I think the only time and period to have lived in that was really comparable to Eastern Europe and Russia, from 1930 to 1950, or China in the same period, was Central Asia or North China when the Mongols invaded.
You are right about the Mongols. Why though are the death tolls of the Japanese Chinese War separated from the Second World War? I read Beevors work which includes this conflict.
The Chinese appear to be particularly involved in lots of nasty wars over the centuries.
Orwell's view that there must be very dark fantasies that are shared by humans generally.
Hobbes was right. We need civilising because our default state is primal and makes our lives nasty, brutish and short. Civilising requires a modicum of ability to see things from someone else's perspective. 'Isms' and religions and despots find this quite hard and so find it all too easy to revert to our uncivilised natural state.
Reading ancient history, as I am aware several on this site do, you can't get through a description of one period or another without a town or city being "devastated" by its victors. Obviously 2,000+ years later we skip over it without a second thought but I often think of what that must have been like.
If a city offered resistance, and was taken by storm, then it was standard operating practice for the city to be sacked. Murder, rape, and pillage would have been the norm, with the survivors (mainly women and children) being enslaved. But, if the victorious commander considered that a special example was required, the survivors would simply be executed in cold blood, rather than being enslaved. Alexander the Great, for example, had hundreds of defenders of Tyre crucified when he captured the city.
The Chinese appear to be particularly involved in lots of nasty wars over the centuries.
So, in the last 1,000 years around 225 million Chinese have died in major wars. Think what the world would have been like without that.
A very good friend of mine, he's an open minded, thoughtful, liberal Italian is incredibly racist when it comes to anything Chinese. I find it quite baffling.
Dr. Prasannan, reminds me of the Yorkshire air sketch. Takes off Leeds-Bradford airport, lands Leeds-Bradford airport. Because if it's not in Yorkshire it's not bloody worth seeing.
The greatest threat facing the world right now is Russia itself
That would be the second greatest.
After Trump?
Interesting. I had Trump down as a charlatan of the highest order. A Silvio Berlusconi for America. Bad for the country, definitely, as Berlusconi was for Italy, but basically rational. He could be persuaded to do things if he was convinced it was in his interest to do so. As such I preferred him to an obsessive Ted Cruz.
''Absolutely, I posted on here yesterday that the government needs to go all in against private renting and absolutely fuck the landlord's or we'll end up with some kind of Corbyn in charge. ''
Mate, their policy is driving investors to the property market. Say you have 100 grand, what else is there to do with it? stocks are fully valued, Bank interest is zero and half of Europe's banks are bust anyway.
Right now, buying a flat in a Northern City and renting it looks like a pretty good idea to me.
The Conservatives are digging the grave of their own long-term future by not doing anything useful about housing. So long as supply continues to lag demand, prices will almost certainly rise inexorably. The percentage of owner-occupiers will eventually decline so much, and rents climb to such unbearable levels for everyone else, that people will get desperate and bring back the Left to deal with the problem.
Silly little mortgage guarantee schemes of the Osborne type aren't going to cut it: the only solution is the building of a very large number of new houses, which is going to mean cutting chunks out of the green belt and letting developers concrete them - with the caveats that building regs need to be tightened to end the scourge of rabbit hutch new builds, and there need to be proper plans put in place at the outset for transport, public services and so on, in the same way as the garden cities and new towns were carefully managed.
Anyway, I shall be interested to see if May (or Javid) announces anything meaningful to deal with this issue at Tory conference - although the small Government majority does leave them exposed to Nimbyism on this. If we're to have a radical rethink on housing then a new policy may (a) have to be articulated in the next Tory manifesto, and (b) go for large scale development in a limited number of locations, both to minimise the numbers of Parliamentary constituencies affected and because urbanisation is probably the best way forward. Building up carefully planned cities with good public transportation links has to be better than fighting two hundred separate battles with local protestors over developing new towns, or bolting chunks onto existing ones, all over the place. If I had anything to do with solving this problem (which, mercifully, I do not) then I would adjust the boundary of Greater London to match the M25, and invite the Mayor to begin drawing up new plans immediately; and I would be thinking about expanding Oxford and Cambridge to each accommodate half a million people, with dedicated high speed rail lines running express services straight into central London.
Mr. F, be fair. The men Alexander crucified never resisted him again.
[Also, Tyre was a monumental siege. Can't recall off the top of my head, but it was at least months and possibly years in the making].
