Tony Diver @Tony_Diver · 20m Labour source in Doncaster says the party is facing an “extinction event” on the council, despite winning the mayoralty. There is talk Reform could win a council majority in Ed Miliband’s back yard.
Is there a specific reason for this difference e.g. is the Mayor very popular?
Candidates. If Nick Fletcher had run for Reform, Reform would have romped home.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
A dark day for Germany. The former DDR has gone from having its democratic wishes suppressed from the East to having its democratic wishes suppressed from the West.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
IMHO we should restrict what is available on the NHS. Emergency care, obviously, and basic services. But a lot of things we just can't afford, yes, like latest treatments for X, Y, Z. If we have to borrow money to support our standard if living we aren't a wealthy country.
I think the brutal but necessary action is to freeze hospital spending in nominal terms until it represents the same proportion of health spending as it did 20 years ago. Tighten up QALYs and revert the emphasis to public health and primary care.
I've hunted down the thread for these two comments, which I think are quite interesting, and almost certainly correct, and deserve a bit more thought. The pickle we are in with health is not that we are poor, as a nation - we are far richer than we were in the 1960s, for example - but that our potential outgoings on health has grown so massively. We can treat people for far more, far more successfully, with the innovations which have happened in health in my lifetime, but the cost of this is massive. And our demographics have shifted: we have a much greater proportion of (expensive to the NHS) old people - especially the super old (85+), who are crippling expensive, and a smaller proportion of 16-64 year olds to pay for it (though a greater number of these are working - but that is a separate quality-of-life issue) A couple of half remembered stats: Over half of NHS spending goes on the over 85s (is this true? It seems incredible. I am happy to be contradicted. It may be 'the under 1s and the over 85s' but that still seems incredible. If we doubled NHS spending, we could improve life expectancies by all of six months. (This stat is a good 30 years old but I can't imagine it's changed much).
I agree with AnneJGP's position - and the implication of Eabhal's position - that this means the NHS has to cut back on what it does. We can't be borrowing from our children to give to our parents. But the logic of which means there will be things which have to be paid for by individuals - which means that those who can afford them will get more life years than those who cannot, but also that this is money which will not get left to children. Which almost has us arriving in the same place by default. Where this all lands is people's lives being shortened - dying when they could have lived - even if this is only by 6 months of low quality life or such. This feels very much like assisted dying by an altogether messier route.
I don't have any good answers for any of this (where 'good' means both logically coherent and electorally popular).
If you've got an expensive drug that is going to give a cancer victim an extra 6 months, or a 10% chance at an extra 6 years, then there is very strong pressure to pay almost anything to (try to) save that person's life. If you have a public health intervention that is going to save 100 unidentified lives some decades in the future (e.g., a smoking cessation programme), no-one's interested.
It's the sort of situation where a collective decision is better than an individual one and the government needs to make the case. You can put more money into public health and into treating conditions affecting working age adults (e.g., mental health). One big problem was public health was moved to local councils around the same time that council funding was eviscerated under austerity.
Well my small bet on Lab in Runcorn and Helsby turned out to be a value loser. Oh well. But more generally, I'd say there was more value in the second favourites last night than in the favourites. And also, Reform still struggle to get their vote out...
Yes, I remember you saying last night. It wasn't a bad idea. And I did actively consider a second-favourite strategy for the betting. But fatigue won out (Wednesday was a mare at work and it caught up) so I couldn't crank the numbers due to head fuzz and did not, plumping for other options.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
Does that mean they are banned?
No. It's a lot more limited than that. It means they can be surveilled more.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
Tony Diver @Tony_Diver · 20m Labour source in Doncaster says the party is facing an “extinction event” on the council, despite winning the mayoralty. There is talk Reform could win a council majority in Ed Miliband’s back yard.
Is there a specific reason for this difference e.g. is the Mayor very popular?
A concentrated vote will let you win wards without wining the overall vote so Reform could have 50% of the vote in half the wards, which gives them the council but not enough votes to win the mayoral vote.
I remember the BBC presenting a programme from Boston on the then upcoming referendum. I remember being amazed at how it seemed that everyone was posh and in favour of staying in Europe. It was nothing like I found it, as I was born and brought up in the town and most of my family still live there. None of my relatives was going to vote to stay and the pubs I frequented were all full of Leavers.
I wondered if I had totally re-read it. Not so. More than three quarters voted to leave - the highest total in the country. I lost all faith in the BBC as being unbiased - they could not have got it so wrong without being totally biased.
The Lincolnshire Mayor vote shows that little has changed. The Lincolnshire independence vote came to 8% along with the 42% for Reform. No doubt the BBC were gobsmacked again.
You can't judge the BBC on a poor researcher. The BBC had to give equal airtime to Leave and Remain which was pretty difficult as almost everyone who could spell their name was a Remainer.
