspoken position of the pro-immigration lobby for the last 25 years. They can just keep coming indefinitely.
It's more that, to suggest that immigration has any costs/issues is considered "anti-immigration" or "pandering to the far right".
"Putin’s regime is not yet at [economic collapse] but it would only take one more change in the Middle East to bring matters to a head. If the Saudis again decide to flood the world with cheap crude to recoup market share – as many predict – oil will fall below $40 and Russia will spin out of economic control.
The Ukraine war may end in Riyadh."
AEP - Telegraph
Looks like the Saudis will be cutting back production then.
Nope.
By opening the taps, the Saudis will ultimately take out a lot of competing Russian production. That Russian production is already suffering degradation by dint of sanctions. This winter will see more wells closed down, not to be replaced. It will see pipelines of waxy crude turned into hundred-mile long candles. When the Soviet Union fell, that process caused many fields to be closed down for years, even decades.
The Saudis can take out a chunk of their competition for reducing world hydrocarbon markets. While they, like their fellow members of the GCC, invest in long-term renewables. By the time Russia gets opened up again, the market for their hydrocarbons will be even further reduced, the price further driven down.
I’m still amazed that Biden and Blinken didn’t use every bit of political capital they had left with OPEC, to get them pumping like crazy in the run up to the election.
Nothing would have helped more with their “Economy is getting better” narrative, than a significant fall in gas (petrol) prices in the summer and autumn.
Comments
The vast majority of the US Military Aid, for example, aiui goes to the US military industrial complex and is counted at the full cost of the new equipment the US forces are getting as replacements, rather than the out of date cast-offs being sent to Ukraine.
Someone here will know more detail on this.
I agree it's just DT's weekly hate-the-NT session. Plus DT's daily wind up the farmers session.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9nonCqesLI
FPTP though massively benefits Labour now
Although your summary is nevertheless the big picture, they've got the detail badly wrong somewhere
It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.
Driving standards are definitely deteriorating.
Not necessarily. There have been several elections in which the party benefitting was the one in second place - and a gross distortion is quite likely in an election where the vote shares for any of the pairs LibDem and Tory, LibDem and Labour, or Reform and Tory, or Reform and Labour, were very close
It benefit parties with more concentrated support rather than those with broader, but shallower appeal (the opposite of what we should want given only a choice between that or the opposite).
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
...
I still can't believe McLaren buggered up Piastri's race in Silverstone and ruined my 29 bet.
Consider the case of a Housing Association that wanted to build some low cost accommodation. Because they merged with another HA, the name changed. So, it was demanded that all the reports on the project be redone.
No one can tell me that wasn't a legal hack to delay the project.
Husband: Disaster!
Wife: What?
Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box!
Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth?
Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.
“Best is from late Robert Anton Wilson the arch psychonaut explorer who had one trip so terrifying he ran out of his house, jumped on his motorcycle and rode out into the California Desert, kept going until he ran out of gas then slept in a ditch beneath the open skies, when he came to, he realised not only was he completely lost but he'd never owned, had access to or even ridden a motorbike.”
Obviously ammunition is actually being made and sent, as is a lot of transport and labour, but the big-ticket items are very much overvalued in discussions about aid, and the difference is indeed going straight to the military industrial complex supporting jobs in your Congressman’s district.
"It is a pity Rachel Reeve did not look across the Atlantic, to a Democratic president much to her liking, and copy some of his better ideas. During his four years in office Joe Biden allowed more oil and gas drilling – on top of the 50 per cent increase under Donald Trump – permitting more cheaper energy to be made available to American business.
"He had a strong onshoring policy for more industrial investment, again building on Trump’s successful push for more home-based industry. Like his predecessor, Biden used tariffs and bans against China where he thought they were competing unfairly or undermining American national security interests."
https://conservativehome.com/2024/12/11/john-redwood-if-labour-really-wanted-to-deliver-growth-they-should-take-lessons-from-biden/
(ducks)
The Liberals in Canada soon dropped the idea when in power!.
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
Their are certainly a lot of Ukrainians getting very rich off the SMO either by skimming aid or sanctions busting trade with Russia. I saw as many Bentaygas in Zvirinyets' as I ever have in W1.
Your commentary is the equivalent of flatulence. You don’t comment, you fart. You come on here occasionally, and you fart, then you absent-mindedly walk away again
As such, I’m not sure you’re entitled to critique the wider PB discourse
If reports needed redoing there would have to be an objective reason, which would be a timeout of relevance (I have often seen 2 years as the LPA view). I think whether that would stick would depend on circumstances, and would normally perhaps be a problem where the Application (or further application for Detailed PP over PP in principle). If the PP has been granted, that is probably that.
Another reason may be copyright issues by the author of the report as to its further usage - which depends on the original and sale agreements. Architects and other consultants are quite favourable to receiving another lot of fees for little or no extra work.
Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.
Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.
And I think early unforced errors are inevitable when a party is out of power for 14 years. Is still make errors in my job, and I've been doing it for a lot longer than the government. What is different is that in my job there is a process to catch most of my errors before anyone else notices, but Labour hasn't worked it out fully yet.