There were occasional examples of more humane behaviour; Lucullus for example, allowed the inhabitants of Tigranocerta to evacuate the city with their moveable goods, after he captured it, much to the fury of his soldiers who'd been looking forward to making a fortune by selling them into slavery. But, he was very unusual for a Roman general. Indeed, some observers commented on the fact that Roman soldiers concentrated on killing, rather than taking plunder, when they took a city.
''Absolutely, I posted on here yesterday that the government needs to go all in against private renting and absolutely fuck the landlord's or we'll end up with some kind of Corbyn in charge. ''
Mate, their policy is driving investors to the property market. Say you have 100 grand, what else is there to do with it? stocks are fully valued, Bank interest is zero and half of Europe's banks are bust anyway.
Right now, buying a flat in a Northern City and renting it looks like a pretty good idea to me.
The Conservatives are digging the grave of their own long-term future by not doing anything useful about housing. So long as supply continues to lag demand, prices will almost certainly rise inexorably. The percentage of owner-occupiers will eventually decline so much, and rents climb to such unbearable levels for everyone else, that people will get desperate and bring back the Left to deal with the problem.
Silly little mortgage guarantee schemes of the Osborne type aren't going to cut it: the only solution is the building of a very large number of new houses, which is going to mean cutting chunks out of the green belt and letting developers concrete them - with the caveats that building regs need to be tightened to end the scourge of rabbit hutch new builds, and there need to be proper plans put in place at the outset for transport, public services and so on, in the same way as the garden cities and new towns were carefully managed.
Anyway, I shall be interested to see if May (or Javid) announces anything meaningful to deal with this issue at Tory conference - although the small Government majority does leave them exposed to Nimbyism on this. If we're to have a radical rethink on housing then a new policy may (a) have to be articulated in the next Tory manifesto, and (b) go for large scale development in a limited number of locations, both to minimise the numbers of Parliamentary constituencies affected and because urbanisation is probably the best way forward. Building up carefully planned cities with good public transportation links has to be better than fighting two hundred separate battles with local protestors over developing new towns, or bolting chunks onto existing ones, all over the place. If I had anything to do with solving this problem (which, mercifully, I do not) then I would adjust the boundary of Greater London to match the M25, and invite the Mayor to begin drawing up new plans immediately; and I would be thinking about expanding Oxford and Cambridge to each accommodate half a million people, with dedicated high speed rail lines running express services straight into central London.
The government owns plenty of land. Why not just build on it, and sell the houses off to private owners?
Hobbes was right. We need civilising because our default state is primal and makes our lives nasty, brutish and short. Civilising requires a modicum of ability to see things from someone else's perspective. 'Isms' and religions and despots find this quite hard and so find it all too easy to revert to our uncivilised natural state.
But the evidence is that tribal peoples living those short brutish lives close to nature have virtually no mental health or depression issues, a construct of our civilization.
Read an interesting stat - the Bushmen of the Kalahari needed work only 12 hours a week to survive. Where, precisely, has our industrialization got us? (No need to answer. It is only a semi-serious rhetorical question)
Mr. F, I did not know that about Lucullus (though I am aware of his interesting victory over Tigranes the Great, who should've known better than to punish messengers).
Mr Max, surely a free market capitalist type like yourself would understand that the way to fix the housing problem is:
1. Reform planning to allow more housing to be built where the demand exists, such as in London, and to create new towns around the country. 2. Get interest rates off the floor, so that other ways of investing money generate a return. 3. Reduce the cap on housing benefit, sell off high value council housing and reinvest in new housing stock.
Then the market will do what it does, with more housing and prices falling. Trying to "f... landlords" only increases rents and makes the problem worse.
There will never be a true free market in houses because we can't build houses anywhere. If we derestrict planning London will grow to 16m and engulf the whole of Hertfordshire, Surrey and Kent which would be an environmental disaster.
Agreed on interest rates and even on council housing, but neither will address the real problem of the transfer housing from owner occupiers to landlords in the last 10 years and how to reverse it. Building more houses won't solve the problem within the next 20 years.
It's also about fairness and the transfer of wealth from the working young to the non-working elderly. We must reverse that process either by imposing higher capital gains and non-primary property taxes and lower income taxes or by forcing landlords to sell and crash the buy to let sector to make houses affordable for first time buyers.
Without that a Corbynite reaction among 18-40 year olds is imminent. It might not be Corbyn but it will be someone who is slightly more palatable but wants to impose expropriation of property into public hands. It is a huge failing of successive governments and the current one must get a handle on home ownership, the only way to do that is the fuck the landlords.
