If you are insisting on free speech you can collect your refund on the way out
(How autocorrect turned “you can collect your refund on the way out” into “you can polecat on the way out”… and what does that even mean? It sounds like the sort of thing @Leon gets up to in Bangkok…)
Cops rushed to Kamala Harris' evacuated Brentwood home on Saturday to reports of a potential burglary - as Los Angeles' lawlessness spiraled amid the city's worst fires in history.
Two people were ultimately arrested for breaching curfew after cops found no evidence they were outside the vice president's home to commit robbery.
However, the incident speaks to the fear that is gripping neighborhoods that have been ravaged by the monstrous fires. Looting is now running rampant as the flames continue to destroy homes across the City of Angels. At least 20 people have been arrested for looting in evacuation zones around the Los Angeles area.
Given that about 40 square miles have been burnt, and about 200k people have been evacuated from those and others areas, is "20 people being arrested" an actual indicator of looting "running rampant" ?
Incidentally rcs our gracious host lives near Kamala Harris in Brentwood. Any news if he has had to evacuate.
A few weeks back, I related the story of my friend who had a surprise wedding. Incongruously - as he describes himself, self-deprecatingly, as a 'council estate thicko', he tells me he has a brother in law who lives next door to Kamala Harris. Maybe it's rcs100.
Yes . I know much of Brentwood is under an evacuation order now.
“Bloke v Woke” is actually quite a brilliant TV idea
*thinks*
Well I'm not doing it. It'll have to be TUD or Foxy.
We’ve already established you won’t venture beyond Rotterdam so, fret not, you weren’t in the frame…
What it could be, however, is an excellent travelling podcast. I’d be *bloke* I just need the right wokester, someone smart and amusing but also painfully sincere
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
Incidentally rcs our gracious host lives near Kamala Harris in Brentwood. Any news if he has had to evacuate.
A few weeks back, I related the story of my friend who had a surprise wedding. Incongruously - as he describes himself, self-deprecatingly, as a 'council estate thicko', he tells me he has a brother in law who lives next door to Kamala Harris. Maybe it's rcs100.
Yes . I know much of Brentwood is under an evacuation order now.
Incidentally rcs our gracious host lives near Kamala Harris in Brentwood. Any news if he has had to evacuate.
A few weeks back, I related the story of my friend who had a surprise wedding. Incongruously - as he describes himself, self-deprecatingly, as a 'council estate thicko', he tells me he has a brother in law who lives next door to Kamala Harris. Maybe it's rcs100.
Yes . I know much of Brentwood is under an evacuation order now.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
And one of the under-commented features of the current labour market is that the inexorable generous increases in the minimum wage, coupled with pay restraint for many people in what Miliband called the ‘squeezed middle’, means that a surprisingly large number of previous well-above-minimum pay rates are now pegged to the minimum wage. A feature that remuneration professionals would describe as the erosion of differentials.
Another example of 70s redux.
From April the minimum wage will be approximately £25,000 pa for a full-time worker, which (if I've got my sums right) equates to about £1,800 take home pay per month, after the deduction of income tax and employee national insurance.
That wouldn't be too bad, especially for a couple, if it wasn't for astronomical housing costs. As it is, you understand both why so many people are struggling, and why the average pensioner is better off than the average worker, despite the basic state pension being substantial lower than the minimum wage. Home ownership is the key to prosperity in this country, though all those prehistoric final salary pensions in payment help a lot of folk as well.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
And one of the under-commented features of the current labour market is that the inexorable generous increases in the minimum wage, coupled with pay restraint for many people in what Miliband called the ‘squeezed middle’, means that a surprisingly large number of previous well-above-minimum pay rates are now pegged to the minimum wage. A feature that remuneration professionals would describe as the erosion of differentials.
Another example of 70s redux.
From April the minimum wage will be approximately £25,000 pa for a full-time worker, which (if I've got my sums right) equates to about £1,800 take home pay per month, after the deduction of income tax and employee national insurance.
That wouldn't be too bad, especially for a couple, if it wasn't for astronomical housing costs. As it is, you understand both why so many people are struggling, and why the average pensioner is better off than the average worker, despite the basic state pension being substantial lower than the minimum wage. Home ownership is the key to prosperity in this country, though all those prehistoric final salary pensions in payment help a lot of folk as well.
If you live at home with your parents thats not too bad actually. Different story if renting.
A brief scan of the latest news suggests that almost no progress has been made in containing the two major fires, and adverse wind conditions are on the way. It looks like this disaster has some way still to run.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
The Trumpist right’s steadfast belief in everything being the fault of someone else continues unabated.
Or maybe Trump has some methods of his own in mind for putting out wildfires of bone-dry brush in the midst of 60 mph winds. Because I’m sure the firefighters in LA would love to know about them.
(Yes, things could have been done differently /before/ the fires started. That’s a separate issue.)
A brief scan of the latest news suggests that almost no progress has been made in containing the two major fires, and adverse wind conditions are on the way. It looks like this disaster has some way still to run.
An area destroyed now larger than Greater Manchester inside the M60 according to the BBC.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
Ok, have it your own way.
Always happy to learn more on the issue if you'd ever like to bring fresh info to the table.
No, I won't be doing that. I've said my piece. Empire = Exploitation. Exploitation = ££££ for the exploiter. That's the headline. Nothing to back it up except for loads of history books and podcasts, all by other people.
I think the mistake you are making was to assume it was exploitation by *Britain*
It was usually *British* chancers and promotors operating independently on the ground - basically a land based version of Raleigh or Drake - exploring the locals for all they were worth (literally)
“Empire” was a loose term employed to give a sense of order to a kaleidoscope of localised arrangements
The Macmillan govt's 'Audit of Empire' reports in the late 1950s reckoned that the 'home' (ie. UK-based) economy was smaller by a sixth than it would have been without the empire - similar to the effect of WW2, but less than that of WW1.
You can sense check that by comparing with (West) Germany which, starting from a lower base in 1871 and suffering similar WW1 and greater WW2 losses, surpassed us in GDP terms around 1960.
It's hard to see the empire as having been anything other than a net loss for us, in economic terms at least.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Home ownership in the UK peaked at about 73%.
The lowest 25% have rarely been home owners.
What we saw in the 1980s and 1990s was an increase in home ownership among the working class and young.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
Ok, have it your own way.
Always happy to learn more on the issue if you'd ever like to bring fresh info to the table.
No, I won't be doing that. I've said my piece. Empire = Exploitation. Exploitation = ££££ for the exploiter. That's the headline. Nothing to back it up except for loads of history books and podcasts, all by other people.
