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If these numbers persist then Vance is unlikely to win in 2028 – politicalbetting.com
If these numbers persist then Vance is unlikely to win in 2028 – politicalbetting.com
It’s 100 days in, and the polls consistently look very bad for Trump, even on his core issues of the economy and immigration. I dive into what the numbers say and what they could mean going forward, in today’s write-up. Check it out in the replies. pic.twitter.com/msBotY19kt
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@TSE dethreaded me. Bah. We have quite major developments starting here in Ashfield, including a continuation of building more Council Houses that have been a thing for several years. They are trying to build on several areas of open land on older housing estates, where dogwalkers go etc, which is getting some blowback.
Looking at the numbers, they are massively lumpy, and come out 4 months behind - so 2024 Q4 is due out in the next week. Starts by quarter from 2022 Q1 look weird as Covid worked it way out - no conclusions are possible. WTF is 80k, 29k, 24k across Q2-Q4 2023 ?
But this is one, like NHS waiting lists, where the Govt have to deliver significant improvement towards their 1.5 million: target
Housing Starts - UK
2022 Q1 - No data
2022 Q2 - 65,200
2022 Q3 - 56,180
2022 Q4 - 39,350
2023 Q1 - 44,850
2023 Q2 - 79,710
2023 Q3 - 28,750
2023 Q4 - 23,940
2024 Q1 - 30,010
2024 Q2 - 33,390
2024 Q3 - 37,030
2024 Q1 - soon
I can only put it down to marketing shenanigans that the Cons indulged in before the Election to stroke Nimbies as they were circling the drain - eg the abolition of Housing Targets by Council, which they had never touched before.
But that is just my surmise.
Source of data: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/datasets/ukhousebuildingpermanentdwellingsstartedandcompleted
(Now I will read the header.)
If Trump tries to hang on, he can't run.
If the Republicans are unpopular, he'll be tainted. That includes if he has become President, which is fairly likely given Trump's age and state of decay. This means either he will be primaried out, or he will lose.
For me, the likelier Republican candidate is Ramaswamy. If they double down on whatever they're smoking, he's the obvious contender - younger, more plausible, more coherent and even more batshit than Trump and Musk.
But what it really shows is how broken the American political system is if they can elect somebody to carry out policies that will blow up their lives, and then be surprised or disapproving about it.
The Republican primary process really shouldn't have ended up with Trump as the candidate last year, but it did. How that plays out when a simple reading of the law doesn't allow him to run in 2028 remains to be seen.
After all, he's never let a simple reading of the law stop him before.
I laid out my suggestions for what they actually need to do to have a positive message at the next Election, and that is a significant increase by year 4 - perhaps to 250-300k per annum. Then there is something worthwhile to point at as an achievement. There are also factors around starts/completions data, which are roughly 1 year apart.
The Popebane is toast electorally.
But he could still be the next President...
Following last night’s brutal assault on Kyiv, it’s clear Putin has no interest in peace. Time to answer Russia’s ongoing invasion in Ukraine with renewed American strength and give our ally the military support they need to win a victory for freedom.
https://x.com/Mike_Pence/status/1915432808366981276
I've enjoyed roasters pivoting from "we're not like the Dutch" to "we're not like Londoners".
Two Bayeux scholars at loggerheads over whether dangling shape depicts dagger or the embroidery’s 94th phallus
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/25/bayeux-tapestry-historian-genitalia-dispute
https://news.sky.com/story/meta-too-slow-during-uk-riots-to-deal-with-violent-posts-online-says-independent-review-13354324
Whatever, it's a dismal record, especially as most if not all will be tiny, shoddy new builds a third of the size of their American counterparts, rather than the large family homes we need if our birthrate is to rise.
We need 8 million new houses to match France, which has a similar population. Allowing for population increase and demolition that's at least 500,000/year for 20 years. It really is the challenge of our generation, one that we're failing totally and spectacularly, and they need to be in exactly the kind of places that don't want them. The Economist highlighted recently that booming Oxford has built fewer new homes than shitheap Doncaster. Mad.
Really nice light geeky info for a Friday morning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Post#External_links
Trump is moaning about the Supreme Court blocking him. HIS judges. They have already got around the court once, surely it seems likely that the next move will be to simply bypass it.
