He's lucky it's not 20 years on Benbecula breaking rocks.
Nope - he named names of "victims" in a sexual allegation case. That was f***ing stupid and the actual sentence is appropriate in the circumstances.
Actually, he didn’t. In order to work out who the accusers were, you would also have needed some journalists’ reports. Strangely, though, none of the journalists who provided more useful clues, such as Dani Garavelli (whose husband holds a senior position in the Crown Office) were even cautioned, let alone charged. Craig Murray’s most heinous crime was in fact that of crossing the junta in Bute House.
He also made blog posts about the violinist, which maybe he shouldn't have
About time. It’s amazing that these schemes - ubiquitous in Europe and increasingly in all Western metros - are almost absent from the U.K (save London).
They have been in several I believe but the abuse of the system lead them to cancel them.
We generally prefer the simpler system of just nicking a nearby bike if you need one. Credit cards/drop-off stations, bit of a faff, innit?
So it appeared in Manchester. Although the drop off rate in the canals was quite high I note.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
...ran the thinking in 1975.
Meanwhile, in 2021, there's this thing called the climate emergency.
Oh cut the bullshit! Meanwhile in 2021 there's this thing call zero emission vehicles. Meanwhile by 2030 the Internal Combusion Engine is going to be made illegal to retail in new vehicles.
There is no excuse to be anti-car nowadays.
Question - where /how do you charge up your electric car if you live in a place without off road parking.
And how do you put 50 charging options in a car park with 50 narrow parking spaces for 50 flats?
That's precisely the point I was making. That's precisely why I support building more houses with off-road driveways and fewer flats.
A house with two reserved parking spots and charging should be the norm in 2021 not the exception for construction.
No profit in houses compared to 4-5 bed executive homes or flats.
And if the 4 bed "executive" homes round here are typical (and I suspect the none local builder ones are) the houses are little bigger than my 1930's unextended house except they've filled the loft with a large bedroom and an en-suite.
So what's the problem? That sounds great. You have 4 bedrooms in the space of what would have previously been 3, so we're making maximum use of the land. Great value.
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
The more we sprawl out the more natural space becomes available within walking distance. By having a spread out sprawl we can have green spaces, parks etc between people - but trying to cram as many people into as tiny a space as we can fit them, the less space that people have within walking distance.
If only people who can't afford a car had known that to make it easier to have two cars you just needed to have built two parking spaces outside their home.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
LibDems: Luddite and Proud!
Ironic that the LibDems are for a very open door immigration policy. You just don't want to build houses for them to live in once they get here....
First line of the LibDem policy paper on planning - "We have a chronic shortage of housing across the country, and especially the type of homes people with lower or even middle incomes can afford."
You will be shocked to find out that the LibDem approach is to give more power back to local communities and take it away from developers who build the wrong kind of houses in the wrong locations.
"Wrong kind of houses in the wrong locations"; translation: houses near me. 🙄
What's the right kind of house in the right location? Please don't say brownfield.
Wrong kind of houses in the wrong locations means great that you are building on that massive brownfield site, stupid that all the houses are 4-5 bed "executive" homes and there's a massive local shortage of starter homes.
Developers should be invited to tender to develop housing developments that fit the needs of the community. Not buy the land, refuse to build for just long enough to overrule the council the councillors the community and the MP, then build whatever the fuck you like for the maximum possible profit.
The real problem is that small flats marketed at BTL and foreign investors are generally most profitable yet least in need
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
...ran the thinking in 1975.
Meanwhile, in 2021, there's this thing called the climate emergency.
Oh cut the bullshit! Meanwhile in 2021 there's this thing call zero emission vehicles. Meanwhile by 2030 the Internal Combusion Engine is going to be made illegal to retail in new vehicles.
There is no excuse to be anti-car nowadays.
Question - where /how do you charge up your electric car if you live in a place without off road parking.
And how do you put 50 charging options in a car park with 50 narrow parking spaces for 50 flats?
That's precisely the point I was making. That's precisely why I support building more houses with off-road driveways and fewer flats.
A house with two reserved parking spots and charging should be the norm in 2021 not the exception for construction.
No profit in houses compared to 4-5 bed executive homes or flats.
And if the 4 bed "executive" homes round here are typical (and I suspect the none local builder ones are) the houses are little bigger than my 1930's unextended house except they've filled the loft with a large bedroom and an en-suite.
So what's the problem? That sounds great. You have 4 bedrooms in the space of what would have previously been 3, so we're making maximum use of the land. Great value.
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
At £350,000 each just about the only person round here who could get a mortgage for one is me.
There needs to be a whole lot of housing that targets a £150,000 or so price range that isn't a flat.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
...ran the thinking in 1975.
Meanwhile, in 2021, there's this thing called the climate emergency.
Oh cut the bullshit! Meanwhile in 2021 there's this thing call zero emission vehicles. Meanwhile by 2030 the Internal Combusion Engine is going to be made illegal to retail in new vehicles.
There is no excuse to be anti-car nowadays.
Question - where /how do you charge up your electric car if you live in a place without off road parking.
And how do you put 50 charging options in a car park with 50 narrow parking spaces for 50 flats?
That's precisely the point I was making. That's precisely why I support building more houses with off-road driveways and fewer flats.
A house with two reserved parking spots and charging should be the norm in 2021 not the exception for construction.
No profit in houses compared to 4-5 bed executive homes or flats.
And if the 4 bed "executive" homes round here are typical (and I suspect the none local builder ones are) the houses are little bigger than my 1930's unextended house except they've filled the loft with a large bedroom and an en-suite.
So what's the problem? That sounds great. You have 4 bedrooms in the space of what would have previously been 3, so we're making maximum use of the land. Great value.
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Ponder the median income and average house prices and you begin to understand the issue.
On voter ID, whenever we receive our form from our LA to register we have to sign it, and it clearly states the signature will be checked against the voter return
At the last General Election I had my postal vote rejected because I accidentally put the wrong year of my birth. I was out by one. I put my wife's. I got the letter rejecting it after the election so I couldn't rectify it. I gave myself a slap on the wrist. It could have made a difference but didn't TG.
If only Casino were right and there were "virtually no checks"!
My small village in south Devon has recently had 67 houses built in it. Dartmouth is currently having at least three hundred and probably more - in a population of c. 6,000. Schools are full, no local hospital, roads already buggered if two large vehicles meet. And that is before answering the question: where will the occupants work? But we are shouldering more than our fair share of national housebuilding targets locally.
In the last 10 years my (large) village in Bucks has had a thousand extra homes added. In terms of extra amenities there is a new small Co-op. There were 2 separate infants which had 1 form entry each, now one still has 1-form whereas the other has 2. The junior school is still the same size. There is no secondary with every pupil travelling between 3 and 7 miles and going to one of about 6 different schools. The only other things added have been a few play areas.
We believe we have taken far more than our fair share of housebuilding. The question is, is there anywhere in the country that doesn't feel that they have taken more than their fair share?!
The primary driving factor behind my Brexit vote was that I didn't want us building so many houses, destroying countryside and ruining communities through poor planning. I felt that we couldn't manage housebuilding properly and the only way to keep it in check was to reduce immigration back to more sustainable levels.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
...ran the thinking in 1975.
Meanwhile, in 2021, there's this thing called the climate emergency.
Oh cut the bullshit! Meanwhile in 2021 there's this thing call zero emission vehicles. Meanwhile by 2030 the Internal Combusion Engine is going to be made illegal to retail in new vehicles.
There is no excuse to be anti-car nowadays.
Question - where /how do you charge up your electric car if you live in a place without off road parking.
And how do you put 50 charging options in a car park with 50 narrow parking spaces for 50 flats?
That's precisely the point I was making. That's precisely why I support building more houses with off-road driveways and fewer flats.
A house with two reserved parking spots and charging should be the norm in 2021 not the exception for construction.
No profit in houses compared to 4-5 bed executive homes or flats.
And if the 4 bed "executive" homes round here are typical (and I suspect the none local builder ones are) the houses are little bigger than my 1930's unextended house except they've filled the loft with a large bedroom and an en-suite.
So what's the problem? That sounds great. You have 4 bedrooms in the space of what would have previously been 3, so we're making maximum use of the land. Great value.
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
At £350,000 each just about the only person round here who could get a mortgage for one is me.
There needs to be a whole lot of housing that targets a £150,000 or so price range that isn't a flat.
There is no need for them to be £350,000 each and if you buy one and move into one from a three-bedroom house then your three-bedroom will end up on the market for less than it would have gone for previously.
Build more good quality houses and people move up the ladder and their older homes become available for less than would have been the case. Build more shit homes and all you're doing is cramming people into shit homes.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
...ran the thinking in 1975.
Meanwhile, in 2021, there's this thing called the climate emergency.
Oh cut the bullshit! Meanwhile in 2021 there's this thing call zero emission vehicles. Meanwhile by 2030 the Internal Combusion Engine is going to be made illegal to retail in new vehicles.
There is no excuse to be anti-car nowadays.
Question - where /how do you charge up your electric car if you live in a place without off road parking.
And how do you put 50 charging options in a car park with 50 narrow parking spaces for 50 flats?
That's precisely the point I was making. That's precisely why I support building more houses with off-road driveways and fewer flats.
A house with two reserved parking spots and charging should be the norm in 2021 not the exception for construction.
No profit in houses compared to 4-5 bed executive homes or flats.
And if the 4 bed "executive" homes round here are typical (and I suspect the none local builder ones are) the houses are little bigger than my 1930's unextended house except they've filled the loft with a large bedroom and an en-suite.
So what's the problem? That sounds great. You have 4 bedrooms in the space of what would have previously been 3, so we're making maximum use of the land. Great value.
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Ponder the median income and average house prices and you begin to understand the issue.
And if you added 400,000 4-bedroom houses per year across the country you don't think that would reduce affordability problems?
In my part of the country housing construction has been going great guns and house price to income ratio is 4x as a result. It is only when you're not constructing enough that prices go up.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
...ran the thinking in 1975.
Meanwhile, in 2021, there's this thing called the climate emergency.
Oh cut the bullshit! Meanwhile in 2021 there's this thing call zero emission vehicles. Meanwhile by 2030 the Internal Combusion Engine is going to be made illegal to retail in new vehicles.
There is no excuse to be anti-car nowadays.
Question - where /how do you charge up your electric car if you live in a place without off road parking.
And how do you put 50 charging options in a car park with 50 narrow parking spaces for 50 flats?
That's precisely the point I was making. That's precisely why I support building more houses with off-road driveways and fewer flats.
A house with two reserved parking spots and charging should be the norm in 2021 not the exception for construction.
No profit in houses compared to 4-5 bed executive homes or flats.
And if the 4 bed "executive" homes round here are typical (and I suspect the none local builder ones are) the houses are little bigger than my 1930's unextended house except they've filled the loft with a large bedroom and an en-suite.
So what's the problem? That sounds great. You have 4 bedrooms in the space of what would have previously been 3, so we're making maximum use of the land. Great value.
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Ponder the median income and average house prices and you begin to understand the issue.
Spot on. Successive governments have had an unspoken priority to make it ever worse. Still do. Therein lies the problem. All else is marginalia.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
LibDems: Luddite and Proud!
Ironic that the LibDems are for a very open door immigration policy. You just don't want to build houses for them to live in once they get here....
First line of the LibDem policy paper on planning - "We have a chronic shortage of housing across the country, and especially the type of homes people with lower or even middle incomes can afford."
You will be shocked to find out that the LibDem approach is to give more power back to local communities and take it away from developers who build the wrong kind of houses in the wrong locations.
"Wrong kind of houses in the wrong locations"; translation: houses near me. 🙄
What's the right kind of house in the right location? Please don't say brownfield.
Wrong kind of houses in the wrong locations means great that you are building on that massive brownfield site, stupid that all the houses are 4-5 bed "executive" homes and there's a massive local shortage of starter homes.
Developers should be invited to tender to develop housing developments that fit the needs of the community. Not buy the land, refuse to build for just long enough to overrule the council the councillors the community and the MP, then build whatever the fuck you like for the maximum possible profit.
The real problem is that small flats marketed at BTL and foreign investors are generally most profitable yet least in need
Totally agreed. We should be building real houses not flats.
The problem is NIMBYs want more flats. So they can get unlived in land near them remaining unspoilt.
Amazing the mental grip American politics has on our consciousness here, isn't it. This voter ID argument is classic: both sides - and this seems to split almost entirely on partisan Tory / non-Tory lines - importing the beliefs and arguments of their US counterparts in the republicans and democrats wholesale.
This is one of the troubles with sharing a language. We get their journalism and social media content and assume America is the world.
It's like a form of cosplay. Cowboys and Indians for our times. I don't actually think the conservatives are making a concerted effort at voter suppression, unlike their republican US counterparts. The UK is a very different country. But they are donning the fancy dress and playing the part because it feels like the right thing for their tribe to do, and their left wing opponents are channelling the outrage to levels worthy of the RSC, because that's what the Dems do.