Wow. Another Batley & Spen seemed like the impossible dream yet LAB came within a ridiculous 6 - SIX! - votes of doing it. 'Close but no cigar' does not apply here. SKS, if he smoked, would be lighting one up and rightly so. The strong LAB performance (against the most challenging backdrop for an incumbent imaginable) is the big story here.
Agree. The really important binary divide at the moment is between those who might vote for Reform and those who certainly won't. Such evidence as Runcorn provides is that both groups are large, and that those who are anti Reform will vote tactically in substantial numbers.
If this is correct it will, if sustained over time, lead us back to a sort of quasi 2 party system in most of England - the Reform camp and the Anti Reform camp.
Also, if correct, it sharpens the Tory dilemma, possibly to the point of destruction or absorption.
Do we have any polling indications on this in Runcorn - eg Would (or did) vote tactically vs Couldn't be bothered, across parties?
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
The market is primarily broken by planning restrictions and micromanagement. Bringing prices down - which means expanding supply - is the biggest single thing that could address all the above problems. The details of what's built is secondary (though far from irrelevant).
As an aside, very high mortgage repayments doesn't extract money from the economy (much) - but it does recycle it from younger adults (especially) paying those mortgages, to inheritance receivers.
Easy money, openness to dodgy foreign money, and too low taxation on property ownership generally, are critical factors.
We should also consider other factors in the economy. Uber, Deliveroo and Amazon not investing in employees, the likes of Apple and Starbucks taking money out of the economy with questionable schemes to avoid paying tax in the UK, etc. Communities need affordable housing. They also need businesses who are invested in their success.
Very Trumpian logic. Buying things from foreign companies means our money is being taken?
Nah. It's fairly well-established that multi-nationals use dodgy accounting to shift as much of their profits as possible to wherever is most tax-efficient. Profit made in Britain should be taxed in Britain.
Wow. Another Batley & Spen seemed like the impossible dream yet LAB came within a ridiculous 6 - SIX! - votes of doing it. 'Close but no cigar' does not apply here. SKS, if he smoked, would be lighting one up and rightly so. The strong LAB performance (against the most challenging backdrop for an incumbent imaginable) is the big story here.
Agree. The really important binary divide at the moment is between those who might vote for Reform and those who certainly won't. Such evidence as Runcorn provides is that both groups are large, and that those who are anti Reform will vote tactically in substantial numbers.
If this is correct it will, if sustained over time, lead us back to a sort of quasi 2 party system in most of England - the Reform camp and the Anti Reform camp.
Also, if correct, it sharpens the Tory dilemma, possibly to the point of destruction or absorption.
If the current political impasse continues then the next GE is going to definitely be contested between those two camps of Pro-Reform vs Not Reform.
We have seen, for instance in France, how powerful that can be. But FPTP also makes it a numbers game in terms of how the voter demographics fall in each constituency.
For instance, if you’re looking at leafy parts of the northern and western Home Counties, the commuter belts around cities like Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, and nice, well-heeled parts of the South West, you are going to see sizeable “stop-Reform” movements that I think will be to the benefit of Labour and the LDs.
Conversely in the smaller county towns, the coasts and the East, that “Stop Reform” coalition probably can’t build itself a large enough vote to stop REFUK (and the Tories in places) from winning.
At the moment it very much feels like we’re going to get some kind of coalition (even if not a formal one) at the next GE. I find it hard to see, given the geographic splits, how one party can engineer a majority right now. If anyone can, it’s Labour, but it will be tough.
Lots of people are presuming that FPTP will push people into camps and effectively ensure 2-party contests everywhere. What if it doesn't? What if we continue having elections like this week? Lots of candidates winning on less than 30% of the vote? Results where it is unclear how to vote tactically?
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
Has Elon Musk or his sidekick JD Pants found out yet, Moriarty?
Wow. Another Batley & Spen seemed like the impossible dream yet LAB came within a ridiculous 6 - SIX! - votes of doing it. 'Close but no cigar' does not apply here. SKS, if he smoked, would be lighting one up and rightly so. The strong LAB performance (against the most challenging backdrop for an incumbent imaginable) is the big story here.
Agree. The really important binary divide at the moment is between those who might vote for Reform and those who certainly won't. Such evidence as Runcorn provides is that both groups are large, and that those who are anti Reform will vote tactically in substantial numbers.
If this is correct it will, if sustained over time, lead us back to a sort of quasi 2 party system in most of England - the Reform camp and the Anti Reform camp.
Also, if correct, it sharpens the Tory dilemma, possibly to the point of destruction or absorption.
Interesting times in British politics. If there's no CON revival and the LDs stay in their Blue Wall comfort zone the next GE will likely devolve into LAB v REF for leading a government. In which case LAB will probably prevail. The biggest risk to LAB is not a strong REF (which counterintuitively helps since it sharpens the choice) but a serious electoral threat emerging to the Left of them. If this happens we'll have an incredibly volatile set of feasible scenarios. If it doesn't LAB should win again (at least as largest party). Long time, only a fool etc.
