The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
And this might not have ended in a dumpster fire if she, (and her successors, to be fair: New Labour exhibited no interest in addressing the matter) had bothered to replace the council houses. All Maggie was interested in was using the receipts to subsidise current spending and thus fund tax cuts.
As it is, a large segment of the population now finds itself stuck in ludicrously expensive private rentals with no prospect of ever buying their way off that treadmill. We now have a neo-Hanoverian settlement: rentier capitalism with a large peasant underclass.
Your party won't fix this problem because it is contrary to the interest of your rump vote to do so. It is therefore useless to most of the country and thoroughly deserved the good caning it got last year.
*A lot* of post WWII council house estates (eg Robin Hood Gardens, or the Everton Piggeries or Hackney Wick tower blocks), were jerry-built shitholes. Beware of thinking that in the past, everyone had decent homes. The overall standard of housing today is better today than in the Sixties or Seventies.
One man's Council house shithole is another man's step up compared to what slum landlords offer. At least the Council would make urgent repairs to your leaky roofed sithole.
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
"Only"???
How much, in your eyes, is an average account?
There doesn't appear to be figures on an average 'following' on twitter, unlike average 'followers'.
But a quick look at some of those that the organisations that the CPS are following themselves:
Met police fed - 1642 Police fed - 925 NCA - 2395 College of policing - 3923 Moj - 1375 CBA - 4524 Dignity in dying - 8702 Law society - 888
I follow over a 1,000.
I'd say average. Someone manages this account.
The Head of Diversity and Inclusion at the CPS is friendly with Mr C****n. They've done a video together talking about how great it is to come out in the forces.
And your point is...?
It might explain why the CPS's social media account follows a former Defence Minister. That's all.
Just as long as it's not guilt by association...
Caplin has not been found guilty of anything. FWIW I am a bit wary of private arrests because of the risk of prejudicing people's rights and getting things badly wrong. Even more so if it follows a "sting" operation.
I do think organisations need to think about their social media policies and who they follow, precisely because of the risk of finding yourself inadvertently associated with something unsavoury. All the more so if you are performing a policing or judicial function. The risk of actual or perceived bias is real. Plus the risk of missing evidence of a possible criminal offence.
Whether any of this applies here I don't know and it is far too early to tell. It may well all end up a big fat nothing.
I commented this morning that livestreaming the arrest worries me. Was this done with the police's knowledge and/or acceptance?
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
And this might not have ended in a dumpster fire if she, (and her successors, to be fair: New Labour exhibited no interest in addressing the matter) had bothered to replace the council houses. All Maggie was interested in was using the receipts to subsidise current spending and thus fund tax cuts.
As it is, a large segment of the population now finds itself stuck in ludicrously expensive private rentals with no prospect of ever buying their way off that treadmill. We now have a neo-Hanoverian settlement: rentier capitalism with a large peasant underclass.
Your party won't fix this problem because it is contrary to the interest of your rump vote to do so. It is therefore useless to most of the country and thoroughly deserved the good caning it got last year.
*A lot* of post WWII council house estates (eg Robin Hood Gardens, or the Everton Piggeries or Hackney Wick tower blocks), were jerry-built shitholes. Beware of thinking that in the past, everyone had decent homes. The overall standard of housing today is better today than in the Sixties or Seventies.
One man's Council house shithole is another man's step up compared to what slum landlords offer. At least the Council would make urgent repairs to your leaky roofed sithole.
2.2m council properties bought under right to buy from Local Authorities
Presumably the purchasers believe them not to be shitholes!
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Home ownership in the UK peaked at about 73%.
The lowest 25% have rarely been home owners.
What we saw in the 1980s and 1990s was an increase in home ownership among the working class and young.
An increase in home ownership amongst the working class and young is an exceptionally good thing and is what is sorely needed today.
And it doesn't neatly transpire that the quarter who didn't own their own home were those that were the lowest quarter of earners, since there is always some variance eg higher earners who were regularly mobile or had bad credit or other reasons to be in the quarter that didn't own their own home.
The minimum wage has grown faster than CPI since 2002 when home ownership peaked so home ownership amongst the young and poorest should have gone up, but the opposite has happened as house price inflation surged out of control and was falsely deemed as not inflation by the Bank of England.
Getting house prices in real terms back to what they were in the 1990s would fix a lot of our economic problems.
It's technically possible but would take a very, very long time. I doubt that the country can build fast enough to plug the demand gap from the people already here, let alone the vast tide of immigrants, and the consequences of a theoretical crash are enormous capital losses for existing long term owners, mass negative equity for mortgage holders, and severe stress on the banking system.
Even if a cross party consensus for affordable housing can be found - which I doubt, because the Tories' supporters profit too much from continual inflation and are mostly rabid nimbies to boot, and the Lib Dems and Greens are waiting to steal them at the first sign of a wobble - then it'll take as long to correct this problem as it did to create it. Decades and decades.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
And this might not have ended in a dumpster fire if she, (and her successors, to be fair: New Labour exhibited no interest in addressing the matter) had bothered to replace the council houses. All Maggie was interested in was using the receipts to subsidise current spending and thus fund tax cuts.
As it is, a large segment of the population now finds itself stuck in ludicrously expensive private rentals with no prospect of ever buying their way off that treadmill. We now have a neo-Hanoverian settlement: rentier capitalism with a large peasant underclass.
Your party won't fix this problem because it is contrary to the interest of your rump vote to do so. It is therefore useless to most of the country and thoroughly deserved the good caning it got last year.
Actually our local Tory council has proposed lots of new affordable homes, including new social council homes, in its Local Plan, to be fair to Labour in line with the government's plans for new homes.
It is the Nimby LD, Reform, Green and Independent opposition who are opposing new housing (though at least in Reform's case also with a platform of slashing immigration to cut demand)
It is worth noting that the devastation caused by the fires in Los Angeles aren't one tenth of the damage the Fukashima earthquake did to Japan, either financially or in terms of loss of life. It will also have no impact, for example, on the power grid.
Modern developed economies are remarkably resilient to natural disasters, and US housing is cheap and quick to construct (thanks in part to plenty of ... undocumented ... laborers from South America).
This time next year, Palisades will be a third rebuilt. By the time of the next presidential election, you won't know it happened.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
And one of the under-commented features of the current labour market is that the inexorable generous increases in the minimum wage, coupled with pay restraint for many people in what Miliband called the ‘squeezed middle’, means that a surprisingly large number of previous well-above-minimum pay rates are now pegged to the minimum wage. A feature that remuneration professionals would describe as the erosion of differentials.
Another example of 70s redux.
If you bother to peruse certain bits of Reddit, let alone actually talk to people - the following toxic combo appears -
1) degree on full fees, with all the borrowing 2) stuck in a job with a wage £0.50 above minimum. 3) all money goes on renting a shit hole to live in, in commuting distance of 2) 4) little or no prospect of being promoted out of this.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
I think travelling with @Leon would be huge fun. For me anyway. Others might wonder why The Great Writer and Flint Knapper Extraordinaire is travelling with his sweary older sister, who flirts outrageously with all the staff and their extensive loud - and prolonged - arguments about every topic under the sun.
Very flattering but - in all honesty - I suspect I would be a pretty tough travel companion for most. If there is a dark menacing alleyway, I will generally go down it. If there is a notorious Mafia town 30km way, my reaction is Yay that’s a must see! Show me a country plunged into civil strife and I’ll show you a country with surprisingly cheap hotels, a glimpse of the true human condition, and a rich harvest of alarming anecdotes
Fun for a bit but wearying after a while. I mean, even I get bored of my incessant appetite for this shit
I blame my upbringing. Hereford was SO boring it bred a pathological need for endless stimulation. Also, I can turn stories into money, an added incentive
Your upbringing boring? With a dad like yours? Really? Surprising.
Having a dad like mine was “the wrong kind of interesting”, if you see what I mean
Bizarrely, for a womanizing bastard he was very timid when it came to other outre experiences. Not a great traveller, disliked danger and risk, never adventurous, never even learned to swim, was quite helpless in terms of self reliance (couldn’t cook, etc). He was a touch effete
Perhaps my lust for risk and danger is another form of Oedipal rebellion or filial rivalry? I dunno. I have actually examined this exact question in a book that, if I ever retire from flint knapping. I might punt out to publishers
Although I had been a lurker in these parts for some years, I only signed up last year (I think). It’s comments such as this that make me wish there was a potted history of PB with biographies of the best and the brightest, the dumb and dumber or the infuriating and irritating (delete as applicable).
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
Errr, are you sure about that?
Average house prices trebled between 1979 and 1990. It just doesn't feel as bad, because that was also a period when interest rates fell sharply.
Even in the 1990's you could buy a house or flat for three times a fairly average wage even in the south east....I know because I did twice in the 90's
That'll be because house prices fell 40% in real terms between 1990 and 1994.
Which was an exceptionally good thing.
We need it to happen again, desperately, to reverse the catastrophic damage of the Brown years onwards.
I don't disagree with that! I was just pointing out that @Pagan2 was inaccurate to claim that house prices didn't shoot up during the Thatcher years.
The Thatcher years had a cycle with a boom and bust. Nothing wrong with that over the cycle.
The problem of the 2002 years onwards is we've had cycles of boom and plateau rather than boom and bust in house prices.
That's caused a catastrophic ratchet in costs with no corrections.
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
1) A plane crashes on the border between Ukraine and the Republic of China. Which side do you bury the survivors? 2) Your artistic direction before and after MMMBop sucked. How are you going to fix this?
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I have no desire to join another social media site, but thanks.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Should they stop it happening again?
Quick, cheap prefabricated homes can be rebuilt as rcs just said.
Part of the problem in this country is we want stuff to be built and last forever, even if circumstances change, rather than just be prepared to tear it down and start all over again repeatedly.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
And this might not have ended in a dumpster fire if she, (and her successors, to be fair: New Labour exhibited no interest in addressing the matter) had bothered to replace the council houses. All Maggie was interested in was using the receipts to subsidise current spending and thus fund tax cuts.
As it is, a large segment of the population now finds itself stuck in ludicrously expensive private rentals with no prospect of ever buying their way off that treadmill. We now have a neo-Hanoverian settlement: rentier capitalism with a large peasant underclass.
Your party won't fix this problem because it is contrary to the interest of your rump vote to do so. It is therefore useless to most of the country and thoroughly deserved the good caning it got last year.
*A lot* of post WWII council house estates (eg Robin Hood Gardens, or the Everton Piggeries or Hackney Wick tower blocks), were jerry-built shitholes. Beware of thinking that in the past, everyone had decent homes. The overall standard of housing today is better today than in the Sixties or Seventies.
Some of the apartment blocks built in Glasgow in the 1960s to replace the Gorbals slums were damp and mould infested hellholes from the day they were built. They only lasted 30 years.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Should they stop it happening again?
Would you like your property and possessions burnt down every 5 years?
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
That’s basically my story. Gave up full time work very early, to do full time local politics, and when the electorate moved on, didn’t fancy returning to full time employment.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
Or looked at another way the vast majority of 18-45s don't even with the Guardian headline grabbing phrase of a 'strong leader who doesn't need to bother with elections' as opposed to a 'weak leader who doesn't need to bother with elections'.
There is anyway now a huge range of parties with MPs in parliament to vote from from the Greens to Reform and the SNP and Corbynite Independents and still the Tories, LDs and Labour too. At the end of the day the voters get the governments they voted for and deserve so can't really complain
It doesn't really work like that and you know this. The Overton Window is narrow and if you don't benefit from that narrow range of policies then there is no meaningful choice. To paraphrase Churchill, democracy is the least worst system - but it does have an unfortunate tendency to offer little other than a change of management most of the time.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Should they stop it happening again?