Agreed, we should always be careful importing America's neuroses to British politics. I note the arguments here that imposing voter ID might be more likely to disenfranchise key aspects of the Conservative coalition than the Labour one, but we're all playing our Partisan roles. That said, I do feel like it's likely to impact on who Labour Activists think their core is (the very urban poor, the homeless and immigrants without a good grasp of English, though these groups are not likely to be voters anyway). Not to say I'm in favour of voter ID, because elections and their franchise should be as open as possible and there should be as few barriers as possible to voting.
and the reasons it's a very rare crime are that the penalties for being caught are very severe (especially for anyone involved in politics, and who else would bother?), any individual's ability to move more than a tiny handful of votes is extremely limited, the likelihood that doing so would change any particular election result is very small indeed, and the payoff if anyone actually manages to compound all of these small factors into a successful fraud is marginal (even if they are the person being elected, which they won't be).
The reporting of the story is skewed to in person fraud. I believe it addresses postal vote harvesting as well, where significant effects on the result are more likely. It seems sense to cover all the options in the one proposal.
I don't see how photo ID would work for postal voting, and am not aware it's part of the proposal
But the same applies. Say I'm a candidate, or someone nefarious that a candidate has 'employed' to try and cast fraudulent postal votes. I can find out the list of postal voters (but only from a declared agent - so already a hurdle) and I can find out when they will be posted.
So I call round at the houses and hope to fish them out of letterboxes, or recover them from the halls of HMOs. In the old days before signature cross-checking, that might have worked, provided that the recipient wasn't bothered about voting (unlikely if they've applied for a PV) or moved away. If the person wants to vote, they're likely to complain to the council when their vote doesnt arrive, and thereupon a note would be put to see if that vote was returned, immediately triggering a risk. Nowadays, with signature cross-checking, the likelihood that any votes I stole would pass the verification is small indeed. And the missing votes would again trigger complaints that would flag a problem - particularly if the missing voters were concentrated in one area.
Or I can try to bribe or threaten the postal voters in order to get them to complete them in front of me. How risky is that, and how likely, out of the blue, to succeed?
In the hypothetical of a father of a large family pressuring the others in his household to vote a certain way, he's going to pressure them to supply whatever ID is required, so that circumstance isn't pertinent to the proposal in any case.
I thought that it was the postal votes cast by non-existent and deceased people that was more of a problem.
You'd still need to obtain the physical votes and pass the verification. Unless you'd applied for them yourself in the first place, of course. But how many people have access to multiple addresses and the patience to put in all the admin legwork, just for a few votes?
My small village in south Devon has recently had 67 houses built in it. Dartmouth is currently having at least three hundred and probably more - in a population of c. 6,000. Schools are full, no local hospital, roads already buggered if two large vehicles meet. And that is before answering the question: where will the occupants work? But we are shouldering more than our fair share of national housebuilding targets locally.
In the last 10 years my (large) village in Bucks has had a thousand extra homes added. In terms of extra amenities there is a new small Co-op. There were 2 separate infants which had 1 form entry each, now one still has 1-form whereas the other has 2. The junior school is still the same size. There is no secondary with every pupil travelling between 3 and 7 miles and going to one of about 6 different schools. The only other things added have been a few play areas.
We believe we have taken far more than our fair share of housebuilding. The question is, is there anywhere in the country that doesn't feel that they have taken more than their fair share?!
The primary driving factor behind my Brexit vote was that I didn't want us building so many houses, destroying countryside and ruining communities through poor planning. I felt that we couldn't manage housebuilding properly and the only way to keep it in check was to reduce immigration back to more sustainable levels.
Youve got two decades of pent up demand unwinding. My area is completing about 800 a year, small industrial town aprox 100,000 people. Five years ago it was completing 150. House prices are very competitive here. There's building resentment to the new builds.
Now everyone is becoming an eco loon because theyve worked out that they can appear altruistic not wanting new low cost housing near them by invoking Greta the sky god.
So, do we think there will be unbriefed surprise to capture the press? Something definitive and infrastructure related? Leeds/Manchester rail?
Return of capital punishment.
It'll play well in Hartlepool. Which is apparently the alpha and omega of policy development in this belle epoque.
Crime is a massive issue for voters in places like Hartlepool. As a town the Tory police cuts have absolutely screwed them - a total lack of resources means Cleveland PD have no overnight accommodation which means anyone lifted in town at night needs to get vanned into Boro which takes the few officers they have off the streets.
"We will hire 20,000 police officers" is a brilliant and popular Tory policy. The true genius is that is has been completely disconnected from who cut more coppers than that in the first place - the Tories. Listening to vox pops from Pools, WWC voters think Labour cut the police.
Of course, the truth is that it was Labour's economic incompetence that meant there was "no money left" (in their own words) and caused the Conservatives to cut the police.
If there was no money left how come there is plenty of money left? We have literally hosed money at people during Covid. The police didn't need a hosepipe of cash, just not malicious cuts aimed at Labour areas.
Because the financial markets were not as forgiving in 2010 as they are today.
As it happens I think the Conservatives cut spending rather too rapidly - but had the economy been robust in 2010 they would not have done so at all.
One of the problems with housebuilding right now is building materials prices, which are reported to be rocketing. Copper, for example, is at a record.
Inflationary pressures, higher interest rates and higher taxes threaten to blow Johnson seriously off course in the coming months
No wonder he and Hancock are starting to talk about 'personal responsibility'. It isn't the red wall that is going to concern them from here to the next election. It is the blue one. The reports from the heartlands after May 06 must not be that good.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
...ran the thinking in 1975.
Meanwhile, in 2021, there's this thing called the climate emergency.
Oh cut the bullshit! Meanwhile in 2021 there's this thing call zero emission vehicles. Meanwhile by 2030 the Internal Combusion Engine is going to be made illegal to retail in new vehicles.
There is no excuse to be anti-car nowadays.
Question - where /how do you charge up your electric car if you live in a place without off road parking.
And how do you put 50 charging options in a car park with 50 narrow parking spaces for 50 flats?
That's precisely the point I was making. That's precisely why I support building more houses with off-road driveways and fewer flats.
A house with two reserved parking spots and charging should be the norm in 2021 not the exception for construction.
No profit in houses compared to 4-5 bed executive homes or flats.
And if the 4 bed "executive" homes round here are typical (and I suspect the none local builder ones are) the houses are little bigger than my 1930's unextended house except they've filled the loft with a large bedroom and an en-suite.
So what's the problem? That sounds great. You have 4 bedrooms in the space of what would have previously been 3, so we're making maximum use of the land. Great value.
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Ponder the median income and average house prices and you begin to understand the issue.
If it was an affordability crisis the houses wouldnt be getting occupied. In my area every house gets sold off plan as soon as they are released. The estates have ShowHomes... But they exist to upsell purchasers to buy upgraded fixtures and fittings, the sale of the house isnt a problem.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
...ran the thinking in 1975.
Meanwhile, in 2021, there's this thing called the climate emergency.
Oh cut the bullshit! Meanwhile in 2021 there's this thing call zero emission vehicles. Meanwhile by 2030 the Internal Combusion Engine is going to be made illegal to retail in new vehicles.
There is no excuse to be anti-car nowadays.
Question - where /how do you charge up your electric car if you live in a place without off road parking.
And how do you put 50 charging options in a car park with 50 narrow parking spaces for 50 flats?
That's precisely the point I was making. That's precisely why I support building more houses with off-road driveways and fewer flats.
A house with two reserved parking spots and charging should be the norm in 2021 not the exception for construction.
No profit in houses compared to 4-5 bed executive homes or flats.
And if the 4 bed "executive" homes round here are typical (and I suspect the none local builder ones are) the houses are little bigger than my 1930's unextended house except they've filled the loft with a large bedroom and an en-suite.
So what's the problem? That sounds great. You have 4 bedrooms in the space of what would have previously been 3, so we're making maximum use of the land. Great value.
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
At £350,000 each just about the only person round here who could get a mortgage for one is me.
There needs to be a whole lot of housing that targets a £150,000 or so price range that isn't a flat.
And how do you reset that- building houses that people want to live in that sell for £150k- without undermining the tier of the market just above where people are currently paying a lot more? You need a heck of a lot of general inflation and/or wage growth with zero house price inflation to get things back into synch.
Any politician- even BoJo- who threads that needle will deserve to stay in office as long as they damn well please.
So, do we think there will be unbriefed surprise to capture the press? Something definitive and infrastructure related? Leeds/Manchester rail?
Return of capital punishment.
It'll play well in Hartlepool. Which is apparently the alpha and omega of policy development in this belle epoque.
Crime is a massive issue for voters in places like Hartlepool. As a town the Tory police cuts have absolutely screwed them - a total lack of resources means Cleveland PD have no overnight accommodation which means anyone lifted in town at night needs to get vanned into Boro which takes the few officers they have off the streets.
"We will hire 20,000 police officers" is a brilliant and popular Tory policy. The true genius is that is has been completely disconnected from who cut more coppers than that in the first place - the Tories. Listening to vox pops from Pools, WWC voters think Labour cut the police.
Of course, the truth is that it was Labour's economic incompetence that meant there was "no money left" (in their own words) and caused the Conservatives to cut the police.
If there was no money left how come there is plenty of money left? We have literally hosed money at people during Covid. The police didn't need a hosepipe of cash, just not malicious cuts aimed at Labour areas.
Because in the decade before Covid the government fixed the roof while the sun was shining.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
...ran the thinking in 1975.
Meanwhile, in 2021, there's this thing called the climate emergency.
Oh cut the bullshit! Meanwhile in 2021 there's this thing call zero emission vehicles. Meanwhile by 2030 the Internal Combusion Engine is going to be made illegal to retail in new vehicles.
There is no excuse to be anti-car nowadays.
Question - where /how do you charge up your electric car if you live in a place without off road parking.
And how do you put 50 charging options in a car park with 50 narrow parking spaces for 50 flats?
That's precisely the point I was making. That's precisely why I support building more houses with off-road driveways and fewer flats.
A house with two reserved parking spots and charging should be the norm in 2021 not the exception for construction.
No profit in houses compared to 4-5 bed executive homes or flats.
And if the 4 bed "executive" homes round here are typical (and I suspect the none local builder ones are) the houses are little bigger than my 1930's unextended house except they've filled the loft with a large bedroom and an en-suite.
So what's the problem? That sounds great. You have 4 bedrooms in the space of what would have previously been 3, so we're making maximum use of the land. Great value.
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
At £350,000 each just about the only person round here who could get a mortgage for one is me.
There needs to be a whole lot of housing that targets a £150,000 or so price range that isn't a flat.
And how do you reset that- building houses that people want to live in that sell for £150k- without undermining the tier of the market just above where people are currently paying a lot more? You need a heck of a lot of general inflation and/or wage growth with zero house price inflation to get things back into synch.
Any politician- even BoJo- who threads that needle will deserve to stay in office as long as they damn well please.
You build terrace homes - give them a long but narrow back garden with parking at the rear and job done.
There is a reason why Victorian Terrace houses are often worth a fortune in most towns - look at history and you see what really works.
One of the problems with housebuilding right now is building materials prices, which are reported to be rocketing. Copper, for example, is at a record.
I ordered some LVL for my place in France as I want to build a car port this summer. Holy fuck! It would have been cheaper to build the roof trusses out of solid gold. The last batch I bought 4 years ago was 850 €/m3 but this lot was closer to 1,500 €/m3.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
...ran the thinking in 1975.
Meanwhile, in 2021, there's this thing called the climate emergency.
Oh cut the bullshit! Meanwhile in 2021 there's this thing call zero emission vehicles. Meanwhile by 2030 the Internal Combusion Engine is going to be made illegal to retail in new vehicles.
There is no excuse to be anti-car nowadays.
Question - where /how do you charge up your electric car if you live in a place without off road parking.
And how do you put 50 charging options in a car park with 50 narrow parking spaces for 50 flats?
That's precisely the point I was making. That's precisely why I support building more houses with off-road driveways and fewer flats.
A house with two reserved parking spots and charging should be the norm in 2021 not the exception for construction.
No profit in houses compared to 4-5 bed executive homes or flats.
And if the 4 bed "executive" homes round here are typical (and I suspect the none local builder ones are) the houses are little bigger than my 1930's unextended house except they've filled the loft with a large bedroom and an en-suite.
So what's the problem? That sounds great. You have 4 bedrooms in the space of what would have previously been 3, so we're making maximum use of the land. Great value.
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
At £350,000 each just about the only person round here who could get a mortgage for one is me.
There needs to be a whole lot of housing that targets a £150,000 or so price range that isn't a flat.
And how do you reset that- building houses that people want to live in that sell for £150k- without undermining the tier of the market just above where people are currently paying a lot more? You need a heck of a lot of general inflation and/or wage growth with zero house price inflation to get things back into synch.
Any politician- even BoJo- who threads that needle will deserve to stay in office as long as they damn well please.
Build, build, build. That's how.
Housing price ratios vary dramatically depending upon where construction has been happening and where it hasn't. The Red Wall towns which have been expanding into the countryside with construction has the lowest price ratio of all - isn't that what we should want across the entire country? It works.