Most of the country are in a perpetual state of roiling fumingness with whoever is in government at the time; unable to come to terms with the nation's diminishing status and standard of living. The remainder are in a cynical, detached, possibly Pregabalin fuelled semi-ambulatory vegetative state.
The current rate of building is a stable optimum for a wide range of interests.
On existence and observation, these are quite amusing and known as the Berkeley Limericks - apologies if you are familiar. We are talking early in the 20C. The first is from a Chaplain at Oxford University called Ronald Knox, who did various other things such as a Radio Broadcast in 1926 of a fake revolution in London, which gave Orson Welles his idea for the "War of the Worlds" radio hoax.
There once was a man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."
Dear Sir,
Your astonishment's odd.
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
Yours faithfully,
God
If objects depend on our seeing
So that trees, unobserved, would cease tree-ing,
Then my question is: Who
Is the one who sees you
And assures your persistence in being?
Dear Sir,
You reason most oddly.
To be's to be seen for the bod'ly.
But for spirits like me,
To be is to see.
Sincerely,
The one who is godly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Knox
It's not just making mistakes - it's really seeming to be in entirely the wrong profession.
Interesting post from one of the posters, earlier on here, about the Chinese national arrested with drone technology, near a U.S. base. That might start to head in the direction if some sort of explanation for the goings-on.
So they'd soon be selling it off in parcels able to build, oh, say four houses. To people who would have no interest in sitting on it for decades.
Labour costs would still go up though.
And you might have to have some rules saying the four houses would have one with four bedrooms, one with only three, one with only two - and a one-bed starter home.
Including building houses!
It troubled Kant, who believed something similar but not identical and was very keen to say he didn't follow Berkeley, as he was obviously wrong but it was tricky to say why.
So if the tree falls, the sound it makes is "heard" by every other particle in the universe. There is no need for a human observer.
Incidentally, this theory has two implications
Starmer hammers Badenoch again in PMQs for championing a ‘one nation experiment in open borders under the last government’
Pledges to ‘drive down lawful migration and drive down illegal migration’
The Ukraine war may end in Riyadh."
AEP - Telegraph
One thing I note is that PM Starmer seems to be far more frequent in offering meetings with Minister ("I will make sure that ....").
Is he keeping these promises, and will it make any difference?
The dozen most promising locations they identify for new building would provide 5-600k new homes, and create a surplus value of well over £50bn.
(They identify a further 38 potential new towns.)
CREATING NEW TOWNS FAST AND WELL
https://www.britainremade.co.uk/newtowns
...SHOVEL-READY NEW TOWNS
The government has set an ambitious target for delivering 1.5 million homes by 2029. This means that a first wave of new town sites is needed that does not need to wait for time-consuming planning of new large-scale infrastructure before construction can begin.
This paper is built around locations where transport infrastructure is either in place, already under construction, or approved for construction. While some would require further upgrades to realise their full potential, such as building new tram networks, thousands of houses could be delivered now in each of our twelve new town locations with what is already available. The requirements to get going are local elements, GPs surgeries, primary schools and link roads, which are unavoidable in any large-scale development. Further infrastructure upgrades can be delivered alongside the construction of the first homes and can be paid for by the value surplus that each home provides...
But now AEP is saying it, it’s unlikely to happen.
2021 - Starmer/Labour gets slaughtered in the Hartlepool by-election. The PB cognoscenti were proved right - Starmer is both a dud and an electoral liability. Probably won't make it to the GE.
2022-2024 - Labour wins the odd by-election against the odds.
2024 - the dud/Labour wins a huge majority in the GE.
2024 second half - Starmer is definitely a dud, and hopeless.
2029 - who knows?
Discussion and analysis here by Black Belt Barrister, using a whole 13 minutes you will never get back, but his point is well made. It's a Trevor Philips/Rayner interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzcovTZnA0k
Last 10 years, number of homes has increased by 6%, population up 2%. Nominal wages up 25%, house prices up 36%.
Midlothian is our YIMBYiest council - 15% increase in houses. Yet also has the highest increase in house prices at 67%. Meanwhile Inverclyde has only built 1% more, and house prices only up 13%.
Their costs - like time's arrow - travel in only one direction.
Just the same as Brexit - none of the proponents had any idea what to do with it (and still don't).
I don't think this is going to be the best government of my lifetime, but a sense of balance says that it is far from the worst. It's far too soon to tell whether it stays poor-to-middling or improves as it finds its feet and starts to get some of the boring stuff done.
2024-2029 - Will the Tories continue to self-combust in opposition?
I don't put it past them.
I do agree with your other point about concentrated support e.g. Plaid Cymru.
By opening the taps, the Saudis will ultimately take out a lot of competing Russian production. That Russian production is already suffering degradation by dint of sanctions. This winter will see more wells closed down, not to be replaced. It will see pipelines of waxy crude turned into hundred-mile long candles. When the Soviet Union fell, that process caused many fields to be closed down for years, even decades.
The Saudis can take out a chunk of their competition for reducing world hydrocarbon markets. While they, like their fellow members of the GCC, invest in long-term renewables. By the time Russia gets opened up again, the market for their hydrocarbons will be even further reduced, the price further driven down.
Nothing would have helped more with their “Economy is getting better” narrative, than a significant fall in gas (petrol) prices in the summer and autumn.