Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Johnson starts debate day with punters rating his chances of a

124

Comments

  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 26,176
    edited November 2019
    Well if nothing else it's a good test case for "a rising tide lifts all boats".
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,614
    Noo said:

    Good morning, islamophobes and assorted bigots.

    Morning, Jew-gasser......

  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,478

    ""In a video posted to his campaign Facebook page on Sunday, Anderson told voters of his plan to evict "nuisance tenants" that have been bothering residents in the area.

    "People say to me, 'but they've got to live somewhere'. That's right, so my plan would be, and again this is just my own personal opinion, is that these people who have to live somewhere, let's have them in a tent, in the middle of a field.

    "Six o'clock every morning, let's have them up, let's have them in the field, picking potatoes or any other seasonal vegetables, back in the tent, cold shower, lights out, six o'clock, same again the next day. That would be my solution.""
    I thought the Tories didn't like Gypsies, Travellers and so on? Shouldn't be encouraging them!
  • wooliedyedwooliedyed Posts: 10,061
    Swinson appears to be turning a golden opportunity into a disaster, shes really very poor. She might also single handedly save the Labour party at this rate
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,129
    edited November 2019

    In a new batshit insane move:
    twitter.com/NJamesWorld/status/1196717500710490112

    The scary thing is these dangerous idiots might get a 1/3 of the vote, twice that of say the Lib Dems.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,478

    Swinson appears to be turning a golden opportunity into a disaster, shes really very poor. She might also single handedly save the Labour party at this rate

    What's she done?
  • It is a right little sewer on here this morning...
  • Phil said:

    I'm not familiar with the London market and no doubt its very different to here in the North West.

    However either way long term the price of a home will be settled by demand [number of people wanting a home] and supply [number of homes available]. New builds increase supply and deflate the prices in the long term. More new builds will long term deflate prices by more.

    Hence why property prices have in recent years largely stabilised and home ownership is currently rising not falling. That is good news is it not? Would anyone like to return to falling home ownership?

    The majority of house buyers buy with money borrowed from elsewhere - in 2018 it was about 2:1 mortgage:cash buyers. House prices are therefore strongly affected by the availability & price of credit offered to potential buyers. It’s a two-legged market that funnels money from willing lenders through willing buyers to sellers.

    Demand is not just ”the number of people wanting a home”, it’s ”how much can those people borrow”. Indirectly, the banks decide how much house prices are by how willing they are to lend just as much buyers do by how much they are willing to borrow.
    By your own figures a third of properties are bought by cash buyers.

    If the availability of credit disappears then what happens? Prices go down a bit and the cash buyers [landlords] get cheaper homes. Those struggling to get on the property ladder are not aided by shifting the balance in favour of cash buyers!

    Personally I would like to get back on the property ladder but I can't buy a property for cash. If credit gets harder then landlords who buy for cash can get properties for cheaper in order to let them out increasing their profit margins. How is that good?
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,129
    edited November 2019

    Swinson appears to be turning a golden opportunity into a disaster, shes really very poor. She might also single handedly save the Labour party at this rate

    Save them at this election? That wouldn't be saving them for the long term though.....every day they lurch further to the batshit left.
  • HYUFD said:

    marke0903 said:

    Have the Lib Dems dropped revoking A50? Had a leaflet from the Lib Dem candidate former MP Mark Williams here in Ceredigion today the only mention of Brexit is that he will protect farmers from a no deal Brexit

    In Leave voting Powys maybe, in Remain voting London revoking A50 still very much LD policy
    They can only Revoke if they get a majority. If that happens there won't be any 'Leave voting' areas left.
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118
    edited November 2019
    Phil said:

    MattW said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Why? Perhaps she could name which of the many banks existing now were in existence at the time when slavery was around and the money they made from it. Ditto with businesses.

    Worth noting that her statement about supporters of Boris Johnson being like Klu Klux Klan members is potentially defamatory. It is possible to defame someone without identifying them personally if they can still be clearly identified as part of a group.
    Did she mention the East African slave trade and how all the oil rich countries will have to pay recompense?

    Or the compensation that one lot of tribes who enslaved another lot od tribes will be paying?

    Sorry, but ... LOL.

    And this is supposed to be a future party leader?
    “Those guys over there did the bad thing too!” is not a good look.

    We took the slave trade and turned it into an engine of destruction out of which certain parts of the country made huge profits. I walked past a beautiful country house in Shropshire last year which had been in the family ever since the C18th. It was bought with money made in the slave trade.

    These monuments to cruelty are all around us, yet we choose to ignore them & pretend that we owe nothing to the people we exploited. I don’t know what form reparations ought to take, but I do believe that a moral country would make some effort to improve the lot of the descendants of those we exploited. How to do that without turning it into a rolling ball of recrimination and resentment that never really ends is the difficult part, but I believe we ought to try anyway.
    I don’t disagree. Is allowing their descendants to live in England on an equal footing a form of repayment?

    I don’t see the exploitation of EU immigrants as much different. The same arguments are used to justify it. I’m sure slavery boosted a country’s GDP while widening the gap between rich and poor too

    A lot of people claim freedom to live and work wherever they like is some kind of right, and that the people in the host country aren’t any More entitled to the fruits of said country than others. How does that work when it’s white Europeans raping and pillaging the land of Aborigines, Native Americans, Asians and Africans?
  • wooliedyedwooliedyed Posts: 10,061

    Swinson appears to be turning a golden opportunity into a disaster, shes really very poor. She might also single handedly save the Labour party at this rate

    What's she done?
    Unpicking cables good groundwork. Shes overreached and made it a cult of personality when the personality isn't popular. She appears to be living up to the negative predictions of a Swinson leadership posited a year or so ago
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868
    edited November 2019

    IanB2 said:

    Dura_Ace said:



    I really fail to see why CR is getting all this grief. Yes, people do make a choice to become landlords; one of my son's rented for a couple of years from someone who apparently took the opportunity of a windfall (or something like that) to buy a couple of houses when the market was low as, he told us, a 'pensionable' investment. That was 10 or so years ago and the place is, AFAIK, still tenanted and seems from the outside to be in good repair. Locally there are quite of lot of houses rented.

    Landlordism is socially destructive and should be condemned. It's not the venality of it, although that is worthy of opprobrium on its own, the true moral lapse is putting oneself in a position of power over another citizen.
    Do you think Germany is a socially destroyed society, where almost half (used to be over half) of the population rent?
    Isn't that property mostly corporately owned?
    If it is, how does it pass Dura Ace’s test of the moral lapse of one citizen being in a position of power over another?

    Or is it ok when corporations do it?
    German tenants have proper rights (including, usually, to keep pets) and I would expect property owned by German banks and pensions to be managed more professionally than by the bunch of greedy amateurs and chancers together with their crooked agents that we suffer here in the UK
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,318
    Still, if Labour want to go on about reparations for past wrongs committed by the British establishment I look forward to their policy of paying reparations to us Catholics, with a special bonus for Irish Catholics, for all the wrongs done over three centuries - seizure of property without compensation, torture and execution, denial of the vote, denial of the right to make a living, denial of the right to practise their religion freely, famine etc etc......

    I am sure some of Corbyn’s Sinn Fein friends will be able to fill him on the details re Ireland and I am very willing to provide details of the many and varied ways in which Catholics on the mainland were ill treated by the British from the time of Henry VIII onwards, long before Britain got involved in the slave trade.

    I mean, these historical wrongs should be compensated in the right order, no?

    Or are Catholics the wrong type of victims in Dawn Butler’s mind (assuming she has one)?
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,614

    When you select MPs mainly on the basis that they are sound on Brexit then, inevitably, you have to make compromises with other determinants.

    Do you think he would have made it onto Cameron's A-list?

    (Though, under Cameron, the closest the Tories came to winning Ashfield was defeat by 11.5pp)
    I helped win Ashfield for the Tories - in 1977.....
  • wooliedyedwooliedyed Posts: 10,061

    Swinson appears to be turning a golden opportunity into a disaster, shes really very poor. She might also single handedly save the Labour party at this rate

    Save them at this election? That wouldn't be saving them for the long term though.....every day they lurch further to the batshit left.
    Yes but they could have been buried by Christmas. They now look at least likely to hold at about 200 seats thanks to Jo 'go back to your constituencies and prepare shrines to me' Swinson handing them votes
  • ""In a video posted to his campaign Facebook page on Sunday, Anderson told voters of his plan to evict "nuisance tenants" that have been bothering residents in the area.

    "People say to me, 'but they've got to live somewhere'. That's right, so my plan would be, and again this is just my own personal opinion, is that these people who have to live somewhere, let's have them in a tent, in the middle of a field.

    "Six o'clock every morning, let's have them up, let's have them in the field, picking potatoes or any other seasonal vegetables, back in the tent, cold shower, lights out, six o'clock, same again the next day. That would be my solution.""
    That'll probably go down pretty well.

    Of course the twatteri will be agast, but it'll play well frankly.
  • Cyclefree said:

    Still, if Labour want to go on about reparations for past wrongs committed by the British establishment I look forward to their policy of paying reparations to us Catholics, with a special bonus for Irish Catholics, for all the wrongs done over three centuries - seizure of property without compensation, torture and execution, denial of the vote, denial of the right to make a living, denial of the right to practise their religion freely, famine etc etc......

    I am sure some of Corbyn’s Sinn Fein friends will be able to fill him on the details re Ireland and I am very willing to provide details of the many and varied ways in which Catholics on the mainland were ill treated by the British from the time of Henry VIII onwards, long before Britain got involved in the slave trade.

    I mean, these historical wrongs should be compensated in the right order, no?

    Or are Catholics the wrong type of victims in Dawn Butler’s mind (assuming she has one)?

    Finally, a policy I can get on board with.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 22,845
    edited November 2019

    What government props and subsidies are there to private rental market?

    Housing Benefit - £23bn in 2018-19
    QE - £435bn specifically to boost asset prices
    Mortgage Loans - govt owned RBS and Lloyds, a big share of the buy to let market, allowed to be loss making for many years whilst still paying huge bonuses
    UK Asset Resolution - took on board £95bn of bad debt mortgages in 2010. Would otherwise have been distressed sales moving down the price of property.
    Help to Buy - as discussed

    It is surprising how many are against govt handouts when it is for the less fortunate on points of economic and political principle but are quite happy with the above going to landlords.
    How does Help to Buy help landlords? It hurts landlords.