So, do we think there will be unbriefed surprise to capture the press? Something definitive and infrastructure related? Leeds/Manchester rail?
Return of capital punishment.
It'll play well in Hartlepool. Which is apparently the alpha and omega of policy development in this belle epoque.
Crime is a massive issue for voters in places like Hartlepool. As a town the Tory police cuts have absolutely screwed them - a total lack of resources means Cleveland PD have no overnight accommodation which means anyone lifted in town at night needs to get vanned into Boro which takes the few officers they have off the streets.
"We will hire 20,000 police officers" is a brilliant and popular Tory policy. The true genius is that is has been completely disconnected from who cut more coppers than that in the first place - the Tories. Listening to vox pops from Pools, WWC voters think Labour cut the police.
Of course, the truth is that it was Labour's economic incompetence that meant there was "no money left" (in their own words) and caused the Conservatives to cut the police.
If there was no money left how come there is plenty of money left? We have literally hosed money at people during Covid. The police didn't need a hosepipe of cash, just not malicious cuts aimed at Labour areas.
Because in the decade before Covid the government fixed the roof while the sun was shining.
Brown didn't.
They really didn't. What happened was the Tories spent 10 years arguing that Modern Monetary Theory wasn't valid and then Covid arrived and it was the only option in town,
We should now see a decent infrastructure boom ala the US for similar reasons (albeit from a far better starting point).
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
...ran the thinking in 1975.
Meanwhile, in 2021, there's this thing called the climate emergency.
Oh cut the bullshit! Meanwhile in 2021 there's this thing call zero emission vehicles. Meanwhile by 2030 the Internal Combusion Engine is going to be made illegal to retail in new vehicles.
There is no excuse to be anti-car nowadays.
Question - where /how do you charge up your electric car if you live in a place without off road parking.
And how do you put 50 charging options in a car park with 50 narrow parking spaces for 50 flats?
That's precisely the point I was making. That's precisely why I support building more houses with off-road driveways and fewer flats.
A house with two reserved parking spots and charging should be the norm in 2021 not the exception for construction.
No profit in houses compared to 4-5 bed executive homes or flats.
And if the 4 bed "executive" homes round here are typical (and I suspect the none local builder ones are) the houses are little bigger than my 1930's unextended house except they've filled the loft with a large bedroom and an en-suite.
So what's the problem? That sounds great. You have 4 bedrooms in the space of what would have previously been 3, so we're making maximum use of the land. Great value.
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Ponder the median income and average house prices and you begin to understand the issue.
If it was an affordability crisis the houses wouldnt be getting occupied. In my area every house gets sold off plan as soon as they are released. The estates have ShowHomes... But they exist to upsell purchasers to buy upgraded fixtures and fittings, the sale of the house isnt a problem.
(we dont have a population boom)
The affordability problem doesn't manifest itself in people sleeping on the streets and houses unoccupied. But it does result in older landlords becoming increasingly wealthy at the expense of younger households.
That is bad not just in terms of intergenerational fairness, but also for the wider economy, as concentrating the nations wealth in older landlords reduces spending and investment.
One of the problems with housebuilding right now is building materials prices, which are reported to be rocketing. Copper, for example, is at a record.
Inflationary pressures, higher interest rates and higher taxes threaten to blow Johnson seriously off course in the coming months
No wonder he and Hancock are starting to talk about 'personal responsibility'. It isn't the red wall that is going to concern them from here to the next election. It is the blue one. The reports from the heartlands after May 06 must not be that good.
Anecdotally I have heard that getting cement is proving tricky at the moment. Apparently HS2 is using so much it is causing a shortage. Plus of course lots of people with Covid doing building/garden work. I will need some next month to extend my patio.
So, do we think there will be unbriefed surprise to capture the press? Something definitive and infrastructure related? Leeds/Manchester rail?
Return of capital punishment.
It'll play well in Hartlepool. Which is apparently the alpha and omega of policy development in this belle epoque.
Crime is a massive issue for voters in places like Hartlepool. As a town the Tory police cuts have absolutely screwed them - a total lack of resources means Cleveland PD have no overnight accommodation which means anyone lifted in town at night needs to get vanned into Boro which takes the few officers they have off the streets.
"We will hire 20,000 police officers" is a brilliant and popular Tory policy. The true genius is that is has been completely disconnected from who cut more coppers than that in the first place - the Tories. Listening to vox pops from Pools, WWC voters think Labour cut the police.
Of course, the truth is that it was Labour's economic incompetence that meant there was "no money left" (in their own words) and caused the Conservatives to cut the police.
If there was no money left how come there is plenty of money left? We have literally hosed money at people during Covid. The police didn't need a hosepipe of cash, just not malicious cuts aimed at Labour areas.
Because in the decade before Covid the government fixed the roof while the sun was shining.
Brown didn't.
They really didn't. What happened was the Tories spent 10 years arguing that Modern Monetary Theory wasn't valid and then Covid arrived and it was the only option in town,
We should now see a decent infrastructure boom ala the US for similar reasons (albeit from a far better starting point).
Magic Money Tree isn't valid long term, its a temporary emergency option alone.
What the Tories did was to spend 10 years reducing the deficit to the point that debt to GDP was going down before Covid arrived. The deficit was narrow and under control in 2019 unlike 2008.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
LibDems: Luddite and Proud!
Ironic that the LibDems are for a very open door immigration policy. You just don't want to build houses for them to live in once they get here....
First line of the LibDem policy paper on planning - "We have a chronic shortage of housing across the country, and especially the type of homes people with lower or even middle incomes can afford."
You will be shocked to find out that the LibDem approach is to give more power back to local communities and take it away from developers who build the wrong kind of houses in the wrong locations.
"Wrong kind of houses in the wrong locations"; translation: houses near me. 🙄
What's the right kind of house in the right location? Please don't say brownfield.
Wrong kind of houses in the wrong locations means great that you are building on that massive brownfield site, stupid that all the houses are 4-5 bed "executive" homes and there's a massive local shortage of starter homes.
Developers should be invited to tender to develop housing developments that fit the needs of the community. Not buy the land, refuse to build for just long enough to overrule the council the councillors the community and the MP, then build whatever the fuck you like for the maximum possible profit.
What's wrong with building 4-5 bed homes? Those who move into them have good homes and that frees up the old homes they used to live in.
Building more shit homes is not the solution. Building more good homes is the solution, build up the quality. If you're not happy with what the developers are building then give consent to other developers on other land.
Encourage people to build their own houses much more, like in most countries in Europe. I always quote Austria, which is 80% self-build, compared, to 10% here. A stroll round an Austrian village will show you at once whose new builds are better quality.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
...ran the thinking in 1975.
Meanwhile, in 2021, there's this thing called the climate emergency.
Oh cut the bullshit! Meanwhile in 2021 there's this thing call zero emission vehicles. Meanwhile by 2030 the Internal Combusion Engine is going to be made illegal to retail in new vehicles.
There is no excuse to be anti-car nowadays.
Question - where /how do you charge up your electric car if you live in a place without off road parking.
And how do you put 50 charging options in a car park with 50 narrow parking spaces for 50 flats?
That's precisely the point I was making. That's precisely why I support building more houses with off-road driveways and fewer flats.
A house with two reserved parking spots and charging should be the norm in 2021 not the exception for construction.
No profit in houses compared to 4-5 bed executive homes or flats.
And if the 4 bed "executive" homes round here are typical (and I suspect the none local builder ones are) the houses are little bigger than my 1930's unextended house except they've filled the loft with a large bedroom and an en-suite.
So what's the problem? That sounds great. You have 4 bedrooms in the space of what would have previously been 3, so we're making maximum use of the land. Great value.
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
At £350,000 each just about the only person round here who could get a mortgage for one is me.
There needs to be a whole lot of housing that targets a £150,000 or so price range that isn't a flat.
And how do you reset that- building houses that people want to live in that sell for £150k- without undermining the tier of the market just above where people are currently paying a lot more? You need a heck of a lot of general inflation and/or wage growth with zero house price inflation to get things back into synch.
Any politician- even BoJo- who threads that needle will deserve to stay in office as long as they damn well please.
Build, build, build. That's how.
Housing price ratios vary dramatically depending upon where construction has been happening and where it hasn't. The Red Wall towns which have been expanding into the countryside with construction has the lowest price ratio of all - isn't that what we should want across the entire country? It works.
So most residents in Tory held seats are already home owners, as indeed are residents of the Red Wall seats the Tories gained from Labour in 2019.
The problem of lack of home ownership is most acute in seats which already vote Labour anyway, especially in London and south of Watford but Labour councils don't have much incentive to build more homes to buy as while renters vote Labour, home owners tend to vote Tory
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
LibDems: Luddite and Proud!
Ironic that the LibDems are for a very open door immigration policy. You just don't want to build houses for them to live in once they get here....
First line of the LibDem policy paper on planning - "We have a chronic shortage of housing across the country, and especially the type of homes people with lower or even middle incomes can afford."
You will be shocked to find out that the LibDem approach is to give more power back to local communities and take it away from developers who build the wrong kind of houses in the wrong locations.
"Wrong kind of houses in the wrong locations"; translation: houses near me. 🙄
What's the right kind of house in the right location? Please don't say brownfield.
Wrong kind of houses in the wrong locations means great that you are building on that massive brownfield site, stupid that all the houses are 4-5 bed "executive" homes and there's a massive local shortage of starter homes.
Developers should be invited to tender to develop housing developments that fit the needs of the community. Not buy the land, refuse to build for just long enough to overrule the council the councillors the community and the MP, then build whatever the fuck you like for the maximum possible profit.
What's wrong with building 4-5 bed homes? Those who move into them have good homes and that frees up the old homes they used to live in.
Building more shit homes is not the solution. Building more good homes is the solution, build up the quality. If you're not happy with what the developers are building then give consent to other developers on other land.
Encourage people to build their own houses much more, like in most countries in Europe. I always quote Austria, which is 80% self-build, compared, to 10% here. A stroll round an Austrian village will show you at once whose new builds are better quality.
100% agreed. And that's because its so much easier to get planning consent on your own land there.
Try and self-build with yourself navigating the planning process easily here. 😱
One of the problems with housebuilding right now is building materials prices, which are reported to be rocketing. Copper, for example, is at a record.
Inflationary pressures, higher interest rates and higher taxes threaten to blow Johnson seriously off course in the coming months
No wonder he and Hancock are starting to talk about 'personal responsibility'. It isn't the red wall that is going to concern them from here to the next election. It is the blue one. The reports from the heartlands after May 06 must not be that good.
Anecdotally I have heard that getting cement is proving tricky at the moment. Apparently HS2 is using so much it is causing a shortage. Plus of course lots of people with Covid doing building/garden work. I will need some next month to extend my patio.
As I have been saying for months the Building Industry in the UK is absolutely booming and wages are increasing rapidly.
As an example an Agency contacted me this morning as they have a Mechanical Estimator who wants to change employers. The pre covid rate for such a position in Hampshire was £45-50K. He wants £75K and he will get it.
On voter ID, whenever we receive our form from our LA to register we have to sign it, and it clearly states the signature will be checked against the voter return
At the last General Election I had my postal vote rejected because I accidentally put the wrong year of my birth. I was out by one. I put my wife's. I got the letter rejecting it after the election so I couldn't rectify it. I gave myself a slap on the wrist. It could have made a difference but didn't TG.
If only Casino were right and there were "virtually no checks"!
Sorry, I'm not going to let that pass.
My point was that postal votes were ripe for abuse within the households to which they had been posted. It was not that there were "no checks" whatsoever upon their return, but checking off a signature against a voter return provides no evidence of whether that vote has been secretly cast.
I said there should be higher tests for qualifying for a postal vote, and unless there are extenuating circumstances that these should be delivered to and cast in a public place such as a post office or council site.
Of course, you know this, but as pedantic one-upmanship is how you define 'success' in your life you want to re-frame this as "intimidation" rather than "fraud" so you can win a narrow point.
It's sad, Ian. If we're going to disagree - let's disagree on something substantive rather than waste time on trivialities when the substance of the matter here is the integrity of the ballot.
Its a shame the Queens Speech didn't include some sort of provision to strip the Post Office/Royal Mail of those ridiculous powers which saw hundreds of people wrongly convicted under the Horizon software. So many issues that should have been remedied.
One of the problems with housebuilding right now is building materials prices, which are reported to be rocketing. Copper, for example, is at a record.
Inflationary pressures, higher interest rates and higher taxes threaten to blow Johnson seriously off course in the coming months
No wonder he and Hancock are starting to talk about 'personal responsibility'. It isn't the red wall that is going to concern them from here to the next election. It is the blue one. The reports from the heartlands after May 06 must not be that good.
Anecdotally I have heard that getting cement is proving tricky at the moment. Apparently HS2 is using so much it is causing a shortage. Plus of course lots of people with Covid doing building/garden work. I will need some next month to extend my patio.
As I have been saying for months the Building Industry in the UK is absolutely booming and wages are increasing rapidly.