''Absolutely, I posted on here yesterday that the government needs to go all in against private renting and absolutely fuck the landlord's or we'll end up with some kind of Corbyn in charge. ''
Mate, their policy is driving investors to the property market. Say you have 100 grand, what else is there to do with it? stocks are fully valued, Bank interest is zero and half of Europe's banks are bust anyway.
Right now, buying a flat in a Northern City and renting it looks like a pretty good idea to me.
(Snip) Anyway, I shall be interested to see if May (or Javid) announces anything meaningful to deal with this issue at Tory conference - although the small Government majority does leave them exposed to Nimbyism on this. If we're to have a radical rethink on housing then a new policy may (a) have to be articulated in the next Tory manifesto, and (b) go for large scale development in a limited number of locations, both to minimise the numbers of Parliamentary constituencies affected and because urbanisation is probably the best way forward. Building up carefully planned cities with good public transportation links has to be better than fighting two hundred separate battles with local protestors over developing new towns, or bolting chunks onto existing ones, all over the place. If I had anything to do with solving this problem (which, mercifully, I do not) then I would adjust the boundary of Greater London to match the M25, and invite the Mayor to begin drawing up new plans immediately; and I would be thinking about expanding Oxford and Cambridge to each accommodate half a million people, with dedicated high speed rail lines running express services straight into central London.
" with the caveats that building regs need to be tightened to end the scourge of rabbit hutch new builds, and there need to be proper plans put in place at the outset for transport, public services and so on"
Moves I agree with, but also moves that add to the cost considerably. Anyone can build houses; it's much harder to build communities.
"I would be thinking about expanding Oxford and Cambridge to each accommodate half a million people, with dedicated high speed rail lines running express services straight into central London."
Currently there is talk about building a linear 'town' (or string of villages) between Cambridge, MK and Oxford, using the newly-reopened Oxford to Cambridge railway line (if they ever decide to rebuild the Bedford to Cambridge section).
Mr. Rook, is that necessary? The Green Belt can't be an especially large percentage of the country, surely?
The houses have to go somewhere, and the logical place to put them is in the South East because that is where a disproportionate number of our ever-growing population wishes to reside. It's where there are more and better quality jobs, and where existing pressure on housing (and therefore on over-inflated prices) is most acute. If economic activity were more evenly distributed across the country then we could spread the houses through the regions more evenly, but we must deal with things as we actually find them, not how we would wish them to be.
Most of the major cities are completely surrounded by Green Belt, but that around London is much the most extensive. Something like half of Hertfordshire and Surrey, along with big chunks of Kent, Berks, Bucks, Beds, Essex, and separate doughnut rings totally encircling Oxford and Cambridge, are all covered by this protection. Some of this will be land that we shall definitely want to avoid developing if possible, especially AONBs and grade 1 agricultural land, but ultimately, as I said, the houses have to go somewhere - and better off near London than dumping them out in Northamptonshire or Suffolk, where they'll swallow up just as much open countryside, but then leave all the residents who work in/closer to London facing very long, tiresome and expensive commutes.
Mr Max, surely a free market capitalist type like yourself would understand that the way to fix the housing problem is:
1. Reform planning to allow more housing to be built where the demand exists, such as in London, and to create new towns around the country. 2. Get interest rates off the floor, so that other ways of investing money generate a return. 3. Reduce the cap on housing benefit, sell off high value council housing and reinvest in new housing stock.
Then the market will do what it does, with more housing and prices falling. Trying to "f... landlords" only increases rents and makes the problem worse.
There will never be a true free market in houses because we can't build houses anywhere. If we derestrict planning London will grow to 16m and engulf the whole of Hertfordshire, Surrey and Kent which would be an environmental disaster.
Agreed on interest rates and even on council housing, but neither will address the real problem of the transfer housing from owner occupiers to landlords in the last 10 years and how to reverse it. Building more houses won't solve the problem within the next 20 years.
It's also about fairness and the transfer of wealth from the working young to the non-working elderly. We must reverse that process either by imposing higher capital gains and non-primary property taxes and lower income taxes or by forcing landlords to sell and crash the buy to let sector to make houses affordable for first time buyers.
Without that a Corbynite reaction among 18-40 year olds is imminent. It might not be Corbyn but it will be someone who is slightly more palatable but wants to impose expropriation of property into public hands. It is a huge failing of successive governments and the current one must get a handle on home ownership, the only way to do that is the fuck the landlords.
If we totally abolished planning controls, Herefordshire would become a suburb of Birmingham (Connecticut *is* a suburb of New York city.)