    Help to Buy literally hurts landlords three ways, remembering of course that landlords can't use Help to Buy, they are specifically excluded.

    Firstly if as you claim there is a price premium on the cost of new builds due to Help to Buy then landlords have to pay that premium just as much as first time buyers/movers do. Your own evidence suggests help to buy hurts them.
    Secondly if more first time buyers/movers can afford a home landlords have to compete with them, increasing their costs.
    Finally if more first time buyers buy a home that means fewer tenants for a landlord to let to.

    As for your other examples distressed sales are fantastic for landlords. Who do you think buys distressed sales? Landlords get to get a firesale propety to add to their portfolio.
    You are right re help to buy - it is anti tenants/potential buyers but pro builders not pro landlords. My mistake on that one, was thinking about it from a tenants perspective.

    If the loans that were unsustainable without government intervention had been called in, the big change would have seen prices cheaper leading to fewer renters, also the moral hazard of seeing big landlords go into bankruptcy would have changed the mindset of you cant lose buying houses.

    Some of the UKAR portfolio are landlords with portfolios of hundreds of rented properties that are uneconomic and loss making. They have been in a zombie state for a decade or so, the landlords are often not allowed to sell parts of the portfolio without selling it all, which they do not want to do as it would crash the local market, and no-one is interested in buying the oversized unprofitable portfolios at market rates.
  • alb1onalb1on Posts: 698

    alb1on said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    I wonder if the Tories effectively start this election on about 295 seats, once you strip off 5 losses to the SNP in Scotland and about 15 losses to the LDs and one or two Labour Gain surprises.

    So, they need 31 gains from Labour to get back up to an overall majority again.

    Where (precisely) are these coming from, and how do we know the Labour vote isn’t very sticky in those seats?

    The Tories need a swing of 3.39% to get 31 Labour seats, the latest poll from.ICM gives them a swing of 4% from Labour, the latest poll from Survation a swing of 5% and Deltapoll and Yougov higher still. The LDs are also only gaining 3 Tory seats with ICM with a swing of just 3% from the Tories

    http://www.electionpolling.co.uk/battleground/targets/conservative

    Pretty fine though, isn’t it?
    If the LDs do gain just 3 Tory seats the Tories only need 16 gains from Labour assuming the SNP gain 5 Tory seats for a majority, a swing of just 1% from Labour on 2017 would do that
    I think the LDs will gain far more from the Tories than that
    The latest ICM and Deltapoll and Survation have a swing of just 3% from Tory to LD meaning just 3 LD gains from the Tories
    This is an overall picture. It varies wildly by region, and the biggest swings to the LDs are in London and the SE, where there are most vulnerable seats (Richmond, Guildford, Lewes, Winchester, Wimbledon, City of London, St Albans etc). This picture was supported by the Guardian constituency poll articles at the weekend. What would be interesting would be constituency polls in places like Cheadle and Southport which could compare LD performance in local targets with the regional swing for those areas.
    or Totnes.....
    My problem with Totnes is that I do not think a local poll would tell us much because Wollaston is not a good guide to whether the LDs are doing better in target seats than in the region as a whole. A better indicator may be one of the other SW targets like St Ives. I know we disagree on Wollaston's chances, but think we can probably agree that Totnes is atypical of both the region and LD targets.
  • ozymandiasozymandias Posts: 1,503
    Cyclefree said:

    Still, if Labour want to go on about reparations for past wrongs committed by the British establishment I look forward to their policy of paying reparations to us Catholics, with a special bonus for Irish Catholics, for all the wrongs done over three centuries - seizure of property without compensation, torture and execution, denial of the vote, denial of the right to make a living, denial of the right to practise their religion freely, famine etc etc......

    I am sure some of Corbyn’s Sinn Fein friends will be able to fill him on the details re Ireland and I am very willing to provide details of the many and varied ways in which Catholics on the mainland were ill treated by the British from the time of Henry VIII onwards, long before Britain got involved in the slave trade.

    I mean, these historical wrongs should be compensated in the right order, no?

    Or are Catholics the wrong type of victims in Dawn Butler’s mind (assuming she has one)?

    On a similar theme, can we trace the ancestors of those who had their assets stripped after the Norman invasion?
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,614
    alb1on said:

    alb1on said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    I wonder if the Tories effectively start this election on about 295 seats, once you strip off 5 losses to the SNP in Scotland and about 15 losses to the LDs and one or two Labour Gain surprises.

    So, they need 31 gains from Labour to get back up to an overall majority again.

    Where (precisely) are these coming from, and how do we know the Labour vote isn’t very sticky in those seats?

    The Tories need a swing of 3.39% to get 31 Labour seats, the latest poll from.ICM gives them a swing of 4% from Labour, the latest poll from Survation a swing of 5% and Deltapoll and Yougov higher still. The LDs are also only gaining 3 Tory seats with ICM with a swing of just 3% from the Tories

    http://www.electionpolling.co.uk/battleground/targets/conservative

    Pretty fine though, isn’t it?
    If the LDs do gain just 3 Tory seats the Tories only need 16 gains from Labour assuming the SNP gain 5 Tory seats for a majority, a swing of just 1% from Labour on 2017 would do that
    I think the LDs will gain far more from the Tories than that
    The latest ICM and Deltapoll and Survation have a swing of just 3% from Tory to LD meaning just 3 LD gains from the Tories
    This is an overall picture. It varies wildly by region, and the biggest swings to the LDs are in London and the SE, where there are most vulnerable seats (Richmond, Guildford, Lewes, Winchester, Wimbledon, City of London, St Albans etc). This picture was supported by the Guardian constituency poll articles at the weekend. What would be interesting would be constituency polls in places like Cheadle and Southport which could compare LD performance in local targets with the regional swing for those areas.
    or Totnes.....
    My problem with Totnes is that I do not think a local poll would tell us much because Wollaston is not a good guide to whether the LDs are doing better in target seats than in the region as a whole. A better indicator may be one of the other SW targets like St Ives. I know we disagree on Wollaston's chances, but think we can probably agree that Totnes is atypical of both the region and LD targets.
    North Devon or North Cornwall is where the battle is. St. Ives likely lost by the Tories, Totnes likely lost by Wollaston.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,318
    Phil said:

    MattW said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Why? Perhaps she could name which of the many banks existing now were in existence at the time when slavery was around and the money they made from it. Ditto with businesses.

    Worth noting that her statement about supporters of Boris Johnson being like Klu Klux Klan members is potentially defamatory. It is possible to defame someone without identifying them personally if they can still be clearly identified as part of a group.
    Did she mention the East African slave trade and how all the oil rich countries will have to pay recompense?

    Or the compensation that one lot of tribes who enslaved another lot od tribes will be paying?

    Sorry, but ... LOL.

    And this is supposed to be a future party leader?
    “Those guys over there did the bad thing too!” is not a good look.

    We took the slave trade and turned it into an engine of destruction out of which certain parts of the country made huge profits. I walked past a beautiful country house in Shropshire last year which had been in the family ever since the C18th. It was bought with money made in the slave trade.

    These monuments to cruelty are all around us, yet we choose to ignore them & pretend that we owe nothing to the people we exploited. I don’t know what form reparations ought to take, but I do believe that a moral country would make some effort to improve the lot of the descendants of those we exploited. How to do that without turning it into a rolling ball of recrimination and resentment that never really ends is the difficult part, but I believe we ought to try anyway.
    We provide a huge amount of foreign and development aid to countries where the slave trade existed is one answer to your question.

    Personally I think that providing aid to those who need it now - not to those who are merely descendants of those who suffered in the past - and trying to stop present day slavery is far more moral and useful. And an intelligent response to our knowledge about the suffering in the past. Breast-beating about what happened in the past while doing nothing to help those suffering now is the worst type of narcissistic self-indulgence.

    Teaching people about our history is the way to deal with the existence of houses built by slave owners.
  • welshowlwelshowl Posts: 4,464
    edited November 2019
    Phil said:

    MattW said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Why? Perhaps she could name which of the many banks existing now were in existence at the time when slavery was around and the money they made from it. Ditto with businesses.

    Worth noting that her statement about supporters of Boris Johnson being like Klu Klux Klan members is potentially defamatory. It is possible to defame someone without identifying them personally if they can still be clearly identified as part of a group.
    Did she mention the East African slave trade and how all the oil rich countries will have to pay recompense?

    Or the compensation that one lot of tribes who enslaved another lot od tribes will be paying?

    Sorry, but ... LOL.

    And this is supposed to be a future party leader?
    “Those guys over there did the bad thing too!” is not a good look.

    We took the slave trade and turned it into an engine of destruction out of which certain parts of the country made huge profits. I walked past a beautiful country house in Shropshire last year which had been in the family ever since the C18th. It was bought with money made in the slave trade.

    These monuments to cruelty are all around us, yet we choose to ignore them & pretend that we owe nothing to the people we exploited. I don’t know what form reparations ought to take, but I do believe that a moral country would make some effort to improve the lot of the descendants of those we exploited. How to do that without turning it into a rolling ball of recrimination and resentment that never really ends is the difficult part, but I believe we ought to try anyway.
    OK, but where do you draw the line? This focuses on events circa 1600's - 1834.

    1) What's that got to do with me as an individual?
    2) What about other periods in history and other nations? Can we counter sue the Danes/Norwegians for all that Viking pillaging? Or the French for 1066? Except they weren't really French of course, which is another question. Or what about the Italians? All that wealth carted off to Italy for 400 years during the Roman occupation which you can still see the evidence of. How about Wales having all of England back please, that was taken by force?

    There was terrible suffering during the slave trade of course,and judged through a 21st C prism it was 100% wrong, indeed many saw it as 100% wrong at the time and good for them, for they were right. We should do our bit too to acknowledge that slavery did happen and not airbrush it out of history but to say that we, now, should be financially liable is plain bat shit bonkers. It would open up pandora's box.

