Mr. Eagles, cities already get disproportionately more funding (I get why, the funding can go further due to higher population density) than towns and villages, so throwing more powers and privileges to cities will only widen the gap between the urban and rural populations.
Not to mention that mayors cannot set income tax rates, whereas Holyrood can vary them (to give one example). There's more power in Scottish devolution and Scotland is kept whole. Your preference is for weaker English devolution and to carve England into fiefdoms. It fails utterly compared to an English Parliament.
IFS just endorsed the stamp duty exemption for first time buyers as a positive in the budget thereby dishing all the media journalists negative comments
TBF to Davis that sounds like an idiot diary secretary rather than anything else.
I can easily see a conversation between DD and DS along the lines of "No point in talking to X. Can you see if Kenny is available?" and DS assuming it was a first name not a surname.
Glad I wasn't the only one thinking that.
As it's the civil service, I imagine the solution to their incompetence will be to promote them.
No, a glowing reference gets you a sideways transfer to another department.
That’s how DExEU got staffed in the first place.
DExEU's big staffing problems is that
1) No one really wants to work for a department that won't be extant within a couple of years
2) Few want to work for the preening egotist that is David Davis
That wasn't my problem.
I applied and pulled out when I found out my salary would be almost halved.
Happy to do my duty, work longer hours for less money to help, but I couldn't pay the mortgage on what the civil service pay.
Of course, there was zero flexibility.
A friend of mine works for the DfIT, she's incredibly smart. I don't know why she bothers for what they pay her.
It depends on your lifestyle and expectations.
For smart people entering the civil service from an NGO from the regions the pay is probably quite good, comparatively. If you're coming from a major profession, or consultancy, currently employed in London, not so much.
The way the civil service get round that is by hiring the latter as consultants on v.expensive day rates, usually from the Big4, when it'd be much cheaper to hire them in-house, but they'd then have to pay them a much higher salary the civil service unions wouldn't wear.
You're one of the people who supports the public sector pay cap, aren't you?
Non sequiter. It's more efficient for the public purse overall to get the right skills they need to do the job that needs to be done required on time, on budget and to quality.
Even if you disagree with that, it's crazy to retain multiple EY/Deloitte staff at £1,500 per day, when you could pay £80-£100k pa to have the same resource in house on short-medium term contracts (rather than offering £45-60k) with a net saving to the public purse.
en the promised abolition of letting agent fees seems to have disappeared into the long grass.
.
In such a scenario, where do people who cannot get a mortgage or want to rent short term go?
If you tax yields, then surely those remaining landlords in the market would have to hike up their rents to compensate for the tax bill.
Obliterating the private rented sector cannot be a wise move.
The whole point is that it would increase supply and reduce house prices. The point of a huge surcharge is that there is no way to pass it on, someone who pays £1200 per month on a £360k value house won't suddenly be able to pay an extra £900 per month if a 3% surcharge were introduced to the landlord. The landlord would have to sell. Once you take it across the whole market we're suddenly unlocking up to a million homes, mostly in London and the SE where yields are lower than in the North and Midlands for owner occupiers. There isn't a housing shortage so much as a shortage of housing available to purchase. Removing units from the rental market and putting them into the owner occupier market will ease a lot of the current housing shortage.
I'm not sure I understand your plan, but it seems to me that the actual problem is that many people have no access to the housing market. No way of getting on to the housing ladder. The taxi driver I spoke to yesterday is 44 and cannot get a mortgage, even though he had a sizeable inheritance last year and has been working self employed with a stable income for 20 years. And, we are in a town which is affordable, his rented flat is worth about £120 - 150K. For whatever reason, he cannot get a mortgage.
So, if you create policies that force landlords to sell you end up making him homeless, and many other people like him, and reduce the supply of private rented sector houses. It only helps the people who are in the position of being able to get a mortgage. So, middle class kids with parental assistance; people otherwise on the straight and narrow who have managed to save up around £10k. But that just isn't any where near a majority of young people. Nor does it help my taxi driver friend.
Secondly, entry level housing are frequently leasehold flats which are unmortgageable due to management and structural issues and the increasing tighening of rules in this regard (ie post grenfell). So, the only market for these flats are landlords who are cash buyers anyway because no bank will go near them.