But there's a lot to be said for councils acquiring the power to issue compulsory purchase orders, buy farmland at existing use value, give it planning consent and sell serviced plots to self builders who want to build detached houses, or to developers who want to build flats. As in Germany.
It happened in Milton Keynes. But the profit went to the Treasury. It should partly stay with the council.
Demolish all of the big swanky houses in the posh bits of London and replace them with high rise apartment blocks. 20 times as many homes, and no greenfield building. Those displaced can afford a mansion somewhere else in the country, so they'll have nothing to complain about.
Mr Max, surely a free market capitalist type like yourself would understand that the way to fix the housing problem is:
1. Reform planning to allow more housing to be built where the demand exists, such as in London, and to create new towns around the country. 2. Get interest rates off the floor, so that other ways of investing money generate a return. 3. Reduce the cap on housing benefit, sell off high value council housing and reinvest in new housing stock.
Then the market will do what it does, with more housing and prices falling. Trying to "f... landlords" only increases rents and makes the problem worse.
There will never be a true free market in houses because we can't build houses anywhere. If we derestrict planning London will grow to 16m and engulf the whole of Hertfordshire, Surrey and Kent which would be an environmental disaster.
Agreed on interest rates and even on council housing, but neither will address the real problem of the transfer housing from owner occupiers to landlords in the last 10 years and how to reverse it. Building more houses won't solve the problem within the next 20 years.
It's also about fairness and the transfer of wealth from the working young to the non-working elderly. We must reverse that process either by imposing higher capital gains and non-primary property taxes and lower income taxes or by forcing landlords to sell and crash the buy to let sector to make houses affordable for first time buyers.
Without that a Corbynite reaction among 18-40 year olds is imminent. It might not be Corbyn but it will be someone who is slightly more palatable but wants to impose expropriation of property into public hands. It is a huge failing of successive governments and the current one must get a handle on home ownership, the only way to do that is the fuck the landlords.
Fucking over the landlords is all very well, until you take into account that the landlords that Osbrowne tried to fuck over were the one or two property , non incorporated type - i.e. the good ones.
The institutional landlord who act like its the 18th century still, didn't get touched.
''Absolutely, I posted on here yesterday that the government needs to go all in against private renting and absolutely fuck the landlord's or we'll end up with some kind of Corbyn in charge. ''
Mate, their policy is driving investors to the property market. Say you have 100 grand, what else is there to do with it? stocks are fully valued, Bank interest is zero and half of Europe's banks are bust anyway.
Right now, buying a flat in a Northern City and renting it looks like a pretty good idea to me.
The Conservatives are digging the grave of their own long-term future by not doing anything useful about housing. So long as supply continues to lag demand, prices will almost certainly rise inexorably. The percentage of owner-occupiers will eventually decline so much, and rents climb to such unbearable levels for everyone else, that people will get desperate and bring back the Left to deal with the problem.
Silly little mortgage guarantee schemes of the Osborne type aren't going to cut it: the only solution is the building of a very large number of new houses, which is going to mean cutting chunks out of the green belt and letting developers concrete them - with the caveats that building regs need to be tightened to end the scourge of rabbit hutch new builds, and there need to be proper plans put in place at the outset for transport, public services and so on, in the same way as the garden cities and new towns were carefully managed.
Anyway, I shall be interested to see if May (or Javid) announces anything meaningful to deal with this issue at Tory conference -SNIP
The government owns plenty of land. Why not just build on it, and sell the houses off to private owners?
Agreed that govt land is a must. But that would require the civil service to do things. Best approach would be to hire a few property "rationalisation" people with large potential bonuses. Could IMHO easily find land for another 1million houses in the south.
Silly little mortgage guarantee schemes of the Osborne type aren't going to cut it: the only solution is the building of a very large number of new houses, which is going to mean cutting chunks out of the green belt and letting developers concrete them - with the caveats that building regs need to be tightened to end the scourge of rabbit hutch new builds, and there need to be proper plans put in place at the outset for transport, public services and so on, in the same way as the garden cities and new towns were carefully managed.
Anyway, I shall be interested to see if May (or Javid) announces anything meaningful to deal with this issue at Tory conference - although the small Government majority does leave them exposed to Nimbyism on this. If we're to have a radical rethink on housing then a new policy may (a) have to be articulated in the next Tory manifesto, and (b) go for large scale development in a limited number of locations, both to minimise the numbers of Parliamentary constituencies affected and because urbanisation is probably the best way forward. Building up carefully planned cities with good public transportation links has to be better than fighting two hundred separate battles with local protestors over developing new towns, or bolting chunks onto existing ones, all over the place. If I had anything to do with solving this problem (which, mercifully, I do not) then I would adjust the boundary of Greater London to match the M25, and invite the Mayor to begin drawing up new plans immediately; and I would be thinking about expanding Oxford and Cambridge to each accommodate half a million people, with dedicated high speed rail lines running express services straight into central London.