    Good luck selling that on the doorsteps right now outside of deepest rich, hand wringing, metropolitania.
  • ""In a video posted to his campaign Facebook page on Sunday, Anderson told voters of his plan to evict "nuisance tenants" that have been bothering residents in the area.

    "People say to me, 'but they've got to live somewhere'. That's right, so my plan would be, and again this is just my own personal opinion, is that these people who have to live somewhere, let's have them in a tent, in the middle of a field.

    "Six o'clock every morning, let's have them up, let's have them in the field, picking potatoes or any other seasonal vegetables, back in the tent, cold shower, lights out, six o'clock, same again the next day. That would be my solution.""
    Will these 'nuisance tenants' be able to leave these forced-labour camps, or will there be armed guards and watchtowers and stuff?
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,478

    Cyclefree said:

    Still, if Labour want to go on about reparations for past wrongs committed by the British establishment I look forward to their policy of paying reparations to us Catholics, with a special bonus for Irish Catholics, for all the wrongs done over three centuries - seizure of property without compensation, torture and execution, denial of the vote, denial of the right to make a living, denial of the right to practise their religion freely, famine etc etc......

    I am sure some of Corbyn’s Sinn Fein friends will be able to fill him on the details re Ireland and I am very willing to provide details of the many and varied ways in which Catholics on the mainland were ill treated by the British from the time of Henry VIII onwards, long before Britain got involved in the slave trade.

    I mean, these historical wrongs should be compensated in the right order, no?

    Or are Catholics the wrong type of victims in Dawn Butler’s mind (assuming she has one)?

    On a similar theme, can we trace the ancestors of those who had their assets stripped after the Norman invasion?
    The educational practices of the English in Wales....... the Welsh Not, for example ........ require compensating for!
    And what happened to the Welsh royal silver?
  • BromBrom Posts: 3,760

    Looking at what he said, and knowing the area, that’ll be worth another thousand votes....
    I would 100% vote for him!
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    Thoughts on this thread:

    https://twitter.com/gsoh31/status/1196504797886795776

    Specifically the likelihood of:

    https://twitter.com/gsoh31/status/1196506381366550528

    I'm still thinking a lot about efficiency of vote share. Labour and LDs can afford to take some votes off of each other as long as they are in specific locations: if LDs in the North tactically vote Labour and Labour voters in the South tactically vote LD, their vote shares could be well below the 40% ceiling the Tories look like they have, but still prevent a Tory majority.
  • Cyclefree said:

    Still, if Labour want to go on about reparations for past wrongs committed by the British establishment I look forward to their policy of paying reparations to us Catholics, with a special bonus for Irish Catholics, for all the wrongs done over three centuries - seizure of property without compensation, torture and execution, denial of the vote, denial of the right to make a living, denial of the right to practise their religion freely, famine etc etc......

    I am sure some of Corbyn’s Sinn Fein friends will be able to fill him on the details re Ireland and I am very willing to provide details of the many and varied ways in which Catholics on the mainland were ill treated by the British from the time of Henry VIII onwards, long before Britain got involved in the slave trade.

    I mean, these historical wrongs should be compensated in the right order, no?

    Or are Catholics the wrong type of victims in Dawn Butler’s mind (assuming she has one)?

    I'd like to see the Catholics repay the descendants of those who had to pay the Pope to pardon their 'sins' first.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,254
    edited November 2019
    >NickPalmer said:

    I actually wrote that bit of the manifesto. I know Sue Hayman, the Shadow S of S well and made a bunch of suggestions for animal welfare which have made it into the policy: https://labour.org.uk/issues/animal-welfare-manifesto/

    The proposal is to shift the default to "allow if no reasonable reason not to". Obviously if someone wants to keep 8 fierce dogs in a 1-room flat, the landlord can reasonably object that they're likely to disturb the neighbours.

    That's interesting, Nick, but that wording looks to me likely to cause a decade and millions of pounds to be spent on legal action? Does anyone know what it actually means? How is that enforcible, given the absolute right of Ts to exclude LLs from access by changing the locks and under Common Law?

    Interested in the assertion that pet tenancies are declining. Until recently it had increased 25% in 5 years.

    Presumably this is another artefact of the Tenant Fees Act, which took away most of the inexpensive risk management tools?

    What will happen is that some properties will leave the market, tenant selection will become even more risk averse, and for the remainder it will become proceduralised as has happened with Build-to-Letters in that eg Legal and General charge a £350 fee and a £50 rental per pet per month, as they have done since they started.
  • wooliedyedwooliedyed Posts: 10,061
    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    John gonna get ya
  • It is a right little sewer on here this morning...

    Just popped in and it is depressing to be honest
  • alb1onalb1on Posts: 698
    Phil said:

    MattW said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Why? Perhaps she could name which of the many banks existing now were in existence at the time when slavery was around and the money they made from it. Ditto with businesses.

    Worth noting that her statement about supporters of Boris Johnson being like Klu Klux Klan members is potentially defamatory. It is possible to defame someone without identifying them personally if they can still be clearly identified as part of a group.
    Did she mention the East African slave trade and how all the oil rich countries will have to pay recompense?

    Or the compensation that one lot of tribes who enslaved another lot od tribes will be paying?

    Sorry, but ... LOL.

    And this is supposed to be a future party leader?
    “Those guys over there did the bad thing too!” is not a good look.

    We took the slave trade and turned it into an engine of destruction out of which certain parts of the country made huge profits. I walked past a beautiful country house in Shropshire last year which had been in the family ever since the C18th. It was bought with money made in the slave trade.

    These monuments to cruelty are all around us, yet we choose to ignore them & pretend that we owe nothing to the people we exploited. I don’t know what form reparations ought to take, but I do believe that a moral country would make some effort to improve the lot of the descendants of those we exploited. How to do that without turning it into a rolling ball of recrimination and resentment that never really ends is the difficult part, but I believe we ought to try anyway.
    A line has to be drawn, otherwise we all become prisoners of the acts of our ancestors. As Hartley said, 'the past is a foreign country'. Holding today's population responsible for the acts of their many times great grandparents is no different to holding us responsible for the actions of the current crop of foreign despots.
  • welshowl said:

    Phil said:

    MattW said:

    Cyclefree said:
    Did she mention the East African slave trade and how all the oil rich countries will have to pay recompense?

    Or the compensation that one lot of tribes who enslaved another lot od tribes will be paying?

    Sorry, but ... LOL.

    And this is supposed to be a future party leader?
    “Those guys over there did the bad thing too!” is not a good look.

    We took the slave trade and turned it into an engine of destruction out of which certain parts of the country made huge profits. I walked past a beautiful country house in Shropshire last year which had been in the family ever since the C18th. It was bought with money made in the slave trade.

    These monuments to cruelty are all around us, yet we choose to ignore them & pretend that we owe nothing to the people we exploited. I don’t know what form reparations ought to take, but I do believe that a moral country would make some effort to improve the lot of the descendants of those we exploited. How to do that without turning it into a rolling ball of recrimination and resentment that never really ends is the difficult part, but I believe we ought to try anyway.
    OK, but where do you draw the line? This focuses on events circa 1600's - 1834.

    1) What's that got to do with me as an individual?
    2) What about other periods in history and other nations? Can we counter sue the Danes/Norwegians for all that Viking pillaging? Or the French for 1066? Except they weren't really French of course, which is another question. Or what about the Italians? All that wealth carted off to Italy for 400 years during the Roman occupation which you can still see the evidence of. How about Wales having all of England back please, that was taken by force?

    There was terrible suffering during the slave trade of course,and judged through a 21st C prism it was 100% wrong, indeed many saw it as 100% wrong at the time and good for them, for they were right. We should do our bit too to acknowledge that slavery did happen and not airbrush it out of history but to say that we, now, should be financially liable is plain bat shit bonkers. It would open up pandora's box.

    Good luck selling that on the doorsteps right now outside of deepest rich, hand wringing, metropolitania.
    Well said. Whatever our race, all of us will have ancestors that suffered (and benefitted) from heinous incidents in the past. We can and should learn from those, but we are not responsible for them.

    ps one quibble, dont think it will have any traction in metropolitania either.
  • QuincelQuincel Posts: 4,042

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    John gonna get ya

    Interestingly the Companies Act already lists as part of every company director's legal duty to 'Promote the success of the company' a requirement to have regard to 'the impact of the company’s operations on the community and the environment'.

    That's not quite the same as this, but I do find it interesting that in theory the law already requires companies to be eco-concious but it is the practice/enforcement that doesn't match. In some ways McDonnell is being radical by promising to make reality match the letter of the law already.
  • You are right re help to buy - it is anti tenants/potential buyers but pro builders not pro landlords. My mistake on that one, was thinking about it from a tenants perspective.

    If the loans that were unsustainable without government intervention had been called in, the big change would have seen prices cheaper leading to fewer renters, also the moral hazard of seeing big landlords go into bankruptcy would have changed the mindset of you cant lose buying houses.

    Some of the UKAR portfolio are landlords with portfolios of hundreds of rented properties that are uneconomic and loss making. They have been in a zombie state for a decade or so, the landlords are often not allowed to sell parts of the portfolio without selling it all, which they do not want to do as it would crash the local market, and no-one is interested in buying the oversized unprofitable portfolios at market rates.

    It is pro-tenants/potential buyers by lowering the deposit they require to get on the property ladder. How would increasing the deposit tenants/potential buyers require help them - and if they can get that increased deposit why do they not just buy an existing home rather than a new home?

    The gainers from help to buy are those that use it: those buying and those selling.

    The losers from help to buy are those not using it: landlords and existing home owners who see more houses constructed devaluing relatively the value of their home.

    Nearly twice as many new homes are being built now than in 2013.
  • GIN1138GIN1138 Posts: 22,293

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    John gonna get ya

    Depending on how much financial clout those companies have that could see HMG (aka the tax payer) getting caught up in litigation for years?
  • https://twitter.com/RaynerSkyNews/status/1196749888689758212

    What the actual f??