I think the mistake you are making was to assume it was exploitation by *Britain*
It was usually *British* chancers and promotors operating independently on the ground - basically a land based version of Raleigh or Drake - exploring the locals for all they were worth (literally)
“Empire” was a loose term employed to give a sense of order to a kaleidoscope of localised arrangements
No, I know. We did a lot of it through proxies. And there was plenty of private sector involvement.
But the headline stands. It was exploitative and we gained. That's (literally) the bottom line.
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
The Trumpist right’s steadfast belief in everything being the fault of someone else continues unabated.
Or maybe Trump has some methods of his own in mind for putting out wildfires of bone-dry brush in the midst of 60 mph winds. Because I’m sure the firefighters in LA would love to know about them.
(Yes, things could have been done differently /before/ the fires started. That’s a separate issue.)
Actually, a lot of time during Trump's Joe Rogan interview was apparently dedicated to a soliloquy on the lack of controlled brush fires to prevent wildfires, water shortages in LA etc. So he may not have solutions to putting the fires out, but he certainly speaks with some authority given what he's said in the past.
“Bloke v Woke” is actually quite a brilliant TV idea
*thinks*
Well I'm not doing it. It'll have to be TUD or Foxy.
We’ve already established you won’t venture beyond Rotterdam so, fret not, you weren’t in the frame…
What it could be, however, is an excellent travelling podcast. I’d be *bloke* I just need the right wokester, someone smart and amusing but also painfully sincere
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
A brief scan of the latest news suggests that almost no progress has been made in containing the two major fires, and adverse wind conditions are on the way. It looks like this disaster has some way still to run.
An area destroyed now larger than Greater Manchester inside the M60 according to the BBC.
Gosh. Interesting that the BBC have now moved on from comparing it to an arbitrary area of Central London. Though still not that helpful for non-Mancunians (and I'd note tbat the 'Greater Manchester' bit there is redundant; they could have just said 'the area inside the M60'.) They could, for example, have just said 'an area the size of the city of Manchester' (ot Liverpool, or any one of a dozen others).
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
The Trumpist right’s steadfast belief in everything being the fault of someone else continues unabated.
Or maybe Trump has some methods of his own in mind for putting out wildfires of bone-dry brush in the midst of 60 mph winds. Because I’m sure the firefighters in LA would love to know about them.
(Yes, things could have been done differently /before/ the fires started. That’s a separate issue.)
Actually, a lot of time during Trump's Joe Rogan interview was apparently dedicated to a soliloquy on the lack of controlled brush fires to prevent wildfires, water shortages in LA etc. So he may not have solutions to putting the fires out, but he certainly speaks with some authority given what he's said in the past.
Just because someone says something with authority doesn't mean they are right.
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
In the space of 24 hours, Naomi Wolf has claimed that the fires in LA are an actual war or foreign invasion, a plot to kill people to destroy evidence of Covid vaccine adverse effects, weather manipulation, a deliberate bombing campaign, and mass spraying of mood stabilisers.
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
Very good post. The thatcherite settlement did benefit the baby boomers however who saw soaring house prices when they were already on the ladder plus an initial debt fuelled economic boom. Hence why they vote tory.
A brief scan of the latest news suggests that almost no progress has been made in containing the two major fires, and adverse wind conditions are on the way. It looks like this disaster has some way still to run.
An area destroyed now larger than Greater Manchester inside the M60 according to the BBC.
Gosh. Interesting that the BBC have now moved on from comparing it to an arbitrary area of Central London. Though still not that helpful for non-Mancunians (and I'd note tbat the 'Greater Manchester' bit there is redundant; they could have just said 'the area inside the M60'.) They could, for example, have just said 'an area the size of the city of Manchester' (ot Liverpool, or any one of a dozen others).
At least they aren't counting in the SI unit of landscape destruction, the Wales. Yet.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
Upwards the socioeconomic pyramid.
And also upwards in age.
Its the second which has been the most damaging in this country.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
Ok, have it your own way.
Always happy to learn more on the issue if you'd ever like to bring fresh info to the table.
No, I won't be doing that. I've said my piece. Empire = Exploitation. Exploitation = ££££ for the exploiter. That's the headline. Nothing to back it up except for loads of history books and podcasts, all by other people.
I think the mistake you are making was to assume it was exploitation by *Britain*
It was usually *British* chancers and promotors operating independently on the ground - basically a land based version of Raleigh or Drake - exploring the locals for all they were worth (literally)
“Empire” was a loose term employed to give a sense of order to a kaleidoscope of localised arrangements
The Macmillan govt's 'Audit of Empire' reports in the late 1950s reckoned that the 'home' (ie. UK-based) economy was smaller by a sixth than it would have been without the empire - similar to the effect of WW2, but less than that of WW1.
You can sense check that by comparing with (West) Germany which, starting from a lower base in 1871 and suffering similar WW1 and greater WW2 losses, surpassed us in GDP terms around 1960.
It's hard to see the empire as having been anything other than a net loss for us, in economic terms at least.
Love Kinnabula's line of arguing here. Well, if podcasts say so, it must be true.
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
BlueAnon liberal is urging Americans to flee the United States immediately, claiming the country is just weeks away from becoming a Christian Nationalist Fascist dictatorship.
He alleges that Trump’s team has compiled an enemies list that includes individuals like himself and warns that in two years, other nations may no longer accept Americans seeking refuge.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
Very good post. The thatcherite settlement did benefit the baby boomers however who saw soaring house prices when they were already on the ladder plus an initial debt fuelled economic boom. Hence why they vote tory.
People with estates that they're desperate to protect from death duties - mostly well-off pensioners and their expectant heirs, and some angry farmers - are pretty much all the Tories have left now. Chickens, roost, etc.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
Very good post. The thatcherite settlement did benefit the baby boomers however who saw soaring house prices when they were already on the ladder plus an initial debt fuelled economic boom. Hence why they vote tory.
People with estates that they're desperate to protect from death duties - mostly well-off pensioners and their expectant heirs, and some angry farmers - are pretty much all the Tories have left now. Chickens, roost, etc.
More of them than train drivers, which is all Labour will have left.
""Around 200 cars" parked up along part of the Peak District have prevented gritting taking place.
Derbyshire County Council said on Saturday morning crews could not get through due to double parking on Rushup Edge and Mam Nick, near Edale."
My photo quota:
No point having a 4WD if you can't take it for a spin in weather like that. Intriguingly there seems to be a nascent wildfire on the horizon. I hope we don't wake up tomorrow to find an area the size of Derbyshire (actually ... Derbyshire) has been lost to an unseasonal conflagration.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
Ok, have it your own way.
Always happy to learn more on the issue if you'd ever like to bring fresh info to the table.
No, I won't be doing that. I've said my piece. Empire = Exploitation. Exploitation = ££££ for the exploiter. That's the headline. Nothing to back it up except for loads of history books and podcasts, all by other people.