As an example an Agency contacted me this morning as they have a Mechanical Estimator who wants to change employers. The pre covid rate for such a position in Hampshire was £45-50K. He wants £75K and he will get it.
Inflation is going to rear it's head again isn't it.
Not sure the opposition attack line of “where’s the social care plan” is a very good one. I think it implicitly accepts that the Tories hold all the answers.
Not sure the opposition attack line of “where’s the social care plan” is a very good one. I think it implicitly accepts that the Tories hold all the answers.
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 23m And you know who is the one politician who has talked seriously and consistently about confronting social-care. Andy Burnham. Which Keir Starmer will be delighted about...
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Ponder the median income and average house prices and you begin to understand the issue.
If it was an affordability crisis the houses wouldnt be getting occupied. In my area every house gets sold off plan as soon as they are released. The estates have ShowHomes... But they exist to upsell purchasers to buy upgraded fixtures and fittings, the sale of the house isnt a problem.
(we dont have a population boom)
The affordability problem doesn't manifest itself in people sleeping on the streets and houses unoccupied. But it does result in older landlords becoming increasingly wealthy at the expense of younger households.
That is bad not just in terms of intergenerational fairness, but also for the wider economy, as concentrating the nations wealth in older landlords reduces spending and investment.
There are a whole generation of people who cannot buy. Either they could afford the mortgage payments but not the deposit, or they can't afford either. So they end up renting and stuck in renting.
Whats more, for every pound that is overpaid in rent or mortgage that is a pound removed from circulation. People can just about find a way to afford a home but then don't have the free cash to spend that the economy needs to sustain jobs.
The solution absolutely is to build affordable homes. Which means shagging the market. Which is why we don't do it as then you end up stuck in negative equity and unable to move as I was for a decade.
One of the problems with housebuilding right now is building materials prices, which are reported to be rocketing. Copper, for example, is at a record.
Inflationary pressures, higher interest rates and higher taxes threaten to blow Johnson seriously off course in the coming months
No wonder he and Hancock are starting to talk about 'personal responsibility'. It isn't the red wall that is going to concern them from here to the next election. It is the blue one. The reports from the heartlands after May 06 must not be that good.
Anecdotally I have heard that getting cement is proving tricky at the moment. Apparently HS2 is using so much it is causing a shortage. Plus of course lots of people with Covid doing building/garden work. I will need some next month to extend my patio.
As I have been saying for months the Building Industry in the UK is absolutely booming and wages are increasing rapidly.
As an example an Agency contacted me this morning as they have a Mechanical Estimator who wants to change employers. The pre covid rate for such a position in Hampshire was £45-50K. He wants £75K and he will get it.
Inflation is going to rear it's head again isn't it.
Not half.
Question is whether it will balloon out of control.
Voter ID is clearly not a salient issue in many places. I can understand why Labourites might look upon it skeptically, as a Trumpite means of electoral suppression. But this, as in all things, has to be taken in the round - in certain areas ID fraudulence of this type is a mahoosive issue, in fact I'd go sor far as to say it's a mahoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoo- hoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohooho- hoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohohoohoohoo- hoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohooohoooohoooohooohooohooohoohohoohoohoohoohooosive issue and it must be treated accordingly, and maturely
One of the problems with housebuilding right now is building materials prices, which are reported to be rocketing. Copper, for example, is at a record.
Inflationary pressures, higher interest rates and higher taxes threaten to blow Johnson seriously off course in the coming months
No wonder he and Hancock are starting to talk about 'personal responsibility'. It isn't the red wall that is going to concern them from here to the next election. It is the blue one. The reports from the heartlands after May 06 must not be that good.
Anecdotally I have heard that getting cement is proving tricky at the moment. Apparently HS2 is using so much it is causing a shortage. Plus of course lots of people with Covid doing building/garden work. I will need some next month to extend my patio.
I can anecdotally agree on the small home building/garden works. It never stops around my way and has been like that since last summer. Small builders are run off their feet. Redoing the drive seems to have become a collective obsession.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
That makes sense though, since the Conserative Party has become the concrete-over-everything party and to hell with the original inhabitants party.
Good!
What "original inhabitants"? Nobody is having their own private land they inhabit being concreted over do they?
If you mean that selfish hatefilled NIMBY scum aren't able to tell people that land they do not inhabit shouldn't be built on then that is a good thing. Living near some green land doesn't mean you inhabit it.
Do you currently live in the countryside, Philip ?
No I live in a town that has been expanding into the surrounding countryside - and needs to do so because of rising population.
Do you like the accessibility of the countryside from where you are now ?
The countryside will remain accessible, the entire country is accessible with a short drive.
What isn't always accessible is good houses. That's far more important to people's lives.
That's true, but there's plenty of space to build on hoarded brownfield. Many people don't have a car, and even for those that do what often makes a difference to their psychological health and communities is natural space within walking distance, not by car.
That's why we should be encouraging as many homes as possible to be built with 2 dedicated parking spaces per house, to make it easier for people to have a car.
...ran the thinking in 1975.
Meanwhile, in 2021, there's this thing called the climate emergency.
Oh cut the bullshit! Meanwhile in 2021 there's this thing call zero emission vehicles. Meanwhile by 2030 the Internal Combusion Engine is going to be made illegal to retail in new vehicles.
There is no excuse to be anti-car nowadays.
Question - where /how do you charge up your electric car if you live in a place without off road parking.
And how do you put 50 charging options in a car park with 50 narrow parking spaces for 50 flats?
That's precisely the point I was making. That's precisely why I support building more houses with off-road driveways and fewer flats.
A house with two reserved parking spots and charging should be the norm in 2021 not the exception for construction.
No profit in houses compared to 4-5 bed executive homes or flats.
And if the 4 bed "executive" homes round here are typical (and I suspect the none local builder ones are) the houses are little bigger than my 1930's unextended house except they've filled the loft with a large bedroom and an en-suite.
So what's the problem? That sounds great. You have 4 bedrooms in the space of what would have previously been 3, so we're making maximum use of the land. Great value.
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Ponder the median income and average house prices and you begin to understand the issue.
If it was an affordability crisis the houses wouldnt be getting occupied. In my area every house gets sold off plan as soon as they are released. The estates have ShowHomes... But they exist to upsell purchasers to buy upgraded fixtures and fittings, the sale of the house isnt a problem.
(we dont have a population boom)
We don't have a population boom, but we do have a rapidly changing demographic structure without the same churn in occupation. Very broadly, middle-aged families who bought four and five bedroom houses 20 years ago are now occupied by one elderly couple now their children have left home. But the children are in flat shares because they can't afford a house. We have a much less efficient distribution of people within our housing stock to what we had a generation ago. Note I am not proposing any particular solution to this! Just saying that the problem is slightly more nuanced than is often appreciated.
One of the problems with housebuilding right now is building materials prices, which are reported to be rocketing. Copper, for example, is at a record.
Inflationary pressures, higher interest rates and higher taxes threaten to blow Johnson seriously off course in the coming months
No wonder he and Hancock are starting to talk about 'personal responsibility'. It isn't the red wall that is going to concern them from here to the next election. It is the blue one. The reports from the heartlands after May 06 must not be that good.
Anecdotally I have heard that getting cement is proving tricky at the moment. Apparently HS2 is using so much it is causing a shortage. Plus of course lots of people with Covid doing building/garden work. I will need some next month to extend my patio.
As I have been saying for months the Building Industry in the UK is absolutely booming and wages are increasing rapidly.
As an example an Agency contacted me this morning as they have a Mechanical Estimator who wants to change employers. The pre covid rate for such a position in Hampshire was £45-50K. He wants £75K and he will get it.
Inflation is going to rear it's head again isn't it.
Not half.
Question is whether it will balloon out of control.
And given how much the current housing market in the South and East is underpinned by absurdly low nominal interest rates, inflation doesn't need to rise far to be a problem.
Good thing that we're not due to mess around with our supply lines for imported food and goods, even if only temporarily, eh?
Not sure the opposition attack line of “where’s the social care plan” is a very good one. I think it implicitly accepts that the Tories hold all the answers.
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 23m And you know who is the one politician who has talked seriously and consistently about confronting social-care. Andy Burnham. Which Keir Starmer will be delighted about...
And what will the national scheme be based on?
The one that Andy Burnham has implemented in Manchester...
It's about priorities isn't it, essentially. Boris and team deciding to introduce voter ID in the Queen's speech alongside various other partisan procedural legislation, some of which may have very reasonable foundations and arguments in its favour, because it's on-brand and appeals to the base.
Same as Labour and Palestine. Nobody would argue there's not a long-running issue with Israel's policies on settlers and blockade of Gaza, especially this week, but Labour chose to prioritise this as an issue because it appealed to the base.
Political parties doing what political parties do. And I could say the same about my own party who have long devoted outsized attention and debate to legalising cannabis and introducing a land tax, two issues that never score that highly in lists of voter priorities (though the latter should).
Tactically this is spot on for Blue Labour. Dog whistle gesture politics at its finest. It will harm them at the next election when it discourages chunks of their new electorate from voting, but Boris can only ever see 6 inches in front of him.
Here you go again "chunks". But I was wrong to write "vast".
How big of a "chunk" are you thinking about? What percentage of the electorate in your eyes will be put off voting because of this?
Take somewhere like Thornaby where I used to live. Take one of the sink estates that turned out in record numbers to vote Tory in 2019. These people do not vote - or didn't until Brexit woke them up. So finding excuses and reasons not to bother comes easy to them. All it takes are the tiny numbers who have no ID and cannot vote talking about it and the people who aren't sure will drift off the definitely going to vote list.
It doesn't take many people before those new Tory majorities start to dissolve. BAME communities were mentioned above, but so many of these vote by post anyway so aren't affected. It is the white working class who are in the firing line for this, and in these seats if they vote they're voting Tory.
Again, this is based on years of doorstep campaigning in these places with these voters. Your absolute certainty is based upon zero experience of these voters.
I have experience I'd just rather talk about the issue than my private life. Especially since I post in my name and not an anonymous moniker, something I regret doing when I signed up, I'd rather not give information that makes doxxing possible.
If you're convinced that significant numbers of people have no ID and won't get free ID and won't vote then what proportion of people do you think that is? Do you think its one in four voters that will be put off voting? One in ten? One percent? 0.5%? 0.1%?
You keep saying "many" or "chunks" but object to "vast" so what sort of apparently not vast "chunk" are you imagining here?
Philip, let's assume you are right re the numbers who will be turned off by voter id, can you answer my post below which explains why this type of voter fraud is miniscule and ineffective and what little there is can be prevented by other more effective and simpler means (see below).
I would have thought tightening up postal voting was far more important. In fact of the 2 methods I gave of voter id fraud the 2nd (and more effective) is best done via a postal vote and not turning up at the polling station.
PS I have actual experience of both types of frauds (I hasten to add not as the culprit, but in identifying it).
This is the issue. Require voter ID and: (a) a small number of people who would otherwise have voted do not vote (b) a small amount of casual electoral fraud may be prevented
If b > a then it's potentially worth doing (also weigh up any other costs).
But we don't seem to have either made a good attempt to meaure b (which could presumably be done by randomly sampling polling station records and then following up a sample of voters to see whether they did in fact vote).
We also have not, from what I've seen, done a proper evaluation of a. There have been some trials, but these really need to be randomised to polling stations within some carefullly demographically chosen bigger areas, with blanket literature to the bigger areas about whether or not ID is needed at your polling station. Current trials seem to be bigger areas, presumabl with an information campaign, but that information campaign may itself raise turnout (you remind people of the vote, how to vote etc etc) so it skews any assessment of impact on turnout.
We need to get serious about this and commission a university (probably, or ONS) to do a properly designed trial of impact of requiring electoral ID to establish a and an audit of past voting to try and establish the size of b.
Evidence based policy making vs. "are you happy to have your vote stolen ?". It will never catch on.
On levelling up. Laura Trott, MP for Sevenoaks, refusing to admit her constituency is wealthier than Hartlepool. And that money will need to flow from her constituents to elsewhere. It's not about money she reckons.
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Ponder the median income and average house prices and you begin to understand the issue.
If it was an affordability crisis the houses wouldnt be getting occupied. In my area every house gets sold off plan as soon as they are released. The estates have ShowHomes... But they exist to upsell purchasers to buy upgraded fixtures and fittings, the sale of the house isnt a problem.
(we dont have a population boom)
The affordability problem doesn't manifest itself in people sleeping on the streets and houses unoccupied. But it does result in older landlords becoming increasingly wealthy at the expense of younger households.
That is bad not just in terms of intergenerational fairness, but also for the wider economy, as concentrating the nations wealth in older landlords reduces spending and investment.
There are a whole generation of people who cannot buy. Either they could afford the mortgage payments but not the deposit, or they can't afford either. So they end up renting and stuck in renting.
Whats more, for every pound that is overpaid in rent or mortgage that is a pound removed from circulation. People can just about find a way to afford a home but then don't have the free cash to spend that the economy needs to sustain jobs.
The solution absolutely is to build affordable homes. Which means shagging the market. Which is why we don't do it as then you end up stuck in negative equity and unable to move as I was for a decade.