Would you like your property and possessions burnt down every 5 years?
No.
But I'd rather that than have no property or possessions.
Besides its not every 5 years that each home will need replacing, within 5 years other homes might not the same ones.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Home ownership in the UK peaked at about 73%.
The lowest 25% have rarely been home owners.
What we saw in the 1980s and 1990s was an increase in home ownership among the working class and young.
An increase in home ownership amongst the working class and young is an exceptionally good thing and is what is sorely needed today.
And it doesn't neatly transpire that the quarter who didn't own their own home were those that were the lowest quarter of earners, since there is always some variance eg higher earners who were regularly mobile or had bad credit or other reasons to be in the quarter that didn't own their own home.
The minimum wage has grown faster than CPI since 2002 when home ownership peaked so home ownership amongst the young and poorest should have gone up, but the opposite has happened as house price inflation surged out of control and was falsely deemed as not inflation by the Bank of England.
Getting house prices in real terms back to what they were in the 1990s would fix a lot of our economic problems.
It's technically possible but would take a very, very long time. I doubt that the country can build fast enough to plug the demand gap from the people already here, let alone the vast tide of immigrants, and the consequences of a theoretical crash are enormous capital losses for existing long term owners, mass negative equity for mortgage holders, and severe stress on the banking system.
Even if a cross party consensus for affordable housing can be found - which I doubt, because the Tories' supporters profit too much from continual inflation and are mostly rabid nimbies to boot, and the Lib Dems and Greens are waiting to steal them at the first sign of a wobble - then it'll take as long to correct this problem as it did to create it. Decades and decades.
The UK constructed a lot of decent housing in the London suburbs in the 1930s, so I don't think it's technically impossible, merely politically difficult.
The problem is that too many people - like with the triple lock - benefit from the status quo.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I have no desire to join another social media site, but thanks.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
I think travelling with @Leon would be huge fun. For me anyway. Others might wonder why The Great Writer and Flint Knapper Extraordinaire is travelling with his sweary older sister, who flirts outrageously with all the staff and their extensive loud - and prolonged - arguments about every topic under the sun.
Very flattering but - in all honesty - I suspect I would be a pretty tough travel companion for most. If there is a dark menacing alleyway, I will generally go down it. If there is a notorious Mafia town 30km way, my reaction is Yay that’s a must see! Show me a country plunged into civil strife and I’ll show you a country with surprisingly cheap hotels, a glimpse of the true human condition, and a rich harvest of alarming anecdotes
Fun for a bit but wearying after a while. I mean, even I get bored of my incessant appetite for this shit
I blame my upbringing. Hereford was SO boring it bred a pathological need for endless stimulation. Also, I can turn stories into money, an added incentive
Your upbringing boring? With a dad like yours? Really? Surprising.
Having a dad like mine was “the wrong kind of interesting”, if you see what I mean
Bizarrely, for a womanizing bastard he was very timid when it came to other outre experiences. Not a great traveller, disliked danger and risk, never adventurous, never even learned to swim, was quite helpless in terms of self reliance (couldn’t cook, etc). He was a touch effete
Perhaps my lust for risk and danger is another form of Oedipal rebellion or filial rivalry? I dunno. I have actually examined this exact question in a book that, if I ever retire from flint knapping. I might punt out to publishers
Although I had been a lurker in these parts for some years, I only signed up last year (I think). It’s comments such as this that make me wish there was a potted history of PB with biographies of the best and the brightest, the dumb and dumber or the infuriating and irritating (delete as applicable).
I did that one year and was resolutely told to eff off (politely) on the grounds it was stalking. I also did a list of obituaries.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Home ownership in the UK peaked at about 73%.
The lowest 25% have rarely been home owners.
What we saw in the 1980s and 1990s was an increase in home ownership among the working class and young.
An increase in home ownership amongst the working class and young is an exceptionally good thing and is what is sorely needed today.
And it doesn't neatly transpire that the quarter who didn't own their own home were those that were the lowest quarter of earners, since there is always some variance eg higher earners who were regularly mobile or had bad credit or other reasons to be in the quarter that didn't own their own home.
The minimum wage has grown faster than CPI since 2002 when home ownership peaked so home ownership amongst the young and poorest should have gone up, but the opposite has happened as house price inflation surged out of control and was falsely deemed as not inflation by the Bank of England.
Getting house prices in real terms back to what they were in the 1990s would fix a lot of our economic problems.
It's technically possible but would take a very, very long time. I doubt that the country can build fast enough to plug the demand gap from the people already here, let alone the vast tide of immigrants, and the consequences of a theoretical crash are enormous capital losses for existing long term owners, mass negative equity for mortgage holders, and severe stress on the banking system.
Even if a cross party consensus for affordable housing can be found - which I doubt, because the Tories' supporters profit too much from continual inflation and are mostly rabid nimbies to boot, and the Lib Dems and Greens are waiting to steal them at the first sign of a wobble - then it'll take as long to correct this problem as it did to create it. Decades and decades.
The UK constructed a lot of decent housing in the London suburbs in the 1930s, so I don't think it's technically impossible, merely politically difficult.
The problem is that too many people - like with the triple lock - benefit from the status quo.
Yes the 1930s saw a considerable period of improvement in both housing quality and quantity.
What happened afterwards is an utter tragedy. With post-war decisions causing even more damage today than the blitz caused.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Should they stop it happening again?
Would you like your property and possessions burnt down every 5 years?
I'm assuming the question isn't about abandoning people's houses to burn over and over, but rather the wisdom of rebuilding in some of these places.
It's rather like the idiocy of plonking new builds on floodplains in this country. It might be unwise to attempt reconstruction in some of these high fire risk areas. And there's no point at all if the homes are deemed uninsurable.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Should they stop it happening again?
Quick, cheap prefabricated homes can be rebuilt as rcs just said.
Part of the problem in this country is we want stuff to be built and last forever, even if circumstances change, rather than just be prepared to tear it down and start all over again repeatedly.
Alternatively, live somewhere else. Why do you want to live somewhere they have repeated forest fires? Similarly New Oeleans. It floods, so rebuild it somewhere else. We're not talking about Europe. America has plenty of space, it is under-occupied.
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
"Only"???
How much, in your eyes, is an average account?
There doesn't appear to be figures on an average 'following' on twitter, unlike average 'followers'.
But a quick look at some of those that the organisations that the CPS are following themselves:
Met police fed - 1642 Police fed - 925 NCA - 2395 College of policing - 3923 Moj - 1375 CBA - 4524 Dignity in dying - 8702 Law society - 888
I follow over a 1,000.
I'd say average. Someone manages this account.
The Head of Diversity and Inclusion at the CPS is friendly with Mr C****n. They've done a video together talking about how great it is to come out in the forces.
And your point is...?
It might explain why the CPS's social media account follows a former Defence Minister. That's all.
Just as long as it's not guilt by association...
Caplin has not been found guilty of anything. FWIW I am a bit wary of private arrests because of the risk of prejudicing people's rights and getting things badly wrong. Even more so if it follows a "sting" operation.
I do think organisations need to think about their social media policies and who they follow, precisely because of the risk of finding yourself inadvertently associated with something unsavoury. All the more so if you are performing a policing or judicial function. The risk of actual or perceived bias is real. Plus the risk of missing evidence of a possible criminal offence.
Whether any of this applies here I don't know and it is far too early to tell. It may well all end up a big fat nothing.
I commented this morning that livestreaming the arrest worries me. Was this done with the police's knowledge and/or acceptance?
A very good question. I don't know. But suspect not.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
I think travelling with @Leon would be huge fun. For me anyway. Others might wonder why The Great Writer and Flint Knapper Extraordinaire is travelling with his sweary older sister, who flirts outrageously with all the staff and their extensive loud - and prolonged - arguments about every topic under the sun.
Very flattering but - in all honesty - I suspect I would be a pretty tough travel companion for most. If there is a dark menacing alleyway, I will generally go down it. If there is a notorious Mafia town 30km way, my reaction is Yay that’s a must see! Show me a country plunged into civil strife and I’ll show you a country with surprisingly cheap hotels, a glimpse of the true human condition, and a rich harvest of alarming anecdotes
Fun for a bit but wearying after a while. I mean, even I get bored of my incessant appetite for this shit
I blame my upbringing. Hereford was SO boring it bred a pathological need for endless stimulation. Also, I can turn stories into money, an added incentive
Your upbringing boring? With a dad like yours? Really? Surprising.
Having a dad like mine was “the wrong kind of interesting”, if you see what I mean
Bizarrely, for a womanizing bastard he was very timid when it came to other outre experiences. Not a great traveller, disliked danger and risk, never adventurous, never even learned to swim, was quite helpless in terms of self reliance (couldn’t cook, etc). He was a touch effete
Perhaps my lust for risk and danger is another form of Oedipal rebellion or filial rivalry? I dunno. I have actually examined this exact question in a book that, if I ever retire from flint knapping. I might punt out to publishers
Although I had been a lurker in these parts for some years, I only signed up last year (I think). It’s comments such as this that make me wish there was a potted history of PB with biographies of the best and the brightest, the dumb and dumber or the infuriating and irritating (delete as applicable).
Hmm .... that's a header just waiting to be written. Of course all the Blokes on here will be competing to appear in @Leon's reworking of Withnail and I in Foreign Parts (as Women are not invited, apparently - ** sniff **).
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not less.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Not true. It happens less these days than it used to 100 years ago. You need to see past the opportunistic ghoulish bullshit that the green lobby puts out whenever such a miserable event takes place.
Bit like the sudden jump in sea temperatures that was actually the result of banning sulphur compounds from marine fuel. Didn't stop the lying scrotes claiming it's all because people have the audacity to heat their homes and drive their cars.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Should they stop it happening again?
Quick, cheap prefabricated homes can be rebuilt as rcs just said.
Part of the problem in this country is we want stuff to be built and last forever, even if circumstances change, rather than just be prepared to tear it down and start all over again repeatedly.
Alternatively, live somewhere else. Why do you want to live somewhere they have repeated forest fires? Similarly New Oeleans. It floods, so rebuild it somewhere else. We're not talking about Europe. America has plenty of space, it is under-occupied.
Because what makes it risky is also what makes it interesting and popular.
Yes California has foliage that might burn. Nevada does not. But that foliage is part of California's charm over Nevada.
Yes New Orleans has water that may flood. That water is also why New Orleans was built where it is.
You can either try to cut out risk and make sacrifices, or accept risk because the risk is worth it. Nothing wrong with option 2.
As a reminder, there are no "silver bullets", whether in solving housing availability in the UK, or in preventing wildfires in California.
What there is are many, small incremental changes that can make a very significant difference when combined. Not doing something that will help, solely because it won't solve everything all on its own, is the very worst thing about politics
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
"Only"???
How much, in your eyes, is an average account?
There doesn't appear to be figures on an average 'following' on twitter, unlike average 'followers'.
But a quick look at some of those that the organisations that the CPS are following themselves:
Met police fed - 1642 Police fed - 925 NCA - 2395 College of policing - 3923 Moj - 1375 CBA - 4524 Dignity in dying - 8702 Law society - 888
I follow over a 1,000.
I'd say average. Someone manages this account.
The Head of Diversity and Inclusion at the CPS is friendly with Mr C****n. They've done a video together talking about how great it is to come out in the forces.
And your point is...?