I think the mistake you are making was to assume it was exploitation by *Britain*
It was usually *British* chancers and promotors operating independently on the ground - basically a land based version of Raleigh or Drake - exploring the locals for all they were worth (literally)
“Empire” was a loose term employed to give a sense of order to a kaleidoscope of localised arrangements
The Macmillan govt's 'Audit of Empire' reports in the late 1950s reckoned that the 'home' (ie. UK-based) economy was smaller by a sixth than it would have been without the empire - similar to the effect of WW2, but less than that of WW1.
You can sense check that by comparing with (West) Germany which, starting from a lower base in 1871 and suffering similar WW1 and greater WW2 losses, surpassed us in GDP terms around 1960.
It's hard to see the empire as having been anything other than a net loss for us, in economic terms at least.
Love Kinnabula's line of arguing here. Well, if podcasts say so, it must be true.
And the spreadsheet. It's not even close.
Still, if we pretend it's the other way round and we made a loss we're actually owed reparations so maybe that's the way to go.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
Very good post. The thatcherite settlement did benefit the baby boomers however who saw soaring house prices when they were already on the ladder plus an initial debt fuelled economic boom. Hence why they vote tory.
People with estates that they're desperate to protect from death duties - mostly well-off pensioners and their expectant heirs, and some angry farmers - are pretty much all the Tories have left now. Chickens, roost, etc.
The LDs and Reform also back restoring agricultural property relief for assets over £1 million and both also back restoring WFA like the Tories too and keeping Osborne's IHT exemption for residential properties for married couples up to £1 million
""Around 200 cars" parked up along part of the Peak District have prevented gritting taking place.
Derbyshire County Council said on Saturday morning crews could not get through due to double parking on Rushup Edge and Mam Nick, near Edale."
My photo quota:
No point having a 4WD if you can't take it for a spin in weather like that. Intriguingly there seems to be a nascent wildfire on the horizon. I hope we don't wake up tomorrow to find an area the size of Derbyshire (actually ... Derbyshire) has been lost to an unseasonal conflagration.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
Very good post. The thatcherite settlement did benefit the baby boomers however who saw soaring house prices when they were already on the ladder plus an initial debt fuelled economic boom. Hence why they vote tory.
People with estates that they're desperate to protect from death duties - mostly well-off pensioners and their expectant heirs, and some angry farmers - are pretty much all the Tories have left now. Chickens, roost, etc.
More of them than train drivers, which is all Labour will have left.
Time will tell. The Government has been dealt a bad hand and isn't playing it well at the moment, but at least it shows some evidence of being interested in people other than its deep core vote. The Conservatives are a gentry party. They only think you're worth anything if you're replete with valuable assets.
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
BlueAnon liberal is urging Americans to flee the United States immediately, claiming the country is just weeks away from becoming a Christian Nationalist Fascist dictatorship.
He alleges that Trump’s team has compiled an enemies list that includes individuals like himself and warns that in two years, other nations may no longer accept Americans seeking refuge.
That's probably a touch hyperbolic from "BlueAnon liberal". But you can understand the anxiety of those who see Trump for what he is. I'm glad I'm here not there, let's just say.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
Thatcher understood that capitalism only works if people have capital, and the the opportunity to accumulate capital. You do not understand this.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
Very good post. The thatcherite settlement did benefit the baby boomers however who saw soaring house prices when they were already on the ladder plus an initial debt fuelled economic boom. Hence why they vote tory.
People with estates that they're desperate to protect from death duties - mostly well-off pensioners and their expectant heirs, and some angry farmers - are pretty much all the Tories have left now. Chickens, roost, etc.
The LDs and Reform also back restoring agricultural property relief for assets over £1 million and both also back restoring WFA like the Tories too and keeping Osborne's IHT exemption for residential properties for married couples up to £1 million
They are, of course, free to attempt to peel off some of your remaining minted octogenarians from a position of zero responsibility. Neither party is likely actually to have to make hard decisions about how to fund public services before they collapse in a burning heap of rubble and they know it.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
Very good post. The thatcherite settlement did benefit the baby boomers however who saw soaring house prices when they were already on the ladder plus an initial debt fuelled economic boom. Hence why they vote tory.
People with estates that they're desperate to protect from death duties - mostly well-off pensioners and their expectant heirs, and some angry farmers - are pretty much all the Tories have left now. Chickens, roost, etc.
The LDs and Reform also back restoring agricultural property relief for assets over £1 million and both also back restoring WFA like the Tories too and keeping Osborne's IHT exemption for residential properties for married couples up to £1 million
They are, of course, free to attempt to peel off some of your remaining minted octogenarians from a position of zero responsibility. Neither party is likely actually to have to make hard decisions about how to fund public services before they collapse in a burning heap of rubble and they know it.
Actually on the current Electoral Calculus poll average seat projection, Labour is already going to lose its majority at the next GE giving the LDs or Reform the balance of power https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
Thatcher understood that capitalism only works if people have capital, and the the opportunity to accumulate capital. You do not understand this.
Most of the electorate are home owners (with a mortgage or outright) even now
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
The Trumpist right’s steadfast belief in everything being the fault of someone else continues unabated.
Or maybe Trump has some methods of his own in mind for putting out wildfires of bone-dry brush in the midst of 60 mph winds. Because I’m sure the firefighters in LA would love to know about them.
(Yes, things could have been done differently /before/ the fires started. That’s a separate issue.)
Actually, a lot of time during Trump's Joe Rogan interview was apparently dedicated to a soliloquy on the lack of controlled brush fires to prevent wildfires, water shortages in LA etc. So he may not have solutions to putting the fires out, but he certainly speaks with some authority given what he's said in the past.
Many parts of California do have controlled burns. The issue with LA is that the canyons mean there is often a lot of wind being channeled though them, even if it's fairly still generally. That makes them quite challenging, compared to the brush outside the city.
My personal view is that there need to be more defined fire breaks, so things are easier to contain. But 100mph winds when you've had an exceptionally dry summer and autumn are going to be challenging irrespective of whether you have fire breaks and controlled burns, simply because they spread burning embers, and bring oxygen to the fire. Combine that with the canyons that make getting fire fighters to the right place exceptionally difficult, and you have a recipe for occasional disasters.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
Thatcher understood that capitalism only works if people have capital, and the the opportunity to accumulate capital. You do not understand this.
Most of the electorate are home owners (with a mortgage or outright) even now
That's good. The more the merrier. Gives people a stake in society, as well as opportunities to take risks. Again, something Thatcher understood.
“Bloke v Woke” is actually quite a brilliant TV idea
*thinks*
Well I'm not doing it. It'll have to be TUD or Foxy.