It is the 1920s dream being sold over again "come and live in the countryside, surrounded by fields and fresh air" until the land gets so overbuilt that the original premise gets eaten away.
It is very weird, this concept, that “my village/town has taken more than its share”, with all of these plans presumably imposed from on high.
We essentially have a Soviet-style planning system, comprising tractor-style production targets, runaway unaffordability, and acres of Barrett shite.
However, sprawl is not the answer for all the obvious reasons (obvious to all except @Philip_Thompson).
This is why its such a big issue on the doorstep. Places like Stockton have built north of 10,000 homes all across the borough over the last decade or so, yet is told by the government they are not building enough houses.
You do not have a local plan unless you build your government-imposed quota. You cannot shape what developers build and where they build them without a local plan. But the developers sit on the planning permission you give so that despite you having greenlit enough homes to hit the quota you can't hit it as the developers refuse, they can then overrule you and do what the fuck they like.
I have no objection to new houses being built, only to the anarchic way its is done at the moment. Let the community plan housing development zones - building where it makes sense, where the roads can cope, where there are school places. Building the homes needed for that community. Give planning permission. Then tender construction out to the developers.
One of the problems with housebuilding right now is building materials prices, which are reported to be rocketing. Copper, for example, is at a record.
Inflationary pressures, higher interest rates and higher taxes threaten to blow Johnson seriously off course in the coming months
No wonder he and Hancock are starting to talk about 'personal responsibility'. It isn't the red wall that is going to concern them from here to the next election. It is the blue one. The reports from the heartlands after May 06 must not be that good.
Anecdotally I have heard that getting cement is proving tricky at the moment. Apparently HS2 is using so much it is causing a shortage. Plus of course lots of people with Covid doing building/garden work. I will need some next month to extend my patio.
As I have been saying for months the Building Industry in the UK is absolutely booming and wages are increasing rapidly.
As an example an Agency contacted me this morning as they have a Mechanical Estimator who wants to change employers. The pre covid rate for such a position in Hampshire was £45-50K. He wants £75K and he will get it.
Inflation is going to rear it's head again isn't it.
Not half.
Question is whether it will balloon out of control.
That will of course depend partly on the Bank of England, which has a remit to control inflation but here's the thing. Can you raise interest rates into an economy that was/is/is about to be......locked down?
And its not just inflation. Taxation is going to have to rise to pay for lunacy that seemed like an awfully good idea 12 months ago.
That double whammy is going to batter middle England. Add in costs to save the planet and you have a potentially very dangerous situation for Johnson.
One of the problems with housebuilding right now is building materials prices, which are reported to be rocketing. Copper, for example, is at a record.
Inflationary pressures, higher interest rates and higher taxes threaten to blow Johnson seriously off course in the coming months
No wonder he and Hancock are starting to talk about 'personal responsibility'. It isn't the red wall that is going to concern them from here to the next election. It is the blue one. The reports from the heartlands after May 06 must not be that good.
Anecdotally I have heard that getting cement is proving tricky at the moment. Apparently HS2 is using so much it is causing a shortage. Plus of course lots of people with Covid doing building/garden work. I will need some next month to extend my patio.
As I have been saying for months the Building Industry in the UK is absolutely booming and wages are increasing rapidly.
As an example an Agency contacted me this morning as they have a Mechanical Estimator who wants to change employers. The pre covid rate for such a position in Hampshire was £45-50K. He wants £75K and he will get it.
The price of timber has risen x4 in the past 12 months and virtually all commodities are seen a boom in prices off the back of Chinese demand and global recovery.
That is feeding through to the consumer. Pretty much all the major FMCG companies said in their Q1 results that they will pass on price increases to consumers, mid to high single digit price increases being the general rule.
The reason that it's woke to whinge about voter ID is that it's so out of kilter with mainstream Britons. It's typical of the sort of thing extreme libertarians and Guardianistas get so agitated about but which has very little to do with normal British people.
By all means get vexed about infringements to civil liberties if that keeps you occupied but voter ID isn't a particular backdoor to their erosion. It's to ensure that the kind of voter fraud which we've seen in some parts is stopped in its tracks.
Sadly typical of a lot of rightwing politicians nowadays. People have reasoned arguments for opposing a policy (eg voter id). They could be right or wrong. But instead of counter-arguments it's just irrelevant insults ("woke").
And when picked up on the irrelevant insult, they go straight to a very ugly form of nationalism. "People who disagree with me are not 'normal British people'" etc
Which just goes back to the original point that the people doing this are actually anti-democratic.
What's maybe even sadder is that the democratic right seem to mostly go along with this because it seems to get enough votes to stay in power.
Utter tosh. How does it get a single vote to "stay in power? It prevents the possibility of fraudulent ones. Which is excellent news. You sound as though you'd be happy for a legitimate government to be rejected by fraudulent votes. Not a good position.
There were council seats that were decided by drawing lots last week. In a least one (Northumberland), the fraudulent casting of one vote would have prevented a gain that resulted in a change of control of the council.
No, I said ugly nationalist rhetoric (eg "normal British people") helps rightwing parties stay in power.
And you may want to put ridiculous words into my mouth, but no I am not in favour of fraudulent votes.
I am generally against anything that discourages anyone from voting, but measures need to be looked at on case-by-case basis. If you want to have photo ID for voting then first you need to make sure that everyone already has photo ID, in my opinion.
One of the problems with housebuilding right now is building materials prices, which are reported to be rocketing. Copper, for example, is at a record.
Inflationary pressures, higher interest rates and higher taxes threaten to blow Johnson seriously off course in the coming months
No wonder he and Hancock are starting to talk about 'personal responsibility'. It isn't the red wall that is going to concern them from here to the next election. It is the blue one. The reports from the heartlands after May 06 must not be that good.
Anecdotally I have heard that getting cement is proving tricky at the moment. Apparently HS2 is using so much it is causing a shortage. Plus of course lots of people with Covid doing building/garden work. I will need some next month to extend my patio.
As I have been saying for months the Building Industry in the UK is absolutely booming and wages are increasing rapidly.
As an example an Agency contacted me this morning as they have a Mechanical Estimator who wants to change employers. The pre covid rate for such a position in Hampshire was £45-50K. He wants £75K and he will get it.
The rates being paid now will have to be refelected in the price for any construction projects
On levelling up. Laura Trott, MP for Sevenoaks, refusing to admit her constituency is wealthier than Hartlepool. And that money will need to flow from her constituents to elsewhere.
Well, quite. If you live in Sevenoaks and you think there should be a massive transference of local wealth to Hartlepool, you wouldn't vote Conservative, would you?
It is very weird, this concept, that “my village/town has taken more than its share”, with all of these plans presumably imposed from on high.
We essentially have a Soviet-style planning system, comprising tractor-style production targets, runaway unaffordability, and acres of Barrett shite.
However, sprawl is not the answer for all the obvious reasons (obvious to all except @Philip_Thompson).
This is why its such a big issue on the doorstep. Places like Stockton have built north of 10,000 homes all across the borough over the last decade or so, yet is told by the government they are not building enough houses.
You do not have a local plan unless you build your government-imposed quota. You cannot shape what developers build and where they build them without a local plan. But the developers sit on the planning permission you give so that despite you having greenlit enough homes to hit the quota you can't hit it as the developers refuse, they can then overrule you and do what the fuck they like.
I have no objection to new houses being built, only to the anarchic way its is done at the moment. Let the community plan housing development zones - building where it makes sense, where the roads can cope, where there are school places. Building the homes needed for that community. Give planning permission. Then tender construction out to the developers.
10,000 homes is a great start. And what is the house price to income ratio in Stockton?
Ideally there should be no quota, just a complete free for all so that planning permission can never be refused, its not even needed to be asked for.
If we're going to have a planning permission system then refusal should only be permitted if house price to earnings ratios are ~3x income, no higher than that. So yes, Stockton should keep building, everywhere should.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
NIMBYism is entirely appropriate in the countryside.
We are, even where I am currently sitting in London Zone 2, a low-rise country.
To paraphrase Yazz, “the only way is up (in brownfield sites)”.
Total Nimbyism is not, since it stifles communities.
Though I think that such demands are heavily an almost automatic result of population density etc.
There are significant differences between eg England and Scotland. I have a friend who recently took advantage of a rule that allowed smaller plots in open countryside to be developed if they were under a certain size and fenced on all sides.
On levelling up. Laura Trott, MP for Sevenoaks, refusing to admit her constituency is wealthier than Hartlepool. And that money will need to flow from her constituents to elsewhere. It's not about money she reckons.
Those southern MPs are getting more restive by the day.
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Ponder the median income and average house prices and you begin to understand the issue.
If it was an affordability crisis the houses wouldnt be getting occupied. In my area every house gets sold off plan as soon as they are released. The estates have ShowHomes... But they exist to upsell purchasers to buy upgraded fixtures and fittings, the sale of the house isnt a problem.
(we dont have a population boom)
The affordability problem doesn't manifest itself in people sleeping on the streets and houses unoccupied. But it does result in older landlords becoming increasingly wealthy at the expense of younger households.
That is bad not just in terms of intergenerational fairness, but also for the wider economy, as concentrating the nations wealth in older landlords reduces spending and investment.
There are a whole generation of people who cannot buy. Either they could afford the mortgage payments but not the deposit, or they can't afford either. So they end up renting and stuck in renting.
Whats more, for every pound that is overpaid in rent or mortgage that is a pound removed from circulation. People can just about find a way to afford a home but then don't have the free cash to spend that the economy needs to sustain jobs.
The solution absolutely is to build affordable homes. Which means shagging the market. Which is why we don't do it as then you end up stuck in negative equity and unable to move as I was for a decade.
It is the 1920s dream being sold over again "come and live in the countryside, surrounded by fields and fresh air" until the land gets so overbuilt that the original premise gets eaten away.
Its also about demographics. Its much easier now, as it always was, for a working couple to buy than a singleton. Millennials seem to like being singletons.
It is very weird, this concept, that “my village/town has taken more than its share”, with all of these plans presumably imposed from on high.
We essentially have a Soviet-style planning system, comprising tractor-style production targets, runaway unaffordability, and acres of Barrett shite.
However, sprawl is not the answer for all the obvious reasons (obvious to all except @Philip_Thompson).
This is why its such a big issue on the doorstep. Places like Stockton have built north of 10,000 homes all across the borough over the last decade or so, yet is told by the government they are not building enough houses.
You do not have a local plan unless you build your government-imposed quota. You cannot shape what developers build and where they build them without a local plan. But the developers sit on the planning permission you give so that despite you having greenlit enough homes to hit the quota you can't hit it as the developers refuse, they can then overrule you and do what the fuck they like.
I have no objection to new houses being built, only to the anarchic way its is done at the moment. Let the community plan housing development zones - building where it makes sense, where the roads can cope, where there are school places. Building the homes needed for that community. Give planning permission. Then tender construction out to the developers.
10,000 homes is a great start. And what is the house price to income ratio in Stockton?
Ideally there should be no quota, just a complete free for all so that planning permission can never be refused, its not even needed to be asked for.
If we're going to have a planning permission system then refusal should only be permitted if house price to earnings ratios are ~3x income, no higher than that. So yes, Stockton should keep building, everywhere should.
As Rochdale correcly pointed out it is not planning permission that is the problem, planning permission has already been given by most councils through local plans in suitable areas with the infrastructure to cope.
It is developers land banking and not developing in areas where they already have planning permission that is the issue and where they need to be taken to task and fined if they do not follow through and develop there
On levelling up. Laura Trott, MP for Sevenoaks, refusing to admit her constituency is wealthier than Hartlepool. And that money will need to flow from her constituents to elsewhere. It's not about money she reckons.
The Tories won Hartlepool in the by election last week but lost the Sevenoaks Town county council seat to the LDs, Trott has obviously taken note.
She does not want to see the Tories gain voters in Hartlepool only to lose her voters to the LDs in Sevenoaks
What to do about meeting housing demand while avoiding suburban sprawl. Well, I wouldn't have started here. The problem is what has already happened in the country over the past 150 years starting with the Victorians.
My favourite places in Europe are those with quite dense population in pretty countryside, where people live in closely populated market towns within walking distance of shops and places to eat but also easy walking distance of the countryside. But outside places like Ludlow or Totnes we don't really have much of that in Britain.
Population decline may make some of these issues moot in a decade or so. Particularly post Brexit and post-Covid, unless there's a baby boom. So might the return of multigenerational households.
It is very weird, this concept, that “my village/town has taken more than its share”, with all of these plans presumably imposed from on high.
We essentially have a Soviet-style planning system, comprising tractor-style production targets, runaway unaffordability, and acres of Barrett shite.
However, sprawl is not the answer for all the obvious reasons (obvious to all except @Philip_Thompson).
This is why its such a big issue on the doorstep. Places like Stockton have built north of 10,000 homes all across the borough over the last decade or so, yet is told by the government they are not building enough houses.
You do not have a local plan unless you build your government-imposed quota. You cannot shape what developers build and where they build them without a local plan. But the developers sit on the planning permission you give so that despite you having greenlit enough homes to hit the quota you can't hit it as the developers refuse, they can then overrule you and do what the fuck they like.