It might explain why the CPS's social media account follows a former Defence Minister. That's all.
Just as long as it's not guilt by association...
Caplin has not been found guilty of anything. FWIW I am a bit wary of private arrests because of the risk of prejudicing people's rights and getting things badly wrong. Even more so if it follows a "sting" operation.
I do think organisations need to think about their social media policies and who they follow, precisely because of the risk of finding yourself inadvertently associated with something unsavoury. All the more so if you are performing a policing or judicial function. The risk of actual or perceived bias is real. Plus the risk of missing evidence of a possible criminal offence.
Whether any of this applies here I don't know and it is far too early to tell. It may well all end up a big fat nothing.
I commented this morning that livestreaming the arrest worries me. Was this done with the police's knowledge and/or acceptance?
A very good question. I don't know. But suspect not.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
I think travelling with @Leon would be huge fun. For me anyway. Others might wonder why The Great Writer and Flint Knapper Extraordinaire is travelling with his sweary older sister, who flirts outrageously with all the staff and their extensive loud - and prolonged - arguments about every topic under the sun.
Very flattering but - in all honesty - I suspect I would be a pretty tough travel companion for most. If there is a dark menacing alleyway, I will generally go down it. If there is a notorious Mafia town 30km way, my reaction is Yay that’s a must see! Show me a country plunged into civil strife and I’ll show you a country with surprisingly cheap hotels, a glimpse of the true human condition, and a rich harvest of alarming anecdotes
Fun for a bit but wearying after a while. I mean, even I get bored of my incessant appetite for this shit
I blame my upbringing. Hereford was SO boring it bred a pathological need for endless stimulation. Also, I can turn stories into money, an added incentive
Your upbringing boring? With a dad like yours? Really? Surprising.
Having a dad like mine was “the wrong kind of interesting”, if you see what I mean
Bizarrely, for a womanizing bastard he was very timid when it came to other outre experiences. Not a great traveller, disliked danger and risk, never adventurous, never even learned to swim, was quite helpless in terms of self reliance (couldn’t cook, etc). He was a touch effete
Perhaps my lust for risk and danger is another form of Oedipal rebellion or filial rivalry? I dunno. I have actually examined this exact question in a book that, if I ever retire from flint knapping. I might punt out to publishers
Although I had been a lurker in these parts for some years, I only signed up last year (I think). It’s comments such as this that make me wish there was a potted history of PB with biographies of the best and the brightest, the dumb and dumber or the infuriating and irritating (delete as applicable).
Hmm .... that's a header just waiting to be written. Of course all the Blokes on here will be competing to appear in @Leon's reworking of Withnail and I in Foreign Parts (as Women are not invited, apparently - ** sniff **).
So I'd better get my pencil sharpened......
Oh, I don’t know. Imagine a series of Race Across the World with Leon and Nicola Sturgeon as a team.
Trump to my mind strengthens the logic of rejoining the EU.
I think the hopes that the UK will get favourable special treatment from US are misplaced if Musk has the influence that's reputed... he clearly has it in for Starmer. But Trump will pass I guess , the question is whether America generally decides to go in his America first direction generally.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
That’s basically my story. Gave up full time work very early, to do full time local politics, and when the electorate moved on, didn’t fancy returning to full time employment.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Should they stop it happening again?
Would you like your property and possessions burnt down every 5 years?
No.
But I'd rather that than have no property or possessions.
Besides its not every 5 years that each home will need replacing, within 5 years other homes might not the same ones.
That is how insurance is able to work.
Or, you rebuild at a lower density, to higher standards, with better firebreaks or you move to a different area.
I certainly wouldn't buy a like-for-like property in that area now.
I don't think it would make a good investment and, I doubt it'd be fully insurable.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
Or looked at another way the vast majority of 18-45s don't even with the Guardian headline grabbing phrase of a 'strong leader who doesn't need to bother with elections' as opposed to a 'weak leader who doesn't need to bother with elections'.
There is anyway now a huge range of parties with MPs in parliament to vote from from the Greens to Reform and the SNP and Corbynite Independents and still the Tories, LDs and Labour too. At the end of the day the voters get the governments they voted for and deserve so can't really complain
It doesn't really work like that and you know this. The Overton Window is narrow and if you don't benefit from that narrow range of policies then there is no meaningful choice. To paraphrase Churchill, democracy is the least worst system - but it does have an unfortunate tendency to offer little other than a change of management most of the time.
There is a huge difference between say the policies of the Greens and Reform, or indeed between what Corbyn was offering and the Tories were offering. If radical parties don't always win it is because most voters are relatively centrist and don't want radical change
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
And this might not have ended in a dumpster fire if she, (and her successors, to be fair: New Labour exhibited no interest in addressing the matter) had bothered to replace the council houses. All Maggie was interested in was using the receipts to subsidise current spending and thus fund tax cuts.
As it is, a large segment of the population now finds itself stuck in ludicrously expensive private rentals with no prospect of ever buying their way off that treadmill. We now have a neo-Hanoverian settlement: rentier capitalism with a large peasant underclass.
Your party won't fix this problem because it is contrary to the interest of your rump vote to do so. It is therefore useless to most of the country and thoroughly deserved the good caning it got last year.
*A lot* of post WWII council house estates (eg Robin Hood Gardens, or the Everton Piggeries or Hackney Wick tower blocks), were jerry-built shitholes. Beware of thinking that in the past, everyone had decent homes. The overall standard of housing today is better today than in the Sixties or Seventies.
I was brought up in a post-war council house. Well built, spacious rooms and decent sized gardens front & back.
Plus views of St James' Park and the East Coast Mainline.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
They're talking about the wrong things to the wrong people. They seem obsessed with the Nigel and gave members a choice between bonkers and insane for leader. They wisely chose the bonkers one, but she's making an utter tit of herself and the party with her.
We're in the middle of a power shift in global politics. Who are the kingmakers backing at a time where Labour continue to embarrass themselves? Not the Tories. And they're never going to back the Tories because the Tories are complicit in everything wrong with this country - and everyone knows it.
Their route through this is to inject umph back into the political economy. We can rebuild the country together, we want your ideas and your drive and we're going to reward you with a future worth having - a buzz in the country like we had in the 80s with Thatcher and the late 90s with Blair. Hope, through enterprise - that has to be the Tories best play. Not wazzocking up every week. Because by the time they realise its going wrong they will already have been thrown overboard.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not less.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Not true. It happens less these days than it used to 100 years ago. You need to see past the opportunistic ghoulish bullshit that the green lobby puts out whenever such a miserable event takes place.
Bit like the sudden jump in sea temperatures that was actually the result of banning sulphur compounds from marine fuel. Didn't stop the lying scrotes claiming it's all because people have the audacity to heat their homes and drive their cars.
You're a denier, so it's a waste of time discussing this with you.
Margaret Thatcher understand and knew the science and recognised it. And, as one of your heroes, you should listen to her.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Home ownership in the UK peaked at about 73%.
The lowest 25% have rarely been home owners.
What we saw in the 1980s and 1990s was an increase in home ownership among the working class and young.
An increase in home ownership amongst the working class and young is an exceptionally good thing and is what is sorely needed today.
And it doesn't neatly transpire that the quarter who didn't own their own home were those that were the lowest quarter of earners, since there is always some variance eg higher earners who were regularly mobile or had bad credit or other reasons to be in the quarter that didn't own their own home.
The minimum wage has grown faster than CPI since 2002 when home ownership peaked so home ownership amongst the young and poorest should have gone up, but the opposite has happened as house price inflation surged out of control and was falsely deemed as not inflation by the Bank of England.
Getting house prices in real terms back to what they were in the 1990s would fix a lot of our economic problems.
It's technically possible but would take a very, very long time. I doubt that the country can build fast enough to plug the demand gap from the people already here, let alone the vast tide of immigrants, and the consequences of a theoretical crash are enormous capital losses for existing long term owners, mass negative equity for mortgage holders, and severe stress on the banking system.
We absolutely CAN build enough houses quickly.
It's the disastrous slowness of the planning system and bureaucracy, and the concomitant lack of land cleared for building that slows everything down to the speed of a geriatric snail with gout. It can easily take two or three years to get all the permissions for a large development, while the actual construction can take less than a year - sometimes as little as six-nine months.
That and the oligopoly of corrupt and incompetent large builders are the reasons we don't have enough houses in this country.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
You mean like in 2019 when they talked about nothing else and won a large majority for the first time in a generation?
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Should they stop it happening again?
Would you like your property and possessions burnt down every 5 years?
No.
But I'd rather that than have no property or possessions.
Besides its not every 5 years that each home will need replacing, within 5 years other homes might not the same ones.
That is how insurance is able to work.
Bear in mind that many of the houses affected will have been constructed with lightweight timber framing and have simple shingle roofs that will need to be replaced every 15-20 years anyway.
They're not quite temporary structures, but there's no expectation that a house should last for 400-odd years like there is here.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
They're talking about the wrong things to the wrong people. They seem obsessed with the Nigel and gave members a choice between bonkers and insane for leader. They wisely chose the bonkers one, but she's making an utter tit of herself and the party with her.
We're in the middle of a power shift in global politics. Who are the kingmakers backing at a time where Labour continue to embarrass themselves? Not the Tories. And they're never going to back the Tories because the Tories are complicit in everything wrong with this country - and everyone knows it.
Their route through this is to inject umph back into the political economy. We can rebuild the country together, we want your ideas and your drive and we're going to reward you with a future worth having - a buzz in the country like we had in the 80s with Thatcher and the late 90s with Blair. Hope, through enterprise - that has to be the Tories best play. Not wazzocking up every week. Because by the time they realise its going wrong they will already have been thrown overboard.
Yet already Badenoch is projected to gain 55 seats at the next GE and deprive Starmer of his majority.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Home ownership in the UK peaked at about 73%.
The lowest 25% have rarely been home owners.
What we saw in the 1980s and 1990s was an increase in home ownership among the working class and young.
An increase in home ownership amongst the working class and young is an exceptionally good thing and is what is sorely needed today.
And it doesn't neatly transpire that the quarter who didn't own their own home were those that were the lowest quarter of earners, since there is always some variance eg higher earners who were regularly mobile or had bad credit or other reasons to be in the quarter that didn't own their own home.
The minimum wage has grown faster than CPI since 2002 when home ownership peaked so home ownership amongst the young and poorest should have gone up, but the opposite has happened as house price inflation surged out of control and was falsely deemed as not inflation by the Bank of England.
Getting house prices in real terms back to what they were in the 1990s would fix a lot of our economic problems.
It's technically possible but would take a very, very long time. I doubt that the country can build fast enough to plug the demand gap from the people already here, let alone the vast tide of immigrants, and the consequences of a theoretical crash are enormous capital losses for existing long term owners, mass negative equity for mortgage holders, and severe stress on the banking system.
We absolutely CAN build enough houses quickly.
It's the disastrous slowness of the planning system and bureaucracy, and the concomitant lack of land cleared for building that slows everything down to the speed of a geriatric snail with gout. It can easily take two or three years to get all the permissions for a large development, while the actual construction can take less than a year - sometimes as little as six-nine months.
That and the oligopoly of corrupt and incompetent large builders are the reasons we don't have enough houses in this country.
If we're going to build build build then we need to train train train.
We don't have anywhere near enough builders and skilled tradespeople. So we can bring in foreign labour now, or we can make building an appealing career choice and train people up.
Starter for 10 for this idiot government - branding. "Rebuilding Britain" or "Building our Future" or something. A basic reminder that the Tories broke the country and Labour are fixing it.