We’ve already established you won’t venture beyond Rotterdam so, fret not, you weren’t in the frame…
What it could be, however, is an excellent travelling podcast. I’d be *bloke* I just need the right wokester, someone smart and amusing but also painfully sincere
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
Errr, are you sure about that?
Average house prices trebled between 1979 and 1990. It just doesn't feel as bad, because that was also a period when interest rates fell sharply.
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
Not really because you've got your timing wrong there.
There is a 5 year window from 1999 through 2004 where house prices shifted thanks to mortgages going from 3+1 times earnings to 3 or 3.5 times joint earnings...
Now granted you could get 3 times join earnings before 1999 but that is the point where the loosing of lending criteria impacted house prices - I remember the seeing it hitting Kent between 2001 and 2002 and not arriving up north until 2004...
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
Errr, are you sure about that?
Average house prices trebled between 1979 and 1990. It just doesn't feel as bad, because that was also a period when interest rates fell sharply.
Even in the 1990's you could buy a house or flat for three times a fairly average wage even in the south east....I know because I did twice in the 90's
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
And this might not have ended in a dumpster fire if she, (and her successors, to be fair: New Labour exhibited no interest in addressing the matter) had bothered to replace the council houses. All Maggie was interested in was using the receipts to subsidise current spending and thus fund tax cuts.
As it is, a large segment of the population now finds itself stuck in ludicrously expensive private rentals with no prospect of ever buying their way off that treadmill. We now have a neo-Hanoverian settlement: rentier capitalism with a large peasant underclass.
Your party won't fix this problem because it is contrary to the interest of your rump vote to do so. It is therefore useless to most of the country and thoroughly deserved the good caning it got last year.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
It's a great shame the purchase money wasn't invested in more new council houses.
I used to think a solution to the housing issue would be nationalisation of all housing, but I see now that would give a government far too much power.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
And this might not have ended in a dumpster fire if she, (and her successors, to be fair: New Labour exhibited no interest in addressing the matter) had bothered to replace the council houses. All Maggie was interested in was using the receipts to subsidise current spending and thus fund tax cuts.
As it is, a large segment of the population now finds itself stuck in ludicrously expensive private rentals with no prospect of ever buying their way off that treadmill. We now have a neo-Hanoverian settlement: rentier capitalism with a large peasant underclass.
Your party won't fix this problem because it is contrary to the interest of your rump vote to do so. It is therefore useless to most of the country and thoroughly deserved the good caning it got last year.
Most people were in favour of council house sell offs due to in the 70's they switched council houses to a need basis so most people realised they didnt stand a chance of getting a council house. Why do you think most people are going to support it
I like ginger but it makes me sneeze. But you can buy ginger cordial and dilute it with water and - hey presto - it's nice and non-sneezy.
#PBNewent
I discovered yesterday that ginger and fresh wasabi root make a (pale, but delicious) approximation of chilli - which I'm allergic to.
HYUFD will be delighted to hear that I made a nourishing broth from the post Christmas goods stock. Root veg & (at the last moment) finely chopped watercress and parsley, flavoured with lots of ginger and wasabi; really good.
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
"Only"???
How much, in your eyes, is an average account?
There doesn't appear to be figures on an average 'following' on twitter, unlike average 'followers'.
But a quick look at some of those that the organisations that the CPS are following themselves:
Met police fed - 1642 Police fed - 925 NCA - 2395 College of policing - 3923 Moj - 1375 CBA - 4524 Dignity in dying - 8702 Law society - 888
I follow over a 1,000.
I'd say average. Someone manages this account.
The Head of Diversity and Inclusion at the CPS is friendly with Mr C****n. They've done a video together talking about how great it is to come out in the forces.
And your point is...?
It might explain why the CPS's social media account follows a former Defence Minister. That's all.
Just as long as it's not guilt by association...
Caplin has not been found guilty of anything. FWIW I am a bit wary of private arrests because of the risk of prejudicing people's rights and getting things badly wrong. Even more so if it follows a "sting" operation.
I do think organisations need to think about their social media policies and who they follow, precisely because of the risk of finding yourself inadvertently associated with something unsavoury. All the more so if you are performing a policing or judicial function. The risk of actual or perceived bias is real. Plus the risk of missing evidence of a possible criminal offence.
Whether any of this applies here I don't know and it is far too early to tell. It may well all end up a big fat nothing.
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
Errr, are you sure about that?
Average house prices trebled between 1979 and 1990. It just doesn't feel as bad, because that was also a period when interest rates fell sharply.
Even in the 1990's you could buy a house or flat for three times a fairly average wage even in the south east....I know because I did twice in the 90's
That'll be because house prices fell 40% in real terms between 1990 and 1994.
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
Errr, are you sure about that?
Average house prices trebled between 1979 and 1990. It just doesn't feel as bad, because that was also a period when interest rates fell sharply.
Even in the 1990's you could buy a house or flat for three times a fairly average wage even in the south east....I know because I did twice in the 90's
That'll be because house prices fell 40% in real terms between 1990 and 1994.
The mid to late 90s for someone coming of age in Britain were incredible, in hindsight.
Cold War over. Economy growing but plenty of spare capacity. Housing affordable and rising again. Optimism. Good weather.
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
Errr, are you sure about that?
Average house prices trebled between 1979 and 1990. It just doesn't feel as bad, because that was also a period when interest rates fell sharply.
Even in the 1990's you could buy a house or flat for three times a fairly average wage even in the south east....I know because I did twice in the 90's
That'll be because house prices fell 40% in real terms between 1990 and 1994.
yes I bought a flat on a pretty average wage before the fall and another house after the fall. However after selling a property in 2004 after doubling my wage I couldnt afford to buy a 1 bedroom flat after selling a 4 bedroom detatched house in 2002
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
Errr, are you sure about that?
Average house prices trebled between 1979 and 1990. It just doesn't feel as bad, because that was also a period when interest rates fell sharply.
Even in the 1990's you could buy a house or flat for three times a fairly average wage even in the south east....I know because I did twice in the 90's
That'll be because house prices fell 40% in real terms between 1990 and 1994.
The mid to late 90s for someone coming of age in Britain were incredible, in hindsight.
Cold War over. Economy growing but plenty of spare capacity. Housing affordable and rising again. Optimism. Good weather.
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
Errr, are you sure about that?
Average house prices trebled between 1979 and 1990. It just doesn't feel as bad, because that was also a period when interest rates fell sharply.
Even in the 1990's you could buy a house or flat for three times a fairly average wage even in the south east....I know because I did twice in the 90's
That'll be because house prices fell 40% in real terms between 1990 and 1994.
The mid to late 90s for someone coming of age in Britain were incredible, in hindsight.
Cold War over. Economy growing but plenty of spare capacity. Housing affordable and rising again. Optimism. Good weather.