I have no objection to new houses being built, only to the anarchic way its is done at the moment. Let the community plan housing development zones - building where it makes sense, where the roads can cope, where there are school places. Building the homes needed for that community. Give planning permission. Then tender construction out to the developers.
10,000 homes is a great start. And what is the house price to income ratio in Stockton?
Ideally there should be no quota, just a complete free for all so that planning permission can never be refused, its not even needed to be asked for.
If we're going to have a planning permission system then refusal should only be permitted if house price to earnings ratios are ~3x income, no higher than that. So yes, Stockton should keep building, everywhere should.
As Rochdale correcly pointed out it is not planning permission that is the problem, planning permission has already been given by most councils through local plans in suitable areas with the infrastructure to cope.
It is developers land banking and not developing in areas where they already have planning permission that is the issue and where they need to be taken to task and fined if they do not follow through and develop there
That's a load of bollocks, a lie to justify NIMBYism, developments take time. There will always be a pipeline of homes where consent has been granted and hasn't yet happened - its not possible to grant consent and have it built the very next day.
If you want more houses built then widen the pipeline and approve more homes.
If you were to look at developments approved eg five years ago (giving time for construction to be done), then barring times where developers have gone out of business, how many homes are there that have consent from five years ago but haven't yet been built yet?
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Ponder the median income and average house prices and you begin to understand the issue.
If it was an affordability crisis the houses wouldnt be getting occupied. In my area every house gets sold off plan as soon as they are released. The estates have ShowHomes... But they exist to upsell purchasers to buy upgraded fixtures and fittings, the sale of the house isnt a problem.
(we dont have a population boom)
The affordability problem doesn't manifest itself in people sleeping on the streets and houses unoccupied. But it does result in older landlords becoming increasingly wealthy at the expense of younger households.
That is bad not just in terms of intergenerational fairness, but also for the wider economy, as concentrating the nations wealth in older landlords reduces spending and investment.
There are a whole generation of people who cannot buy. Either they could afford the mortgage payments but not the deposit, or they can't afford either. So they end up renting and stuck in renting.
Whats more, for every pound that is overpaid in rent or mortgage that is a pound removed from circulation. People can just about find a way to afford a home but then don't have the free cash to spend that the economy needs to sustain jobs.
The solution absolutely is to build affordable homes. Which means shagging the market. Which is why we don't do it as then you end up stuck in negative equity and unable to move as I was for a decade.
It is the 1920s dream being sold over again "come and live in the countryside, surrounded by fields and fresh air" until the land gets so overbuilt that the original premise gets eaten away.
Its also about demographics. Its much easier now, as it always was, for a working couple to buy than a singleton. Millennials seem to like being singletons.
20 years ago, I was at an investor presentation by Sky. They pointed out that one of the big positive factors working for them structurally was that household growth was massively outstripping population growth - so, in the past 30 years (then), population growth was +10% but Household growth was something like 30% growth. The factors they included were millennials being singletons but also the rise of divorces amongst other things.
One last story from the Scottish Parliament election.
"Independent Green Voice was a tiny (list) party whose five candidates included two former British National Party activists and a man accused of Holocaust denial (he denies the allegation). But did all Scottish voters know this? There are plenty of signs that they didn’t.
While far-Right candidates such as Britain First leader Jayda Fransen won just 46 votes in Glasgow, the anti-immigrant, anti-EU Independent Green Voice won thousands of votes. How come? How many of these voters thought they were voting for the Scottish Greens?
These voters mattered. In Glasgow, for example, where Independent Green Voice took 2,210 votes, the Green Party fell 914 votes short of a second seat on the regional list. In South of Scotland, the Greens were just 115 votes short of taking a seat. Independent Green Voice won 1,690."
I thought the Registration of Political Parties Act 1998 (following the 'Literal Democrats' case in 1994) was supposed to stop this tactic?
movement46 @movement46 · 10 May The message from across the south of England is clear @EdwardJDavey and @Keir_Starmer : by working together you can free us from this Tory government; continue to fight each other and you never will.
Interesting idea that voting patterns will not change if some parties step down and make a single front against the Tories. Similar to the wooly thinking about PR and the idea that the Tories are doomed because their voters are dying off.......
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Ponder the median income and average house prices and you begin to understand the issue.
If it was an affordability crisis the houses wouldnt be getting occupied. In my area every house gets sold off plan as soon as they are released. The estates have ShowHomes... But they exist to upsell purchasers to buy upgraded fixtures and fittings, the sale of the house isnt a problem.
(we dont have a population boom)
The affordability problem doesn't manifest itself in people sleeping on the streets and houses unoccupied. But it does result in older landlords becoming increasingly wealthy at the expense of younger households.
That is bad not just in terms of intergenerational fairness, but also for the wider economy, as concentrating the nations wealth in older landlords reduces spending and investment.
There are a whole generation of people who cannot buy. Either they could afford the mortgage payments but not the deposit, or they can't afford either. So they end up renting and stuck in renting.
Whats more, for every pound that is overpaid in rent or mortgage that is a pound removed from circulation. People can just about find a way to afford a home but then don't have the free cash to spend that the economy needs to sustain jobs.
The solution absolutely is to build affordable homes. Which means shagging the market. Which is why we don't do it as then you end up stuck in negative equity and unable to move as I was for a decade.
It is the 1920s dream being sold over again "come and live in the countryside, surrounded by fields and fresh air" until the land gets so overbuilt that the original premise gets eaten away.
Its also about demographics. Its much easier now, as it always was, for a working couple to buy than a singleton. Millennials seem to like being singletons.
And because political parties like to provide for "hard-working families" they are not bothered about singletons
On levelling up. Laura Trott, MP for Sevenoaks, refusing to admit her constituency is wealthier than Hartlepool. And that money will need to flow from her constituents to elsewhere. It's not about money she reckons.
The Tories won Hartlepool in the by election last week but lost the Sevenoaks Town county council seat to the LDs, Trott has obviously taken note.
She does not want to see the Tories gain voters in Hartlepool only to lose her voters to the LDs in Sevenoaks
Voters in these constituencies can see they are about to be used an an enormous cash cow by a 'conservative' government that ditched every conservative principle in the book at the first whiff of gunpowder.
It is very weird, this concept, that “my village/town has taken more than its share”, with all of these plans presumably imposed from on high.
We essentially have a Soviet-style planning system, comprising tractor-style production targets, runaway unaffordability, and acres of Barrett shite.
However, sprawl is not the answer for all the obvious reasons (obvious to all except @Philip_Thompson).
I agree on several levels, without the government pressure to open up land for housing though there would be even less. There are areas that would be quite happy to never allow another house to be built (while busily telling their friends how terrible it is that their grandchildren cant afford to buy in the village).
It is the refusal of municipalities to face up to the need for more housing which has resulted in this.
It is very weird, this concept, that “my village/town has taken more than its share”, with all of these plans presumably imposed from on high.
We essentially have a Soviet-style planning system, comprising tractor-style production targets, runaway unaffordability, and acres of Barrett shite.
However, sprawl is not the answer for all the obvious reasons (obvious to all except @Philip_Thompson).
This is why its such a big issue on the doorstep. Places like Stockton have built north of 10,000 homes all across the borough over the last decade or so, yet is told by the government they are not building enough houses.
You do not have a local plan unless you build your government-imposed quota. You cannot shape what developers build and where they build them without a local plan. But the developers sit on the planning permission you give so that despite you having greenlit enough homes to hit the quota you can't hit it as the developers refuse, they can then overrule you and do what the fuck they like.
I have no objection to new houses being built, only to the anarchic way its is done at the moment. Let the community plan housing development zones - building where it makes sense, where the roads can cope, where there are school places. Building the homes needed for that community. Give planning permission. Then tender construction out to the developers.
10,000 homes is a great start. And what is the house price to income ratio in Stockton?
Ideally there should be no quota, just a complete free for all so that planning permission can never be refused, its not even needed to be asked for.
If we're going to have a planning permission system then refusal should only be permitted if house price to earnings ratios are ~3x income, no higher than that. So yes, Stockton should keep building, everywhere should.
As Rochdale correcly pointed out it is not planning permission that is the problem, planning permission has already been given by most councils through local plans in suitable areas with the infrastructure to cope.
It is developers land banking and not developing in areas where they already have planning permission that is the issue and where they need to be taken to task and fined if they do not follow through and develop there
That's a load of bollocks, a lie to justify NIMBYism, developments take time. There will always be a pipeline of homes where consent has been granted and hasn't yet happened - its not possible to grant consent and have it built the very next day.
If you want more houses built then widen the pipeline and approve more homes.
If you were to look at developments approved eg five years ago (giving time for construction to be done), then barring times where developers have gone out of business, how many homes are there that have consent from five years ago but haven't yet been built yet?
No, planning permission has been given in suitable areas which protects the greenbelt as far as possible and has the infrastructure, schools, GPs, roads etc to cope. Not a free for all which would destroy the area and the countryside and have no infrastructure.
It is land banking that is the problem eg an investigation in 2015 'revealed that the UK’s biggest housebuilders are sitting on 600,000 plots of land with planning permission; that’s four times the total number of homes built last year. Berkeley, Barratt, Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey (the four biggest companies in the industry) accounted for more than 450,000 of the plots – while paying out more than £1.5bn to their shareholders.' https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/31/britain-land-housing-crisis-developers-not-building-land-banking
It is very weird, this concept, that “my village/town has taken more than its share”, with all of these plans presumably imposed from on high.
We essentially have a Soviet-style planning system, comprising tractor-style production targets, runaway unaffordability, and acres of Barrett shite.
However, sprawl is not the answer for all the obvious reasons (obvious to all except @Philip_Thompson).
This is why its such a big issue on the doorstep. Places like Stockton have built north of 10,000 homes all across the borough over the last decade or so, yet is told by the government they are not building enough houses.
You do not have a local plan unless you build your government-imposed quota. You cannot shape what developers build and where they build them without a local plan. But the developers sit on the planning permission you give so that despite you having greenlit enough homes to hit the quota you can't hit it as the developers refuse, they can then overrule you and do what the fuck they like.
I have no objection to new houses being built, only to the anarchic way its is done at the moment. Let the community plan housing development zones - building where it makes sense, where the roads can cope, where there are school places. Building the homes needed for that community. Give planning permission. Then tender construction out to the developers.
10,000 homes is a great start. And what is the house price to income ratio in Stockton?
Ideally there should be no quota, just a complete free for all so that planning permission can never be refused, its not even needed to be asked for.
If we're going to have a planning permission system then refusal should only be permitted if house price to earnings ratios are ~3x income, no higher than that. So yes, Stockton should keep building, everywhere should.
As Rochdale correcly pointed out it is not planning permission that is the problem, planning permission has already been given by most councils through local plans in suitable areas with the infrastructure to cope.
It is developers land banking and not developing in areas where they already have planning permission that is the issue and where they need to be taken to task and fined if they do not follow through and develop there
And whilst a house price = 3 x earnings rough principle may well be a desirable thing, that ship sailed long ago in many places. I'm in Romford, Zone 6 edge of London. The cheapest 3 bedroom house I can quickly find on the internet is ex-council house, on a big estate with no train or tube access.
£280 000.
That bubble isn't deflating without hurting a lot of people.
One last story from the Scottish Parliament election.
"Independent Green Voice was a tiny (list) party whose five candidates included two former British National Party activists and a man accused of Holocaust denial (he denies the allegation). But did all Scottish voters know this? There are plenty of signs that they didn’t.
While far-Right candidates such as Britain First leader Jayda Fransen won just 46 votes in Glasgow, the anti-immigrant, anti-EU Independent Green Voice won thousands of votes. How come? How many of these voters thought they were voting for the Scottish Greens?
These voters mattered. In Glasgow, for example, where Independent Green Voice took 2,210 votes, the Green Party fell 914 votes short of a second seat on the regional list. In South of Scotland, the Greens were just 115 votes short of taking a seat. Independent Green Voice won 1,690."
I thought the Registration of Political Parties Act 1998 (following the 'Literal Democrats' case in 1994 was supposed to stop this tactic?
The logog change was the key thing for me. Their new logo had the word Green in massively bigger font than Independent and Voice.
It ended up being a larger Green text logo than the genuine Scottish Green party logo.
Undoubtedly cost the Greens 1 seat and almost certainly 2.
It is very weird, this concept, that “my village/town has taken more than its share”, with all of these plans presumably imposed from on high.
We essentially have a Soviet-style planning system, comprising tractor-style production targets, runaway unaffordability, and acres of Barrett shite.
However, sprawl is not the answer for all the obvious reasons (obvious to all except @Philip_Thompson).
This is why its such a big issue on the doorstep. Places like Stockton have built north of 10,000 homes all across the borough over the last decade or so, yet is told by the government they are not building enough houses.
You do not have a local plan unless you build your government-imposed quota. You cannot shape what developers build and where they build them without a local plan. But the developers sit on the planning permission you give so that despite you having greenlit enough homes to hit the quota you can't hit it as the developers refuse, they can then overrule you and do what the fuck they like.