Tony Diver @Tony_Diver · 20m Labour source in Doncaster says the party is facing an “extinction event” on the council, despite winning the mayoralty. There is talk Reform could win a council majority in Ed Miliband’s back yard.
Is there a specific reason for this difference e.g. is the Mayor very popular?
A concentrated vote will let you win wards without wining the overall vote so Reform could have 50% of the vote in half the wards, which gives them the council but not enough votes to win the mayoral vote.
Lets see. I've got a hunch Fletcher will have outperformed Conservative council candidates though.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
Does that mean they are banned?
No. It's a lot more limited than that. It means they can be surveilled more.
It also makes it obvious what kind of shit they stand for, so voters have little excuse.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
The market is primarily broken by planning restrictions and micromanagement. Bringing prices down - which means expanding supply - is the biggest single thing that could address all the above problems. The details of what's built is secondary (though far from irrelevant).
As an aside, very high mortgage repayments doesn't extract money from the economy (much) - but it does recycle it from younger adults (especially) paying those mortgages, to inheritance receivers.
Easy money, openness to dodgy foreign money, and too low taxation on property ownership generally, are critical factors.
We should also consider other factors in the economy. Uber, Deliveroo and Amazon not investing in employees, the likes of Apple and Starbucks taking money out of the economy with questionable schemes to avoid paying tax in the UK, etc. Communities need affordable housing. They also need businesses who are invested in their success.
Very Trumpian logic. Buying things from foreign companies means our money is being taken?
Nah. It's fairly well-established that multi-nationals use dodgy accounting to shift as much of their profits as possible to wherever is most tax-efficient. Profit made in Britain should be taxed in Britain.
It cuts both ways. Should we tax British multinationals less on their global profit?
Wow. Another Batley & Spen seemed like the impossible dream yet LAB came within a ridiculous 6 - SIX! - votes of doing it. 'Close but no cigar' does not apply here. SKS, if he smoked, would be lighting one up and rightly so. The strong LAB performance (against the most challenging backdrop for an incumbent imaginable) is the big story here.
Agree. The really important binary divide at the moment is between those who might vote for Reform and those who certainly won't. Such evidence as Runcorn provides is that both groups are large, and that those who are anti Reform will vote tactically in substantial numbers.
If this is correct it will, if sustained over time, lead us back to a sort of quasi 2 party system in most of England - the Reform camp and the Anti Reform camp.
Also, if correct, it sharpens the Tory dilemma, possibly to the point of destruction or absorption.
If the current political impasse continues then the next GE is going to definitely be contested between those two camps of Pro-Reform vs Not Reform.
We have seen, for instance in France, how powerful that can be. But FPTP also makes it a numbers game in terms of how the voter demographics fall in each constituency.
For instance, if you’re looking at leafy parts of the northern and western Home Counties, the commuter belts around cities like Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, and nice, well-heeled parts of the South West, you are going to see sizeable “stop-Reform” movements that I think will be to the benefit of Labour and the LDs.
Conversely in the smaller county towns, the coasts and the East, that “Stop Reform” coalition probably can’t build itself a large enough vote to stop REFUK (and the Tories in places) from winning.
At the moment it very much feels like we’re going to get some kind of coalition (even if not a formal one) at the next GE. I find it hard to see, given the geographic splits, how one party can engineer a majority right now. If anyone can, it’s Labour, but it will be tough.
Lots of people are presuming that FPTP will push people into camps and effectively ensure 2-party contests everywhere. What if it doesn't? What if we continue having elections like this week? Lots of candidates winning on less than 30% of the vote? Results where it is unclear how to vote tactically?
There will always be seats like that, and we’ll likely see a few more of them. But I think the trend will be towards 2 party contests where it’s clear.
That said, tactical voting is often overstated. You do tend to be able to squeeze smaller parties in a contest, but there will just be people who, say, voted Lib Dem or Green in Runcorn because they genuinely want to show their support for that party. There are plenty of voters out there who do behave that way; though I think the number is reducing.
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
The woman is vile in the extreme.
Not sure where she's been, housing migrants/homeless in tents seems to have been unofficial policy for a while.
If the promised improvement in processing asylum applications is achieved then this problem should reduce and hence become less of a campaigning point for Reform. Hence Jenkyns' suggestion, migrant camps will be more unpopular than migrant hostels.
“If…”
Record Number of Channel Crossings so far this year.
Even if Channel crossings are up, you can save money if you are quicker with the processing. The big problem was that the Tories were (deliberately?) slow at processing because... well, it's never been entirely clear. They thought it would put off people coming? They thought a large number would mean they could bang on about the issue and get votes? They were just penny pinching?