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions
  • Not playing myself but Ladbrokes has a debate bingo market.
  • PhilPhil Posts: 2,316
    isam said:

    Phil said:


    “Those guys over there did the bad thing too!” is not a good look.

    We took the slave trade and turned it into an engine of destruction out of which certain parts of the country made huge profits. I walked past a beautiful country house in Shropshire last year which had been in the family ever since the C18th. It was bought with money made in the slave trade.

    These monuments to cruelty are all around us, yet we choose to ignore them & pretend that we owe nothing to the people we exploited. I don’t know what form reparations ought to take, but I do believe that a moral country would make some effort to improve the lot of the descendants of those we exploited. How to do that without turning it into a rolling ball of recrimination and resentment that never really ends is the difficult part, but I believe we ought to try anyway.

    I don’t disagree. Is allowing their descendants to live in England on an equal footing a form of repayment?

    I don’t see the exploitation of EU immigrants as much different. The same arguments are used to justify it. I’m sure slavery boosted a country’s GDP while widening the gap between rich and poor too

    A lot of people claim freedom to live and work wherever they like is some kind of right, and that the people in the host country aren’t any More entitled to the fruits of said country than others. How does that work when it’s white Europeans raping and pillaging the land of Aborigines, Native Americans, Asians and Africans?
    (I should probably add that said country house was not in my family. Just realised that was ambiguous...)

    IIRC Ta-Nehisi Coates has written about reparations from a US perspective, but I suspect whatever form an honest UK response took would have to be different from in the US, for (hopefully) obvious reasons. I don’t really know what form they ought to take - we can’t just throw a bag of money over the wall at a random group of dark-skinned people and say ”there you go, now please go away”. True reparations requires real engagement. “Truth and Reconciliation” style engagement maybe.

    Anyway, I acknowledge that my thoughts on this are not entirely coherent. But I think that honest engagement with the issues raised by the idea of reparations is important & we should be thinking about it as a nation.
  • alb1onalb1on Posts: 698

    https://twitter.com/RaynerSkyNews/status/1196749888689758212

    What the actual f??

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    That would be one way to ensure Frankfurt and Paris become the financial centres of Europe.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,254
    Brom said:

    Not a Labour Marginal, though - I suspect.
  • NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    John gonna get ya

    I though Labour policy was to either Remain or at least stay in the single market? We diverge in some ways but EU capital market regulations wouldn’t allow that.
  • dr_spyndr_spyn Posts: 11,300
    GIN1138 said:

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    John gonna get ya

    Depending on how much financial clout those companies have that could see HMG (aka the tax payer) getting caught up in litigation for years?
    How many of the 'targetted' firms will have shares held by pension funds, savings vehicles, insurance companies, overseas firms and individuals? It must be McDonnell's help for commercial lawyers programme. Perhaps the old fool might explain what 'adequate' means and over what sort of timescale.
  • ozymandiasozymandias Posts: 1,503
    alb1on said:

    https://twitter.com/RaynerSkyNews/status/1196749888689758212

    What the actual f??

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    That would be one way to ensure Frankfurt and Paris become the financial centres of Europe.
    Well - they didn't mention this to the CBI yesterday. Utter insanity.
  • PhilPhil Posts: 2,316

    Phil said:

    I'm not familiar with the London market and no doubt its very different to here in the North West.

    However either way long term the price of a home will be settled by demand [number of people wanting a home] and supply [number of homes available]. New builds increase supply and deflate the prices in the long term. More new builds will long term deflate prices by more.

    Hence why property prices have in recent years largely stabilised and home ownership is currently rising not falling. That is good news is it not? Would anyone like to return to falling home ownership?

    The majority of house buyers buy with money borrowed from elsewhere - in 2018 it was about 2:1 mortgage:cash buyers. House prices are therefore strongly affected by the availability & price of credit offered to potential buyers. It’s a two-legged market that funnels money from willing lenders through willing buyers to sellers.

    Demand is not just ”the number of people wanting a home”, it’s ”how much can those people borrow”. Indirectly, the banks decide how much house prices are by how willing they are to lend just as much buyers do by how much they are willing to borrow.
    By your own figures a third of properties are bought by cash buyers.

    If the availability of credit disappears then what happens? Prices go down a bit and the cash buyers [landlords] get cheaper homes. Those struggling to get on the property ladder are not aided by shifting the balance in favour of cash buyers!

    Personally I would like to get back on the property ladder but I can't buy a property for cash. If credit gets harder then landlords who buy for cash can get properties for cheaper in order to let them out increasing their profit margins. How is that good?
    I didn’t say it was good or bad. I said that you can’t ignore the price & availability of credit when you look at the housing market. It’s like only looking at two legs of a three-legged stool.
  • GIN1138GIN1138 Posts: 22,293
    148grss said:

    Thoughts on this thread:

    https://twitter.com/gsoh31/status/1196504797886795776

    Specifically the likelihood of:

    https://twitter.com/gsoh31/status/1196506381366550528

    I'm still thinking a lot about efficiency of vote share. Labour and LDs can afford to take some votes off of each other as long as they are in specific locations: if LDs in the North tactically vote Labour and Labour voters in the South tactically vote LD, their vote shares could be well below the 40% ceiling the Tories look like they have, but still prevent a Tory majority.

    Who knows but I think people are still assuming this election will play out like 2017 and at some point there will be a Labour/Jezza surge.

    My own view is that people have pretty much made up their mind about this election already and a drop in support for Labour from low 30s back to 20s as happened in the 1983 campaign is just as likely as any further significant rise in Labour support before the end of the campaign.
  • dr_spyndr_spyn Posts: 11,300
    alb1on said:

    Phil said:

    MattW said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Why? Perhaps she could name which of the many banks existing now were in existence at the time when slavery was around and the money they made from it. Ditto with businesses.

    Worth noting that her statement about supporters of Boris Johnson being like Klu Klux Klan members is potentially defamatory. It is possible to defame someone without identifying them personally if they can still be clearly identified as part of a group.
    Did she mention the East African slave trade and how all the oil rich countries will have to pay recompense?

    Or the compensation that one lot of tribes who enslaved another lot od tribes will be paying?

    Sorry, but ... LOL.

    And this is supposed to be a future party leader?
    “Those guys over there did the bad thing too!” is not a good look.

    We took the slave trade and turned it into an engine of destruction out of which certain parts of the country made huge profits. I walked past a beautiful country house in Shropshire last year which had been in the family ever since the C18th. It was bought with money made in the slave trade.

    These monuments to cruelty are all around us, yet we choose to ignore them & pretend that we owe nothing to the people we exploited. I don’t know what form reparations ought to take, but I do believe that a moral country would make some effort to improve the lot of the descendants of those we exploited. How to do that without turning it into a rolling ball of recrimination and resentment that never really ends is the difficult part, but I believe we ought to try anyway.
    A line has to be drawn, otherwise we all become prisoners of the acts of our ancestors. As Hartley said, 'the past is a foreign country'. Holding today's population responsible for the acts of their many times great grandparents is no different to holding us responsible for the actions of the current crop of foreign despots.
    Wait until McDonnell reads up on The Opium Wars.
  • One worry with the Ashfield candidate's plan to relocate 'nuisance tenants' to forced-labour camps is who decides whether the tenant is a nuisance or not. Will it be the landlord? If so, I can foresee malicious landlords informing on tenants who've had the temerity to complain about a faulty boiler. There's a potential can of worms here. Boris needs to assure the renters of Ashfield that, to them, habeas corpus will still apply.
  • So all that good will of Remain supporting soft right and soft left voters, are Labour now trying to throw it away?
  • You are right re help to buy - it is anti tenants/potential buyers but pro builders not pro landlords. My mistake on that one, was thinking about it from a tenants perspective.

    If the loans that were unsustainable without government intervention had been called in, the big change would have seen prices cheaper leading to fewer renters, also the moral hazard of seeing big landlords go into bankruptcy would have changed the mindset of you cant lose buying houses.

    Some of the UKAR portfolio are landlords with portfolios of hundreds of rented properties that are uneconomic and loss making. They have been in a zombie state for a decade or so, the landlords are often not allowed to sell parts of the portfolio without selling it all, which they do not want to do as it would crash the local market, and no-one is interested in buying the oversized unprofitable portfolios at market rates.

    It is pro-tenants/potential buyers by lowering the deposit they require to get on the property ladder. How would increasing the deposit tenants/potential buyers require help them - and if they can get that increased deposit why do they not just buy an existing home rather than a new home?

    The gainers from help to buy are those that use it: those buying and those selling.

    The losers from help to buy are those not using it: landlords and existing home owners who see more houses constructed devaluing relatively the value of their home.

    Nearly twice as many new homes are being built now than in 2013.
    "Allowing" people to be saddled with extra debt is not helping them. Excluding them for a portion of the housing stock if they refuse to take on the extra debt is not helping them. CEOs of a traditional housebuilder, doing nothing innovative or special, earning £100m because of govt subsidies is a national disgrace not to mention waste of money.

    We are not going to agree. In my world credit availability is the biggest driver of house prices. In yours it is supply and demand.
  • Not playing myself but Ladbrokes has a debate bingo market.

    I think there are some goodies there. As well as 'Marxist' at evens mentioned earlier by @peter_from_putney, I'm taken a punt on:

    'Green Industrial Revolution' @ 4.0
    'Chlorinated Chicken' @ 4.0
    'Zero Hours Contracts' @ 3.0
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 22,131

    Jonathan said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:



    I haven’t complained in public. I haven’t shared any details of the tenant nor the letting agent nor my property.

    We were debating the rights and wrongs of this policy on the previous thread. It’s wholly appropriate to share anonymised experiences that might contribute to that discussion.

    The trouble is you’ll be told what you want to hear about ‘well behaved dogs’, but you never know what you’re going to get.

    I have heard plenty of stories of nightmare tenants, so believe you. There are plenty of nightmare landlords too.

    Nick's law is an interesting one. Would it be reasonable to require a larger cleaning deposit for pet owners for example? Or for the rules to apply only to unfurnished rentals?
    The private rental market is a cesspit and wherever possible best avoided.
    I’m going to have to object to that. I was an ideal landlord (and generous) - I responded to every issue of my tenants within 24/48 hours and never interfered with inspections (except annually) or imposed onerous conditions.