I remember the year the Wall came down. Heady. Now we seem to be back into the years of imperial hegemony, cynical and unforgiving.
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
Errr, are you sure about that?
Average house prices trebled between 1979 and 1990. It just doesn't feel as bad, because that was also a period when interest rates fell sharply.
Even in the 1990's you could buy a house or flat for three times a fairly average wage even in the south east....I know because I did twice in the 90's
That'll be because house prices fell 40% in real terms between 1990 and 1994.
Which was an exceptionally good thing.
We need it to happen again, desperately, to reverse the catastrophic damage of the Brown years onwards.
Disappotingly, I have just realised I failed to put the oven on when I thought I had, so my roast duck leg will be further delayed. I am also on my second almost-negroni (I'm out of Lustau rosado so tried Cocchi Americano and it's awesome, even better paired with Tarquin's. Negroni is a bit of a headfuck anyway so if I find an excuse for a third, I'm not sure I'll be up to making gravy)
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
The Trumpist right’s steadfast belief in everything being the fault of someone else continues unabated.
Or maybe Trump has some methods of his own in mind for putting out wildfires of bone-dry brush in the midst of 60 mph winds. Because I’m sure the firefighters in LA would love to know about them.
(Yes, things could have been done differently /before/ the fires started. That’s a separate issue.)
Actually, a lot of time during Trump's Joe Rogan interview was apparently dedicated to a soliloquy on the lack of controlled brush fires to prevent wildfires, water shortages in LA etc. So he may not have solutions to putting the fires out, but he certainly speaks with some authority given what he's said in the past.
Many parts of California do have controlled burns. The issue with LA is that the canyons mean there is often a lot of wind being channeled though them, even if it's fairly still generally. That makes them quite challenging, compared to the brush outside the city.
My personal view is that there need to be more defined fire breaks, so things are easier to contain. But 100mph winds when you've had an exceptionally dry summer and autumn are going to be challenging irrespective of whether you have fire breaks and controlled burns, simply because they spread burning embers, and bring oxygen to the fire. Combine that with the canyons that make getting fire fighters to the right place exceptionally difficult, and you have a recipe for occasional disasters.
The desperation of the GOP to politicise the disaster is quite something.
No doubt there are some failings - and California environmental law has perverse consequences - but Trump has largely been spouting nonsense.
(Incidentally the state doubled spending on the state fire service in recent years, or they wouldn't have most of the water bombers currently in use.)
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Home ownership in the UK peaked at about 73%.
The lowest 25% have rarely been home owners.
What we saw in the 1980s and 1990s was an increase in home ownership among the working class and young.
An increase in home ownership amongst the working class and young is an exceptionally good thing and is what is sorely needed today.
And it doesn't neatly transpire that the quarter who didn't own their own home were those that were the lowest quarter of earners, since there is always some variance eg higher earners who were regularly mobile or had bad credit or other reasons to be in the quarter that didn't own their own home.
The minimum wage has grown faster than CPI since 2002 when home ownership peaked so home ownership amongst the young and poorest should have gone up, but the opposite has happened as house price inflation surged out of control and was falsely deemed as not inflation by the Bank of England.
Getting house prices in real terms back to what they were in the 1990s would fix a lot of our economic problems.
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
The Trumpist right’s steadfast belief in everything being the fault of someone else continues unabated.
Or maybe Trump has some methods of his own in mind for putting out wildfires of bone-dry brush in the midst of 60 mph winds. Because I’m sure the firefighters in LA would love to know about them.
(Yes, things could have been done differently /before/ the fires started. That’s a separate issue.)
Actually, a lot of time during Trump's Joe Rogan interview was apparently dedicated to a soliloquy on the lack of controlled brush fires to prevent wildfires, water shortages in LA etc. So he may not have solutions to putting the fires out, but he certainly speaks with some authority given what he's said in the past.
Many parts of California do have controlled burns. The issue with LA is that the canyons mean there is often a lot of wind being channeled though them, even if it's fairly still generally. That makes them quite challenging, compared to the brush outside the city.
My personal view is that there need to be more defined fire breaks, so things are easier to contain. But 100mph winds when you've had an exceptionally dry summer and autumn are going to be challenging irrespective of whether you have fire breaks and controlled burns, simply because they spread burning embers, and bring oxygen to the fire. Combine that with the canyons that make getting fire fighters to the right place exceptionally difficult, and you have a recipe for occasional disasters.
The desperation of the GOP to politicise the disaster is quite something.
No doubt there are some failings - and California environmental law has perverse consequences - but Trump has largely been spouting nonsense.
(Incidentally the state doubled spending on the state fire service in recent years, or they wouldn't have most of the water bombers currently in use.)
Given that the USA is quite big, why don't people just live further away from trees? Looking at wiki, that part of the world has regular burns, and of course that part of the world has regular burns. Just cut big fire breaks and maintain them
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
Ok, have it your own way.
Always happy to learn more on the issue if you'd ever like to bring fresh info to the table.
No, I won't be doing that. I've said my piece. Empire = Exploitation. Exploitation = ££££ for the exploiter. That's the headline. Nothing to back it up except for loads of history books and podcasts, all by other people.
I think the mistake you are making was to assume it was exploitation by *Britain*
It was usually *British* chancers and promotors operating independently on the ground - basically a land based version of Raleigh or Drake - exploring the locals for all they were worth (literally)
“Empire” was a loose term employed to give a sense of order to a kaleidoscope of localised arrangements
The Macmillan govt's 'Audit of Empire' reports in the late 1950s reckoned that the 'home' (ie. UK-based) economy was smaller by a sixth than it would have been without the empire - similar to the effect of WW2, but less than that of WW1.
You can sense check that by comparing with (West) Germany which, starting from a lower base in 1871 and suffering similar WW1 and greater WW2 losses, surpassed us in GDP terms around 1960.
It's hard to see the empire as having been anything other than a net loss for us, in economic terms at least.
The Empire cost money, overall, but it provided huge military advantages. The contribution of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, from India, the Dominions, and Africa, in both world wars, was huge.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
The Trumpist right’s steadfast belief in everything being the fault of someone else continues unabated.
Or maybe Trump has some methods of his own in mind for putting out wildfires of bone-dry brush in the midst of 60 mph winds. Because I’m sure the firefighters in LA would love to know about them.
(Yes, things could have been done differently /before/ the fires started. That’s a separate issue.)
Actually, a lot of time during Trump's Joe Rogan interview was apparently dedicated to a soliloquy on the lack of controlled brush fires to prevent wildfires, water shortages in LA etc. So he may not have solutions to putting the fires out, but he certainly speaks with some authority given what he's said in the past.
Many parts of California do have controlled burns. The issue with LA is that the canyons mean there is often a lot of wind being channeled though them, even if it's fairly still generally. That makes them quite challenging, compared to the brush outside the city.