Wow. Another Batley & Spen seemed like the impossible dream yet LAB came within a ridiculous 6 - SIX! - votes of doing it. 'Close but no cigar' does not apply here. SKS, if he smoked, would be lighting one up and rightly so. The strong LAB performance (against the most challenging backdrop for an incumbent imaginable) is the big story here.
Agree. The really important binary divide at the moment is between those who might vote for Reform and those who certainly won't. Such evidence as Runcorn provides is that both groups are large, and that those who are anti Reform will vote tactically in substantial numbers.
If this is correct it will, if sustained over time, lead us back to a sort of quasi 2 party system in most of England - the Reform camp and the Anti Reform camp.
Also, if correct, it sharpens the Tory dilemma, possibly to the point of destruction or absorption.
If the current political impasse continues then the next GE is going to definitely be contested between those two camps of Pro-Reform vs Not Reform.
We have seen, for instance in France, how powerful that can be. But FPTP also makes it a numbers game in terms of how the voter demographics fall in each constituency.
For instance, if you’re looking at leafy parts of the northern and western Home Counties, the commuter belts around cities like Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, and nice, well-heeled parts of the South West, you are going to see sizeable “stop-Reform” movements that I think will be to the benefit of Labour and the LDs.
Conversely in the smaller county towns, the coasts and the East, that “Stop Reform” coalition probably can’t build itself a large enough vote to stop REFUK (and the Tories in places) from winning.
At the moment it very much feels like we’re going to get some kind of coalition (even if not a formal one) at the next GE. I find it hard to see, given the geographic splits, how one party can engineer a majority right now. If anyone can, it’s Labour, but it will be tough.
Lots of people are presuming that FPTP will push people into camps and effectively ensure 2-party contests everywhere. What if it doesn't? What if we continue having elections like this week? Lots of candidates winning on less than 30% of the vote? Results where it is unclear how to vote tactically?
I think the situation you describe is the more likely - not least because to some extent that's how politics has been for all of my adult lifetime. 50%+ vote shares have got gradually less common. And that is very much what we have seen in Scotland. I think the problem for the not-reform bloc is that individual votes do not see Reform as the anathema that some of the more involved activists and politicians do.
The LibDems have also held Watlington on South Oxfordshire District Council in the by-election caused by Freddie van Mierlo (now MP) stepping down:
🔶 Benjamin Higgins (LD) 679 🔵 Richard Riley (Con) 585 🟢 Lucie Ponsford (Grn) 174 🌹 Nick Palmer (Lab) 34
He’s failed to let the Tory in, yet again….
It takes quite some shameless cheek to try and guilt trip the LibDem, Liberal and pro-EU candidates in Runcorn, on the same day as you have put up as Labour candidate in a seat like that…!
If he was a LibDem Mark Pack would have said 'thanks for getting us one the ballot paper."
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
A dark day for Germany. The former DDR has gone from having its democratic wishes suppressed from the East to having its democratic wishes suppressed from the West.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
The market is primarily broken by planning restrictions and micromanagement. Bringing prices down - which means expanding supply - is the biggest single thing that could address all the above problems. The details of what's built is secondary (though far from irrelevant).
As an aside, very high mortgage repayments doesn't extract money from the economy (much) - but it does recycle it from younger adults (especially) paying those mortgages, to inheritance receivers.
Easy money, openness to dodgy foreign money, and too low taxation on property ownership generally, are critical factors.
We should also consider other factors in the economy. Uber, Deliveroo and Amazon not investing in employees, the likes of Apple and Starbucks taking money out of the economy with questionable schemes to avoid paying tax in the UK, etc. Communities need affordable housing. They also need businesses who are invested in their success.
Very Trumpian logic. Buying things from foreign companies means our money is being taken?
If I go to Starbucks and purchase a hot beverage, most of the work is being done in the UK, but Starbucks UK claims it makes very little profit because it has to pay Starbucks International lots of money for the Starbucks branding. I am effectively buying something from a local company, but they make the accounting look as though I am buying something from a foreign company.
That’s not how transfer pricing works. Unfortunately the public discourse on corporation tax seems still to be stuck in some distorted version of the reality circa 2005.
The local retail subsidiaries of coffee shops, fast food chains etc generally make similar or greater taxable profits than independent local businesses and franchisees.
I’m not going to comment on specific companies, but Guardian reporting on corporate tax is the mirror image of Telegraph reporting on IHT or the super rich fleeing the country.
Large multinationals are successful - those that are* - because of economies of scale, and because they segment their supply chains globally rather than doing everything everywhere (though Trump seems to be trying to reverse this).
So they will source or manufacture for the world or a region in one company, will do their R&D somewhere else, have shared services in a low cost location and strategic brand and marketing at the HQ. Local operations, especially in the retail industry, are either 3rd party franchisees or in-house limited risk distribution outfits. They focus on managing the shops and running day to day operations. For that, they generally earn a return that’s benchmarked against similar third party / independent operations. If a tax authority thinks a multinational is leaving too little profit locally, they will challenge and assess more tax, as HMRC and others frequently do.