Yes, very good. Not only are home ownership rates falling, we have the some of the smallest new build houses in Europe I think - even comparably dense countries like the Netherlands build bigger than us. And London remains extremely overvalued (see latest UBS figures).
Putting aside demand-side issues (low interest rates, and foreign investors using UK property as an asset class) the problem seems to be a combination of 1. A strict but unpredictable planning system that basically that turns housing development into a oligopoly 2. Restrictions imposed by the greenbelt 3. A collapse in government or third sector housing development since the 80s.
Although we cannot or should not --- because we are so densely populated, and because the English countryside is one of the great treasures of Europe -- develop willy nilly -- a lot of the so called green belt is actually marginal wasteland. Enlarging London to the M25 makes a lot of sense.
Also, if you look at a map, most of the area on both sides of the Thames east to Southend to Sea is edgelands. We could build a whole new London out there if we wanted.
Mr Max, surely a free market capitalist type like yourself would understand that the way to fix the housing problem is:
1. Reform planning to allow more housing to be built where the demand exists, such as in London, and to create new towns around the country. 2. Get interest rates off the floor, so that other ways of investing money generate a return. 3. Reduce the cap on housing benefit, sell off high value council housing and reinvest in new housing stock.
Then the market will do what it does, with more housing and prices falling. Trying to "f... landlords" only increases rents and makes the problem worse.
There will never be a true free market in houses because we can't build houses anywhere. If we derestrict planning London will grow to 16m and engulf the whole of Hertfordshire, Surrey and Kent which would be an environmental disaster.
Agreed on interest rates and even on council housing, but neither will address the real problem of the transfer housing from owner occupiers to landlords in the last 10 years and how to reverse it. Building more houses won't solve the problem within the next 20 years.
It's also about fairness and the transfer of wealth from the working young to the non-working elderly. We must reverse that process either by imposing higher capital gains and non-primary property taxes and lower income taxes or by forcing landlords to sell and crash the buy to let sector to make houses affordable for first time buyers.
Without that a Corbynite reaction among 18-40 year olds is imminent. It might not be Corbyn but it will be someone who is slightly more palatable but wants to impose expropriation of property into public hands. It is a huge failing of successive governments and the current one must get a handle on home ownership, the only way to do that is the fuck the landlords.
Fucking over the landlords is all very well, until you take into account that the landlords that Osbrowne tried to fuck over were the one or two property , non incorporated type - i.e. the good ones.
The institutional landlord who act like its the 18th century still, didn't get touched.
In my extensive rental experience the smaller the landlord the worse they are and the more likely they are to jack up rents. I'm just lucky I was able to get out of that rat race when I could and that my flat has increased on value by a truly ridiculous amount.
Demolish all of the big swanky houses in the posh bits of London and replace them with high rise apartment blocks. 20 times as many homes, and no greenfield building. Those displaced can afford a mansion somewhere else in the country, so they'll have nothing to complain about.
Demolish all of the big swanky houses in the posh bits of London and replace them with high rise apartment blocks. 20 times as many homes, and no greenfield building. Those displaced can afford a mansion somewhere else in the country, so they'll have nothing to complain about.
TTFN...
You don't need to demolish anything swanky. Streets of terraces in places like Fulham will do, and the land can be used to accommodate much higher quality and higher density housing befitting a world class city.
Demolish all of the big swanky houses in the posh bits of London and replace them with high rise apartment blocks. 20 times as many homes, and no greenfield building. Those displaced can afford a mansion somewhere else in the country, so they'll have nothing to complain about.
TTFN...
You don't need to demolish anything swanky. Streets of terraces in places like Fulham will do, and the land can be used to accommodate much higher quality and higher density housing befitting a world class city.
There is research from I think Savils and also Centre of London which show that redeveloping council housing - much of which is horrendously inefficient in how it uses space - could deliver a good percentage of our housing needs - can't remember how much but at least a third.
Demolish all of the big swanky houses in the posh bits of London and replace them with high rise apartment blocks. 20 times as many homes, and no greenfield building. Those displaced can afford a mansion somewhere else in the country, so they'll have nothing to complain about.
TTFN...