I have no objection to new houses being built, only to the anarchic way its is done at the moment. Let the community plan housing development zones - building where it makes sense, where the roads can cope, where there are school places. Building the homes needed for that community. Give planning permission. Then tender construction out to the developers.
10,000 homes is a great start. And what is the house price to income ratio in Stockton?
Ideally there should be no quota, just a complete free for all so that planning permission can never be refused, its not even needed to be asked for.
If we're going to have a planning permission system then refusal should only be permitted if house price to earnings ratios are ~3x income, no higher than that. So yes, Stockton should keep building, everywhere should.
As Rochdale correcly pointed out it is not planning permission that is the problem, planning permission has already been given by most councils through local plans in suitable areas with the infrastructure to cope.
It is developers land banking and not developing in areas where they already have planning permission that is the issue and where they need to be taken to task and fined if they do not follow through and develop there
That's a load of bollocks, a lie to justify NIMBYism, developments take time. There will always be a pipeline of homes where consent has been granted and hasn't yet happened - its not possible to grant consent and have it built the very next day.
If you want more houses built then widen the pipeline and approve more homes.
If you were to look at developments approved eg five years ago (giving time for construction to be done), then barring times where developers have gone out of business, how many homes are there that have consent from five years ago but haven't yet been built yet?
No, planning permission has been given in suitable areas which protects the greenbelt as far as possible and has the infrastructure, schools, GPs, roads etc to cope. Not a free for all which would destroy the area and the countryside and have no infrastructure.
It is land banking that is the problem eg an investigation in 2015 'revealed that the UK’s biggest housebuilders are sitting on 600,000 plots of land with planning permission; that’s four times the total number of homes built last year. Berkeley, Barratt, Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey (the four biggest companies in the industry) accounted for more than 450,000 of the plots – while paying out more than £1.5bn to their shareholders.' https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/31/britain-land-housing-crisis-developers-not-building-land-banking
Again that is bullshit. Yes they will have 450,000 plots currently with consent but you can't give consent and have construction completed within 24 hours. 🙄🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
Don't be silly. There will always be a pipeline of homes that are due to be built as developments can take years to complete. How many of the 450,000 plots in 2015 still haven't been finished now? If they're all still not completed then yes there's a problem, if they have been then it is not the problem.
It is very weird, this concept, that “my village/town has taken more than its share”, with all of these plans presumably imposed from on high.
We essentially have a Soviet-style planning system, comprising tractor-style production targets, runaway unaffordability, and acres of Barrett shite.
However, sprawl is not the answer for all the obvious reasons (obvious to all except @Philip_Thompson).
This is why its such a big issue on the doorstep. Places like Stockton have built north of 10,000 homes all across the borough over the last decade or so, yet is told by the government they are not building enough houses.
You do not have a local plan unless you build your government-imposed quota. You cannot shape what developers build and where they build them without a local plan. But the developers sit on the planning permission you give so that despite you having greenlit enough homes to hit the quota you can't hit it as the developers refuse, they can then overrule you and do what the fuck they like.
I have no objection to new houses being built, only to the anarchic way its is done at the moment. Let the community plan housing development zones - building where it makes sense, where the roads can cope, where there are school places. Building the homes needed for that community. Give planning permission. Then tender construction out to the developers.
10,000 homes is a great start. And what is the house price to income ratio in Stockton?
Ideally there should be no quota, just a complete free for all so that planning permission can never be refused, its not even needed to be asked for.
If we're going to have a planning permission system then refusal should only be permitted if house price to earnings ratios are ~3x income, no higher than that. So yes, Stockton should keep building, everywhere should.
As Rochdale correcly pointed out it is not planning permission that is the problem, planning permission has already been given by most councils through local plans in suitable areas with the infrastructure to cope.
It is developers land banking and not developing in areas where they already have planning permission that is the issue and where they need to be taken to task and fined if they do not follow through and develop there
And whilst a house price = 3 x earnings rough principle may well be a desirable thing, that ship sailed long ago in many places. I'm in Romford, Zone 6 edge of London. The cheapest 3 bedroom house I can quickly find on the internet is ex-council house, on a big estate with no train or tube access.
£280 000.
That bubble isn't deflating without hurting a lot of people.
We need a period of significant wage inflation - but I'm not sure that can be pulled off.
Its all kicking off in Middlesbrough. I have just been sent a copy of a letter to (independent) Mayor Andy Preston demanding his resignation due to alleged financial shenanigans.
The letter is signed by five out of six executive committee members - all of whom were personally appointed by Preston.
If the Mayor refuses to go, they will call an EGM of the council and have the numbers to no confidence him.
Good News for Dr Paul Williams! He's always been a dedicated and committed local champion for Boro...
One last story from the Scottish Parliament election.
"Independent Green Voice was a tiny (list) party whose five candidates included two former British National Party activists and a man accused of Holocaust denial (he denies the allegation). But did all Scottish voters know this? There are plenty of signs that they didn’t.
While far-Right candidates such as Britain First leader Jayda Fransen won just 46 votes in Glasgow, the anti-immigrant, anti-EU Independent Green Voice won thousands of votes. How come? How many of these voters thought they were voting for the Scottish Greens?
These voters mattered. In Glasgow, for example, where Independent Green Voice took 2,210 votes, the Green Party fell 914 votes short of a second seat on the regional list. In South of Scotland, the Greens were just 115 votes short of taking a seat. Independent Green Voice won 1,690."
I thought the Registration of Political Parties Act 1998 (following the 'Literal Democrats' case in 1994 was supposed to stop this tactic?
The logog change was the key thing for me. Their new logo had the word Green in massively bigger font than Independent and Voice.
It ended up being a larger Green text logo than the genuine Scottish Green party logo.
Undoubtedly cost the Greens 1 seat and almost certainly 2.
I just don't see why this isn't heading to a court challenge pronto.
It is very weird, this concept, that “my village/town has taken more than its share”, with all of these plans presumably imposed from on high.
We essentially have a Soviet-style planning system, comprising tractor-style production targets, runaway unaffordability, and acres of Barrett shite.
However, sprawl is not the answer for all the obvious reasons (obvious to all except @Philip_Thompson).
This is why its such a big issue on the doorstep. Places like Stockton have built north of 10,000 homes all across the borough over the last decade or so, yet is told by the government they are not building enough houses.
You do not have a local plan unless you build your government-imposed quota. You cannot shape what developers build and where they build them without a local plan. But the developers sit on the planning permission you give so that despite you having greenlit enough homes to hit the quota you can't hit it as the developers refuse, they can then overrule you and do what the fuck they like.
I have no objection to new houses being built, only to the anarchic way its is done at the moment. Let the community plan housing development zones - building where it makes sense, where the roads can cope, where there are school places. Building the homes needed for that community. Give planning permission. Then tender construction out to the developers.
10,000 homes is a great start. And what is the house price to income ratio in Stockton?
Ideally there should be no quota, just a complete free for all so that planning permission can never be refused, its not even needed to be asked for.
If we're going to have a planning permission system then refusal should only be permitted if house price to earnings ratios are ~3x income, no higher than that. So yes, Stockton should keep building, everywhere should.
As Rochdale correcly pointed out it is not planning permission that is the problem, planning permission has already been given by most councils through local plans in suitable areas with the infrastructure to cope.
It is developers land banking and not developing in areas where they already have planning permission that is the issue and where they need to be taken to task and fined if they do not follow through and develop there
And whilst a house price = 3 x earnings rough principle may well be a desirable thing, that ship sailed long ago in many places. I'm in Romford, Zone 6 edge of London. The cheapest 3 bedroom house I can quickly find on the internet is ex-council house, on a big estate with no train or tube access.
£280 000.
That bubble isn't deflating without hurting a lot of people.
We need a period of significant wage inflation - but I'm not sure that can be pulled off.
Without massive construction that will just feed into house price inflation and not reduce the ratio.
If we have inflation plus construction then we can see real house prices go down, but without negative equity.
Disgraceful, opportunistic @MichelBarnier interview this AM
All of the principles he defended & spoke for during the Brexit negs chucked out of the window to serve his political ambitions. Not too dissimilar to @BorisJohnson then?
No wonder there's so much cynicism about the European Union
It is very weird, this concept, that “my village/town has taken more than its share”, with all of these plans presumably imposed from on high.
We essentially have a Soviet-style planning system, comprising tractor-style production targets, runaway unaffordability, and acres of Barrett shite.
However, sprawl is not the answer for all the obvious reasons (obvious to all except @Philip_Thompson).
This is why its such a big issue on the doorstep. Places like Stockton have built north of 10,000 homes all across the borough over the last decade or so, yet is told by the government they are not building enough houses.
You do not have a local plan unless you build your government-imposed quota. You cannot shape what developers build and where they build them without a local plan. But the developers sit on the planning permission you give so that despite you having greenlit enough homes to hit the quota you can't hit it as the developers refuse, they can then overrule you and do what the fuck they like.
I have no objection to new houses being built, only to the anarchic way its is done at the moment. Let the community plan housing development zones - building where it makes sense, where the roads can cope, where there are school places. Building the homes needed for that community. Give planning permission. Then tender construction out to the developers.
10,000 homes is a great start. And what is the house price to income ratio in Stockton?
Ideally there should be no quota, just a complete free for all so that planning permission can never be refused, its not even needed to be asked for.
If we're going to have a planning permission system then refusal should only be permitted if house price to earnings ratios are ~3x income, no higher than that. So yes, Stockton should keep building, everywhere should.
As Rochdale correcly pointed out it is not planning permission that is the problem, planning permission has already been given by most councils through local plans in suitable areas with the infrastructure to cope.
It is developers land banking and not developing in areas where they already have planning permission that is the issue and where they need to be taken to task and fined if they do not follow through and develop there
And whilst a house price = 3 x earnings rough principle may well be a desirable thing, that ship sailed long ago in many places. I'm in Romford, Zone 6 edge of London. The cheapest 3 bedroom house I can quickly find on the internet is ex-council house, on a big estate with no train or tube access.
£280 000.
That bubble isn't deflating without hurting a lot of people.
We need a period of significant wage inflation - but I'm not sure that can be pulled off.
Going back to the 1980s really, it's been possible to accumulate quite a lot of wealth by putting down the deposit on a house and waiting. That's as true for me as anyone else.
None of us really stopped to think where that wealth was coming from.
It is very weird, this concept, that “my village/town has taken more than its share”, with all of these plans presumably imposed from on high.
We essentially have a Soviet-style planning system, comprising tractor-style production targets, runaway unaffordability, and acres of Barrett shite.
However, sprawl is not the answer for all the obvious reasons (obvious to all except @Philip_Thompson).
This is why its such a big issue on the doorstep. Places like Stockton have built north of 10,000 homes all across the borough over the last decade or so, yet is told by the government they are not building enough houses.
You do not have a local plan unless you build your government-imposed quota. You cannot shape what developers build and where they build them without a local plan. But the developers sit on the planning permission you give so that despite you having greenlit enough homes to hit the quota you can't hit it as the developers refuse, they can then overrule you and do what the fuck they like.
I have no objection to new houses being built, only to the anarchic way its is done at the moment. Let the community plan housing development zones - building where it makes sense, where the roads can cope, where there are school places. Building the homes needed for that community. Give planning permission. Then tender construction out to the developers.
10,000 homes is a great start. And what is the house price to income ratio in Stockton?
Ideally there should be no quota, just a complete free for all so that planning permission can never be refused, its not even needed to be asked for.
If we're going to have a planning permission system then refusal should only be permitted if house price to earnings ratios are ~3x income, no higher than that. So yes, Stockton should keep building, everywhere should.
As Rochdale correcly pointed out it is not planning permission that is the problem, planning permission has already been given by most councils through local plans in suitable areas with the infrastructure to cope.
It is developers land banking and not developing in areas where they already have planning permission that is the issue and where they need to be taken to task and fined if they do not follow through and develop there
That's a load of bollocks, a lie to justify NIMBYism, developments take time. There will always be a pipeline of homes where consent has been granted and hasn't yet happened - its not possible to grant consent and have it built the very next day.
If you want more houses built then widen the pipeline and approve more homes.
If you were to look at developments approved eg five years ago (giving time for construction to be done), then barring times where developers have gone out of business, how many homes are there that have consent from five years ago but haven't yet been built yet?
No, planning permission has been given in suitable areas which protects the greenbelt as far as possible and has the infrastructure, schools, GPs, roads etc to cope. Not a free for all which would destroy the area and the countryside and have no infrastructure.
It is land banking that is the problem eg an investigation in 2015 'revealed that the UK’s biggest housebuilders are sitting on 600,000 plots of land with planning permission; that’s four times the total number of homes built last year. Berkeley, Barratt, Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey (the four biggest companies in the industry) accounted for more than 450,000 of the plots – while paying out more than £1.5bn to their shareholders.' https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/31/britain-land-housing-crisis-developers-not-building-land-banking
Spot on - you'll be moving to the left soon, HYUFD. Those four biggest housebuilding companies are crooks - complete rip-off merchants, land-banking, building poor quality homes, and lining directors' and shareholders' pockets while deliberately skewing the housing market.