My personal view is that there need to be more defined fire breaks, so things are easier to contain. But 100mph winds when you've had an exceptionally dry summer and autumn are going to be challenging irrespective of whether you have fire breaks and controlled burns, simply because they spread burning embers, and bring oxygen to the fire. Combine that with the canyons that make getting fire fighters to the right place exceptionally difficult, and you have a recipe for occasional disasters.
The desperation of the GOP to politicise the disaster is quite something.
No doubt there are some failings - and California environmental law has perverse consequences - but Trump has largely been spouting nonsense.
(Incidentally the state doubled spending on the state fire service in recent years, or they wouldn't have most of the water bombers currently in use.)
Given that the USA is quite big, why don't people just live further away from trees? Looking at wiki, that part of the world has regular burns, and of course that part of the world has regular burns. Just cut big fire breaks and maintain them
Sorry about the repetition, that's the effect of my second negroni
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
The problems began in 2002 not 1979 when house prices let rip out of control.
State involvement is draconian in our housing market unfortunately via the 1940s planning system. Going back to the 1930s planning system would fix a lot of our problems and enable major construction by small developers stymied by the planning system, taking power away from the volume developers.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
Spot on.That is exactly why we are about to get a far right party expanding at a fastest ever rate in 2029 after the poor bastards who have had enough of neo liberalism making them poorer to allow capitalism to run riot for the advantage of a small elite. Finally revolt for populist fascism.
This Government was a last throw of the dice for neo liberals but has taken precisely the opposite path to what was required.
Never had a chance with SKS and Austerity Reeves belief systems. Somebody on here has been forecasting this inevitability since 2021
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Low earners were able to in the 1980s and 1990s, before the system became broken at the turn of the century.
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
Of course, what actually happened was that housing changed from being simply somewhere to live into an investment and a commodity, with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
When have the lowest earners ever been able to buy a property? 100 years ago most of the population rented let alone just the lowest earners and still had families. There was no minimum wage either until Blair.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
And this might not have ended in a dumpster fire if she, (and her successors, to be fair: New Labour exhibited no interest in addressing the matter) had bothered to replace the council houses. All Maggie was interested in was using the receipts to subsidise current spending and thus fund tax cuts.
As it is, a large segment of the population now finds itself stuck in ludicrously expensive private rentals with no prospect of ever buying their way off that treadmill. We now have a neo-Hanoverian settlement: rentier capitalism with a large peasant underclass.
Your party won't fix this problem because it is contrary to the interest of your rump vote to do so. It is therefore useless to most of the country and thoroughly deserved the good caning it got last year.
*A lot* of post WWII council house estates (eg Robin Hood Gardens, or the Everton Piggeries or Hackney Wick tower blocks), were jerry-built shitholes. Beware of thinking that in the past, everyone had decent homes. The overall standard of housing today is better today than in the Sixties or Seventies.
Disappotingly, I have just realised I failed to put the oven on when I thought I had, so my roast duck leg will be further delayed. I am also on my second almost-negroni (I'm out of Lustau rosado so tried Cocchi Americano and it's awesome, even better paired with Tarquin's. Negroni is a bit of a headfuck anyway so if I find an excuse for a third, I'm not sure I'll be up to making gravy)
Daughter is out at a party and currently in Wagamamas, so it’s mini roast for the remaining 3 of us this evening. 2 partridges and a pheasant, with bread sauce, sprouts and a few roasted veg.
I am 2 beers down - a French “la Goudale” which was a naughty 7.2%, and a Clarkson’s farm Hawkstone. Now on to the 14.5% Cairanne which I’ve diluted to 12% (do it, readers, diluting overly strong red wine brings out the fruit).
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
Tv series proposal taking shape.
Woke v Bloke An odd couple bicker their way round the globe, L making increasingly outrageous statements as each episode progresses, K tutting about the state of the world and L’s socks.
It would work well and is a fairly established genre. There was a touch of that in Oz Clarke and James May’s wine trips, but not strictly woke v bloke. More poet v engineer.
Some sort of combination like Toby Young and Sue Perkins would work a treat.
ETA: my daughter’s currently at a birthday party of someone who’s mums a TV commissioner. Maybe I should pitch it.
The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon is another model. Quite entertaining if a slight tendency to look up each other’s luvvy bottoms, also sharing quite a similar work view I think.
Probably a good thing if there were more conversations between opposing views, as long as proxy Leon and proxy Kinabalu don’t end up tearing lumps out of each other. Stanley Tucci’s Italian programmes weren’t bad at talking to different outlooks, everyone from the Missoni family to Lega Nord politicians.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
Ok, have it your own way.
Always happy to learn more on the issue if you'd ever like to bring fresh info to the table.
No, I won't be doing that. I've said my piece. Empire = Exploitation. Exploitation = ££££ for the exploiter. That's the headline. Nothing to back it up except for loads of history books and podcasts, all by other people.
I think the mistake you are making was to assume it was exploitation by *Britain*
It was usually *British* chancers and promotors operating independently on the ground - basically a land based version of Raleigh or Drake - exploring the locals for all they were worth (literally)
“Empire” was a loose term employed to give a sense of order to a kaleidoscope of localised arrangements
The Macmillan govt's 'Audit of Empire' reports in the late 1950s reckoned that the 'home' (ie. UK-based) economy was smaller by a sixth than it would have been without the empire - similar to the effect of WW2, but less than that of WW1.
You can sense check that by comparing with (West) Germany which, starting from a lower base in 1871 and suffering similar WW1 and greater WW2 losses, surpassed us in GDP terms around 1960.
It's hard to see the empire as having been anything other than a net loss for us, in economic terms at least.
The Empire cost money, overall, but it provided huge military advantages. The contribution of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, from India, the Dominions, and Africa, in both world wars, was huge.
In which case it didn't cost.
It's also worth bearing in mind that without the bases and protectorates it wouldn't have been possible to carry out open trade on a global scale.
The WTO and its equivalents didn't exist then and, to the extent they do now, they are in a large part a child of its legacy.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
You know you are giving the government what they want? They are splitting voices so we aren't all in one place so more easily ignored?
Meh - twitter / X is unusable nowadays..
I wasn't arguing go x, the bluesky thing is being promoted instead of here
The bluesky list came about because @Morris_Dancer was trying to collect the name of everyone who is on twitter and some of us pointed out where weren't there any more.
And the reason it's being done is because the new online safety bill may make the forum part of this site impossible to operate....
I'm interested that in the one I posted yesterday, Eleanor Frances flags up support from the Free Speech Union - which deserves a look.
Toby Young is exceptionally lampoonable, but has imo been a little over-satirised by some - eg the "Tobes Supports Eugenics" attack was heavily overdone.
