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In the last 13 Westminster by-elections just one has been won by a man – politicalbetting.com
In the last 13 Westminster by-elections just one has been won by a man – politicalbetting.com
There have been thirteen Westminster by-elections since December 2016 and an extraordinary fact is that in all but one of them, Stoke Central in February 2017, the winning candidate has been a woman.
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The government tried to claim it but it was proved in court they didn’t. But they then stated in the recitals of some act of parliament that they owned this specific piece of foreshore… that had to go pretty far up the chain to sort out
The Crown should seize your friend’s foreshore by compulsory purchase.
However, the real question there is why should Rights be overridden on the whim of some here-today-gone-tomorrow politician or other, just because they want to?
Where does it stop?
You need a set of principles underlying your proposition, or we are into appropriation at will by those in power.
Some of the soft-pedalled principles in the Planning Act 1948 are interesting in this debate - there was quite a lot of nodding towards the nationalisation of control of land, and it has never aiui gone are far as it could.
And what a fascinating insight in the header.
Thirty years of the "women are always victims; men are always perpetrators" trope?
Poplar & Limehouse - Lab v Galloway
Leicester East - Lab v Galloway
Lagan Valley - DUP v UUP v Alliance
Delyn - Con v Lab
Parking is becoming a significant problem and it isn't helped by the situation you describe. The family over the road from where I am writing has 7 cars - two sports cars, a land cruiser parked on the road, a large saloon, 2 cars for the kids, and a van - for which they have 3 parking spaces.
Given that our registered property (England) is a huge majority of titles, and is compulsory on transfer I think, I'm quite happy.
How does this work in other countries - does eg France have one?
I suspect (can't prove) that we are actually very good on that. It is an instructive comparison with Energy Performance Certificates, where we are generally streets ahead of almost everywhere in Europe for accessibility, and have been since they came in.
Personally my big target for accessibility is Building Regs documents, so the quality of each building is public.
My parish has a couple of hundred new houses being built at the same time that the bus service was cut to 2 hourly, and the last bus from the city is 1830. There are no cycle paths. Clearly nothing other than cars is viable.
It is almost as if local people and councils have a better idea about what works locally than rip off developers and national government.
More visibility of that is necessary.
My comment about the Somerset foreshore was slightly flippant, but I do believe in a general public right to access the entire coastline.
Second, people's self-serving sense of entitlement. The only person in the world is them, and if that means acting like a pig-ignorant moron to their neighbours then so what. At the old place the estate didn't have enough parking spaces, but the planners had at least laid it out with regular 90 degree bends to (attempt to) slow traffic down. A row broke out between neighbours across the road from each other.
Each had a big white van parked half on the pavement (which we all had to do as the street was narrow) which didn't leave enough room. Whose fault it is, who should fuck off with their van etc etc. One tried to get the council involved, then complained to me (as they knew I was in the ruling party and knew the top people) that the council was "useless".
The problem was the covenants attached to the sale of the plots of land to the freeholders. Several conditions were included, one of which prohibited the parking of commercial vehicles (vans were given as example) on the street. Whilst this was hardly enforceable it meant that "can you make them move their van" was met with "you'll have to move yours as well" = "the council are useless".
As with various other always badly parked vehicles, neighbours managed to persuade both to take a breath and stop competing with each other. The bitterness never stopped - the public highway was THEIRS and they should be able to do what they like on the bit outside THEIR house and screw the rest of you.
U.K. needs to get with the times.
Six hundred and fifty MPs. How many people do you think are (or statistically would expect to be) non-binary? And do you mean that biologically (genetically), or people who are identifying that way?
At least it will keep house prices down when most people don't want them and the area is unpleasant.
The route to deal with the neighbour issue is the Community Protection Team at the local council. If such are not faced down, they will treat neighbours as a doormat.
What I can say is that it is quite hard to prove harm in a planning application through excessive on street parking demand arising from new development. It has to really become a safety issue; to run with this you need to prove the amount of cars being parked on the road is contributing to a dangerous situation and that is really difficult. Some London Boroughs have data based on parking surveys, if it is say 90%, then you enter in to a situation where cars are crawling around the roads looking for somewhere to park and this can lead to a heightened risk of collision. But the broader problems - ie quality of life, don't really count for much.