*important caveat: many, many such multinational retailers are much less successful than they seem. It is quite common that the local distribution subs are earning their predictable, low-risk annual profits, while headquarters is making a whacking great loss. I don’t know about this particular one, but it’s extremely common.
Reform have gained Labour's safest seat on Durham Council.
Neither @Taz or myself would be surprised to see Reform do very well in County Durham. The council has failed to delivery - the problem for reform is what they’ve been asked to deliver is impossible
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
Problem with those tall tower blocks is that the services charges are massive (£300+ a month) and rather reduce the attractiveness of living there
Have you ever wondered why insulting your political opponents gains you few votes? The problem the BBC still faces is that it's Metropolitan, middle class, and always assumes it's correct.
Unfortunately, it faces a major problem with funding. It seems to pump out as many adverts as the commercial channels. Although the BBC only advertise their own programmes, having to sit through them incessantly isn't the best advert.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
IMHO we should restrict what is available on the NHS. Emergency care, obviously, and basic services. But a lot of things we just can't afford, yes, like latest treatments for X, Y, Z. If we have to borrow money to support our standard if living we aren't a wealthy country.
I think the brutal but necessary action is to freeze hospital spending in nominal terms until it represents the same proportion of health spending as it did 20 years ago. Tighten up QALYs and revert the emphasis to public health and primary care.
I've hunted down the thread for these two comments, which I think are quite interesting, and almost certainly correct, and deserve a bit more thought. The pickle we are in with health is not that we are poor, as a nation - we are far richer than we were in the 1960s, for example - but that our potential outgoings on health has grown so massively. We can treat people for far more, far more successfully, with the innovations which have happened in health in my lifetime, but the cost of this is massive. And our demographics have shifted: we have a much greater proportion of (expensive to the NHS) old people - especially the super old (85+), who are crippling expensive, and a smaller proportion of 16-64 year olds to pay for it (though a greater number of these are working - but that is a separate quality-of-life issue) A couple of half remembered stats: Over half of NHS spending goes on the over 85s (is this true? It seems incredible. I am happy to be contradicted. It may be 'the under 1s and the over 85s' but that still seems incredible. If we doubled NHS spending, we could improve life expectancies by all of six months. (This stat is a good 30 years old but I can't imagine it's changed much).
I agree with AnneJGP's position - and the implication of Eabhal's position - that this means the NHS has to cut back on what it does. We can't be borrowing from our children to give to our parents. But the logic of which means there will be things which have to be paid for by individuals - which means that those who can afford them will get more life years than those who cannot, but also that this is money which will not get left to children. Which almost has us arriving in the same place by default. Where this all lands is people's lives being shortened - dying when they could have lived - even if this is only by 6 months of low quality life or such. This feels very much like assisted dying by an altogether messier route.
I don't have any good answers for any of this (where 'good' means both logically coherent and electorally popular).
If you've got an expensive drug that is going to give a cancer victim an extra 6 months, or a 10% chance at an extra 6 years, then there is very strong pressure to pay almost anything to (try to) save that person's life. If you have a public health intervention that is going to save 100 unidentified lives some decades in the future (e.g., a smoking cessation programme), no-one's interested.
It's the sort of situation where a collective decision is better than an individual one and the government needs to make the case. You can put more money into public health and into treating conditions affecting working age adults (e.g., mental health). One big problem was public health was moved to local councils around the same time that council funding was eviscerated under austerity.
This, I think, was part of the rationale for the NHS in the first place - it would save people from their own bad decisions (such as spending all their money on treatment which was almost certain to be fruitless). Which while it conflicts massively with my instinctively libertarian approach to things, is an argument I find quite attractive.
Reform have gained Labour's safest seat on Durham Council.
BURRISS, Rhys Reform UK 508 Elected COLLEDGE, Malcolm Conservative Party Candidate 63 KELLETT, Bill Labour Party 356 TALLERMAN, Maggie The Green Party 54 WHITE, Stephen Charles Liberal Democrat 443
Reform have gained Labour's safest seat on Durham Council.
Neither @Taz or myself would be surprised to see Reform do very well in County Durham. The council has failed to delivery - the problem for reform is what they’ve been asked to deliver is impossible
Would the £50 million budget for sun dimming help ?
Reform have gained Labour's safest seat on Durham Council.
As long as Labour don't take the wrong lesson and try to ape Reform I'm sure they'll be fine. Though having read the book 'Get In' the first thing I'd do if I was Starmer would be to get rid of McSwinny
The LibDems have also held Watlington on South Oxfordshire District Council in the by-election caused by Freddie van Mierlo (now MP) stepping down:
🔶 Benjamin Higgins (LD) 679 🔵 Richard Riley (Con) 585 🟢 Lucie Ponsford (Grn) 174 🌹 Nick Palmer (Lab) 34
He’s failed to let the Tory in, yet again….