    There are bad landlords (and property companies are amongst some of the worst) but many are just decent normal people.
    The market is appalling and places Landlords and Tennant’s in horrible positions, which neglects the parasitic agents in the middle. I know of no one with a wholeheartedly good experience. It seems like a source of stress. Too much unavoidable personal baggage. To be avoided at all costs. If you want to make a business from property stick to commercial rent.



    Like many others I wasn’t trying to make a business, I just couldn’t sell my property and had to let it out instead. And the whole country would be f*cked without a private rental market.

    Ditch the ideology.
    Of course you could sell it. Just not at the price you wanted or at a price you thought it would be more profitable to rent out at instead.

    Ditch the pretence that you did not make a decision and were forced to become a landlord.
    You are being mean here. All @Casino_Royale did was to own a property and rent it out to somebody who wanted to rent it. Both parties benefited. It's not rational to force him to make decisions that would make him poorer without there being some overriding need. I assume he was not a Rachman and treated his tenants reasonably, so I'm not convinced of the "overriding need" clause applying.

    I think it was William Burroughs who said that all the problems in the world can be traced back to somebody interfering in somebody else's business. The older I get, the more I think he had a point... :(
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,614

    https://twitter.com/RaynerSkyNews/status/1196749888689758212

    What the actual f??

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    Labour doing their best to lose another 40 seats this morning.....
  • alb1on said:

    Phil said:

    MattW said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Why? Perhaps she could name which of the many banks existing now were in existence at the time when slavery was around and the money they made from it. Ditto with businesses.

    Worth noting that her statement about supporters of Boris Johnson being like Klu Klux Klan members is potentially defamatory. It is possible to defame someone without identifying them personally if they can still be clearly identified as part of a group.
    Did she mention the East African slave trade and how all the oil rich countries will have to pay recompense?

    Or the compensation that one lot of tribes who enslaved another lot od tribes will be paying?

    Sorry, but ... LOL.

    And this is supposed to be a future party leader?
    “Those guys over there did the bad thing too!” is not a good look.

    We took the slave trade and turned it into an engine of destruction out of which certain parts of the country made huge profits. I walked past a beautiful country house in Shropshire last year which had been in the family ever since the C18th. It was bought with money made in the slave trade.

    These monuments to cruelty are all around us, yet we choose to ignore them & pretend that we owe nothing to the people we exploited. I don’t know what form reparations ought to take, but I do believe that a moral country would make some effort to improve the lot of the descendants of those we exploited. How to do that without turning it into a rolling ball of recrimination and resentment that never really ends is the difficult part, but I believe we ought to try anyway.
    A line has to be drawn, otherwise we all become prisoners of the acts of our ancestors. As Hartley said, 'the past is a foreign country'. Holding today's population responsible for the acts of their many times great grandparents is no different to holding us responsible for the actions of the current crop of foreign despots.
    Doesn't this tie in with the discussions over inheritance tax, though? Ancestor rights are apparently inviolable, but responsibilities are a big no-no?

    Personally I'd concentrate on not making things worse in the present, before worrying about righting the wrongs of the past. There's the treatment of the Chagos Islanders, for example. If we manage to deal with that properly in the next few years then we might forestall calls for reparations from the Corbyn3000 politico-bot at the 2197 general election, "one more heave comrades!"
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,129
    edited November 2019

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    John gonna get ya

    All private property is theft....they aren't even pretending now. If they get elected it will be full on Marxist stuff. We really need the Lib Dems to step up and be the sensible voice of the centre left.
  • nico67nico67 Posts: 4,502

    https://twitter.com/RaynerSkyNews/status/1196749888689758212

    What the actual f??

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    Labour doing their best to lose another 40 seats this morning.....
    Lol ! Most of the pubic wouldn’t even know what delist entails and most could care less .
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    edited November 2019

    welshowl said:



    OK, but where do you draw the line? This focuses on events circa 1600's - 1834.

    1) What's that got to do with me as an individual?
    2) What about other periods in history and other nations? Can we counter sue the Danes/Norwegians for all that Viking pillaging? Or the French for 1066? Except they weren't really French of course, which is another question. Or what about the Italians? All that wealth carted off to Italy for 400 years during the Roman occupation which you can still see the evidence of. How about Wales having all of England back please, that was taken by force?

    There was terrible suffering during the slave trade of course,and judged through a 21st C prism it was 100% wrong, indeed many saw it as 100% wrong at the time and good for them, for they were right. We should do our bit too to acknowledge that slavery did happen and not airbrush it out of history but to say that we, now, should be financially liable is plain bat shit bonkers. It would open up pandora's box.

    Good luck selling that on the doorsteps right now outside of deepest rich, hand wringing, metropolitania.

    Well said. Whatever our race, all of us will have ancestors that suffered (and benefitted) from heinous incidents in the past. We can and should learn from those, but we are not responsible for them.

    ps one quibble, dont think it will have any traction in metropolitania either.
    I mean, I haven't read the story this thread is based on, but there is evidence that trauma literally changes the DNA of people, so when you have something like the slave trade or colonialism which was quite recent generationally / literally impacted generations of people, you can see the trauma on people from their grandparents, and the trauma from their grandparents on them.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics

    So historically recent and brutal traumas, from slavery, the holocaust, colonialism and genocides have more impact than the historical traumas of Roman conquest etc. From an economic sense we can also literally point to individuals / institutions which benefited from these recent things.

    Just because past things that were bad but we can't right those wrongs anymore, doesn't mean recent crimes aren't. I assume most people here accept the idea of families of holocaust survivors getting back items their families owned that were stolen by the Nazis. From there it is just a case of saying what is recent enough, what links are provable, who is still feeling the impacts.
  • ozymandiasozymandias Posts: 1,503
    nico67 said:

    https://twitter.com/RaynerSkyNews/status/1196749888689758212

    What the actual f??

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    Labour doing their best to lose another 40 seats this morning.....
    Lol ! Most of the pubic wouldn’t even know what delist entails and most could care less .
    How many trillions of capital flight will it take before they finally do take notice?
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868

    One worry with the Ashfield candidate's plan to relocate 'nuisance tenants' to forced-labour camps is who decides whether the tenant is a nuisance or not. Will it be the landlord? If so, I can foresee malicious landlords informing on tenants who've had the temerity to complain about a faulty boiler. There's a potential can of worms here. Boris needs to assure the renters of Ashfield that, to them, habeas corpus will still apply.

    Its already the case that many tenants daren’t complain about anything, for fear that the landlord will simply S21 them and get another tenant in.
  • PeterCPeterC Posts: 1,275

    When you select MPs mainly on the basis that they are sound on Brexit then, inevitably, you have to make compromises with other determinants.

    Do you think he would have made it onto Cameron's A-list?

    (Though, under Cameron, the closest the Tories came to winning Ashfield was defeat by 11.5pp)
    I helped win Ashfield for the Tories - in 1977.....
    28th April 1977 - I remember it well - in my finals term at Durham Uni!
  • PhilPhil Posts: 2,316
    Cyclefree said:


    Teaching people about our history is the way to deal with the existence of houses built by slave owners.

    That would be a good start, I agree.

    I note in passing that the education of both of my children completely ignored such things in favour of teaching them about Tudor monarchy several times over.
  • 148grss said:

    welshowl said:



    OK, but where do you draw the line? This focuses on events circa 1600's - 1834.

    1) What's that got to do with me as an individual?
    2) What about other periods in history and other nations? Can we counter sue the Danes/Norwegians for all that Viking pillaging? Or the French for 1066? Except they weren't really French of course, which is another question. Or what about the Italians? All that wealth carted off to Italy for 400 years during the Roman occupation which you can still see the evidence of. How about Wales having all of England back please, that was taken by force?

    There was terrible suffering during the slave trade of course,and judged through a 21st C prism it was 100% wrong, indeed many saw it as 100% wrong at the time and good for them, for they were right. We should do our bit too to acknowledge that slavery did happen and not airbrush it out of history but to say that we, now, should be financially liable is plain bat shit bonkers. It would open up pandora's box.

    Good luck selling that on the doorsteps right now outside of deepest rich, hand wringing, metropolitania.

    Well said. Whatever our race, all of us will have ancestors that suffered (and benefitted) from heinous incidents in the past. We can and should learn from those, but we are not responsible for them.

    ps one quibble, dont think it will have any traction in metropolitania either.
    I mean, I haven't read the story this thread is based on, but there is evidence that trauma literally changes the DNA of people, so when you have something like the slave trade or colonialism which was quite recent generationally, you can see the trauma on people from their grandparents.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics

    So historically recent and brutal traumas, from slavery, the holocaust, colonialism and genocides have more impact than the historical traumas of Roman conquest etc. From an economic sense we can also literally point to individuals / institutions which benefited from these recent things.

    Just because past things that were bad but we can't right those wrongs anymore, doesn't mean recent crimes aren't. I assume most people here accept the idea of families of holocaust survivors getting back items their families owned that were stolen by the Nazis. From there it is just a case of saying what is recent enough, what links are provable, who is still feeling the impacts.
    You make a good case there, but still not convinced! Even if the moral side was there, the practical case for how you might do it is inevitably divisive and just dont think it would make the world a better place.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868

    Swinson appears to be turning a golden opportunity into a disaster, shes really very poor. She might also single handedly save the Labour party at this rate

    What's she done?
    Unpicking cables good groundwork. Shes overreached and made it a cult of personality when the personality isn't popular. She appears to be living up to the negative predictions of a Swinson leadership posited a year or so ago

    Certainly it was notable that most PB LibDems, myself included, voted for Davey.
  • ClippPClippP Posts: 1,906

    alb1on said:

    My problem with Totnes is that I do not think a local poll would tell us much because Wollaston is not a good guide to whether the LDs are doing better in target seats than in the region as a whole. A better indicator may be one of the other SW targets like St Ives. I know we disagree on Wollaston's chances, but think we can probably agree that Totnes is atypical of both the region and LD targets.