I've remarked that haye positive achievements in some cases, though I am concerned with their potential political positioning - which could swing towards an American Right free speech fundmentalist, even Muskovite, perspective.
To get far they need to make themselves quite non-partisan - perhaps towards a right-leaning version of the left-leaning NCCL. IMO their biggest risks include getting Free Speech muddled up with partisan politics; that ultimately won't work in the UK as a principled stance, and currently they show some party-alignment, or rather anti-party-alignment.
But they are on the scene now, and are becoming significant as an organisation. They are a Company Limited by Guarantee, have 15 staff, an annual income of around £1-1.5 million, and claim 20k members paying at least £59 each per annum, and "supporters" making it up to 30k+ *. There's a risk that they could become respectable !
As a scale check, that makes them somewhat smaller than Humanists UK, who are about double on turnover, but have a commercial income from 10% levies on Humanist Weddings (last time I looked). HUK are very cagey about membership numbers, claiming 120k "members and supporters", but I think "supporters" means "people on our email list" (again, unless their practice has changed). In any case they work primarily though a network of influencers in politics. That 120k number is perhaps a "community" figure. Whenever I have seen their "are you a humanist" survey, pretty much every church minister I have ever known could qualify.
An interesting point for me re:FSU is their "partner" organisations listed on the front page. https://freespeechunion.org/
* Anglican Clergy Membership is discounted at £34.99, which for some reason I find a little amusing.
The reason she won is because she had two excellent lawyers experienced in this area of the law (Peter Daley and Akua Reindorf KC). A great pity the government's lawyers were not as good or, if they were, were ignored.
From what I read, I get a strong sense of (from the government side)
1) our lawyers are wrong 2) I am convinced of my own moral righteousness 3) I am not financially liable
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
Ok, have it your own way.
Always happy to learn more on the issue if you'd ever like to bring fresh info to the table.
No, I won't be doing that. I've said my piece. Empire = Exploitation. Exploitation = ££££ for the exploiter. That's the headline. Nothing to back it up except for loads of history books and podcasts, all by other people.
I think the mistake you are making was to assume it was exploitation by *Britain*
It was usually *British* chancers and promotors operating independently on the ground - basically a land based version of Raleigh or Drake - exploring the locals for all they were worth (literally)
“Empire” was a loose term employed to give a sense of order to a kaleidoscope of localised arrangements
The Macmillan govt's 'Audit of Empire' reports in the late 1950s reckoned that the 'home' (ie. UK-based) economy was smaller by a sixth than it would have been without the empire - similar to the effect of WW2, but less than that of WW1.
You can sense check that by comparing with (West) Germany which, starting from a lower base in 1871 and suffering similar WW1 and greater WW2 losses, surpassed us in GDP terms around 1960.
It's hard to see the empire as having been anything other than a net loss for us, in economic terms at least.
The Empire cost money, overall, but it provided huge military advantages. The contribution of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, from India, the Dominions, and Africa, in both world wars, was huge.
Far more importantly you'd not be able to get a really decent curry if the Empire hadn't existed.
It should be also noted that house prices didn't spiral in the thatcherite years nor even the majorite years but in the new labour years when 1) brown decided housing could be part of a pension fund and 2) blair opened the immigration floodgates
Errr, are you sure about that?
Average house prices trebled between 1979 and 1990. It just doesn't feel as bad, because that was also a period when interest rates fell sharply.
Even in the 1990's you could buy a house or flat for three times a fairly average wage even in the south east....I know because I did twice in the 90's
That'll be because house prices fell 40% in real terms between 1990 and 1994.
Which was an exceptionally good thing.
We need it to happen again, desperately, to reverse the catastrophic damage of the Brown years onwards.
I don't disagree with that! I was just pointing out that @Pagan2 was inaccurate to claim that house prices didn't shoot up during the Thatcher years.
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
Or looked at another way the vast majority of 18-45s don't even with the Guardian headline grabbing phrase of a 'strong leader who doesn't need to bother with elections' as opposed to a 'weak leader who doesn't need to bother with elections'.
There is anyway now a huge range of parties with MPs in parliament to vote from from the Greens to Reform and the SNP and Corbynite Independents and still the Tories, LDs and Labour too. At the end of the day the voters get the governments they voted for and deserve so can't really complain
Comments
(How autocorrect turned “you can collect your refund on the way out” into “you can polecat on the way out”… and what does that even mean? It sounds like the sort of thing @Leon gets up to in Bangkok…)
What it could be, however, is an excellent travelling podcast. I’d be *bloke* I just need the right wokester, someone smart and amusing but also painfully sincere
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
Donald Trump Truth Social 01:24 AM EST 01/12/25
https://x.com/TrumpDailyPosts/status/1878332173356318720
🫣🙏
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crm72d22znpo
""Around 200 cars" parked up along part of the Peak District have prevented gritting taking place.
Derbyshire County Council said on Saturday morning crews could not get through due to double parking on Rushup Edge and Mam Nick, near Edale."
My photo quota:
#PBNewent
That wouldn't be too bad, especially for a couple, if it wasn't for astronomical housing costs. As it is, you understand both why so many people are struggling, and why the average pensioner is better off than the average worker, despite the basic state pension being substantial lower than the minimum wage. Home ownership is the key to prosperity in this country, though all those prehistoric final salary pensions in payment help a lot of folk as well.
The Los Angeles wildfires have now burned ~38,000 acres of land, or ~2.5 TIMES the size of Manhattan, NY.
Estimated damages now exceed $150 BILLION in the costliest wildfire in US history.
This fire will impact the US economy for decades.
https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1878223623195959344
Anyone who is working full-time ought to be able to own their own home. It is a broken system that means that people are paying a landlord's mortgage instead of their own.
The idea that only the privileged ought to be able to afford a home was an alien concept to better Conservatives of the past. To quote Margaret Thatcher:
I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/12/steve-bannon-calls-elon-musk-racist
Oh dear, what a shame.
Or maybe Trump has some methods of his own in mind for putting out wildfires of bone-dry brush in the midst of 60 mph winds. Because I’m sure the firefighters in LA would love to know about them.
(Yes, things could have been done differently /before/ the fires started. That’s a separate issue.)
You can sense check that by comparing with (West) Germany which, starting from a lower base in 1871 and suffering similar WW1 and greater WW2 losses, surpassed us in GDP terms around 1960.
It's hard to see the empire as having been anything other than a net loss for us, in economic terms at least.
The lowest 25% have rarely been home owners.
What we saw in the 1980s and 1990s was an increase in home ownership among the working class and young.
But the headline stands. It was exploitative and we gained. That's (literally) the bottom line.