No, they prefer doing little, saying less, and seemingly giving up on any kind of positivity.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Should they stop it happening again?
Would you like your property and possessions burnt down every 5 years?
I'm assuming the question isn't about abandoning people's houses to burn over and over, but rather the wisdom of rebuilding in some of these places.
It's rather like the idiocy of plonking new builds on floodplains in this country. It might be unwise to attempt reconstruction in some of these high fire risk areas. And there's no point at all if the homes are deemed uninsurable.
America is being hit with nasty floods, cyclones, hurricanes and fires and, as a continental climate, it will get more and more of them.
As a maritime climate, our fate will largely dodge that but winters will be wetter and warmer, and generally a bit mankier and shitter, but with occasionally very peaky summers, which we can manage provided we get our waterworks and reservoirs right.
Provided we build solid houses away from floodplains (massive ifs, seeing as developers still seem to want to do so) I'm not hugely worried about property here.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Should they stop it happening again?
Would you like your property and possessions burnt down every 5 years?
No.
But I'd rather that than have no property or possessions.
Besides its not every 5 years that each home will need replacing, within 5 years other homes might not the same ones.
That is how insurance is able to work.
Or, you rebuild at a lower density, to higher standards, with better firebreaks or you move to a different area.
I certainly wouldn't buy a like-for-like property in that area now.
I don't think it would make a good investment and, I doubt it'd be fully insurable.
I wouldn't as the prices are far too high and I'm not able to afford to.
But if it were affordable and I was wealthy enough, and if I wanted to live in the States, then I would consider it.
Some people have a higher tolerance of risk than others, there's nothing wrong with that.
If someone wants to play sport, or sky dive, or live on a flood plane, or go mountain climbing, or live in a fire hot-spot then so long as they accept the risks they are taking that should be their free choice and not anyone else's business.
In an escalation of discontent among the highest-profile far-right followers of Donald Trump, his former adviser Steve Bannon has called Trump’s newest favorite, Elon Musk, “racist” and a “truly evil guy”, pledging to “take this guy down” and kick him out of the Maga movement.
In an interview with the Corriere della Sera newspaper in Italy, excerpts of which were published this weekend by Breitbart, Bannon criticised Musk’s embrace of some forms of immigration and vowed to ensure that Musk does not have top-level access to the White House.
“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon said. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it – I’m not prepared to tolerate it any more.”
He added: “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by inauguration day”, which falls on 20 January. “He will not have full access to the White House. He will be like any other person.”
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not less.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Not true. It happens less these days than it used to 100 years ago. You need to see past the opportunistic ghoulish bullshit that the green lobby puts out whenever such a miserable event takes place.
Bit like the sudden jump in sea temperatures that was actually the result of banning sulphur compounds from marine fuel. Didn't stop the lying scrotes claiming it's all because people have the audacity to heat their homes and drive their cars.
You're a denier, so it's a waste of time discussing this with you.
Margaret Thatcher understand and knew the science and recognised it. And, as one of your heroes, you should listen to her.
And you're a prize pillock whose special talent appears to be being wrong about everything and everyone.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not less.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Not true. It happens less these days than it used to 100 years ago. You need to see past the opportunistic ghoulish bullshit that the green lobby puts out whenever such a miserable event takes place.
Bit like the sudden jump in sea temperatures that was actually the result of banning sulphur compounds from marine fuel. Didn't stop the lying scrotes claiming it's all because people have the audacity to heat their homes and drive their cars.
You're a denier, so it's a waste of time discussing this with you.
Margaret Thatcher understand and knew the science and recognised it. And, as one of your heroes, you should listen to her.
And you're a prize pillock whose special talent appears to be being wrong about everything and everyone.
""Around 200 cars" parked up along part of the Peak District have prevented gritting taking place.
Derbyshire County Council said on Saturday morning crews could not get through due to double parking on Rushup Edge and Mam Nick, near Edale."
My photo quota:
No point having a 4WD if you can't take it for a spin in weather like that. Intriguingly there seems to be a nascent wildfire on the horizon. I hope we don't wake up tomorrow to find an area the size of Derbyshire (actually ... Derbyshire) has been lost to an unseasonal conflagration.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Home ownership in the UK peaked at about 73%.
The lowest 25% have rarely been home owners.
What we saw in the 1980s and 1990s was an increase in home ownership among the working class and young.
An increase in home ownership amongst the working class and young is an exceptionally good thing and is what is sorely needed today.
And it doesn't neatly transpire that the quarter who didn't own their own home were those that were the lowest quarter of earners, since there is always some variance eg higher earners who were regularly mobile or had bad credit or other reasons to be in the quarter that didn't own their own home.
The minimum wage has grown faster than CPI since 2002 when home ownership peaked so home ownership amongst the young and poorest should have gone up, but the opposite has happened as house price inflation surged out of control and was falsely deemed as not inflation by the Bank of England.
Getting house prices in real terms back to what they were in the 1990s would fix a lot of our economic problems.
It's technically possible but would take a very, very long time. I doubt that the country can build fast enough to plug the demand gap from the people already here, let alone the vast tide of immigrants, and the consequences of a theoretical crash are enormous capital losses for existing long term owners, mass negative equity for mortgage holders, and severe stress on the banking system.
We absolutely CAN build enough houses quickly.
It's the disastrous slowness of the planning system and bureaucracy, and the concomitant lack of land cleared for building that slows everything down to the speed of a geriatric snail with gout. It can easily take two or three years to get all the permissions for a large development, while the actual construction can take less than a year - sometimes as little as six-nine months.
That and the oligopoly of corrupt and incompetent large builders are the reasons we don't have enough houses in this country.
If we're going to build build build then we need to train train train.
We don't have anywhere near enough builders and skilled tradespeople. So we can bring in foreign labour now, or we can make building an appealing career choice and train people up.
Starter for 10 for this idiot government - branding. "Rebuilding Britain" or "Building our Future" or something. A basic reminder that the Tories broke the country and Labour are fixing it.
No, they prefer doing little, saying less, and seemingly giving up on any kind of positivity.
The UK already has millions of workers qualified and able to work in the construction sector today.
Too many won't go near building houses as the broken planning system stymies them from doing so.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not less.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Not true. It happens less these days than it used to 100 years ago. You need to see past the opportunistic ghoulish bullshit that the green lobby puts out whenever such a miserable event takes place.
Bit like the sudden jump in sea temperatures that was actually the result of banning sulphur compounds from marine fuel. Didn't stop the lying scrotes claiming it's all because people have the audacity to heat their homes and drive their cars.
You're a denier, so it's a waste of time discussing this with you.
Margaret Thatcher understand and knew the science and recognised it. And, as one of your heroes, you should listen to her.
And you're a prize pillock whose special talent appears to be being wrong about everything and everyone.
Great argument, mate. Real zinger.
One I could happily provide dozens of citations for if I could be bothered.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
They're talking about the wrong things to the wrong people. They seem obsessed with the Nigel and gave members a choice between bonkers and insane for leader. They wisely chose the bonkers one, but she's making an utter tit of herself and the party with her.
We're in the middle of a power shift in global politics. Who are the kingmakers backing at a time where Labour continue to embarrass themselves? Not the Tories. And they're never going to back the Tories because the Tories are complicit in everything wrong with this country - and everyone knows it.
Their route through this is to inject umph back into the political economy. We can rebuild the country together, we want your ideas and your drive and we're going to reward you with a future worth having - a buzz in the country like we had in the 80s with Thatcher and the late 90s with Blair. Hope, through enterprise - that has to be the Tories best play. Not wazzocking up every week. Because by the time they realise its going wrong they will already have been thrown overboard.
Yet already Badenoch is projected to gain 55 seats at the next GE and deprive Starmer of his majority.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Should they stop it happening again?
Would you like your property and possessions burnt down every 5 years?
No.
But I'd rather that than have no property or possessions.
Besides its not every 5 years that each home will need replacing, within 5 years other homes might not the same ones.
That is how insurance is able to work.
Or, you rebuild at a lower density, to higher standards, with better firebreaks or you move to a different area.
I certainly wouldn't buy a like-for-like property in that area now.
I don't think it would make a good investment and, I doubt it'd be fully insurable.
I wouldn't as the prices are far too high and I'm not able to afford to.
But if it were affordable and I was wealthy enough, and if I wanted to live in the States, then I would consider it.
Some people have a higher tolerance of risk than others, there's nothing wrong with that.
If someone wants to play sport, or sky dive, or live on a flood plane, or go mountain climbing, or live in a fire hot-spot then so long as they accept the risks they are taking that should be their free choice and not anyone else's business.
So we agree: the risk and price is too high and neither you or me would do it.
My point is that I think "something must be done" applies here, and I think the State/Federal authorities will have to have a better answer to retain confidence than just rebuild quickly and cross their fingers it doesn't happen again.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Home ownership in the UK peaked at about 73%.
The lowest 25% have rarely been home owners.
What we saw in the 1980s and 1990s was an increase in home ownership among the working class and young.
An increase in home ownership amongst the working class and young is an exceptionally good thing and is what is sorely needed today.
And it doesn't neatly transpire that the quarter who didn't own their own home were those that were the lowest quarter of earners, since there is always some variance eg higher earners who were regularly mobile or had bad credit or other reasons to be in the quarter that didn't own their own home.
The minimum wage has grown faster than CPI since 2002 when home ownership peaked so home ownership amongst the young and poorest should have gone up, but the opposite has happened as house price inflation surged out of control and was falsely deemed as not inflation by the Bank of England.
Getting house prices in real terms back to what they were in the 1990s would fix a lot of our economic problems.
It's technically possible but would take a very, very long time. I doubt that the country can build fast enough to plug the demand gap from the people already here, let alone the vast tide of immigrants, and the consequences of a theoretical crash are enormous capital losses for existing long term owners, mass negative equity for mortgage holders, and severe stress on the banking system.
We absolutely CAN build enough houses quickly.
It's the disastrous slowness of the planning system and bureaucracy, and the concomitant lack of land cleared for building that slows everything down to the speed of a geriatric snail with gout. It can easily take two or three years to get all the permissions for a large development, while the actual construction can take less than a year - sometimes as little as six-nine months.
That and the oligopoly of corrupt and incompetent large builders are the reasons we don't have enough houses in this country.
Well said.
And the oligopoly is a direct consequence of the planning system too.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not less.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Not true. It happens less these days than it used to 100 years ago. You need to see past the opportunistic ghoulish bullshit that the green lobby puts out whenever such a miserable event takes place.
Bit like the sudden jump in sea temperatures that was actually the result of banning sulphur compounds from marine fuel. Didn't stop the lying scrotes claiming it's all because people have the audacity to heat their homes and drive their cars.
You're a denier, so it's a waste of time discussing this with you.
Margaret Thatcher understand and knew the science and recognised it. And, as one of your heroes, you should listen to her.
And you're a prize pillock whose special talent appears to be being wrong about everything and everyone.
Great argument, mate. Real zinger.
One I could happily provide dozens of citations for if I could be bothered.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
They're talking about the wrong things to the wrong people. They seem obsessed with the Nigel and gave members a choice between bonkers and insane for leader. They wisely chose the bonkers one, but she's making an utter tit of herself and the party with her.
We're in the middle of a power shift in global politics. Who are the kingmakers backing at a time where Labour continue to embarrass themselves? Not the Tories. And they're never going to back the Tories because the Tories are complicit in everything wrong with this country - and everyone knows it.