    North Devon or North Cornwall is where the battle is. St. Ives likely lost by the Tories, Totnes likely lost by Wollaston.
    That sounds like good progress for the Lib Dems, Mr Mark. The other day, IIRC, you were telling us that Totnes was a dead cert for the Tories.
  • It is a right little sewer on here this morning...

    Just popped in and it is depressing to be honest
    Indeed
  • eekeek Posts: 28,405
    Phil said:

    Cyclefree said:


    Teaching people about our history is the way to deal with the existence of houses built by slave owners.

    That would be a good start, I agree.

    I note in passing that the education of both of my children completely ignored such things in favour of teaching them about Tudor monarchy several times over.
    That's been the case since the 70's if not before.

    By the time children are of an age when you can explain the it in a way they can comprehend the horror, most are doing options and no longer do history.
  • nico67nico67 Posts: 4,502

    nico67 said:

    https://twitter.com/RaynerSkyNews/status/1196749888689758212

    What the actual f??

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    Labour doing their best to lose another 40 seats this morning.....
    Lol ! Most of the pubic wouldn’t even know what delist entails and most could care less .
    How many trillions of capital flight will it take before they finally do take notice?
    These sorts of things really don’t resonate . The city moaning about Labour anyway just let’s them continue the us and them mantra .

  • eekeek Posts: 28,405

    https://twitter.com/RaynerSkyNews/status/1196749888689758212

    What the actual f??

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    Labour doing their best to lose another 40 seats this morning.....
    Nope - it's Labour targeting the wavering green voters.
  • Phil said:

    Phil said:

    I'm not familiar with the London market and no doubt its very different to here in the North West.

    However either way long term the price of a home will be settled by demand [number of people wanting a home] and supply [number of homes available]. New builds increase supply and deflate the prices in the long term. More new builds will long term deflate prices by more.

    Hence why property prices have in recent years largely stabilised and home ownership is currently rising not falling. That is good news is it not? Would anyone like to return to falling home ownership?

    The majority of house buyers buy with money borrowed from elsewhere - in 2018 it was about 2:1 mortgage:cash buyers. House prices are therefore strongly affected by the availability & price of credit offered to potential buyers. It’s a two-legged market that funnels money from willing lenders through willing buyers to sellers.

    Demand is not just ”the number of people wanting a home”, it’s ”how much can those people borrow”. Indirectly, the banks decide how much house prices are by how willing they are to lend just as much buyers do by how much they are willing to borrow.
    By your own figures a third of properties are bought by cash buyers.

    If the availability of credit disappears then what happens? Prices go down a bit and the cash buyers [landlords] get cheaper homes. Those struggling to get on the property ladder are not aided by shifting the balance in favour of cash buyers!

    Personally I would like to get back on the property ladder but I can't buy a property for cash. If credit gets harder then landlords who buy for cash can get properties for cheaper in order to let them out increasing their profit margins. How is that good?
    I didn’t say it was good or bad. I said that you can’t ignore the price & availability of credit when you look at the housing market. It’s like only looking at two legs of a three-legged stool.
    But if you remove the availability of credit then that doesn't remove demand it just changes it. A potential buyer who is relying upon credit will still need a home if they can't get credit. All that will happen if credit is unavailable is that potential buyer will be forced to rent instead and the one third who can afford to buy with cash will buy the home instead and let to the potential buyer and make a profit that way. Long term demand is still the same, you just have more demand for rental rather than home ownership.

    To extend the metaphor removing a leg from a stool hurts those who need the stool. Those who can cope on their own two feet without the stool [cash buyers] cope fine.
  • IanB2 said:

    Swinson appears to be turning a golden opportunity into a disaster, shes really very poor. She might also single handedly save the Labour party at this rate

    What's she done?
    Unpicking cables good groundwork. Shes overreached and made it a cult of personality when the personality isn't popular. She appears to be living up to the negative predictions of a Swinson leadership posited a year or so ago

    Certainly it was notable that most PB LibDems, myself included, voted for Davey.
    The LDs have fallen into the same trap as Theresa May in thinking the election would be entirely about Brexit. They needed to develop other distinctive policies. Skills wallets and planting a few trees aren't going to cut it.
  • You are right re help to buy - it is anti tenants/potential buyers but pro builders not pro landlords. My mistake on that one, was thinking about it from a tenants perspective.

    If the loans that were unsustainable without government intervention had been called in, the big change would have seen prices cheaper leading to fewer renters, also the moral hazard of seeing big landlords go into bankruptcy would have changed the mindset of you cant lose buying houses.

    Some of the UKAR portfolio are landlords with portfolios of hundreds of rented properties that are uneconomic and loss making. They have been in a zombie state for a decade or so, the landlords are often not allowed to sell parts of the portfolio without selling it all, which they do not want to do as it would crash the local market, and no-one is interested in buying the oversized unprofitable portfolios at market rates.

    It is pro-tenants/potential buyers by lowering the deposit they require to get on the property ladder. How would increasing the deposit tenants/potential buyers require help them - and if they can get that increased deposit why do they not just buy an existing home rather than a new home?

    The gainers from help to buy are those that use it: those buying and those selling.

    The losers from help to buy are those not using it: landlords and existing home owners who see more houses constructed devaluing relatively the value of their home.

    Nearly twice as many new homes are being built now than in 2013.
    "Allowing" people to be saddled with extra debt is not helping them. Excluding them for a portion of the housing stock if they refuse to take on the extra debt is not helping them. CEOs of a traditional housebuilder, doing nothing innovative or special, earning £100m because of govt subsidies is a national disgrace not to mention waste of money.

    We are not going to agree. In my world credit availability is the biggest driver of house prices. In yours it is supply and demand.
    People don't have to take on extra debt if they don't want it. They can purchase a non-new build, why don't they?

    Traditional housebuilders are doing something special, they are increasing the housing stock. More companies can join in and do that too, again supply and demand.

    Credit is a driver of house prices but if you restrict credit then who gains? Cash purchasers or those who needed credit that is now restricted? You forget to account for the fact a third of the market are cash purchasers and these include especially buy to let landlords.
  • MangoMango Posts: 1,019

    Not playing myself but Ladbrokes has a debate bingo market.

    I think there are some goodies there. As well as 'Marxist' at evens mentioned earlier by @peter_from_putney, I'm taken a punt on:

    'Green Industrial Revolution' @ 4.0
    'Chlorinated Chicken' @ 4.0
    'Zero Hours Contracts' @ 3.0
    Isn't "Get Brexit Done" free money? Even if they are planning to avoid stock phrases (who can forget the Maybot's "strong and stable"?), just force of habit will let at least one slip out.
  • MangoMango Posts: 1,019

    It is a right little sewer on here this morning...

    Just popped in and it is depressing to be honest
    Indeed
    Not as depressing as the UK's next 20 years will be.
  • Mango said:

    Not playing myself but Ladbrokes has a debate bingo market.

    I think there are some goodies there. As well as 'Marxist' at evens mentioned earlier by @peter_from_putney, I'm taken a punt on:

    'Green Industrial Revolution' @ 4.0
    'Chlorinated Chicken' @ 4.0
    'Zero Hours Contracts' @ 3.0
    Isn't "Get Brexit Done" free money? Even if they are planning to avoid stock phrases (who can forget the Maybot's "strong and stable"?), just force of habit will let at least one slip out.
    Yes it probably is. Also 'Scotland' and 'Wales' look good on the short-odds bets.
  • eekeek Posts: 28,405

    You are right re help to buy - it is anti tenants/potential buyers but pro builders not pro landlords. My mistake on that one, was thinking about it from a tenants perspective.

    If the loans that were unsustainable without government intervention had been called in, the big change would have seen prices cheaper leading to fewer renters, also the moral hazard of seeing big landlords go into bankruptcy would have changed the mindset of you cant lose buying houses.

    Some of the UKAR portfolio are landlords with portfolios of hundreds of rented properties that are uneconomic and loss making. They have been in a zombie state for a decade or so, the landlords are often not allowed to sell parts of the portfolio without selling it all, which they do not want to do as it would crash the local market, and no-one is interested in buying the oversized unprofitable portfolios at market rates.

    It is pro-tenants/potential buyers by lowering the deposit they require to get on the property ladder. How would increasing the deposit tenants/potential buyers require help them - and if they can get that increased deposit why do they not just buy an existing home rather than a new home?

    The gainers from help to buy are those that use it: those buying and those selling.

    The losers from help to buy are those not using it: landlords and existing home owners who see more houses constructed devaluing relatively the value of their home.

    Nearly twice as many new homes are being built now than in 2013.
    "Allowing" people to be saddled with extra debt is not helping them. Excluding them for a portion of the housing stock if they refuse to take on the extra debt is not helping them. CEOs of a traditional housebuilder, doing nothing innovative or special, earning £100m because of govt subsidies is a national disgrace not to mention waste of money.

    We are not going to agree. In my world credit availability is the biggest driver of house prices. In yours it is supply and demand.
    People don't have to take on extra debt if they don't want it. They can purchase a non-new build, why don't they?

    Traditional housebuilders are doing something special, they are increasing the housing stock. More companies can join in and do that too, again supply and demand.

    Credit is a driver of house prices but if you restrict credit then who gains? Cash purchasers or those who needed credit that is now restricted? You forget to account for the fact a third of the market are cash purchasers and these include especially buy to let landlords.
    I would be very surprised if your typical buy to let landlord was a cash buyer.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155

    148grss said:



    Well said. Whatever our race, all of us will have ancestors that suffered (and benefitted) from heinous incidents in the past. We can and should learn from those, but we are not responsible for them.

    ps one quibble, dont think it will have any traction in metropolitania either.

    I mean, I haven't read the story this thread is based on, but there is evidence that trauma literally changes the DNA of people, so when you have something like the slave trade or colonialism which was quite recent generationally, you can see the trauma on people from their grandparents.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics

    So historically recent and brutal traumas, from slavery, the holocaust, colonialism and genocides have more impact than the historical traumas of Roman conquest etc. From an economic sense we can also literally point to individuals / institutions which benefited from these recent things.