The old Spanish saying;
"If you sit by the river long enough the body of your enemy will come floating by' must be bringing a smile to Mr and Mrs Ed Miliband this morning.
After Ms Sarah Vine's very personal attacks on Justine Thornton during the 2015 General Election even Michael Portillo was moved to say;
"Newspapers want you to write that vile stuff? That lady has done nothing wrong in life apart from she happens to be married to the leader of the opposition. To compare her to an alien is in my view not justified."
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/04/15/daily-mails-sarah-vine_n_7069346.html
(An alien when she's married to Gove?)
FPT:
Sean_F said:
’WRT White Working Class constituencies, if one wants to know why the Conservatives have gained strongly in some and not others, I think much of the answer lies in coal-mining, and its subsequent demise…
‘…My view is that these places were actually pretty right wing in outlook for decades, but the voters' economic interests, based on mining, inclined them strongly to Labour. Once mining went, and as over time, people either bought their own homes, and plenty of new houses were built, that historic loyalty to Labour went with it.
‘In demographically similar constituencies where coal-mining was not of much importance, or where there were always other signficant sources of employment, one does not see the same shift in allegiances.’
You could write a dissertation about this subject. Having been born and raised in Yvette Cooper’s constituency, surrounded by (ex-)mining communities and (ex-)miners, here’s my brief take…
You make a good point that these places have always been small-c conservative. Very socially conservative. But the strong trade union movement led people to vote Labour - as you say it suited their economic interests.
There are many factors why that knee jerk Labour support is eroding but if I were to try and sum it up quickly I would say it boils down to demographics. These communities are chock full of old people. If you go into Pontefract it is full of pensioners. It feels like a sleepy town. These pensioners were raised on a diet of war films and the Empire. I have heard more than one person say ‘We should never have got rid of the Empire’.
You go into Leeds and it is full of young people. I’m only in my 40s and walking around Leeds I think to myself ‘Christ, everyone’s young!’ Leeds feels like the future.
Young people from round here, if they have the means or opportunity to, generally move away as soon as they can. I certainly did. I came back in my late 20s for what I intended to be for a few months, but then life happened and I ended up staying. I don’t mind, I went to uni, broadened my outlook, got educated, had my 20s in more exciting places. Once you want a quieter life, this is a nice place to live.
But most of those who leave don’t come back.
So we have aging, socially conservative populations in these places who don’t like change, don’t like foreigners, want everything to stay the same. The more liberal, progressive types generally move elsewhere.
Now they’re chucking up houses round here. We will be a dormitory town for Leeds. How that plays out in terms of voting will be interesting to watch. Will it bring more young, liberal types who simply can’t afford to live in Leeds who will be centrist or left-leaning? Or will, by the very act of buying a house, they become more inclined to vote Tory as they get older and move out of the city?
Are they signalling to their local green nimbies, like a political-no on a Planning Application that they know will pass at Appeal?
But self-identifying doesn't alter one's genetics. There's also the strong possibility they're mostly younger, whereas MPs are mostly older.
Perhaps the way to argue it would be disability discrimination. That's usually the easiest way to get unsatisfactory anti-cycling barriers off cycle paths.
Likewise, we were not allowed satellite dishes, as we would all have cable. And the houses built in the first few years did - before the company went bust and loads of houses were built without cable. I've never heard of the no-satellite-dishes rule being enforced.
Building standards are also really lax. I've been saying this on here for years, and had people saying they were not that bad. Then Grenfell happened. We see cases of houses with poor insulation, wall cracks, subsidence, flooding gardens. They're not terribly built, but they're not brilliant, either.
The government and councils need to understand that it is absolutely fine introducing new standards, rules and levies - e.g. on energy efficiency. But they're pointless unless those standards are robustly checked, and that costs money. Likewise, they need to think more of the lived environment, and throwing more houses onto smaller plots may not be an ideal way forward.
Sadly, though, checks and large plots all cost money, and drive up the prices of new builds. So we're in a race to the bottom.
With regard to nimbies, their biggest complaint people have is often about parking, so putting in a limit of 1 space will not go down well with these people.
I have to admit, I don't get that at all. There's nothing wrong with being a tomboy, or a chap who does things mostly associated with women (I sewed up some loose seams on a t-shirt the other day...). If people choose to identify that way then bully for them, but it just seems a bit pointless to me.