Remember folks - they are already laying the ground for this. Activist judges, woke liberal lawyers, traitors of the American people - the abuse is already lined up. To sue the US government you need lawyers - and the government are busy smashing them. To stop the US government you need a legislature willing to speak out. Trump got impeached twice and wasn't stopped. And congress as currently elected is submissive. To stop the US government you need an independent media willing to speak truth to power. That has gone.
I'm very serious when I float questions about midterms and future elections. Trump is rapidly moving to squash the constitution and all opposition. He can sit there in the Oval Office with chinese-made MAGA hats on his desk signing endless executive orders and nobody is going to stop him.
The only question is how far will he go?
At least they weren’t erect.
People are grumpy and willing to vote against the incumbents to shake it all about. After they do though the new incumbents are the ones they're grumpy with, hence the in, out, in, out effect.
We've been through periods like this before. EG the late 60s to 1979 with Wilson doing the Hokey Cokey from Downing Street.
We are in sight of a route around the outskirts of town *if* there was a vision.
* Here this means that if I go for a 3-4 mile varied walk I might see a couple of dozen people on cycles if I am in the right part of town. Nothing happening on the roads and the staggered pedestrian crossings of course.
Anything could happen and he has a fanatical base. Plus, we don't know if the Dems will continue sticking their fingers in their ears or start listening.
Shadow minister dismisses alliance with Nigel Farage’s party and asks critics of Kemi Badenoch to ‘give her a break’
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/apr/25/robert-jenrick-rules-out-tory-pact-with-reform-uk-nigel-farage
At a conference on Tuesday, Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, said that a recession was now all but guaranteed, and called Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs plan “stupid.”
https://x.com/NewYorker/status/1915575466846495218
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/apr/25/bill-maher-calls-larry-davids-satire-of-his-trump-dinner-kind-of-insulting-to-6-million-dead-jews
PBers ?
Larry David: My Dinner With Adolf
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/opinion/larry-david-hitler-dinner.html
What makes you think the USA will even need another Presidential Election? The Constitution has been binned, Congress is MAGA, the Supreme Court despite last week's 7 to 2 ruling is owned by Trump. There is government by Executive Order only. Next!
Graham Cowley, who works with young people who are not in employment, education or training (Neets) in Blackpool, said a colleague this week told him there were “kids on the internet 24-hours a day, and they don’t want to work for anything less than 40 grand”.
Some on the Lords’ social mobility policy committee gasped in response, prompting Mr Crowley to say: “I know, I had that reaction. You may laugh, but that is the reality.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/25/workless-youths-wont-get-out-of-bed-for-less-than-40k/
No doubt Maher will recover a facsimile of a conscience as Trump's ratings fall even further.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-pardon-michele-fiore-nevada-fraud-cf56ef8b302b8111e47cf52d5a606d19
LAS VEGAS (AP) — President Donald Trump has pardoned a Nevada Republican politician who was awaiting sentencing on federal charges that she used money meant for a statue honoring a slain police officer for personal costs, including plastic surgery.
It would be better if it looked more like a key of course...
His piece is quite funny, and nails Maher's self regard pretty well, IMO.
Good morning, everyone.
I'm sorry, but "Vladimir, STOP!" is just absolutely a line from porn
https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/1915451167485952376
People object to building in the open countryside, on the edges of towns, and also in the centre of towns, they object to building on green belt, green fields, but also brownfield. They'll fight to preserve high quality agricultural land, useless scrubland, and derelict buildings and former car parks. They'll complain the infrastructure is not built first then object if infrastructure is built first. They'll bemoan they and their children cannot afford to live where they grew up but object to any affordable housing being built there.
It never ends and its infuriating. The system we have is at war with itself as it incentivises pandering to Nimbys whilst also having little teeth on developers. I do believe the government is now trying, but it may need more and look how they act in their own back yards.
No employer would be able to get them to put down their mobiles in the few weeks before they were sacked.
What next, Guardian? This is the sort of media incest non-story they'd sneer at the Mail or Express writing from TwiX comments about ITV soaps, except the Guardian story is classy because it is about Americans so appeals to the sort of rich intellectuals who bored us all about Seinfeld in the 1990s.
And, grumpy middle-aged cynic that I am, the Bank and Landlord of Mum and Dad probably have something to do with making this sort of lifestyle viable.