You don't need to demolish anything swanky. Streets of terraces in places like Fulham will do, and the land can be used to accommodate much higher quality and higher density housing befitting a world class city.
You could also set a London wide minimum roofline, and liberalise planning rules for anything built after say 1901.
Greater London is denser than greater Paris, but inner London is much much less dense than inner Paris or Manhattan. There is lots of space, but requires heroic political will to achieve a transformation of the city.
Reading ancient history, as I am aware several on this site do, you can't get through a description of one period or another without a town or city being "devastated" by its victors. Obviously 2,000+ years later we skip over it without a second thought but I often think of what that must have been like.
If a city offered resistance, and was taken by storm, then it was standard operating practice for the city to be sacked. Murder, rape, and pillage would have been the norm, with the survivors (mainly women and children) being enslaved. But, if the victorious commander considered that a special example was required, the survivors would simply be executed in cold blood, rather than being enslaved. Alexander the Great, for example, had hundreds of defenders of Tyre crucified when he captured the city.
Much the same happened in Berlin, Danzig, Konigsberg, Breslau etc. in 1945
A report on the Adeyfield West by election on the Vote2012 website by someone involved in the Green campaign . Note the ward used to be a strong Labour ward , Conservatives managed to get 1 of the 2 seats in a by election and hold it in 2011 . Lib Dems made a surprise gain of the remaining Labour seat in a 2013 by election and very narrowly held that in 2011 . Con/LD/Lab and UKIP were all within 50 votes of winning the 2nd seat . LDems ran an efficient campaign with telling and a good GOTV campaign . Effort paid off by the easy win . Conservatives put in some effort with telling and GOTV . Surprising they did not put in more effort unclear whether that was because they were overconfident based on national polls or knew the seat was lost . Labour put in a big effort with plenty of activists , a very poor result considering their past success in the ward . UKIP ,managed to put out 1 leaflet , no effort put in on the day . The resignation from the party of their 2015 parliamentary candidate seems to have left the local party moribund . Greens put in a reasonable campaign did not expect much but managed to achieve even less
Hobbes was right. We need civilising because our default state is primal and makes our lives nasty, brutish and short. Civilising requires a modicum of ability to see things from someone else's perspective. 'Isms' and religions and despots find this quite hard and so find it all too easy to revert to our uncivilised natural state.
But the evidence is that tribal peoples living those short brutish lives close to nature have virtually no mental health or depression issues, a construct of our civilization.
Read an interesting stat - the Bushmen of the Kalahari needed work only 12 hours a week to survive. Where, precisely, has our industrialization got us? (No need to answer. It is only a semi-serious rhetorical question)
Basically we can support a vastly greater population than by living as those in the Kalahari do - but at a cost of having to work much harder and on far more complex tasks.
One school of thought on the garden of eden - adam and eve - story was that it was a parable of when we reached the point where we could no longer live off the fruits of the land in a life of leisure and had to take up backbreaking farming - and in that part of the world were coerced into it by a regime that used a snake symbol.
Demolish all of the big swanky houses in the posh bits of London and replace them with high rise apartment blocks. 20 times as many homes, and no greenfield building. Those displaced can afford a mansion somewhere else in the country, so they'll have nothing to complain about.
TTFN...
You don't need to demolish anything swanky. Streets of terraces in places like Fulham will do, and the land can be used to accommodate much higher quality and higher density housing befitting a world class city.
That would be a much better use of land, but you'd also need to pay attention to transport links which would add a phenomenal amount of cost. (Roads through Fulham are an utter nightmare, and rail/tube misses most of it out).
Any significant integrated solution would (I suspect) require transport investment in the 10's of billions. That doesn't mean it's a non-starter, but simply throwing up high-density hutches will only create more problems.
Hobbes was right. We need civilising because our default state is primal and makes our lives nasty, brutish and short. Civilising requires a modicum of ability to see things from someone else's perspective. 'Isms' and religions and despots find this quite hard and so find it all too easy to revert to our uncivilised natural state.
But the evidence is that tribal peoples living those short brutish lives close to nature have virtually no mental health or depression issues, a construct of our civilization.
Read an interesting stat - the Bushmen of the Kalahari needed work only 12 hours a week to survive. Where, precisely, has our industrialization got us? (No need to answer. It is only a semi-serious rhetorical question)
Hunter-gatherers are also much less affected by drought.
Mr Max, surely a free market capitalist type like yourself would understand that the way to fix the housing problem is:
1....se.