When I was in hospital recently it was very noticeable that women now seem to dominate the medical profession. There were several young female doctors for every male and of course a preponderance of nurses were female (possibly some uptick in the number of males there?) Such men as were about tended to be more senior, at consultant level. The bevy of young doctors following the consultants about on their ward rounds contained a token male but no more.
Is it possible that our politics might go the same way? In the next PM stakes I think I would go for Liz Truss at the moment, even ahead of Rishi.
Already backed both and hedged so not inclined to dabble any more.
But just because gender identity doesn't matter much to me or you doesn't mean that it doesn't matter to others. There are some folk obsessed by politics, ancient wars and formula 1 for example, which others find boring or irrelevant.
If a population is as low as 0.3% in a survey then I'd think the true percentage would be much lower since the error of people ticking a box for shits and giggles rather than being honest grows.
What you reap you sow imho.
Remember Ferguson saying SAGE didn't believe people would stand for the restrictions they were talking about in a free society?
I stake my claim!
London will always find a way I guess..
Ironically, perhaps, I strongly agree with you on sexual stereotypes, to the extent that some people now think if a chap's into sewing or a girl's into engineering then they're 'really' the other sex.
I'd support the right of a knowing adult to transition, though once again that's beyond me, but marketing this stuff to kids is deeply disturbing, as is the degradation of women's sport and having rapists sent to women's prison when they choose to identify that way.
My remedy would be more thorough inspections, and all the docs to be public for every house.
For the individual, it is a professional snagging service.
30s Estates around London are a great example of what happens with car provision - places like Surbiton. They were built for "Morris Motor Houses" and Austin 7s. And the kerbs are really, really horrible.
Not fit for Plonker-Tonkas, and regulations that force anyone who may transport 4 children to get a 7-seater.
It just gets funnier!
I don’t think there’s sufficient current knowledge to settle that either way, but I’d be very surprised if there is no genetic influence.
Big mistake imho. He should have said the narrowness of this in a heartland Lab seat shows we must reinvent ourselves totally for the 21st century. We go back to the drawing board with our tail between our legs and we look anew at every aspect of our vision, message and policy. For too long we have focused on identity and not economics.
He could start by calling John Crudas in for a proper chat.
It is rainbow month and we should be more relaxed about these things.
One vision of the very near future which I am attracted by, if not totally sold on, is that no-one owns cars. If you want to go somewhere by road, you order a car as you would an user: a few minutes later, it turns up, you get in, and off you go. The problem of parking spaces becomes a thing of the past. This would be a far cheaper model than car ownership, which is an inefficient use of assets - thus would happen organically rather than needing enforcement; you could still choose to own a car if you want to - and would also be a better use of urban space.
It would need autonomous vehicle technology to work properly.
It would also mean no longer using the boot of my car as a sort of store room for random objects.
Walked into the Design Centre at 9:05, jabbed at 9:10.
Good news headlines this morning
London reclaims Europe's share trading crown from Amsterdam (FT)
Vauxhall to build electric van at Ellesmere Port safeguarding 1,000 factory jobs (BBC)
Merkel and Boris agree to resolve the issues in the Northern Ireland Protocol (Euro news)
That's one thing I'll change at once in my future stint as dictator.
Also he says he does not read it
By-elections are characterised by negative campaigning.
It is harder to "go negative" on a female candidate without looking like a dick.
We are not yet in a post-feminist world where "gallantry" is not a thing.
Big thing in our small town, too. We've got a big, and free, car park, but it's nearly full with residents cars, so every so often there are arguments about visitors being able to park.
Trouble is, of course, that when the town was built one either didn't need to leave it, walked, or took the next horse out of the coaching inn in the Town Centre. Now everyone has their own transport.
Now the bagpipes I could believe.
I do enjoy right of way stuff generally though. It can be pretty harsh on landowners - for instance if they've been a bit haphazard in trying to be clear people cannot wander through their land, or only have signage from one side, or people wander off a permissive path and then claim the non permissive bit - but there are some fun stories of rich twerps buying property and then being aghast that people are able to walk though bits of it, and falling back on lame 'would you like it if it was your land?' whinges.
I can never keep straight in my head which is 'as of right' and which is 'by right', so I had best never get into such a dispute personally.