Their route through this is to inject umph back into the political economy. We can rebuild the country together, we want your ideas and your drive and we're going to reward you with a future worth having - a buzz in the country like we had in the 80s with Thatcher and the late 90s with Blair. Hope, through enterprise - that has to be the Tories best play. Not wazzocking up every week. Because by the time they realise its going wrong they will already have been thrown overboard.
Yet already Badenoch is projected to gain 55 seats at the next GE and deprive Starmer of his majority.
That would be more seat gains than Hague, Howard or indeed Kinnock, Foot and Ed Miliband and even Corbyn 2017 ever got as Leader of the Opposition
You'll stay in denial until you accept reality and join Reform.
The polls now are meaningless with regards to seats in an election 4 years away. The *trends* shown in the polls are what is relevant - will they continue / get stronger / get weaker?
The polls show that you lot would get plowed. Not on "if there was an election tomorrow" - there won't be. In 4 years, when you play the current trends forward.
Your party is done - and you are the culprit. Bravo.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
Indeed there is not.
We pay too much out to people who don't work, and, for those that do, far too many jobs aren't especially productive.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
Bonkers. People who never ever votes coming out in armies to vote in terrible run down places. Voting out of desperation to stick it to the system which had so utterly failed them.
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
"Only"???
How much, in your eyes, is an average account?
There doesn't appear to be figures on an average 'following' on twitter, unlike average 'followers'.
But a quick look at some of those that the organisations that the CPS are following themselves:
Met police fed - 1642 Police fed - 925 NCA - 2395 College of policing - 3923 Moj - 1375 CBA - 4524 Dignity in dying - 8702 Law society - 888
I follow over a 1,000.
I'd say average. Someone manages this account.
The Head of Diversity and Inclusion at the CPS is friendly with Mr C****n. They've done a video together talking about how great it is to come out in the forces.
And your point is...?
It might explain why the CPS's social media account follows a former Defence Minister. That's all.
Just as long as it's not guilt by association...
Caplin has not been found guilty of anything. FWIW I am a bit wary of private arrests because of the risk of prejudicing people's rights and getting things badly wrong. Even more so if it follows a "sting" operation.
I do think organisations need to think about their social media policies and who they follow, precisely because of the risk of finding yourself inadvertently associated with something unsavoury. All the more so if you are performing a policing or judicial function. The risk of actual or perceived bias is real. Plus the risk of missing evidence of a possible criminal offence.
Whether any of this applies here I don't know and it is far too early to tell. It may well all end up a big fat nothing.
I commented this morning that livestreaming the arrest worries me. Was this done with the police's knowledge and/or acceptance?
A very good question. I don't know. But suspect not.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
I think travelling with @Leon would be huge fun. For me anyway. Others might wonder why The Great Writer and Flint Knapper Extraordinaire is travelling with his sweary older sister, who flirts outrageously with all the staff and their extensive loud - and prolonged - arguments about every topic under the sun.
Very flattering but - in all honesty - I suspect I would be a pretty tough travel companion for most. If there is a dark menacing alleyway, I will generally go down it. If there is a notorious Mafia town 30km way, my reaction is Yay that’s a must see! Show me a country plunged into civil strife and I’ll show you a country with surprisingly cheap hotels, a glimpse of the true human condition, and a rich harvest of alarming anecdotes
Fun for a bit but wearying after a while. I mean, even I get bored of my incessant appetite for this shit
I blame my upbringing. Hereford was SO boring it bred a pathological need for endless stimulation. Also, I can turn stories into money, an added incentive
Your upbringing boring? With a dad like yours? Really? Surprising.
Having a dad like mine was “the wrong kind of interesting”, if you see what I mean
Bizarrely, for a womanizing bastard he was very timid when it came to other outre experiences. Not a great traveller, disliked danger and risk, never adventurous, never even learned to swim, was quite helpless in terms of self reliance (couldn’t cook, etc). He was a touch effete
Perhaps my lust for risk and danger is another form of Oedipal rebellion or filial rivalry? I dunno. I have actually examined this exact question in a book that, if I ever retire from flint knapping. I might punt out to publishers
Although I had been a lurker in these parts for some years, I only signed up last year (I think). It’s comments such as this that make me wish there was a potted history of PB with biographies of the best and the brightest, the dumb and dumber or the infuriating and irritating (delete as applicable).
Hmm .... that's a header just waiting to be written. Of course all the Blokes on here will be competing to appear in @Leon's reworking of Withnail and I in Foreign Parts (as Women are not invited, apparently - ** sniff **).
So I'd better get my pencil sharpened......
Oh, I don’t know. Imagine a series of Race Across the World with Leon and Nicola Sturgeon as a team.
Christ, that would be like a reboot of the Krankies on acid.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
They're talking about the wrong things to the wrong people. They seem obsessed with the Nigel and gave members a choice between bonkers and insane for leader. They wisely chose the bonkers one, but she's making an utter tit of herself and the party with her.
We're in the middle of a power shift in global politics. Who are the kingmakers backing at a time where Labour continue to embarrass themselves? Not the Tories. And they're never going to back the Tories because the Tories are complicit in everything wrong with this country - and everyone knows it.
Their route through this is to inject umph back into the political economy. We can rebuild the country together, we want your ideas and your drive and we're going to reward you with a future worth having - a buzz in the country like we had in the 80s with Thatcher and the late 90s with Blair. Hope, through enterprise - that has to be the Tories best play. Not wazzocking up every week. Because by the time they realise its going wrong they will already have been thrown overboard.
Yet already Badenoch is projected to gain 55 seats at the next GE and deprive Starmer of his majority.
That would be more seat gains than Hague, Howard or indeed Kinnock, Foot and Ed Miliband and even Corbyn 2017 ever got as Leader of the Opposition
You'll stay in denial until you accept reality and join Reform.
The polls now are meaningless with regards to seats in an election 4 years away. The *trends* shown in the polls are what is relevant - will they continue / get stronger / get weaker?
The polls show that you lot would get plowed. Not on "if there was an election tomorrow" - there won't be. In 4 years, when you play the current trends forward.
Your party is done - and you are the culprit. Bravo.
They're not meaningless. They tell you lots about views and trends which, one set, become harder to shift.
Starmer, and Labour more broadly, won't get to magically wipe the slate clean and start again at T-12 months from the next GE just because it's in the offing.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
Bonkers. People who never ever votes coming out in armies to vote in terrible run down places. Voting out of desperation to stick it to the system which had so utterly failed them.
As I've pointed out before I knew Brexit when my colleague of the time told me how many people in Leyland who didn't know how to vote had voted by 1pm...
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
And this might not have ended in a dumpster fire if she, (and her successors, to be fair: New Labour exhibited no interest in addressing the matter) had bothered to replace the council houses. All Maggie was interested in was using the receipts to subsidise current spending and thus fund tax cuts.
As it is, a large segment of the population now finds itself stuck in ludicrously expensive private rentals with no prospect of ever buying their way off that treadmill. We now have a neo-Hanoverian settlement: rentier capitalism with a large peasant underclass.
Your party won't fix this problem because it is contrary to the interest of your rump vote to do so. It is therefore useless to most of the country and thoroughly deserved the good caning it got last year.
*A lot* of post WWII council house estates (eg Robin Hood Gardens, or the Everton Piggeries or Hackney Wick tower blocks), were jerry-built shitholes. Beware of thinking that in the past, everyone had decent homes. The overall standard of housing today is better today than in the Sixties or Seventies.
I was brought up in a post-war council house. Well built, spacious rooms and decent sized gardens front & back.
Plus views of St James' Park and the East Coast Mainline.
What's not to like?
The East Coast Main Line goes nowhere near St James's Park! It's served by the District and Circle lines.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
Bonkers. People who never ever votes coming out in armies to vote in terrible run down places. Voting out of desperation to stick it to the system which had so utterly failed them.
That's the stereotype but the data is the polar opposite.
Wealthy home owners were far more likely to vote Leave.
Insecure tenants were far more likely to vote Remain.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
They're talking about the wrong things to the wrong people. They seem obsessed with the Nigel and gave members a choice between bonkers and insane for leader. They wisely chose the bonkers one, but she's making an utter tit of herself and the party with her.
We're in the middle of a power shift in global politics. Who are the kingmakers backing at a time where Labour continue to embarrass themselves? Not the Tories. And they're never going to back the Tories because the Tories are complicit in everything wrong with this country - and everyone knows it.
Their route through this is to inject umph back into the political economy. We can rebuild the country together, we want your ideas and your drive and we're going to reward you with a future worth having - a buzz in the country like we had in the 80s with Thatcher and the late 90s with Blair. Hope, through enterprise - that has to be the Tories best play. Not wazzocking up every week. Because by the time they realise its going wrong they will already have been thrown overboard.
Yet already Badenoch is projected to gain 55 seats at the next GE and deprive Starmer of his majority.
That would be more seat gains than Hague, Howard or indeed Kinnock, Foot and Ed Miliband and even Corbyn 2017 ever got as Leader of the Opposition
You'll stay in denial until you accept reality and join Reform.
The polls now are meaningless with regards to seats in an election 4 years away. The *trends* shown in the polls are what is relevant - will they continue / get stronger / get weaker?
The polls show that you lot would get plowed. Not on "if there was an election tomorrow" - there won't be. In 4 years, when you play the current trends forward.
Your party is done - and you are the culprit. Bravo.
They're not meaningless. They tell you lots about views and trends which, one set, become harder to shift.
Starmer, and Labour more broadly, won't get to magically wipe the slate clean and start again at T-12 months from the next GE just because it's in the offing.
The trend is the relevant bit. The "if there was an election tomorrow there would be more seat gains that" bit is meaningless. Because there won't be an election tomorrow, and if the current trends play forward its the opposite result.
As for Labour? Toast. Already. Have to give them credit.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not less.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Not true. It happens less these days than it used to 100 years ago. You need to see past the opportunistic ghoulish bullshit that the green lobby puts out whenever such a miserable event takes place.
Bit like the sudden jump in sea temperatures that was actually the result of banning sulphur compounds from marine fuel. Didn't stop the lying scrotes claiming it's all because people have the audacity to heat their homes and drive their cars.
You've clearly misunderstood the point about sea temperatures rising as a result of banning sulphur compounds from marine fuel. In fact, it seems the the cooling effect of sulphur aerosols was partially counteracting the warming effect of rising greenhouse gas concentration. When that effect was removed, we were able to see the full impact of greenhouse warming.
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
Errr, are you sure about that?
Average house prices trebled between 1979 and 1990. It just doesn't feel as bad, because that was also a period when interest rates fell sharply.
Even in the 1990's you could buy a house or flat for three times a fairly average wage even in the south east....I know because I did twice in the 90's
That'll be because house prices fell 40% in real terms between 1990 and 1994.
Which was an exceptionally good thing.
We need it to happen again, desperately, to reverse the catastrophic damage of the Brown years onwards.
I don't disagree with that! I was just pointing out that @Pagan2 was inaccurate to claim that house prices didn't shoot up during the Thatcher years.
The Thatcher years had a cycle with a boom and bust. Nothing wrong with that over the cycle.
The problem of the 2002 years onwards is we've had cycles of boom and plateau rather than boom and bust in house prices.
That's caused a catastrophic ratchet in costs with no corrections.
In real term house prices are pretty much where they were 20 years ago.
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
Errr, are you sure about that?
Average house prices trebled between 1979 and 1990. It just doesn't feel as bad, because that was also a period when interest rates fell sharply.
Even in the 1990's you could buy a house or flat for three times a fairly average wage even in the south east....I know because I did twice in the 90's
That'll be because house prices fell 40% in real terms between 1990 and 1994.