As with absurdly early retirees, it's not an easy problem to fix, and at an individual level, it's arguable that we can't and shouldn't try.
I suspect it was russian trolls who initiated the idea but it's catching on, I wouldn't be surprised if some maga cabinet members start parroting this theory soon.
Oblivion remake looks pretty good and it seems they've improved the godawful levelling system, which was my only major gripe about the original (still got it).
Might pick up the new version when it's on sale. And I have a thousand hours.
F1: probably because I posted it earlier, last podcast slightly fell off a cliff so in case anyone missed it, here are the links:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/f1-2025-saudi-arabian-grand-prix-review/
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f1-2025-saudi-arabian-grand-prix-review/id1786574257?i=1000704410551
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1xxxu5PeXCJvkNSieGr70V
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/bcfe213b-55fb-408a-a823-dc6693ee9f78/episodes/6f22639b-8655-4bcd-9400-c3972b1a4994/undercutters---f1-podcast-f1-2025-saudi-arabian-grand-prix-review
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2025/04/f1-2025-saudi-arabian-grand-prix-review.html
Next one will be up on Tuesday, including some interesting engine news. Some info is here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/articles/cgqvk9vyly1o
Essentially, it could be winter for Ferrari and Red Bull next season. Prospects for Aston Martin and Williams seem set to improve, with McLaren/Mercedes staying at the sharp end in what is being widely dubbed an 'engine formula'. Questions over the electrical power being so high, though.
Most deprived seat in country pretty much.
We need to stop housing being rejected by the planning system. Frankly, there are very few reasons why anything should be rejected.
The National
@ScotNational
NEW: The SNP have won a council by-election, holding the seat with more than double the Labour vote 👇
https://x.com/ScotNational/status/1915670770040111158
SCons must be bricking it (again).
Britain Elects
@BritainElects
✅ SNP HOLD
Glenrothes Central and Thornton (Fife) council by-election result:
SNP: 47.6% (-1.1)
LAB: 21.5% (-6.4)
REF: 17.9% (+17.9)
LDEM: 6.9% (+2.9)
CON: 6.1% (-5.9)
No Grn (-3.7) as prev.
+/- 2022
Why bother working when if you do, you'll lose your benefits and be taxed and be no better off?
I've been banging the drum on this for years, but the real marginal tax rate can be as high as 80-100% on work for those on low incomes so many people think why bother working? And that's not an irrational thought, even if its not a good one.
Fix the system, let people keep more of their own money they work for - and by that I mean prioritising those on low incomes caught in the poverty trap, but deal with other cliff edges too.
However, frames are all over the place. I'm playing on High and it alternates between 140+ inside cities and low 20s outside in the wilderness. I had to update my drivers to play it but it still crashes all the time, usually on leaving a building.
A cursory glance at income distributions, average hours worked and so on finds the benefit system simply isn't that big a disincentive overall - there is no discernible spike/dip at 16 hours, for example. It's frustrating because quite a lot of think tanks focus on these edge cases, it gets picked up in the press, and then we miss the broader picture.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/149832044#/?channel=RES_BUY
Plenty of others available:
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/find.html?maxPrice=150000&index=0&sortType=2&channel=BUY&transactionType=BUY&locationIdentifier=REGION^168&displayLocationIdentifier=Blackpool.html
Or 3 bed terraces for £80k:
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/find.html?maxPrice=80000&index=0&sortType=2&channel=BUY&transactionType=BUY&locationIdentifier=REGION^168&displayLocationIdentifier=Blackpool.html
They are, universally, extremely fearful of being “docked” - judged to have been given too much money and having it clawed back by reducing their benefits over a long period of time.
I am a fan of the minimum wage but not sure we can keep increasing it at the current pace without creating a different set of problems for the next tier of jobs above.
If your housing costs are zero, for whatever reason, life is really quite easy. The pressure to work to survive isn't really there, and not doing a minimum wage job is pretty rational from the point of view of homo economicus. You would have to be paid a blooming fortune to generate enough happiness.
If you are paying current market rents, life is a flipping nightmare. Hence the tales of young barristers in a flatshare in Watford.