There will never be a true free market in houses because we can't build houses anywhere. If we derestrict planning London will grow to 16m and engulf the whole of Hertfordshire, Surrey and Kent which would be an environmental disaster.
Agreed on interest rates and even on council housing, but neither will address the real problem of the transfer housing from owner occupiers to landlords in the last 10 years and how to reverse it. Building more houses won't solve the problem within the next 20 years.
It's also about fairness and the transfer of wealth from the working young to the non-working elderly. We must reverse that process either by imposing higher capital gains and non-primary property taxes and lower income taxes or by forcing landlords to sell and crash the buy to let sector to make houses affordable for first time buyers.
Without that a Corbynite reaction among 18-40 year olds is imminent. It might not be Corbyn but it will be someone who is slightly more palatable but wants to impose expropriation of property into public hands. It is a huge failing of successive governments and the current one must get a handle on home ownership, the only way to do that is the fuck the landlords.
Fucking over the landlords is all very well, until you take into account that the landlords that Osbrowne tried to fuck over were the one or two property , non incorporated type - i.e. the good ones.
The institutional landlord who act like its the 18th century still, didn't get touched.
In my extensive rental experience the smaller the landlord the worse they are and the more likely they are to jack up rents. I'm just lucky I was able to get out of that rat race when I could and that my flat has increased on value by a truly ridiculous amount.
I had good landlords and bad, and for my sins I'm now a landlord myself (an accidental one, I couldn't sell my house quickly enough to secure the move I needed for the kids schooling and wife's work needs, so I rent our old house out to a friend at a level below the market rate).
We gave our tenant 5 years on a template , no rises in the 5 (above inflation, and we haven't imposed that either), and a month free upfront to decorate and move in. The problem is that the rent barely covers the mortgage, so when tax rules change, any work we have to do will be done at a loss I suspect.
Osborne only attacked private landlords, many of whom only own a rental because all other routes to investment are useless in ZIRP, or because they simply couldn't sell in a mortgage tight environment.
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Hobbes was right. We need civilising because our default state is primal and makes our lives nasty, brutish and short. Civilising requires a modicum of ability to see things from someone else's perspective. 'Isms' and religions and despots find this quite hard and so find it all too easy to revert to our uncivilised natural state.
[Also, Tyre was a monumental siege. Can't recall off the top of my head, but it was at least months and possibly years in the making].
I estimate ~124,000 people age 24-26 are missing from the GA voter file. Here is a comparison of GA & NC voter reg freq by year of birth
https://twitter.com/electproject
Will affect Democrats much more.
Now I am very doubtful he is rational.
Silly little mortgage guarantee schemes of the Osborne type aren't going to cut it: the only solution is the building of a very large number of new houses, which is going to mean cutting chunks out of the green belt and letting developers concrete them - with the caveats that building regs need to be tightened to end the scourge of rabbit hutch new builds, and there need to be proper plans put in place at the outset for transport, public services and so on, in the same way as the garden cities and new towns were carefully managed.
Anyway, I shall be interested to see if May (or Javid) announces anything meaningful to deal with this issue at Tory conference - although the small Government majority does leave them exposed to Nimbyism on this. If we're to have a radical rethink on housing then a new policy may (a) have to be articulated in the next Tory manifesto, and (b) go for large scale development in a limited number of locations, both to minimise the numbers of Parliamentary constituencies affected and because urbanisation is probably the best way forward. Building up carefully planned cities with good public transportation links has to be better than fighting two hundred separate battles with local protestors over developing new towns, or bolting chunks onto existing ones, all over the place. If I had anything to do with solving this problem (which, mercifully, I do not) then I would adjust the boundary of Greater London to match the M25, and invite the Mayor to begin drawing up new plans immediately; and I would be thinking about expanding Oxford and Cambridge to each accommodate half a million people, with dedicated high speed rail lines running express services straight into central London.
Read an interesting stat - the Bushmen of the Kalahari needed work only 12 hours a week to survive. Where, precisely, has our industrialization got us? (No need to answer. It is only a semi-serious rhetorical question)
Agreed on interest rates and even on council housing, but neither will address the real problem of the transfer housing from owner occupiers to landlords in the last 10 years and how to reverse it. Building more houses won't solve the problem within the next 20 years.
It's also about fairness and the transfer of wealth from the working young to the non-working elderly. We must reverse that process either by imposing higher capital gains and non-primary property taxes and lower income taxes or by forcing landlords to sell and crash the buy to let sector to make houses affordable for first time buyers.