Which was an exceptionally good thing.
We need it to happen again, desperately, to reverse the catastrophic damage of the Brown years onwards.
I don't disagree with that! I was just pointing out that @Pagan2 was inaccurate to claim that house prices didn't shoot up during the Thatcher years.
The Thatcher years had a cycle with a boom and bust. Nothing wrong with that over the cycle.
The problem of the 2002 years onwards is we've had cycles of boom and plateau rather than boom and bust in house prices.
That's caused a catastrophic ratchet in costs with no corrections.
In real term house prices are pretty much where they were 20 years ago.
20 years ago being after Brown's disastrous house price inflation began, which has never been reversed. Compare to 25 or 30 years ago.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
In particular (IIRC) the retired, with their secure pensions were far more likely to vote Leave than the working population.
Brexit wasn’t driven by the precariat making a last throw of the dice: It was driven by the comfortably off taking a risk that others would have to pay for if it didn’t work out.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
Bonkers. People who never ever votes coming out in armies to vote in terrible run down places. Voting out of desperation to stick it to the system which had so utterly failed them.
That's the stereotype but the data is the polar opposite.
Wealthy home owners were far more likely to vote Leave.
Insecure tenants were far more likely to vote Remain.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
In particular (IIRC) the retired, with their secure pensions were far more likely to vote Leave than the working population.
Brexit wasn’t driven by the precariat making a last throw of the dice: It was driven by the comfortably off taking a risk that others would have to pay for if it didn’t work out.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
They're talking about the wrong things to the wrong people. They seem obsessed with the Nigel and gave members a choice between bonkers and insane for leader. They wisely chose the bonkers one, but she's making an utter tit of herself and the party with her.
We're in the middle of a power shift in global politics. Who are the kingmakers backing at a time where Labour continue to embarrass themselves? Not the Tories. And they're never going to back the Tories because the Tories are complicit in everything wrong with this country - and everyone knows it.
Their route through this is to inject umph back into the political economy. We can rebuild the country together, we want your ideas and your drive and we're going to reward you with a future worth having - a buzz in the country like we had in the 80s with Thatcher and the late 90s with Blair. Hope, through enterprise - that has to be the Tories best play. Not wazzocking up every week. Because by the time they realise its going wrong they will already have been thrown overboard.
Yet already Badenoch is projected to gain 55 seats at the next GE and deprive Starmer of his majority.
That would be more seat gains than Hague, Howard or indeed Kinnock, Foot and Ed Miliband and even Corbyn 2017 ever got as Leader of the Opposition
You'll stay in denial until you accept reality and join Reform.
The polls now are meaningless with regards to seats in an election 4 years away. The *trends* shown in the polls are what is relevant - will they continue / get stronger / get weaker?
The polls show that you lot would get plowed. Not on "if there was an election tomorrow" - there won't be. In 4 years, when you play the current trends forward.
Your party is done - and you are the culprit. Bravo.
The trend is there has been a big swing against Labour since the GE, Labour at the moment will likely scrape home even if it requires being propped up by the LDs,
However a Tory and Reform government is not out of the question even at this GE or more so the time after
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
And this might not have ended in a dumpster fire if she, (and her successors, to be fair: New Labour exhibited no interest in addressing the matter) had bothered to replace the council houses. All Maggie was interested in was using the receipts to subsidise current spending and thus fund tax cuts.
As it is, a large segment of the population now finds itself stuck in ludicrously expensive private rentals with no prospect of ever buying their way off that treadmill. We now have a neo-Hanoverian settlement: rentier capitalism with a large peasant underclass.
Your party won't fix this problem because it is contrary to the interest of your rump vote to do so. It is therefore useless to most of the country and thoroughly deserved the good caning it got last year.
*A lot* of post WWII council house estates (eg Robin Hood Gardens, or the Everton Piggeries or Hackney Wick tower blocks), were jerry-built shitholes. Beware of thinking that in the past, everyone had decent homes. The overall standard of housing today is better today than in the Sixties or Seventies.
One man's Council house shithole is another man's step up compared to what slum landlords offer. At least the Council would make urgent repairs to your leaky roofed sithole.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
In particular (IIRC) the retired, with their secure pensions were far more likely to vote Leave than the working population.
Brexit wasn’t driven by the precariat making a last throw of the dice: It was driven by the comfortably off taking a risk that others would have to pay for if it didn’t work out.
Then why did white working class voters of working age from Stoke to Grimsby to Basildon to Sunderland and the Rhondda also vote Leave too then?
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
Bonkers. People who never ever votes coming out in armies to vote in terrible run down places. Voting out of desperation to stick it to the system which had so utterly failed them.
That's the stereotype but the data is the polar opposite.
Wealthy home owners were far more likely to vote Leave.
Insecure tenants were far more likely to vote Remain.
Mainly a reflection of age, the wealthiest parts of the country and the highest earning tended to vote Remain too.
Insecure tenants of course also voted for Corbyn while wealthy home owners voted for May and Boris
"Wealthiest parts" is a very misleading term as it includes areas where those who live rent and mortgage free are fabulously wealthy, while others are struggling to make ends meet to pay the rent.
Even within locales the data is clear, it was the (predominantly home owning) wealthy within the area who disproportionately within that area voted Leave, while it was the (predominantly renting) working poor who disproportionately voted Remain.
Across both panel data sets, the researchers found the likelihood of a Leave vote increased as property wealth increased. In the Bank of England data for example, a standard deviation increase in property wealth increased Leave support by as much as 7.1 percentage points.
And although the researchers acknowledge that poorer areas of the UK were more likely to have voted for Brexit, their work shows it was wealthier people within those areas that were more likely to support leaving the EU while relatively poorer voters supported Remain.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
Bonkers. People who never ever votes coming out in armies to vote in terrible run down places. Voting out of desperation to stick it to the system which had so utterly failed them.
That's the stereotype but the data is the polar opposite.
Wealthy home owners were far more likely to vote Leave.
Insecure tenants were far more likely to vote Remain.
Mainly a reflection of age, the wealthiest parts of the country and the highest earning tended to vote Remain too.
Insecure tenants of course also voted for Corbyn while wealthy home owners voted for May and Boris
"Wealthiest parts" is a very misleading term as it includes areas where those who live rent and mortgage free are fabulously wealthy, while others are struggling to make ends meet to pay the rent.
Even within locales the data is clear, it was the (predominantly home owning) wealthy within the area who disproportionately within that area voted Leave, while it was the (predominantly renting) working poor who disproportionately voted Remain.
Across both panel data sets, the researchers found the likelihood of a Leave vote increased as property wealth increased. In the Bank of England data for example, a standard deviation increase in property wealth increased Leave support by as much as 7.1 percentage points.
And although the researchers acknowledge that poorer areas of the UK were more likely to have voted for Brexit, their work shows it was wealthier people within those areas that were more likely to support leaving the EU while relatively poorer voters supported Remain.
A lot of people I know voted leave, they were all renters including myself we had nothing to lose and we will continue voting for extremes because labour con libdem will continue to fuck us over
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
In particular (IIRC) the retired, with their secure pensions were far more likely to vote Leave than the working population.
Brexit wasn’t driven by the precariat making a last throw of the dice: It was driven by the comfortably off taking a risk that others would have to pay for if it didn’t work out.
Then why did white working class voters of working age from Stoke to Grimsby to Basildon to Sunderland and the Rhondda also vote Leave too then?
They disproportionately didn't.
It was the home owning pensioners from Stoke to Grimsby to Basildon etc who disproportionately did.
The poor within those neighbourhoods were more likely to vote Remain than their neighbours.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
They're talking about the wrong things to the wrong people. They seem obsessed with the Nigel and gave members a choice between bonkers and insane for leader. They wisely chose the bonkers one, but she's making an utter tit of herself and the party with her.
We're in the middle of a power shift in global politics. Who are the kingmakers backing at a time where Labour continue to embarrass themselves? Not the Tories. And they're never going to back the Tories because the Tories are complicit in everything wrong with this country - and everyone knows it.
Their route through this is to inject umph back into the political economy. We can rebuild the country together, we want your ideas and your drive and we're going to reward you with a future worth having - a buzz in the country like we had in the 80s with Thatcher and the late 90s with Blair. Hope, through enterprise - that has to be the Tories best play. Not wazzocking up every week. Because by the time they realise its going wrong they will already have been thrown overboard.
Yet already Badenoch is projected to gain 55 seats at the next GE and deprive Starmer of his majority.
That would be more seat gains than Hague, Howard or indeed Kinnock, Foot and Ed Miliband and even Corbyn 2017 ever got as Leader of the Opposition
You'll stay in denial until you accept reality and join Reform.
The polls now are meaningless with regards to seats in an election 4 years away. The *trends* shown in the polls are what is relevant - will they continue / get stronger / get weaker?
The polls show that you lot would get plowed. Not on "if there was an election tomorrow" - there won't be. In 4 years, when you play the current trends forward.
Your party is done - and you are the culprit. Bravo.
They're not meaningless. They tell you lots about views and trends which, one set, become harder to shift.
Starmer, and Labour more broadly, won't get to magically wipe the slate clean and start again at T-12 months from the next GE just because it's in the offing.
When was the last time a politician laid out an unpopular prospectus but had the courage and energy to make a case for it and persuade a majority why it was necessary? 1983 perhaps? Ever since then we have had government by focus group, triangulating policies to maximise their electoral appeal, regardless of consistency or efficacy.
My heart sinks whenever there's a PB header derived from a YouGov poll. They simply demonstrate how facile the electorate is when asked their opinion about anything. Sooner or later a plausible leader will emerge and make an irresistible case for monosyllabic half-baked solutions to our deep-rooted complex problems and it will be 2016 all over again.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
You mean like in 2019 when they talked about nothing else and won a large majority for the first time in a generation?
That was then. Now the Brexit believers are largely voting Refirm. And they're in the minority.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
Ok, have it your own way.
Always happy to learn more on the issue if you'd ever like to bring fresh info to the table.
No, I won't be doing that. I've said my piece. Empire = Exploitation. Exploitation = ££££ for the exploiter. That's the headline. Nothing to back it up except for loads of history books and podcasts, all by other people.
I think the mistake you are making was to assume it was exploitation by *Britain*
It was usually *British* chancers and promotors operating independently on the ground - basically a land based version of Raleigh or Drake - exploring the locals for all they were worth (literally)
“Empire” was a loose term employed to give a sense of order to a kaleidoscope of localised arrangements
The Macmillan govt's 'Audit of Empire' reports in the late 1950s reckoned that the 'home' (ie. UK-based) economy was smaller by a sixth than it would have been without the empire - similar to the effect of WW2, but less than that of WW1.
You can sense check that by comparing with (West) Germany which, starting from a lower base in 1871 and suffering similar WW1 and greater WW2 losses, surpassed us in GDP terms around 1960.
It's hard to see the empire as having been anything other than a net loss for us, in economic terms at least.
The Empire cost money, overall, but it provided huge military advantages. The contribution of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, from India, the Dominions, and Africa, in both world wars, was huge.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
Ok, have it your own way.
Always happy to learn more on the issue if you'd ever like to bring fresh info to the table.
No, I won't be doing that. I've said my piece. Empire = Exploitation. Exploitation = ££££ for the exploiter. That's the headline. Nothing to back it up except for loads of history books and podcasts, all by other people.