Leasehold is a scam. I'm amazed that England has put up with it for so long.
The Liberal Democrats are positioned perfectly as an economically centre-left pro-Remaim party. The problem is that most Remainers have allowed their anger at Brexit to focus on punishing the Tories by voting Labour, even while Corbyn is much more anti-EU than May.
Labour won't be able to perch on its fence forever.
STV for local government was the logical choice, as in Scotland. But the MPs were too obsessed with improving their own prospects.
A stronger local government base would have done the LDs huge benefit, over time. Nationwide experience of fairer voting might have built support for a change for GEs. And, since the Tories don't actually care that much about local government, if the LibDem negotiators had played their cards right, I am sure that retreating from national change to local change could have delivered an agreement from the Tories.
Yes, I think next time we need to go into negotiations with much stronger "red lines" and while I'd like us to insist on STV for all elections without a referendum, having it for all non-Westminster elections is a good start.
The other side is not yielding to civil service/media pressure to form a Government. Back in 2010, Greece appeared to be on the brink of implosion and all we heard from (especially) the pro-Conservative media was that a new Government had to be quickly formed and all that.
The outgoing Prime Minister also needs to be reminded he or she remains in a caretaker capacity pending the formation of a new administration whether that takes hours, days or weeks. The country wouldn't have fallen apart if Brown had stayed in No.10 for a few days longer and indeed most other countries function with long periods of transition (Belgium, Germany and even the US has two and a half months between the election and a new administration taking over).
Finally, we mustn't be afraid to walk away if the deal doesn't work.
Fair do's. The lender is a participant in a free market, they decide who to lend the money to (albeit in a heavily regulated way). The question is really whether it is right that people are stuck in insecurity and unable to accumulate wealth, to support the profitability of banks.
We saw what happens when the government intervenes in the mortgage market in 2007. The Communities Reinvestment Act in the US was largely the trigger for the sub-prime crisis.
No it wasn't. That's a piece of quasi racist clap trap that was promulgated by the Ameican right to feed the "minorities are to blame for everything" narrative HT have going on.
You might want to forget about all these people, but for millions of people their personal circumstances mean that there is just no chance whatseover that they can get a mortgage.
Even if the prices go down 50%, which they might well do anyway, this won't solve the problem, because if you have a 10k deposit, you still need to borrow another £50k to meet the £60k asking price. And that is before you take in to account the likelihood of rising interest rates which make the monthly payments even more unaffordable.
OHHH JEREMY CORBYN.
Mortgage rules are onerous, that is true, but the last time they were relaxed and self-certified income was acceptable, we saw the consequences. Also, a lot of those ineligible people you have pointed out suffer from poor life choices, but would be eligible for social housing, which, IMO, is the other side of the coin. Money raised from the additional taxes should be spent on procuring and building millions of social housing units across the country. We need to expand owner occupation, but also expand social housing for secure tenancies and a more secure lifestyle.
So then, you are advocating for a significant fall in house prices partially engineered by punitive taxation on landlords, which is nonetheless going to lead to an increase in tax revenues (along with the obliteration of the private rented sector) that then results in sufficient revenue to promote a massive increase in social housing that provides for everyone excluded from the mortgage market.
It seems a bit far fetched.
Why not: a) keep the private rented sector as it basically works well enough, and just make tenancies more secure? b) encourage institutional investment in new build private rented sector (ie rather than individual landlords) c) Find ways of taking over poor quality leasehold housing through co-operatives/ community ownership etc? d) Expand shared equity schemes for people who are unable to access mortgages or are on low incomes, ie through credit unions. e) stop putting people in the position where they have to take out mortgages as the only way of obtaining secure housing, when they may not be ready to do so (ie when they are not in secure relationships). f) reduce the transaction costs and time involved in buying and selling property. g) find a way of promoting a sustainable reduction in house prices, whilst returning interest rates to a more realistic level.
How would you go about achieving those goals?
Also, believe me shared ownership flats are seen as a scam by most of my friends, everyone is avoiding them like the plague. It should be phased out.
TBF to Davis that sounds like an idiot diary secretary rather than anything else.
I can easily see a conversation between DD and DS along the lines of "No point in talking to X. Can you see if Kenny is available?" and DS assuming it was a first name not a surname.