Low earnings - and there are a hell of a lot of people on the minimum wage, just think of the vast legions of warehouse workers, delivery drivers, basement level shop and hospitality staff, care sector workers and the rest - stymie household formation. You end up with millions of adults as permanent teenagers living in their childhood bedrooms, or in couples stuck in starter flats, spending most of their incomes on subsistence and deciding they can probably just about afford to keep a cat but a baby is out of the question.
The entire post-1979 economic settlement has come to this: a disaster. When you withdraw state involvement from the housing market and leave everything to volume housebuilders then they're going to produce a strangulated supply of shoddily constructed homes, built with deliberately small rooms to cram the maximum quantity on the available plots, sat in the middle of a car park. No thought is given to people's welfare and everything is about the maximisation of profit. It's part of a larger theme in which the entire economy is structured to redistribute what wealth exists upwards.
Interesting that the BBC have now moved on from comparing it to an arbitrary area of Central London. Though still not that helpful for non-Mancunians (and I'd note tbat the 'Greater Manchester' bit there is redundant; they could have just said 'the area inside the M60'.) They could, for example, have just said 'an area the size of the city of Manchester' (ot Liverpool, or any one of a dozen others).
https://bsky.app/profile/shayan86.bsky.social/post/3lfie3v4pcs23
So Putins mob seem slow off the mark.
And also upwards in age.
Its the second which has been the most damaging in this country.
Theres this.
BlueAnon liberal is urging Americans to flee the United States immediately, claiming the country is just weeks away from becoming a Christian Nationalist Fascist dictatorship.
He alleges that Trump’s team has compiled an enemies list that includes individuals like himself and warns that in two years, other nations may no longer accept Americans seeking refuge.
https://x.com/ShadowofEzra/status/1878232876250026331
Still, if we pretend it's the other way round and we made a loss we're actually owed reparations so maybe that's the way to go.
Thatcher at least enabled those with council homes to have the chance to buy them.
(I've never said that before)
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
My personal view is that there need to be more defined fire breaks, so things are easier to contain. But 100mph winds when you've had an exceptionally dry summer and autumn are going to be challenging irrespective of whether you have fire breaks and controlled burns, simply because they spread burning embers, and bring oxygen to the fire. Combine that with the canyons that make getting fire fighters to the right place exceptionally difficult, and you have a recipe for occasional disasters.
And Leicester at Old Trafford next in FA cup
Average house prices trebled between 1979 and 1990. It just doesn't feel as bad, because that was also a period when interest rates fell sharply.
There is a 5 year window from 1999 through 2004 where house prices shifted thanks to mortgages going from 3+1 times earnings to 3 or 3.5 times joint earnings...
Now granted you could get 3 times join earnings before 1999 but that is the point where the loosing of lending criteria impacted house prices - I remember the seeing it hitting Kent between 2001 and 2002 and not arriving up north until 2004...
As it is, a large segment of the population now finds itself stuck in ludicrously expensive private rentals with no prospect of ever buying their way off that treadmill. We now have a neo-Hanoverian settlement: rentier capitalism with a large peasant underclass.
Your party won't fix this problem because it is contrary to the interest of your rump vote to do so. It is therefore useless to most of the country and thoroughly deserved the good caning it got last year.
I used to think a solution to the housing issue would be nationalisation of all housing, but I see now that would give a government far too much power.
HYUFD will be delighted to hear that I made a nourishing broth from the post Christmas goods stock.
Root veg & (at the last moment) finely chopped watercress and parsley, flavoured with lots of ginger and wasabi; really good.
I do think organisations need to think about their social media policies and who they follow, precisely because of the risk of finding yourself inadvertently associated with something unsavoury. All the more so if you are performing a policing or judicial function. The risk of actual or perceived bias is real. Plus the risk of missing evidence of a possible criminal offence.
Whether any of this applies here I don't know and it is far too early to tell. It may well all end up a big fat nothing.
Cold War over. Economy growing but plenty of spare capacity. Housing affordable and rising again. Optimism. Good weather.
We need it to happen again, desperately, to reverse the catastrophic damage of the Brown years onwards.
No doubt there are some failings - and California environmental law has perverse consequences - but Trump has largely been spouting nonsense.
(Incidentally the state doubled spending on the state fire service in recent years, or they wouldn't have most of the water bombers currently in use.)
And it doesn't neatly transpire that the quarter who didn't own their own home were those that were the lowest quarter of earners, since there is always some variance eg higher earners who were regularly mobile or had bad credit or other reasons to be in the quarter that didn't own their own home.
The minimum wage has grown faster than CPI since 2002 when home ownership peaked so home ownership amongst the young and poorest should have gone up, but the opposite has happened as house price inflation surged out of control and was falsely deemed as not inflation by the Bank of England.
Getting house prices in real terms back to what they were in the 1990s would fix a lot of our economic problems.
State involvement is draconian in our housing market unfortunately via the 1940s planning system. Going back to the 1930s planning system would fix a lot of our problems and enable major construction by small developers stymied by the planning system, taking power away from the volume developers.
One in five Britons aged 18-45 prefer unelected leaders to democracy, poll finds.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/12/one-in-five-britons-aged-18-45-prefer-unelected-leaders-to-democracy-poll-finds
If your life is shit, and all the political parties with a chance of power offer broadly the same defence of the system that has failed you, then is the illusion of choice offered by democracy of any value to you? Seems that plenty of people don't think so, and the bulk of the country believes we are in steep decline. Not pretty.
This Government was a last throw of the dice for neo liberals but has taken precisely the opposite path to what was required.
Never had a chance with SKS and Austerity Reeves belief systems. Somebody on here has been forecasting this inevitability since 2021
I am 2 beers down - a French “la Goudale” which was a naughty 7.2%, and a Clarkson’s farm Hawkstone. Now on to the 14.5% Cairanne which I’ve diluted to 12% (do it, readers, diluting overly strong red wine brings out the fruit).
Probably a good thing if there were more conversations between opposing views, as long as proxy Leon and proxy Kinabalu don’t end up tearing lumps out of each other. Stanley Tucci’s Italian programmes weren’t bad at talking to different outlooks, everyone from the Missoni family to Lega Nord politicians.
It's also worth bearing in mind that without the bases and protectorates it wouldn't have been possible to carry out open trade on a global scale.
The WTO and its equivalents didn't exist then and, to the extent they do now, they are in a large part a child of its legacy.
And the reason it's being done is because the new online safety bill may make the forum part of this site impossible to operate....
1) our lawyers are wrong
2) I am convinced of my own moral righteousness
3) I am not financially liable
There is anyway now a huge range of parties with MPs in parliament to vote from from the Greens to Reform and the SNP and Corbynite Independents and still the Tories, LDs and Labour too. At the end of the day the voters get the governments they voted for and deserve so can't really complain