Without that a Corbynite reaction among 18-40 year olds is imminent. It might not be Corbyn but it will be someone who is slightly more palatable but wants to impose expropriation of property into public hands. It is a huge failing of successive governments and the current one must get a handle on home ownership, the only way to do that is the fuck the landlords.
Moves I agree with, but also moves that add to the cost considerably. Anyone can build houses; it's much harder to build communities.
"I would be thinking about expanding Oxford and Cambridge to each accommodate half a million people, with dedicated high speed rail lines running express services straight into central London."
Currently there is talk about building a linear 'town' (or string of villages) between Cambridge, MK and Oxford, using the newly-reopened Oxford to Cambridge railway line (if they ever decide to rebuild the Bedford to Cambridge section).
Most of the major cities are completely surrounded by Green Belt, but that around London is much the most extensive. Something like half of Hertfordshire and Surrey, along with big chunks of Kent, Berks, Bucks, Beds, Essex, and separate doughnut rings totally encircling Oxford and Cambridge, are all covered by this protection. Some of this will be land that we shall definitely want to avoid developing if possible, especially AONBs and grade 1 agricultural land, but ultimately, as I said, the houses have to go somewhere - and better off near London than dumping them out in Northamptonshire or Suffolk, where they'll swallow up just as much open countryside, but then leave all the residents who work in/closer to London facing very long, tiresome and expensive commutes.
But there's a lot to be said for councils acquiring the power to issue compulsory purchase orders, buy farmland at existing use value, give it planning consent and sell serviced plots to self builders who want to build detached houses, or to developers who want to build flats. As in Germany.
It happened in Milton Keynes. But the profit went to the Treasury. It should partly stay with the council.
TTFN...
The institutional landlord who act like its the 18th century still, didn't get touched.
Not only are home ownership rates falling, we have the some of the smallest new build houses in Europe I think - even comparably dense countries like the Netherlands build bigger than us. And London remains extremely overvalued (see latest UBS figures).
Putting aside demand-side issues (low interest rates, and foreign investors using UK property as an asset class) the problem seems to be a combination of
1. A strict but unpredictable planning system that basically that turns housing development into a oligopoly
2. Restrictions imposed by the greenbelt
3. A collapse in government or third sector housing development since the 80s.
Although we cannot or should not --- because we are so densely populated, and because the English countryside is one of the great treasures of Europe -- develop willy nilly -- a lot of the so called green belt is actually marginal wasteland. Enlarging London to the M25 makes a lot of sense.
Also, if you look at a map, most of the area on both sides of the Thames east to Southend to Sea is edgelands. We could build a whole new London out there if we wanted.
Greater London is denser than greater Paris, but inner London is much much less dense than inner Paris or Manhattan. There is lots of space, but requires heroic political will to achieve a transformation of the city.
Russia Much the same happened in Berlin, Danzig, Konigsberg, Breslau etc. in 1945
LDems ran an efficient campaign with telling and a good GOTV campaign . Effort paid off by the easy win .
Conservatives put in some effort with telling and GOTV . Surprising they did not put in more effort unclear whether that was because they were overconfident based on national polls or knew the seat was lost .
Labour put in a big effort with plenty of activists , a very poor result considering their past success in the ward .
UKIP ,managed to put out 1 leaflet , no effort put in on the day . The resignation from the party of their 2015 parliamentary candidate seems to have left the local party moribund .
Greens put in a reasonable campaign did not expect much but managed to achieve even less
Con 51 UKIP 27 Labour 15 Minor Parties 12
There's a pointer to 2020 if Brexit isn't delivered.
One school of thought on the garden of eden - adam and eve - story was that it was a parable of when we reached the point where we could no longer live off the fruits of the land in a life of leisure and had to take up backbreaking farming - and in that part of the world were coerced into it by a regime that used a snake symbol.
Any significant integrated solution would (I suspect) require transport investment in the 10's of billions. That doesn't mean it's a non-starter, but simply throwing up high-density hutches will only create more problems.
How long till the cages seen in Hong Kong become a reality, eh?
Labour already well behind the curve and those Tory/UKIP numbers could easily swing. UKIP stand a chance of breaking through.
NEW THREAD
We gave our tenant 5 years on a template , no rises in the 5 (above inflation, and we haven't imposed that either), and a month free upfront to decorate and move in. The problem is that the rent barely covers the mortgage, so when tax rules change, any work we have to do will be done at a loss I suspect.
Osborne only attacked private landlords, many of whom only own a rental because all other routes to investment are useless in ZIRP, or because they simply couldn't sell in a mortgage tight environment.