I think the mistake you are making was to assume it was exploitation by *Britain*
It was usually *British* chancers and promotors operating independently on the ground - basically a land based version of Raleigh or Drake - exploring the locals for all they were worth (literally)
“Empire” was a loose term employed to give a sense of order to a kaleidoscope of localised arrangements
The Macmillan govt's 'Audit of Empire' reports in the late 1950s reckoned that the 'home' (ie. UK-based) economy was smaller by a sixth than it would have been without the empire - similar to the effect of WW2, but less than that of WW1.
You can sense check that by comparing with (West) Germany which, starting from a lower base in 1871 and suffering similar WW1 and greater WW2 losses, surpassed us in GDP terms around 1960.
It's hard to see the empire as having been anything other than a net loss for us, in economic terms at least.
The Empire cost money, overall, but it provided huge military advantages. The contribution of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, from India, the Dominions, and Africa, in both world wars, was huge.
In which case it didn't cost.
It's also worth bearing in mind that without the bases and protectorates it wouldn't have been possible to carry out open trade on a global scale.
The WTO and its equivalents didn't exist then and, to the extent they do now, they are in a large part a child of its legacy.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
In particular (IIRC) the retired, with their secure pensions were far more likely to vote Leave than the working population.
Brexit wasn’t driven by the precariat making a last throw of the dice: It was driven by the comfortably off taking a risk that others would have to pay for if it didn’t work out.
Then why did white working class voters of working age from Stoke to Grimsby to Basildon to Sunderland and the Rhondda also vote Leave too then?
'They disproportionately didn't.
It was the home owning pensioners from Stoke to Grimsby to Basildon etc who disproportionately did.
The poor within those neighbourhoods were more likely to vote Remain than their neighbours.'
No it wasn't just them otherwise Remain would have won comfortably.
Leave won all social groups other than upper middle class ABs and Leave won most working voters aged 45 to 65, not just retired home owning voters over 65
"The Syrian gov. has decided not to let 3 Russian ships enter the Russian Naval Base in Tartus.
The ships were meant to evacuate Russian military equipment from Syria. In order not to let it fall into Syrian hands, the Russians have ordered some of it to be burned"
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
In particular (IIRC) the retired, with their secure pensions were far more likely to vote Leave than the working population.
Brexit wasn’t driven by the precariat making a last throw of the dice: It was driven by the comfortably off taking a risk that others would have to pay for if it didn’t work out.
If you look,at the tables in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report Brexit had far more support from households with a sub £20K income than households with a £60K plus income. I agree with Rochdale on this and you only have to look at some areas that supported Brexit to see these are not well off, wealthy, areas. Places like North Tyneside, Durham and Gateshead for example by me.
The poorest households, with incomes of less than £20,000 per year, were much more likely to support leaving the EU than the wealthiest households, as were the unemployed, people in low-skilled and manual occupations, people who feel that their financial situation has worsened, and those with no qualifications.
Groups vulnerable to poverty were more likely to support Brexit. Age, income and education matter, though it is educational inequality that was the strongest driver. Other things being equal, support for leave was 30 percentage points higher among those with GCSE qualifications or below than it was for people with a degree. In contrast, support for leave was just 10 points higher among those on less than £20,000 per year than it was among those with incomes of more than £60,000 per year, and 20 points higher among those aged 65 than those aged 25.
Support for Brexit varied not only between individuals but also between areas. People with all levels of qualifications were more likely to vote leave in low-skill areas compared with high-skill areas. However, this effect was stronger for the more highly qualified. In low-skilled communities the difference in support for leave between graduates and those with GCSEs was 20 points. In high-skilled communities it was over 40 points. In low-skill areas the proportion of A-level holders voting leave was closer to that of people with low-skills. In high-skill areas their vote was much more similar to graduates.
Groups in Britain who have been ‘left behind’ by rapid economic change and feel cut adrift from the mainstream consensus were the most likely to support Brexit. These voters face a ‘double whammy’. While their lack of qualifications put them at a significant disadvantage in the modern economy, they are also being further marginalised in society by the lack of opportunities that faced in their low-skilled communities. This will make it extremely difficult for the left behind to adapt and prosper in future.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
I don't hear many people talking about it.
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
The economy was structurally broken pre-Brexit. That's why so many non-voters turned out to vote for it. Whilst various things have become demonstrably worse there isn't a silver bullet Status Quo Ante solution where we rejoin and magically fix our problems.
I hope you realise the opposite was the case.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
In particular (IIRC) the retired, with their secure pensions were far more likely to vote Leave than the working population.
Brexit wasn’t driven by the precariat making a last throw of the dice: It was driven by the comfortably off taking a risk that others would have to pay for if it didn’t work out.
Then why did white working class voters of working age from Stoke to Grimsby to Basildon to Sunderland and the Rhondda also vote Leave too then?
They disproportionately didn't.
It was the home owning pensioners from Stoke to Grimsby to Basildon etc who disproportionately did.
The poor within those neighbourhoods were more likely to vote Remain than their neighbours.
The case against Brexit has always been that the “better” people, the wise, the well-born, the well to do, voted against it, whereas hoi polloi voted in favour.
No it wasn't just them otherwise Remain would have won comfortably.
Leave won all social groups other than upper middle class ABs and Leave won most working voters aged 45 to 65, not just retired home owning voters over 65
Upper middle-class AB != well off. Plenty of people on the hamster wheel struggling to make ends meet are AB.
Leave disproportionately won home owners. Remain disproportionately won tenants.
It was security, not it's inverse, that made people less risk-averse. Whatever the stereotypes might be.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
Should they stop it happening again?
Would you like your property and possessions burnt down every 5 years?
I'm assuming the question isn't about abandoning people's houses to burn over and over, but rather the wisdom of rebuilding in some of these places.
It's rather like the idiocy of plonking new builds on floodplains in this country. It might be unwise to attempt reconstruction in some of these high fire risk areas. And there's no point at all if the homes are deemed uninsurable.
If your response to fire insurance costing elevety trillion is to pass a law capping fire insurance, then you will probably lose your property in a fire.
As a reminder, there are no "silver bullets", whether in solving housing availability in the UK, or in preventing wildfires in California.
What there is are many, small incremental changes that can make a very significant difference when combined. Not doing something that will help, solely because it won't solve everything all on its own, is the very worst thing about politics
"Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who does nothing because he could do only a little." - Edmund Burke
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I've logged back on to talk about this.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
If the Conservative Party is going to eventually regain power, it needs Brexit to no longer be an issue. Therefore their supporters should stop talking about it.
They're talking about the wrong things to the wrong people. They seem obsessed with the Nigel and gave members a choice between bonkers and insane for leader. They wisely chose the bonkers one, but she's making an utter tit of herself and the party with her.
We're in the middle of a power shift in global politics. Who are the kingmakers backing at a time where Labour continue to embarrass themselves? Not the Tories. And they're never going to back the Tories because the Tories are complicit in everything wrong with this country - and everyone knows it.
Their route through this is to inject umph back into the political economy. We can rebuild the country together, we want your ideas and your drive and we're going to reward you with a future worth having - a buzz in the country like we had in the 80s with Thatcher and the late 90s with Blair. Hope, through enterprise - that has to be the Tories best play. Not wazzocking up every week. Because by the time they realise its going wrong they will already have been thrown overboard.
Yet already Badenoch is projected to gain 55 seats at the next GE and deprive Starmer of his majority.
That would be more seat gains than Hague, Howard or indeed Kinnock, Foot and Ed Miliband and even Corbyn 2017 ever got as Leader of the Opposition
You'll stay in denial until you accept reality and join Reform.
The polls now are meaningless with regards to seats in an election 4 years away. The *trends* shown in the polls are what is relevant - will they continue / get stronger / get weaker?
The polls show that you lot would get plowed. Not on "if there was an election tomorrow" - there won't be. In 4 years, when you play the current trends forward.
Your party is done - and you are the culprit. Bravo.
They're not meaningless. They tell you lots about views and trends which, one set, become harder to shift.
Starmer, and Labour more broadly, won't get to magically wipe the slate clean and start again at T-12 months from the next GE just because it's in the offing.
When was the last time a politician laid out an unpopular prospectus but had the courage and energy to make a case for it and persuade a majority why it was necessary? 1983 perhaps? Ever since then we have had government by focus group, triangulating policies to maximise their electoral appeal, regardless of consistency or efficacy.
My heart sinks whenever there's a PB header derived from a YouGov poll. They simply demonstrate how facile the electorate is when asked their opinion about anything. Sooner or later a plausible leader will emerge and make an irresistible case for monosyllabic half-baked solutions to our deep-rooted complex problems and it will be 2016 all over again.
Well, we might get lucky- and actually get a good leader.
It is worth noting that the devastation caused by the fires in Los Angeles aren't one tenth of the damage the Fukashima earthquake did to Japan, either financially or in terms of loss of life. It will also have no impact, for example, on the power grid.
Modern developed economies are remarkably resilient to natural disasters, and US housing is cheap and quick to construct (thanks in part to plenty of ... undocumented ... laborers from South America).
This time next year, Palisades will be a third rebuilt. By the time of the next presidential election, you won't know it happened.
Damn, and I was hoping to find a nice patch of land going cheap…
Although it is early days in the electoral cycle , the signs are not good. If Reeves goes it will do huge damage.
The sense they are not in control is palpable. I belong to that large group who abandoned any other voting options in order to see in a Labour government as the thoughtful, courageous and reasonably skilled competent government we needed.
The early unforced errors are well known. Fair enough, they were new. But just in the last few days they have kicked social care, which is intimately connected with the NHS crisis, into 2028 and after. I think probably as a result they have lost me for good. It is the precise opposite of everything the vote lenders lent them their votes for.
""I hear the atmosphere at the Jewish Labour Conference in North London this afternoon is 'grim'. There is a huge Ivor Caplin shaped elephant in the room and attendees are trying to ignore it but 'everyone knows'.
Many are keeping off social media so they do not get accused of being nonces.
Mike Katz spotted going round other delegates and having "hushed conversations". Some I am told think the event should have been cancelled last night as soon as news of the arrest came to light".
Dr Ian Darcy
SKS has an unfortunate habit of being friends with alleged nonces.
Comments
Presumably the purchasers believe them not to be shitholes!
Even if a cross party consensus for affordable housing can be found - which I doubt, because the Tories' supporters profit too much from continual inflation and are mostly rabid nimbies to boot, and the Lib Dems and Greens are waiting to steal them at the first sign of a wobble - then it'll take as long to correct this problem as it did to create it. Decades and decades.
It is the Nimby LD, Reform, Green and Independent opposition who are opposing new housing (though at least in Reform's case also with a platform of slashing immigration to cut demand)
Modern developed economies are remarkably resilient to natural disasters, and US housing is cheap and quick to construct (thanks in part to plenty of ... undocumented ... laborers from South America).
This time next year, Palisades will be a third rebuilt. By the time of the next presidential election, you won't know it happened.
1) degree on full fees, with all the borrowing
2) stuck in a job with a wage £0.50 above minimum.
3) all money goes on renting a shit hole to live in, in commuting distance of 2)
4) little or no prospect of being promoted out of this.
Climate change means this will happen more frequently in future, not yes.
Any wooden (any?) house virtually anywhere warmish (California, Australia etc) might burn up every few years, particularly if it's in close proximity to others, and you won't be able to get insurance.
This isn't a one off.
The problem of the 2002 years onwards is we've had cycles of boom and plateau rather than boom and bust in house prices.
That's caused a catastrophic ratchet in costs with no corrections.
1) A plane crashes on the border between Ukraine and the Republic of China. Which side do you bury the survivors?