One of the mysteries of the last decade has been the homeowners in depressed areas. They have been key to the success of Farage and Johnson. Objectively, they are comfortably off, but it's in a house price so it's not visible. And yet the areas around them are dismal. On one hand, that mismatch explains the appeal of national populism, but it doesn't make it a better idea.
https://www.bassetlaw.gov.uk/media/gn1kjm1b/adopted-bassetlaw-local-plan-2020-2038.pdf plans for 11,195 dwellings between 2020 and 2038 /
2020 population 118,300 so plenty I think given birth rate trajectory and likely migration to the district. (Est needed is 9,720)
Surely every council should have something like this.
And the problem is this becomes increasingly habitual. If the kids don't see their parents going to work a regular full-time job, then the kids aren't anywhere near as likely to get one themselves too.
We are shooting ourselves in the foot with this problem.
One easy win would be to roll more benefits into the UC taper (which is highly effective), including things like council tax reduction. That would knock METR (marginal effective tax rate) down significantly for some households. But the bigger issue is keeping it below 50% for all households would require such a large cut to the taper rate that it would massively increase the overall benefit bill.
Also, Doncaster isn't entirely a shitheap. And Oxford isn't entirely dreaming spires, either, is it?
Just let people build whatever they want, wherever they want it, and the need will be met. Free market liberalism works.
https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/civils/hs2/hs2-faces-multimillion-pound-hit-after-planning-permission-rejection-23-04-2025/
Merge NI, UC and Income Tax into a single system and have one tax rate applicable to all.
There are local plans which define what kind of residential or industrial development can take place (in terms of density or height) and where it can take place.
Developers can see from these plans what they would be allowed to build and where but some (not all) try to challenge these pre-existing and locally agreed plans with over-dense or over-height developments or with flats where the local authority wants houses and they do this, let's be fair, to maximise their profit on the land.
More sensible developers engage with the local community in advance often using third party communications companies. They hold public meetings, engage with the locals and work to achieve a compromise application which is acceptable to all. That's submitted and often gets approved.
Yes, there are those who don't want any development on a site but they are usually a minority and only become a majority when an insensitive developer puts up an application without local engagement and reference to the local plan which is completely unsuitable for the site. That's when you get public galleries full of angry people at planning sub-committee meetings and that's when you get councillors refusing applications.
The developer can seek to get that overturned but that takes time and costs money and the thoughtful developer recognises for a little bit of pre-application consultation, a lot of that stress can be removed.
That's how the process works - consultation, engagement, offering a little something to the local community whether out of the Section 106 payment or as part of the plan itself and usually that oiling of the wheels gets the application removed and the development underway and makes the public consultation (a legal requirement currently) a tick box exercise.
The actual problem is or are the chokepoints in the development process - availability of materials, of specialist sub contractors and trades at key points in the process. There's also the question of pricing - there's what the developer would like for each property and what the local market will stand and that's before the issue of affordable housing rears its head. In East London, a lot of developments have either part ownership or, more often, a big proportion is for rental.
What we need is to build new towns with proper infrastructure, not cramming more and more into already overheated corners. Like we did between the wars and after the war.
Way, way back, the well-healed businessmen (and they were all men) commuting from Blackpool to Manchester had their own "club train" where the select few could travel in comfort and figure out the best way to exploit the proletariat.
One of the club carriages is preserved at the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway, and you can sometimes take a ride in it.
Empty land along communication routes is an attractive prospect for developers.
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/14689377/aberdeen-schoolgirl-knife-attack/
Those screenings of Adolescence can't come fast enough.
We've never built as many houses after the war, as we did before it, despite the fact that after the war we had to rebuild bombed out homes and had the baby boom etc - the 1948 planning act was such an unmitigated disaster we've never seen levels of housebuilding we took for granted pre-war.
Previously on Trumpland: Chaos
Next time on Trumpland: Chaos
And Good Morning one and all. Cloudy here, but should brighten up. An East wind, which is always chilly at this time of the year, too.
*Edit at 3min. Autocorrect somehow had 'scanning' for 'scrapping'. Don't know what silly mistake I'd made to get that!
But generally pay is linked to skillsets.
Those who want more opportunities for better pay need to improve their skillsets.
Something which isn't going to be done by spending time in bed and on tiktok.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redd_Pepper
https://youtu.be/CVp9rKF3hag?si=s0ih0HbjPQqYn3WZ