It takes quite some shameless cheek to try and guilt trip the LibDem, Liberal and pro-EU candidates in Runcorn, on the same day as you have put up as Labour candidate in a seat like that…!
If he was a LibDem Mark Pack would have said 'thanks for getting us one the ballot paper."
Yes, I'm not quite sure what Nick is doing on the ballot paper in S Oxon. I thought he lived and practiced near Godalming these days. I suspect a token presence, where Labour tacitly stood aside in order not to hamper the LD. He might well tell us if asked politely, or discretely.
It's all a bit unsatisfactory of course, but then if you are stuck with FPTP what are you supposed to do?
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul Petrol in the UK is the cheapest in real terms that it has been since 1993
Rachel Reeves must raise fuel duty
She should have done it last autumn, when she was delivering the tough medicine. At least reversed the recent 5p cut. Doing it now is politically more difficult, but it’s a better idea than several other tax options. Pump prices really are cheap currently.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
Does that mean they are banned?
No. It's a lot more limited than that. It means they can be surveilled more.
Thank goodness we live in a country that would never surveil political parties.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul Petrol in the UK is the cheapest in real terms that it has been since 1993
Rachel Reeves must raise fuel duty
She should, but she should have done it at the budget rather than trying to score a very minor win. She would have slipped it through with the other stuff.
As it is now it’ll look like she’s forced into doing it, hence it will be more unpopular.
Reform have gained Labour's safest seat on Durham Council.
BURRISS, Rhys Reform UK 508 Elected COLLEDGE, Malcolm Conservative Party Candidate 63 KELLETT, Bill Labour Party 356 TALLERMAN, Maggie The Green Party 54 WHITE, Stephen Charles Liberal Democrat 443
What were the 2021 numbers? The Lib Dem in second seems unexpected, or is there an extra digit in there?
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
The market is primarily broken by planning restrictions and micromanagement. Bringing prices down - which means expanding supply - is the biggest single thing that could address all the above problems. The details of what's built is secondary (though far from irrelevant).
As an aside, very high mortgage repayments doesn't extract money from the economy (much) - but it does recycle it from younger adults (especially) paying those mortgages, to inheritance receivers.
Easy money, openness to dodgy foreign money, and too low taxation on property ownership generally, are critical factors.
We should also consider other factors in the economy. Uber, Deliveroo and Amazon not investing in employees, the likes of Apple and Starbucks taking money out of the economy with questionable schemes to avoid paying tax in the UK, etc. Communities need affordable housing. They also need businesses who are invested in their success.
Very Trumpian logic. Buying things from foreign companies means our money is being taken?
Nah. It's fairly well-established that multi-nationals use dodgy accounting to shift as much of their profits as possible to wherever is most tax-efficient. Profit made in Britain should be taxed in Britain.
If it is "dodgy" they will be prosecuted. If it is legal it is their finance leaders fiduciary duty and nothing less than their shareholders would demand.
The idea that many companies or individuals will volunteer to pay tax when there are perfectly legal ways not to is the naivety that only someone who does not understand business would suggest.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
Parliament is sovereign, but it should use that power carefully. It would damage the trustworthiness of the state if it were to casually use that power to cancel the liabilities it had accrued.
Max pb is a grade A idiot. The pensioner vote goes way beyond the 67 + people. Anyone over 55 would be furious at his plans as would many of those younger and aware of the realities of life for their parents and other family. Like several well off posters here he thinks the lifestyle of his wealthy family is the norm
The sane way to have handled that, early on in this government's term, would have been
1) Merge NI & Income tax 2) Get rid of all the odds an ends - 3 rates, fixed personal allowance. 3) In the turmoil of the above, put the effective rates up a bit. 4) Pension is "quadruple locked"* to the personal allowance. 5) All the old age extra benefits go in a blender. Come out as taxable/means tested. Sell this as "Mrs Miggins on the basic pension get YY% more money next year"
Can I be Labour Chancellor?
*A Quadruple Lock has to better than a Triple Lock, right?
I'd support that. What I think is interesting, and where the govt has got it wrong, is that you (if I've read the tone of your posts correctly) and I are both pragmatic centrists, not supporters of Labour but not hostile either, and yet we're both well to the left of the current government.
I do wonder what genuinely left-leaning Labour members think in private about their government.
I'm a Neon Fascist Imperialist Enslaver of the Oppressed.
I was trying to think what a Labour Chancellor with a huge majority might do to improve the structural position of public finances, while still being a Labour party member.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
That's what happened in Basingstoke (to a lesser degree). They devolve into places where pimp-oppressed immigrant prostitutes jump off the higher floors to end the pain (yes, that was an actual incident). High-rise accommodation are just crime machines with a fire risk. Don't build anything over four floors.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
An area of London - possibly. I've long argued that one or more of the big low rise Council Estates in London could redeveloped at Barbican, or higher, densities.