Without massive construction that will just feed into house price inflation and not reduce the ratio.
If we have inflation plus construction then we can see real house prices go down, but without negative equity.
Sure- there is a space where nominal house prices stay flat, or increase slower than wider inflation and you deflate the bubble without it bursting. I can see that working in places where you want the ratio to fall from 5 or 6 to 3 or 4, which sounds like it's true where you are. But the landing spot is awfully small. (And general inflation = higher interest rates = house price pain.)
The ratio in London/South/East is around 10-13 at the moment. In Lambeth (which is as posh as it sounds; John Major was once Chairman of Housing there) it's 15. It shouldn't have got this way, and it's going to be horrible to solve- however necessary.
Comments
Build 400,000 4-bedroom homes per year across the country and the housing crisis would be over rapidly.
There needs to be a whole lot of housing that targets a £150,000 or so price range that isn't a flat.
We believe we have taken far more than our fair share of housebuilding. The question is, is there anywhere in the country that doesn't feel that they have taken more than their fair share?!
The primary driving factor behind my Brexit vote was that I didn't want us building so many houses, destroying countryside and ruining communities through poor planning. I felt that we couldn't manage housebuilding properly and the only way to keep it in check was to reduce immigration back to more sustainable levels.
Build more good quality houses and people move up the ladder and their older homes become available for less than would have been the case. Build more shit homes and all you're doing is cramming people into shit homes.
In my part of the country housing construction has been going great guns and house price to income ratio is 4x as a result. It is only when you're not constructing enough that prices go up.
The problem is NIMBYs want more flats. So they can get unlived in land near them remaining unspoilt.
Now everyone is becoming an eco loon because theyve worked out that they can appear altruistic not wanting new low cost housing near them by invoking Greta the sky god.
As it happens I think the Conservatives cut spending rather too rapidly - but had the economy been robust in 2010 they would not have done so at all.
Inflationary pressures, higher interest rates and higher taxes threaten to blow Johnson seriously off course in the coming months
No wonder he and Hancock are starting to talk about 'personal responsibility'. It isn't the red wall that is going to concern them from here to the next election. It is the blue one. The reports from the heartlands after May 06 must not be that good.
(we dont have a population boom)
Any politician- even BoJo- who threads that needle will deserve to stay in office as long as they damn well please.
Brown didn't.
There is a reason why Victorian Terrace houses are often worth a fortune in most towns - look at history and you see what really works.
Housing price ratios vary dramatically depending upon where construction has been happening and where it hasn't. The Red Wall towns which have been expanding into the countryside with construction has the lowest price ratio of all - isn't that what we should want across the entire country? It works.
We should now see a decent infrastructure boom ala the US for similar reasons (albeit from a far better starting point).
That is bad not just in terms of intergenerational fairness, but also for the wider economy, as concentrating the nations wealth in older landlords reduces spending and investment.
What the Tories did was to spend 10 years reducing the deficit to the point that debt to GDP was going down before Covid arrived. The deficit was narrow and under control in 2019 unlike 2008.
The problem of lack of home ownership is most acute in seats which already vote Labour anyway, especially in London and south of Watford but Labour councils don't have much incentive to build more homes to buy as while renters vote Labour, home owners tend to vote Tory
Try and self-build with yourself navigating the planning process easily here. 😱
As an example an Agency contacted me this morning as they have a Mechanical Estimator who wants to change employers. The pre covid rate for such a position in Hampshire was £45-50K. He wants £75K and he will get it.
With @patrickkmaguire and @EleniCourea
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/angela-rayner-could-oust-you-from-the-top-job-sir-kier-starmer-told-kvpxds5w2
My point was that postal votes were ripe for abuse within the households to which they had been posted. It was not that there were "no checks" whatsoever upon their return, but checking off a signature against a voter return provides no evidence of whether that vote has been secretly cast.
I said there should be higher tests for qualifying for a postal vote, and unless there are extenuating circumstances that these should be delivered to and cast in a public place such as a post office or council site.
Of course, you know this, but as pedantic one-upmanship is how you define 'success' in your life you want to re-frame this as "intimidation" rather than "fraud" so you can win a narrow point.
It's sad, Ian. If we're going to disagree - let's disagree on something substantive rather than waste time on trivialities when the substance of the matter here is the integrity of the ballot.
We essentially have a Soviet-style planning system, comprising tractor-style production targets, runaway unaffordability, and acres of Barrett shite.
However, sprawl is not the answer for all the obvious reasons (obvious to all except @Philip_Thompson).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/11/uk-travellers-complain-of-prison-like-conditions-in-quarantine-hotels
They do know in Australia you aren't even allowed out your room.
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/australia-hotel-quarantine-system/index.html
(((Dan Hodges)))
@DPJHodges
·
23m
And you know who is the one politician who has talked seriously and consistently about confronting social-care. Andy Burnham. Which Keir Starmer will be delighted about...
That is bad not just in terms of intergenerational fairness, but also for the wider economy, as concentrating the nations wealth in older landlords reduces spending and investment.
There are a whole generation of people who cannot buy. Either they could afford the mortgage payments but not the deposit, or they can't afford either. So they end up renting and stuck in renting.
Whats more, for every pound that is overpaid in rent or mortgage that is a pound removed from circulation. People can just about find a way to afford a home but then don't have the free cash to spend that the economy needs to sustain jobs.
The solution absolutely is to build affordable homes. Which means shagging the market. Which is why we don't do it as then you end up stuck in negative equity and unable to move as I was for a decade.
Question is whether it will balloon out of control.
hoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohooho-
hoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohohoohoohoo-
hoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohooohoooohoooohooohooohooohoohohoohoohoohoohooosive issue and it must be treated accordingly, and maturely
In 1938
Currently valued at half a million each...
Very broadly, middle-aged families who bought four and five bedroom houses 20 years ago are now occupied by one elderly couple now their children have left home. But the children are in flat shares because they can't afford a house.
We have a much less efficient distribution of people within our housing stock to what we had a generation ago.
Note I am not proposing any particular solution to this! Just saying that the problem is slightly more nuanced than is often appreciated.
Good thing that we're not due to mess around with our supply lines for imported food and goods, even if only temporarily, eh?
Tory MPs investigated for lobbying judges before Elphicke hearing
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/11/tory-mps-investigated-for-lobbying-judges-before-elphicke-hearing
The one that Andy Burnham has implemented in Manchester...
It will never catch on.
It's not about money she reckons.
Whats more, for every pound that is overpaid in rent or mortgage that is a pound removed from circulation. People can just about find a way to afford a home but then don't have the free cash to spend that the economy needs to sustain jobs.
The solution absolutely is to build affordable homes. Which means shagging the market. Which is why we don't do it as then you end up stuck in negative equity and unable to move as I was for a decade.
It is the 1920s dream being sold over again "come and live in the countryside, surrounded by fields and fresh air" until the land gets so overbuilt that the original premise gets eaten away.
You do not have a local plan unless you build your government-imposed quota. You cannot shape what developers build and where they build them without a local plan. But the developers sit on the planning permission you give so that despite you having greenlit enough homes to hit the quota you can't hit it as the developers refuse, they can then overrule you and do what the fuck they like.
I have no objection to new houses being built, only to the anarchic way its is done at the moment. Let the community plan housing development zones - building where it makes sense, where the roads can cope, where there are school places. Building the homes needed for that community. Give planning permission. Then tender construction out to the developers.
And its not just inflation. Taxation is going to have to rise to pay for lunacy that seemed like an awfully good idea 12 months ago.
That double whammy is going to batter middle England. Add in costs to save the planet and you have a potentially very dangerous situation for Johnson.
That is feeding through to the consumer. Pretty much all the major FMCG companies said in their Q1 results that they will pass on price increases to consumers, mid to high single digit price increases being the general rule.
And you may want to put ridiculous words into my mouth, but no I am not in favour of fraudulent votes.
I am generally against anything that discourages anyone from voting, but measures need to be looked at on case-by-case basis.
If you want to have photo ID for voting then first you need to make sure that everyone already has photo ID, in my opinion.
Ideally there should be no quota, just a complete free for all so that planning permission can never be refused, its not even needed to be asked for.
If we're going to have a planning permission system then refusal should only be permitted if house price to earnings ratios are ~3x income, no higher than that. So yes, Stockton should keep building, everywhere should.
Though I think that such demands are heavily an almost automatic result of population density etc.
There are significant differences between eg England and Scotland. I have a friend who recently took advantage of a rule that allowed smaller plots in open countryside to be developed if they were under a certain size and fenced on all sides.
Not in England
https://news.sky.com/story/election-results-were-staking-the-claim-to-become-englands-third-party-say-greens-12302756
Its also about demographics. Its much easier now, as it always was, for a working couple to buy than a singleton. Millennials seem to like being singletons.
It is developers land banking and not developing in areas where they already have planning permission that is the issue and where they need to be taken to task and fined if they do not follow through and develop there
She does not want to see the Tories gain voters in Hartlepool only to lose her voters to the LDs in Sevenoaks
My favourite places in Europe are those with quite dense population in pretty countryside, where people live in closely populated market towns within walking distance of shops and places to eat but also easy walking distance of the countryside. But outside places like Ludlow or Totnes we don't really have much of that in Britain.
Population decline may make some of these issues moot in a decade or so. Particularly post Brexit and post-Covid, unless there's a baby boom. So might the return of multigenerational households.
If you want more houses built then widen the pipeline and approve more homes.
If you were to look at developments approved eg five years ago (giving time for construction to be done), then barring times where developers have gone out of business, how many homes are there that have consent from five years ago but haven't yet been built yet?
20 years ago, I was at an investor presentation by Sky. They pointed out that one of the big positive factors working for them structurally was that household growth was massively outstripping population growth - so, in the past 30 years (then), population growth was +10% but Household growth was something like 30% growth. The factors they included were millennials being singletons but also the rise of divorces amongst other things.
"Independent Green Voice was a tiny (list) party whose five candidates included two former British National Party activists and a man accused of Holocaust denial (he denies the allegation). But did all Scottish voters know this? There are plenty of signs that they didn’t.
While far-Right candidates such as Britain First leader Jayda Fransen won just 46 votes in Glasgow, the anti-immigrant, anti-EU Independent Green Voice won thousands of votes. How come? How many of these voters thought they were voting for the Scottish Greens?
These voters mattered. In Glasgow, for example, where Independent Green Voice took 2,210 votes, the Green Party fell 914 votes short of a second seat on the regional list. In South of Scotland, the Greens were just 115 votes short of taking a seat. Independent Green Voice won 1,690."
I thought the Registration of Political Parties Act 1998 (following the 'Literal Democrats' case in 1994) was supposed to stop this tactic?
@movement46
·
10 May
The message from across the south of England is clear @EdwardJDavey
and @Keir_Starmer : by working together you can free us from this Tory government; continue to fight each other and you never will.
Interesting idea that voting patterns will not change if some parties step down and make a single front against the Tories. Similar to the wooly thinking about PR and the idea that the Tories are doomed because their voters are dying off.......
And because political parties like to provide for "hard-working families" they are not bothered about singletons
It is the refusal of municipalities to face up to the need for more housing which has resulted in this.
It is land banking that is the problem eg an investigation in 2015 'revealed that the UK’s biggest housebuilders are sitting on 600,000 plots of land with planning permission; that’s four times the total number of homes built last year. Berkeley, Barratt, Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey (the four biggest companies in the industry) accounted for more than 450,000 of the plots – while paying out more than £1.5bn to their shareholders.'
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/31/britain-land-housing-crisis-developers-not-building-land-banking
£280 000.
That bubble isn't deflating without hurting a lot of people.
It ended up being a larger Green text logo than the genuine Scottish Green party logo.
Undoubtedly cost the Greens 1 seat and almost certainly 2.
Don't be silly. There will always be a pipeline of homes that are due to be built as developments can take years to complete. How many of the 450,000 plots in 2015 still haven't been finished now? If they're all still not completed then yes there's a problem, if they have been then it is not the problem.
The letter is signed by five out of six executive committee members - all of whom were personally appointed by Preston.
If the Mayor refuses to go, they will call an EGM of the council and have the numbers to no confidence him.
Good News for Dr Paul Williams! He's always been a dedicated and committed local champion for Boro...
New thread
If we have inflation plus construction then we can see real house prices go down, but without negative equity.
Disgraceful, opportunistic @MichelBarnier interview this AM
All of the principles he defended & spoke for during the Brexit negs chucked out of the window to serve his political ambitions. Not too dissimilar to @BorisJohnson then?
No wonder there's so much cynicism about the European Union
https://twitter.com/Mij_Europe/status/1392054825693683713?s=20
None of us really stopped to think where that wealth was coming from.
The ratio in London/South/East is around 10-13 at the moment. In Lambeth (which is as posh as it sounds; John Major was once Chairman of Housing there) it's 15. It shouldn't have got this way, and it's going to be horrible to solve- however necessary.