Referring to a minister by his forename is no more acceptable than by his surname. The diary secretary knows to call David Davis "the Secretary of State". They should have known to call Davis' counterparts by their title. It slightly amuses me when civil servant friends refer to their bosses by the "Minister" title in general conversation. It's ingrained.
Which is why it probably really was DD himself.
Writing on his Diary Secretary's laptop? I don't think so.
Why did Davis think it was proper to be trying to arrange meetings with the Irish PM in the first place? PMs deal with PMs, Finance ministers with finance ministers, foreign office ministers with foreign office ministers and etc.
Whether he was right to ask his office contact the Irish PM rather than to go through No 10 is another matter but it's clear that getting a solution to the Irish border question is dependent on the agreement of Kenny, as then, or Varadkar, as now.
FWIW, it's far from unknown for PMs to talk to ministers of other countries, though protocol usually demands it happens informally - as an ad hoc meeting following on from some scheduled event, say.
I was pleasantly surprised by the budget yesterday. I put up a wish list of things I thought needed addressed and they all were. Of course you can argue about the extent to which they were addressed but given the tightness of the situation he achieved more than I expected.
The most important thing in the budget going forward was of course the reduction in growth forecasts. On the face of it this looked very bad news for the government but having listened to the chatter whilst driving to and from Aberdeen (after close of play, natch) it seemed to me to be having 2 favourable effects.
First, the link between our standard of living and our productivity has been reestablished in the public mind in a big way. The government is trying to help with this (arguably a little belatedly) but it is not ultimately a government problem.
Secondly, the consequences of this make the Labour plans to spend more on everything look frankly frivolous and silly, hence their more difficult interviews over the last couple of days. No one is happy about the appalling record on real wages but there seems to me more of a recognition that this is the world in which both we and the government are operating and it’s tough. Waving magic wands to make it all go away just isn’t going to cut it.
Is this gross over optimism from a semi detached supporter? Maybe but it will be interesting to see how the polling moves from here.
The Lib Dems could have chosen to move toward an electoral pact with the Tories and become a latter day version of the National Liberals or they could have offered a "confidence and supply" arrangement without accepting ministerial posts like the current arrangement between the DUP and the Tories.
They chose to go into government with no electoral guarantees and thus got the worst of both worlds. This was largely due to the personal vanity of Clegg and Cable - they could not resist the lure of office even though they could have got most, if not all, of the influence they wanted without it.
A solid piece from TSE and very little with which I, as an LD, can disagree.
I would be looking at the 2021 County elections for some insight - the Conservatives had a remarkably good round in 2017 and the extent to which those advances can be held may be indicative of prospects for the GE.
As a LibDem, I agree with all that, including that the Party I joined in 1983 was destroyed by the Coalition.
I'm canvassing in Richmond and Twickenham for the locals next May. I think the LibDems have a reasonable chance of taking it. The Tory party is taking a big hit here for its approach to Brexit. Also, EU nationals can vote in the locals and there are a LOT of them here, and they're angry.
Coalition was always going to destroy the Lib Dems because by building a party from the bottom up, with relatively few things bar expedience keeping its disparate support together, the pressures of government and the compromises of coalition, were going to break those weak bonds and repel the many who joined to oppose the sort of things governments do (it didn't help that it was the Tories that the LDs went into coalition with, but a fag-end Gordon Brown government wouldn't have been any better).
What's so striking is that so many Lib Dems are so insistent on following exactly the same plan that resulted in disaster last time. Of course, in the short term, it might bring gains here and there. Sooner or later though, there'll come a point where they have to choose which big party to back in government. And then it'll all crash down again.
What alternative do they have under our system?
As someone else said (Robert Smithson?) they should have pushed for PR in the Lords, to set a precedent.
It was me who's said for a long time that they should have pushed for PR in the Lords, not as a precedent - I think it'd make it harder to then introduce it for the Commons as there's a value in the two being elected on different systems - but because it would potentially make them the swing vote in the Lords/Senate and with a democratic mandate, the Lords could demand an increase in power to go alongside elections: a return to the 1911 Parliament Act provisions, for example.
The alternative that they have is to build a strong national brand rather than a series of strong local ones.