That would help mitigate the housing pressure for a generation. And there is no shortage of candidates, including by the river in East London.
Add that to appropriate use of Brown Belt bits of Green Belt inside the M25, and it is perfectly possible to manage housing growth effectively and practically.
It seems to me that claiming these results aren’t that good for Reform (whose average vote share, so far, is 39%), is whistling to keep one’s spirits up.
You have to keep your pecker up somehow at times like these.
Can’t believe gullible people fell for Farage’s ‘Divisive hate filled rhetoric’ blaming immigrants for their shit lives and life failings’ !!
I can believe it sadly. My home county of Staffordshire had selfish people who were past masters at blaming other people for their misfortunes. Judging by the early results there they are running true to form.
Wow. Another Batley & Spen seemed like the impossible dream yet LAB came within a ridiculous 6 - SIX! - votes of doing it. 'Close but no cigar' does not apply here. SKS, if he smoked, would be lighting one up and rightly so. The strong LAB performance (against the most challenging backdrop for an incumbent imaginable) is the big story here.
Agree. The really important binary divide at the moment is between those who might vote for Reform and those who certainly won't. Such evidence as Runcorn provides is that both groups are large, and that those who are anti Reform will vote tactically in substantial numbers.
If this is correct it will, if sustained over time, lead us back to a sort of quasi 2 party system in most of England - the Reform camp and the Anti Reform camp.
Also, if correct, it sharpens the Tory dilemma, possibly to the point of destruction or absorption.
If the current political impasse continues then the next GE is going to definitely be contested between those two camps of Pro-Reform vs Not Reform.
We have seen, for instance in France, how powerful that can be. But FPTP also makes it a numbers game in terms of how the voter demographics fall in each constituency.
For instance, if you’re looking at leafy parts of the northern and western Home Counties, the commuter belts around cities like Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, and nice, well-heeled parts of the South West, you are going to see sizeable “stop-Reform” movements that I think will be to the benefit of Labour and the LDs.
Conversely in the smaller county towns, the coasts and the East, that “Stop Reform” coalition probably can’t build itself a large enough vote to stop REFUK (and the Tories in places) from winning.
At the moment it very much feels like we’re going to get some kind of coalition (even if not a formal one) at the next GE. I find it hard to see, given the geographic splits, how one party can engineer a majority right now. If anyone can, it’s Labour, but it will be tough.
Lots of people are presuming that FPTP will push people into camps and effectively ensure 2-party contests everywhere. What if it doesn't? What if we continue having elections like this week? Lots of candidates winning on less than 30% of the vote? Results where it is unclear how to vote tactically?
This is obviously a possibility, but history + FPTP tends towards the likelihood of a combination of voters and politicians enabling a sort of quasi binary system. We are, very obviously, in a transition period evidenced by the fact that no-one knows the future trajectory of the Tory party. This replaces an eternity of the Tories either being in power or being ready to come back to power when Labour get tired. Now, both long term governing and extinction are serious options.
This may settle into UK becoming permanent coalition territory, like so much of Europe, but more likely it settles into two camps; if that occurs, its identity looks like being Camp Reform/Toryreform v Camp Lab/LD.
This is mainly because of the marmite nature of Reform. They are a possible option for X% (up to 35%?) and impossible option for Y% (65%?) much more clearly so than other parties.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
Does that mean they are banned?
No. It's a lot more limited than that. It means they can be surveilled more.
Thank goodness we live in a country that would never surveil political parties.
During the Troubles in NI, it was suggested that various benefits be withdrawn from convicted terrorists. Most low level members of the various organisations live on benefits and illegal casual work via the godfathers of their organisations.
The Thatcher government rejected this out of hand.
These days, probably would be implemented before lunch.
People wanting to remove people's public sector pensions - could we not just tax them? A fatcat tax would be a lot less controversial, though it would be more complex.
Reform have gained Labour's safest seat on Durham Council.
BURRISS, Rhys Reform UK 508 Elected COLLEDGE, Malcolm Conservative Party Candidate 63 KELLETT, Bill Labour Party 356 TALLERMAN, Maggie The Green Party 54 WHITE, Stephen Charles Liberal Democrat 443
What were the 2021 numbers? The Lib Dem in second seems unexpected, or is there an extra digit in there?
They are the numbers from the council web site - don't state the changes. In the Blackhalls and Hesledens ward, Labour have held on by 8 votes from ReFuk:
BARTCH, Victoria Conservative Party Candidate 49 CRUTE, Rob Labour Party 629 Elected JOHNSON, Gary Reform UK 621 THOMPSON, Neil Liberal Democrat 114
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
That's what happened in Basingstoke (to a lesser degree). They devolve into places where pimp-oppressed immigrant prostitutes jump off the higher floors to end the pain (yes, that was an actual incident). High-rise accommodation are just crime machines with a fire risk. Don't build anything over four floors.