    Just because past things that were bad but we can't right those wrongs anymore, doesn't mean recent crimes aren't. I assume most people here accept the idea of families of holocaust survivors getting back items their families owned that were stolen by the Nazis. From there it is just a case of saying what is recent enough, what links are provable, who is still feeling the impacts.
    You make a good case there, but still not convinced! Even if the moral side was there, the practical case for how you might do it is inevitably divisive and just dont think it would make the world a better place.
    Start with the premise that reparations for the holocaust is accepted practice and go from there.

    For instance, outside of the generic stuff we should be doing for inequality, known decedents of slave owners should give some of their money to a fund that gives money to known decedents of slaves. This kind of mixes in with inheritance and tax there and stuff, but when slavery was ended slave owners were compensated for their loss of property when slaves were never compensated for their free labour. That money for some was inherited, built upon, and created multigenerational wealth and privilege. It is obviously complex, obviously personal, and some people will obviously think it is unfair on them. But we know intergenerational wealth has benefits, and one group of people benefited from the slave labour of another group of people, and the group who benefited from the labour were the ones who got given a cash buy out at the end.
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,222
    IanB2 said:

    "Certainly it was notable that most PB LibDems, myself included, voted for Davey."

    I`m not a LibDem member - but would have voted for Davey. Orange booker.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    edited November 2019
    The Coral debate market about whether all male party leaders would wear their party colour ties was an unbelievable steal from times gone past
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    eek said:

    https://twitter.com/RaynerSkyNews/status/1196749888689758212

    What the actual f??

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    Labour doing their best to lose another 40 seats this morning.....
    Nope - it's Labour targeting the wavering green voters.
    If the carbon neutral target moves from 2030 I can see a lot of Greens willing to vote tactically come back to the Greens. The speech from Gardiner made lots of Greens I know who were willing to back Lab in their seat due to the GND think twice. But they are also waiting to see what is in the final Lab manifesto.
  • 148grss said:

    148grss said:



    Well said. Whatever our race, all of us will have ancestors that suffered (and benefitted) from heinous incidents in the past. We can and should learn from those, but we are not responsible for them.

    ps one quibble, dont think it will have any traction in metropolitania either.

    I mean, I haven't read the story this thread is based on, but there is evidence that trauma literally changes the DNA of people, so when you have something like the slave trade or colonialism which was quite recent generationally, you can see the trauma on people from their grandparents.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics

    So historically recent and brutal traumas, from slavery, the holocaust, colonialism and genocides have more impact than the historical traumas of Roman conquest etc. From an economic sense we can also literally point to individuals / institutions which benefited from these recent things.

    Just because past things that were bad but we can't right those wrongs anymore, doesn't mean recent crimes aren't. I assume most people here accept the idea of families of holocaust survivors getting back items their families owned that were stolen by the Nazis. From there it is just a case of saying what is recent enough, what links are provable, who is still feeling the impacts.
    You make a good case there, but still not convinced! Even if the moral side was there, the practical case for how you might do it is inevitably divisive and just dont think it would make the world a better place.
    Start with the premise that reparations for the holocaust is accepted practice and go from there.

    For instance, outside of the generic stuff we should be doing for inequality, known decedents of slave owners should give some of their money to a fund that gives money to known decedents of slaves
    If they're both, do they get to give money to themselves?
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 13,677

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    John gonna get ya

    All private property is theft....they aren't even pretending now. If they get elected it will be full on Marxist stuff. We really need the Lib Dems to step up and be the sensible voice of the centre left.
    La propriété, c'est le vol! is Proudhon not Marx. ie in the anarchist gradualism tradition not M-L communism.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155

    148grss said:

    148grss said:



    Well said. Whatever our race, all of us will have ancestors that suffered (and benefitted) from heinous incidents in the past. We can and should learn from those, but we are not responsible for them.

    ps one quibble, dont think it will have any traction in metropolitania either.

    I mean, I haven't read the story this thread is based on, but there is evidence that trauma literally changes the DNA of people, so when you have something like the slave trade or colonialism which was quite recent generationally, you can see the trauma on people from their grandparents.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics

    So historically recent and brutal traumas, from slavery, the holocaust, colonialism and genocides have more impact than the historical traumas of Roman conquest etc. From an economic sense we can also literally point to individuals / institutions which benefited from these recent things.

    Just because past things that were bad but we can't right those wrongs anymore, doesn't mean recent crimes aren't. I assume most people here accept the idea of families of holocaust survivors getting back items their families owned that were stolen by the Nazis. From there it is just a case of saying what is recent enough, what links are provable, who is still feeling the impacts.
    You make a good case there, but still not convinced! Even if the moral side was there, the practical case for how you might do it is inevitably divisive and just dont think it would make the world a better place.
    Start with the premise that reparations for the holocaust is accepted practice and go from there.

    For instance, outside of the generic stuff we should be doing for inequality, known decedents of slave owners should give some of their money to a fund that gives money to known decedents of slaves
    If they're both, do they get to give money to themselves?
    I mean, the decedents of slave owners who also happened to be decedents of slaves didn't tend to inherit the wealth. Look at the Cumberbatch family.
  • eek said:

    People don't have to take on extra debt if they don't want it. They can purchase a non-new build, why don't they?

    Traditional housebuilders are doing something special, they are increasing the housing stock. More companies can join in and do that too, again supply and demand.

    Credit is a driver of house prices but if you restrict credit then who gains? Cash purchasers or those who needed credit that is now restricted? You forget to account for the fact a third of the market are cash purchasers and these include especially buy to let landlords.

    I would be very surprised if your typical buy to let landlord was a cash buyer.
    Why? A third of purchases are for cash. Apart from those downsizing, or those who have paid off their mortgage and are now moving like-for-like who do you think is buying for cash?

    Yes buy to let mortgages exist, but a lot of people who have money from other means whether businesses, lottery or whatever see buying to let to be a good investment for their cash.

    The question isn't whether your typical buy to let landlord was a cash buyer anyway, the question is whether your typical cash buyer is or isn't a buy to let landlord. Which is more likely a cash buyer: someone independently wealthy buying to let - or a first time buyer getting on the property ladder?
  • kamskikamski Posts: 5,191

    Cyclefree said:

    Still, if Labour want to go on about reparations for past wrongs committed by the British establishment I look forward to their policy of paying reparations to us Catholics, with a special bonus for Irish Catholics, for all the wrongs done over three centuries - seizure of property without compensation, torture and execution, denial of the vote, denial of the right to make a living, denial of the right to practise their religion freely, famine etc etc......

    I am sure some of Corbyn’s Sinn Fein friends will be able to fill him on the details re Ireland and I am very willing to provide details of the many and varied ways in which Catholics on the mainland were ill treated by the British from the time of Henry VIII onwards, long before Britain got involved in the slave trade.

    I mean, these historical wrongs should be compensated in the right order, no?

    Or are Catholics the wrong type of victims in Dawn Butler’s mind (assuming she has one)?

    On a similar theme, can we trace the ancestors of those who had their assets stripped after the Norman invasion?
    We can probably assume that all people of European descent around today have the same ancestors 1000 or so years ago.
  • 148grss said:

    welshowl said:



    OK, but where do you draw the line? This focuses on events circa 1600's - 1834.

    1) What's that got to do with me as an individual?
    2) What about other periods in history and other nations? Can we counter sue the Danes/Norwegians for all that Viking pillaging? Or the French for 1066? Except they weren't really French of course, which is another question. Or what about the Italians? All that wealth carted off to Italy for 400 years during the Roman occupation which you can still see the evidence of. How about Wales having all of England back please, that was taken by force?

    There was terrible suffering during the slave trade of course,and judged through a 21st C prism it was 100% wrong, indeed many saw it as 100% wrong at the time and good for them, for they were right. We should do our bit too to acknowledge that slavery did happen and not airbrush it out of history but to say that we, now, should be financially liable is plain bat shit bonkers. It would open up pandora's box.

    Good luck selling that on the doorsteps right now outside of deepest rich, hand wringing, metropolitania.

    Well said. Whatever our race, all of us will have ancestors that suffered (and benefitted) from heinous incidents in the past. We can and should learn from those, but we are not responsible for them.

    ps one quibble, dont think it will have any traction in metropolitania either.
    I mean, I haven't read the story this thread is based on, but there is evidence that trauma literally changes the DNA of people, so when you have something like the slave trade or colonialism which was quite recent generationally / literally impacted generations of people, you can see the trauma on people from their grandparents, and the trauma from their grandparents on them.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics

    So historically recent and brutal traumas, from slavery, the holocaust, colonialism and genocides have more impact than the historical traumas of Roman conquest etc. From an economic sense we can also literally point to individuals / institutions which benefited from these recent things.

    Just because past things that were bad but we can't right those wrongs anymore, doesn't mean recent crimes aren't. I assume most people here accept the idea of families of holocaust survivors getting back items their families owned that were stolen by the Nazis. From there it is just a case of saying what is recent enough, what links are provable, who is still feeling the impacts.
    The story the thread is based on is a speech made a couple of months ago that has surfaced today because ... your guess is as good as mine. Maybe there's an election on.
  • welshowlwelshowl Posts: 4,464
    edited November 2019
    @148grss

    There's bit of a difference between tracing that family X, lived in house Y, in town Z in Poland in 1940, still within living memory, and something inexact happened to someone untraceable in an unknown place two hundred years ago (or longer).

    It's not to deny any of these things were awful, and yes we should acknowledge, and most importantly learn, but dragging the past up in the way that has been allegedly suggested by one party in this election, sticking a price tag on it, and saying "here's you bill", is going to enhance our communal happiness and well being how?
  • kamskikamski Posts: 5,191

    148grss said:

    welshowl said:



    OK, but where do you draw the line? This focuses on events circa 1600's - 1834.

    1) What's that got to do with me as an individual?
    2) What about other periods in history and other nations? Can we counter sue the Danes/Norwegians for all that Viking pillaging? Or the French for 1066? Except they weren't really French of course, which is another question. Or what about the Italians? All that wealth carted off to Italy for 400 years during the Roman occupation which you can still see the evidence of. How about Wales having all of England back please, that was taken by force?