Fair do's. The lender is a participant in a free market, they decide who to lend the money to (albeit in a heavily regulated way). The question is really whether it is right that people are stuck in insecurity and unable to accumulate wealth, to support the profitability of banks.
We saw what happens when the government intervenes in the mortgage market in 2007. The Communities Reinvestment Act in the US was largely the trigger for the sub-prime crisis.
No it wasn't. That's a piece of quasi racist clap trap that was promulgated by the Ameican right to feed the "minorities are to blame for everything" narrative HT have going on.
CRA loans were less likely to default than non-CRA sub prime loans.
Middle and high income defaulter made up a larger proportion of the defaults-to-morgages ratio.
Cameron has a lot to answer for. I suspect history will put him right up there with Lord North and Neville Chamberlain.
The problem for Cameron's historical position is that the referendum wasn't a one-off mistake, but the culmination of his entire strategy as an elected politician. He appeased the forces that eventually consumed him and acted as their vehicle to gain power.
He kicked the can down the road again and again until he ran out of road.
He should have insisted Brexit would only happen if all four countries voted for it in the referendum.
Would be entirely consistent with what a Conservative and Unionist believes in.
That would be a federalist position. The Unionist position is we vote as one unit
Comments
Now we are choosing to have no border by our own volition.
You'd have to be very sad to complain about that.
Not to mention that mayors cannot set income tax rates, whereas Holyrood can vary them (to give one example). There's more power in Scottish devolution and Scotland is kept whole. Your preference is for weaker English devolution and to carve England into fiefdoms. It fails utterly compared to an English Parliament.
Even if you disagree with that, it's crazy to retain multiple EY/Deloitte staff at £1,500 per day, when you could pay £80-£100k pa to have the same resource in house on short-medium term contracts (rather than offering £45-60k) with a net saving to the public purse.
NEW THREAD
The other side is not yielding to civil service/media pressure to form a Government. Back in 2010, Greece appeared to be on the brink of implosion and all we heard from (especially) the pro-Conservative media was that a new Government had to be quickly formed and all that.
The outgoing Prime Minister also needs to be reminded he or she remains in a caretaker capacity pending the formation of a new administration whether that takes hours, days or weeks. The country wouldn't have fallen apart if Brown had stayed in No.10 for a few days longer and indeed most other countries function with long periods of transition (Belgium, Germany and even the US has two and a half months between the election and a new administration taking over).
Finally, we mustn't be afraid to walk away if the deal doesn't work.
Also, believe me shared ownership flats are seen as a scam by most of my friends, everyone is avoiding them like the plague. It should be phased out.
FWIW, it's far from unknown for PMs to talk to ministers of other countries, though protocol usually demands it happens informally - as an ad hoc meeting following on from some scheduled event, say.
The most important thing in the budget going forward was of course the reduction in growth forecasts. On the face of it this looked very bad news for the government but having listened to the chatter whilst driving to and from Aberdeen (after close of play, natch) it seemed to me to be having 2 favourable effects.
First, the link between our standard of living and our productivity has been reestablished in the public mind in a big way. The government is trying to help with this (arguably a little belatedly) but it is not ultimately a government problem.
Secondly, the consequences of this make the Labour plans to spend more on everything look frankly frivolous and silly, hence their more difficult interviews over the last couple of days. No one is happy about the appalling record on real wages but there seems to me more of a recognition that this is the world in which both we and the government are operating and it’s tough. Waving magic wands to make it all go away just isn’t going to cut it.
Is this gross over optimism from a semi detached supporter? Maybe but it will be interesting to see how the polling moves from here.
The Lib Dems could have chosen to move toward an electoral pact with the Tories and become a latter day version of the National Liberals or they could have offered a "confidence and supply" arrangement without accepting ministerial posts like the current arrangement between the DUP and the Tories.
They chose to go into government with no electoral guarantees and thus got the worst of both worlds. This was largely due to the personal vanity of Clegg and Cable - they could not resist the lure of office even though they could have got most, if not all, of the influence they wanted without it.
The alternative that they have is to build a strong national brand rather than a series of strong local ones.
Middle and high income defaulter made up a larger proportion of the defaults-to-morgages ratio.