2) Your artistic direction before and after MMMBop sucked. How are you going to fix this?
Quick, cheap prefabricated homes can be rebuilt as rcs just said.
Part of the problem in this country is we want stuff to be built and last forever, even if circumstances change, rather than just be prepared to tear it down and start all over again repeatedly.
One one hand, What the Actual Fuck
On the other hand, not a surprise
Instead of petulant bitching and gaslighting revisionism, conservatives need to wake the fuck up before they lose the battle to Reform or worse. You want to remain relevant and have a shot at defeating Labour? You need to still exist and actually engage with things people are interested in.
But I'd rather that than have no property or possessions.
Besides its not every 5 years that each home will need replacing, within 5 years other homes might not the same ones.
That is how insurance is able to work.
The problem is that too many people - like with the triple lock - benefit from the status quo.
What happened afterwards is an utter tragedy. With post-war decisions causing even more damage today than the blitz caused.
It's rather like the idiocy of plonking new builds on floodplains in this country. It might be unwise to attempt reconstruction in some of these high fire risk areas. And there's no point at all if the homes are deemed uninsurable.
So I'd better get my pencil sharpened......
Bit like the sudden jump in sea temperatures that was actually the result of banning sulphur compounds from marine fuel. Didn't stop the lying scrotes claiming it's all because people have the audacity to heat their homes and drive their cars.
Yes California has foliage that might burn. Nevada does not. But that foliage is part of California's charm over Nevada.
Yes New Orleans has water that may flood. That water is also why New Orleans was built where it is.
You can either try to cut out risk and make sacrifices, or accept risk because the risk is worth it. Nothing wrong with option 2.
What there is are many, small incremental changes that can make a very significant difference when combined. Not doing something that will help, solely because it won't solve everything all on its own, is the very worst thing about politics
I think the hopes that the UK will get favourable special treatment from US are misplaced if Musk has the influence that's reputed... he clearly has it in for Starmer. But Trump will pass I guess , the question is whether America generally decides to go in his America first direction generally.
I've no idea really.
I certainly wouldn't buy a like-for-like property in that area now.
I don't think it would make a good investment and, I doubt it'd be fully insurable.
Plus views of St James' Park and the East Coast Mainline.
What's not to like?
We're in the middle of a power shift in global politics. Who are the kingmakers backing at a time where Labour continue to embarrass themselves? Not the Tories. And they're never going to back the Tories because the Tories are complicit in everything wrong with this country - and everyone knows it.
Their route through this is to inject umph back into the political economy. We can rebuild the country together, we want your ideas and your drive and we're going to reward you with a future worth having - a buzz in the country like we had in the 80s with Thatcher and the late 90s with Blair. Hope, through enterprise - that has to be the Tories best play. Not wazzocking up every week. Because by the time they realise its going wrong they will already have been thrown overboard.
Margaret Thatcher understand and knew the science and recognised it. And, as one of your heroes, you should listen to her.
It's the disastrous slowness of the planning system and bureaucracy, and the concomitant lack of land cleared for building that slows everything down to the speed of a geriatric snail with gout. It can easily take two or three years to get all the permissions for a large development, while the actual construction can take less than a year - sometimes as little as six-nine months.
That and the oligopoly of corrupt and incompetent large builders are the reasons we don't have enough houses in this country.
They're not quite temporary structures, but there's no expectation that a house should last for 400-odd years like there is here.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
That would be more seat gains than Hague, Howard or indeed Kinnock, Foot and Ed Miliband and even Corbyn 2017 ever got as Leader of the Opposition
We don't have anywhere near enough builders and skilled tradespeople. So we can bring in foreign labour now, or we can make building an appealing career choice and train people up.
Starter for 10 for this idiot government - branding. "Rebuilding Britain" or "Building our Future" or something. A basic reminder that the Tories broke the country and Labour are fixing it.
No, they prefer doing little, saying less, and seemingly giving up on any kind of positivity.
As a maritime climate, our fate will largely dodge that but winters will be wetter and warmer, and generally a bit mankier and shitter, but with occasionally very peaky summers, which we can manage provided we get our waterworks and reservoirs right.
Provided we build solid houses away from floodplains (massive ifs, seeing as developers still seem to want to do so) I'm not hugely worried about property here.
But if it were affordable and I was wealthy enough, and if I wanted to live in the States, then I would consider it.
Some people have a higher tolerance of risk than others, there's nothing wrong with that.
If someone wants to play sport, or sky dive, or live on a flood plane, or go mountain climbing, or live in a fire hot-spot then so long as they accept the risks they are taking that should be their free choice and not anyone else's business.
In an interview with the Corriere della Sera newspaper in Italy, excerpts of which were published this weekend by Breitbart, Bannon criticised Musk’s embrace of some forms of immigration and vowed to ensure that Musk does not have top-level access to the White House.
“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon said. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it – I’m not prepared to tolerate it any more.”
He added: “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by inauguration day”, which falls on 20 January. “He will not have full access to the White House. He will be like any other person.”
I do hear them talking about the dire economy. There is a vague effort by the Lost Cause crew to link the two, but it doesn't wash.
Too many won't go near building houses as the broken planning system stymies them from doing so.
The root cause needs fixing.
These projections are meaningless.
My point is that I think "something must be done" applies here, and I think the State/Federal authorities will have to have a better answer to retain confidence than just rebuild quickly and cross their fingers it doesn't happen again.
And the oligopoly is a direct consequence of the planning system too.
Small developers consistently state that planning is by far the number one obstacle they face. https://www.hbf.co.uk/news/planning-delays-continue-to-pose-greatest-obstacle-to-uk-home-builders/
Go back to a 1930s style planning system and we could easily build quicker and smash the oligopoly. Win/win.
Apparently Reeves is feeling down and cannot see a way out. A treasury source and a Times article today.
I doubt this is true at all.
Looks like the start of anonymous briefings against her.
What good would panicking do or changjng chancellor at this stage anyway ?
https://x.com/politlcsuk/status/1878512819517141166?s=61
The polls now are meaningless with regards to seats in an election 4 years away. The *trends* shown in the polls are what is relevant - will they continue / get stronger / get weaker?
The polls show that you lot would get plowed. Not on "if there was an election tomorrow" - there won't be. In 4 years, when you play the current trends forward.
Your party is done - and you are the culprit. Bravo.
Those who voted for Brexit were predominantly those who were the most economically secure, who as a result were less risk-averse.
Those who were more economically insecure were more risk-averse and disproportionately voted Remain.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a desperate throw of the dice by those who had nothing to lose is total bullshit.
We pay too much out to people who don't work, and, for those that do, far too many jobs aren't especially productive.
Starmer, and Labour more broadly, won't get to magically wipe the slate clean and start again at T-12 months from the next GE just because it's in the offing.
Wealthy home owners were far more likely to vote Leave.
Insecure tenants were far more likely to vote Remain.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/study-finds-wealthy-more-likely-to-have-voted-for-brexit
As for Labour? Toast. Already. Have to give them credit.
Brexit wasn’t driven by the precariat making a last throw of the dice: It was driven by the comfortably off taking a risk that others would have to pay for if it didn’t work out.
Insecure tenants of course also voted for Corbyn while wealthy home owners voted for May and Boris
However a Tory and Reform government is not out of the question even at this GE or more so the time after
Even within locales the data is clear, it was the (predominantly home owning) wealthy within the area who disproportionately within that area voted Leave, while it was the (predominantly renting) working poor who disproportionately voted Remain.
Across both panel data sets, the researchers found the likelihood of a Leave vote increased as property wealth increased. In the Bank of England data for example, a standard deviation increase in property wealth increased Leave support by as much as 7.1 percentage points.
And although the researchers acknowledge that poorer areas of the UK were more likely to have voted for Brexit, their work shows it was wealthier people within those areas that were more likely to support leaving the EU while relatively poorer voters supported Remain.
You take people's money from them for four years, and just as they think they know you, you bung them a wedge when they least expect it.
It was the home owning pensioners from Stoke to Grimsby to Basildon etc who disproportionately did.
The poor within those neighbourhoods were more likely to vote Remain than their neighbours.
My heart sinks whenever there's a PB header derived from a YouGov poll. They simply demonstrate how facile the electorate is when asked their opinion about anything. Sooner or later a plausible leader will emerge and make an irresistible case for monosyllabic half-baked solutions to our deep-rooted complex problems and it will be 2016 all over again.
Now the Brexit believers are largely voting Refirm. And they're in the minority.
'They disproportionately didn't.It was the home owning pensioners from Stoke to Grimsby to Basildon etc who disproportionately did.
The poor within those neighbourhoods were more likely to vote Remain than their neighbours.'
No it wasn't just them otherwise Remain would have won comfortably.
Leave won all social groups other than upper middle class ABs and Leave won most working voters aged 45 to 65, not just retired home owning voters over 65
I'm watching Civil War at the moment. Very harrowing.
The ships were meant to evacuate Russian military equipment from Syria. In order not to let it fall into Syrian hands, the Russians have ordered some of it to be burned"
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1878460359310197244
https://www.jrf.org.uk/public-attitudes/brexit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-of-opportunities
Key findings:
The poorest households, with incomes of less than £20,000 per year, were much more likely to support leaving the EU than the wealthiest households, as were the unemployed, people in low-skilled and manual occupations, people who feel that their financial situation has worsened, and those with no qualifications.
Groups vulnerable to poverty were more likely to support Brexit. Age, income and education matter, though it is educational inequality that was the strongest driver. Other things being equal, support for leave was 30 percentage points higher among those with GCSE qualifications or below than it was for people with a degree. In contrast, support for leave was just 10 points higher among those on less than £20,000 per year than it was among those with incomes of more than £60,000 per year, and 20 points higher among those aged 65 than those aged 25.
Support for Brexit varied not only between individuals but also between areas. People with all levels of qualifications were more likely to vote leave in low-skill areas compared with high-skill areas. However, this effect was stronger for the more highly qualified. In low-skilled communities the difference in support for leave between graduates and those with GCSEs was 20 points. In high-skilled communities it was over 40 points. In low-skill areas the proportion of A-level holders voting leave was closer to that of people with low-skills. In high-skill areas their vote was much more similar to graduates.
Groups in Britain who have been ‘left behind’ by rapid economic change and feel cut adrift from the mainstream consensus were the most likely to support Brexit. These voters face a ‘double whammy’. While their lack of qualifications put them at a significant disadvantage in the modern economy, they are also being further marginalised in society by the lack of opportunities that faced in their low-skilled communities. This will make it extremely difficult for the left behind to adapt and prosper in future.
Leave disproportionately won home owners.
Remain disproportionately won tenants.
It was security, not it's inverse, that made people less risk-averse. Whatever the stereotypes might be.
Uninsured.
Hope springs eternal.
The sense they are not in control is palpable. I belong to that large group who abandoned any other voting options in order to see in a Labour government as the thoughtful, courageous and reasonably skilled competent government we needed.
The early unforced errors are well known. Fair enough, they were new. But just in the last few days they have kicked social care, which is intimately connected with the NHS crisis, into 2028 and after. I think probably as a result they have lost me for good. It is the precise opposite of everything the vote lenders lent them their votes for.
Many are keeping off social media so they do not get accused of being nonces.
Mike Katz spotted going round other delegates and having "hushed conversations".
Some I am told think the event should have been cancelled last night as soon as news of the arrest came to light".
Dr Ian Darcy
SKS has an unfortunate habit of being friends with alleged nonces.
It’s quite amusing. He has a sense of humour.
https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1878491051423314215?s=61