    There was terrible suffering during the slave trade of course,and judged through a 21st C prism it was 100% wrong, indeed many saw it as 100% wrong at the time and good for them, for they were right. We should do our bit too to acknowledge that slavery did happen and not airbrush it out of history but to say that we, now, should be financially liable is plain bat shit bonkers. It would open up pandora's box.

    Good luck selling that on the doorsteps right now outside of deepest rich, hand wringing, metropolitania.

    Well said. Whatever our race, all of us will have ancestors that suffered (and benefitted) from heinous incidents in the past. We can and should learn from those, but we are not responsible for them.

    ps one quibble, dont think it will have any traction in metropolitania either.
    I mean, I haven't read the story this thread is based on, but there is evidence that trauma literally changes the DNA of people, so when you have something like the slave trade or colonialism which was quite recent generationally, you can see the trauma on people from their grandparents.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics

    So historically recent and brutal traumas, from slavery, the holocaust, colonialism and genocides have more impact than the historical traumas of Roman conquest etc. From an economic sense we can also literally point to individuals / institutions which benefited from these recent things.

    Just because past things that were bad but we can't right those wrongs anymore, doesn't mean recent crimes aren't. I assume most people here accept the idea of families of holocaust survivors getting back items their families owned that were stolen by the Nazis. From there it is just a case of saying what is recent enough, what links are provable, who is still feeling the impacts.
    You make a good case there, but still not convinced! Even if the moral side was there, the practical case for how you might do it is inevitably divisive and just dont think it would make the world a better place.
    the easy answer is inheritance tax
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,478
    148grss said:

    148grss said:

    148grss said:



    Well said. Whatever our race, all of us will have ancestors that suffered (and benefitted) from heinous incidents in the past. We can and should learn from those, but we are not responsible for them.

    ps one quibble, dont think it will have any traction in metropolitania either.

    I mean, I haven't read the story this thread is based on, but there is evidence that trauma literally changes the DNA of people, so when you have something like the slave trade or colonialism which was quite recent generationally, you can see the trauma on people from their grandparents.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics

    So historically recent and brutal traumas, from slavery, the holocaust, colonialism and genocides have more impact than the historical traumas of Roman conquest etc. From an economic sense we can also literally point to individuals / institutions which benefited from these recent things.

    Just because past things that were bad but we can't right those wrongs anymore, doesn't mean recent crimes aren't. I assume most people here accept the idea of families of holocaust survivors getting back items their families owned that were stolen by the Nazis. From there it is just a case of saying what is recent enough, what links are provable, who is still feeling the impacts.
    You make a good case there, but still not convinced! Even if the moral side was there, the practical case for how you might do it is inevitably divisive and just dont think it would make the world a better place.
    Start with the premise that reparations for the holocaust is accepted practice and go from there.

    For instance, outside of the generic stuff we should be doing for inequality, known decedents of slave owners should give some of their money to a fund that gives money to known decedents of slaves
    If they're both, do they get to give money to themselves?
    I mean, the decedents of slave owners who also happened to be decedents of slaves didn't tend to inherit the wealth. Look at the Cumberbatch family.
    It was by no means unknown for children of slave-owners or overseers to be free and accepted by their (almost invariably) fathers.
    Are there any records of 'owners' wives or daughters becoming pregnant by 'handsome young West Africans'?
  • Alistair said:

    The Coral debate market about whether all male party leaders would wear their party colour ties was an unbelievable steal from times gone past

    Interesting traditionally in America all politicians regardless of party tended to wear red ties in the debate. Any other colour was viewed as less patriotic.

    Symbolism being that with a blue suit, red tie and white shirt they would have the red, white and blue of the flag.
  • camelcamel Posts: 815

    Mr. Albon, she might not be mad. She could just be intensely stupid.

    Miss Cyclefree, no idea. Some sort of bizarre guilt fetish.

    As a Yorkshireman, where do I submit my invoice for compensation for the Harrowing of the North? Or the Scottish raiding during the 12th century civil war between Empress Matilda and King Stephen?

    It's demented to suggest that those who have committed no wrong should pay money to those who have suffered no wrong based on actions of their long dead ancestors.

    On the political front, if I were any non-Labour strategist I'd be loudly condemning Butler's bonkers view.

    You are due no reparations for being a Yorkshireman.

    If you're lucky enough to be a Yorkshireman, you're lucky enough.*

    *hat tip to the Irish.

  • eekeek Posts: 28,405

    eek said:

    People don't have to take on extra debt if they don't want it. They can purchase a non-new build, why don't they?

    Traditional housebuilders are doing something special, they are increasing the housing stock. More companies can join in and do that too, again supply and demand.

    Credit is a driver of house prices but if you restrict credit then who gains? Cash purchasers or those who needed credit that is now restricted? You forget to account for the fact a third of the market are cash purchasers and these include especially buy to let landlords.

    I would be very surprised if your typical buy to let landlord was a cash buyer.
    Why? A third of purchases are for cash. Apart from those downsizing, or those who have paid off their mortgage and are now moving like-for-like who do you think is buying for cash?

    Yes buy to let mortgages exist, but a lot of people who have money from other means whether businesses, lottery or whatever see buying to let to be a good investment for their cash.

    The question isn't whether your typical buy to let landlord was a cash buyer anyway, the question is whether your typical cash buyer is or isn't a buy to let landlord. Which is more likely a cash buyer: someone independently wealthy buying to let - or a first time buyer getting on the property ladder?
    I suspect it's neither - 90% plus of the people purchasing a property will be people moving.

    It may just be me but I really don't see any upside in owning a BTL property at the moment.
  • welshowlwelshowl Posts: 4,464
    148grss said:

    148grss said:



    Well said. Whatever our race, all of us will have ancestors that suffered (and benefitted) from heinous incidents in the past. We can and should learn from those, but we are not responsible for them.

    ps one quibble, dont think it will have any traction in metropolitania either.

    I mean, I haven't read the story this thread is based on, but there is evidence that trauma literally changes the DNA of people, so when you have something like the slave trade or colonialism which was quite recent generationally, you can see the trauma on people from their grandparents.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics

    So historically recent and brutal traumas, from slavery, the holocaust, colonialism and genocides have more impact than the historical traumas of Roman conquest etc. From an economic sense we can also literally point to individuals / institutions which benefited from these recent things.

    Just because past things that were bad but we can't right those wrongs anymore, doesn't mean recent crimes aren't. I assume most people here accept the idea of families of holocaust survivors getting back items their families owned that were stolen by the Nazis. From there it is just a case of saying what is recent enough, what links are provable, who is still feeling the impacts.
    You make a good case there, but still not convinced! Even if the moral side was there, the practical case for how you might do it is inevitably divisive and just dont think it would make the world a better place.
    Start with the premise that reparations for the holocaust is accepted practice and go from there.

    For instance, outside of the generic stuff we should be doing for inequality, known decedents of slave owners should give some of their money to a fund that gives money to known decedents of slaves. This kind of mixes in with inheritance and tax there and stuff, but when slavery was ended slave owners were compensated for their loss of property when slaves were never compensated for their free labour. That money for some was inherited, built upon, and created multigenerational wealth and privilege. It is obviously complex, obviously personal, and some people will obviously think it is unfair on them. But we know intergenerational wealth has benefits, and one group of people benefited from the slave labour of another group of people, and the group who benefited from the labour were the ones who got given a cash buy out at the end.
    What if the slave owner descendent is destitute and the slave descended person is wondering which of his three Ferraris to take out for a spin today? What if they are in both groups?

    This is just fraught with difficulty and plain wrong in concept.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,478
    More on the Yorkshire front; the students of Huddersfield Uni seem to want Prince Andrew removed as Chancellor.
    How much lower can he fall?
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,222
    edited November 2019
    eek said: "It may just be me but I really don't see any upside in owning a BTL property at the moment."

    I agree, and have thought that for many years. Trouble is people seem attached to property ahead of, say, a share certificate in a property company or REIT.

    Tangible property = illiquid, significant known and unknown maintainance costs, prohibitive stamp duty, CGT, legal fees, survey, problem tenants, rental agencies, insurance .........
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,976
    I await with interest the Labour party's plans to recompense descendants of the victims of the 1190 York massacre at Clifford's Tower.
  • eekeek Posts: 28,405
    148grss said:

    eek said:

    https://twitter.com/RaynerSkyNews/status/1196749888689758212

    What the actual f??

    NEW: John McDonnell says a Labour govt would take steps to delist companies from the London Stock Exchange if they have not taken “adequate” measures to reduce carbon emissions

    Labour doing their best to lose another 40 seats this morning.....
    Nope - it's Labour targeting the wavering green voters.
    If the carbon neutral target moves from 2030 I can see a lot of Greens willing to vote tactically come back to the Greens. The speech from Gardiner made lots of Greens I know who were willing to back Lab in their seat due to the GND think twice. But they are also waiting to see what is in the final Lab manifesto.
    It's worth noting we are talking about John's comment and not the Green Party Manifesto - this comment has once again done it's job.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,478
    Endillion said:

    I await with interest the Labour party's plans to recompense descendants of the victims of the 1190 York massacre at Clifford's Tower.

    LOL....... not funny really is it......

    The Royalists caused dreadful suffering to the honest Puritans of Colchester during the Civil War.
  • YBarddCwscYBarddCwsc Posts: 7,172
    edited November 2019
    Endillion said:

    I await with interest the Labour party's plans to recompense descendants of the victims of the 1190 York massacre at Clifford's Tower.

    I think the Labour Party should recompense Iraq for the UK invasion it oversaw.

    It seems reasonable that the financial penalty should be footed by the Labour Party itself -- or maybe those who voted for Blair.

    A slightly larger bill for Nick Palmer might be in order -- as he voted for it in Parliament and defended it endlessly here on pb.com (although he is one of many who has changed his tune).

    I opposed the invasion, so I don't have to pay !
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,478
    This has just appeared on the local Facebook page:
    'A friend of mine has given up his time to move out to Africa to help save the endangered Vultures. He has given his time and money to this cause. As an ongoing effort to raise money for Vulpro there will be a spiritualist evening 22 November. All animal and ghost lovers welcome!!!'

    Er........
This discussion has been closed.