That's a broad brush stereotype. It depends very heavily on where, how and who.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
Parliament is sovereign, but it should use that power carefully. It would damage the trustworthiness of the state if it were to casually use that power to cancel the liabilities it had accrued.
Max pb is a grade A idiot. The pensioner vote goes way beyond the 67 + people. Anyone over 55 would be furious at his plans as would many of those younger and aware of the realities of life for their parents and other family. Like several well off posters here he thinks the lifestyle of his wealthy family is the norm
The sane way to have handled that, early on in this government's term, would have been
1) Merge NI & Income tax 2) Get rid of all the odds an ends - 3 rates, fixed personal allowance. 3) In the turmoil of the above, put the effective rates up a bit. 4) Pension is "quadruple locked"* to the personal allowance. 5) All the old age extra benefits go in a blender. Come out as taxable/means tested. Sell this as "Mrs Miggins on the basic pension get YY% more money next year"
Can I be Labour Chancellor?
*A Quadruple Lock has to better than a Triple Lock, right?
I'd support that. What I think is interesting, and where the govt has got it wrong, is that you (if I've read the tone of your posts correctly) and I are both pragmatic centrists, not supporters of Labour but not hostile either, and yet we're both well to the left of the current government.
I do wonder what genuinely left-leaning Labour members think in private about their government.
I'm a Neon Fascist Imperialist Enslaver of the Oppressed.
I was trying to think what a Labour Chancellor with a huge majority might do to improve the structural position of public finances, while still being a Labour party member.
I think it is a fair guess is that she will lie and exaggerate about it, just like she did with her CV, whilst simultaneously doing her best to get as many freebies as she can manage without being noticed.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
That's what happened in Basingstoke (to a lesser degree). They devolve into places where pimp-oppressed immigrant prostitutes jump off the higher floors to end the pain (yes, that was an actual incident). High-rise accommodation are just crime machines with a fire risk. Don't build anything over four floors.
Chunks of London look exactly like this. Until very recently, building residential towers was what every developer applied for.
See the residential towers at Canary Wharf, for example.
I didn't bet on the mayorals but that's due to tardiness. If the bookies had offered mayoral bets (they took them off the machines and wouldn't do it over the counter) by the time I had got there, I would have bet a Reform clean sweep. So lots of losers there, but...
People wanting to remove people's public sector pensions - could we not just tax them? A fatcat tax would be a lot less controversial, though it would be more complex.
Er they are already taxed in the same way as any other pension
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
The woman is vile in the extreme.
Not sure where she's been, housing migrants/homeless in tents seems to have been unofficial policy for a while.
If the promised improvement in processing asylum applications is achieved then this problem should reduce and hence become less of a campaigning point for Reform. Hence Jenkyns' suggestion, migrant camps will be more unpopular than migrant hostels.
“If…”
Record Number of Channel Crossings so far this year.
The Channel Crossings are noise.
The real fun is in the selling of work visas for non-existent jobs. All you need is a bunch of barely existent companies.
1) Create a job that pays £45K 2) Get the visa paperwork started. 3) Sell the visa to some poor shmuck in a developing country 4) He arrives and finds no job...
This is now an industry. Visas priced at 15K plus, they say. Some small companies are doing a few hundred visas. A year.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
That's what happened in Basingstoke (to a lesser degree). They devolve into places where pimp-oppressed immigrant prostitutes jump off the higher floors to end the pain (yes, that was an actual incident). High-rise accommodation are just crime machines with a fire risk. Don't build anything over four floors.
That's a stereotype. It depends very heavily on where, how and who.
Hmmm. The proportion and numbers of successful high-rises is low. Grenfell was a warning we've ignored. They are a bad solution and better are available.
Some interesting things happening in County Durham. Eye-test town goes Labour thanks to a split on the right(?)
Barnard Castle Name of Candidate Description (if any) Number of votes* BEWLEY, Christopher Paul Reform UK 436 FOOTE-WOOD, Chris Labour Party 456 Elected HENDERSON, Ted Local Conservatives 421 HOGG, John Edward The Green Party 97 HUZZEY, Richard Liberal Democrat 63
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
That's what happened in Basingstoke (to a lesser degree). They devolve into places where pimp-oppressed immigrant prostitutes jump off the higher floors to end the pain (yes, that was an actual incident). High-rise accommodation are just crime machines with a fire risk. Don't build anything over four floors.
That's a stereotype. It depends very heavily on where, how and who.
Hmmm. The proportion and numbers of successful high-rises is low. Grenfell was a warning we've ignored. They are a bad solution and better are available.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
That's what happened in Basingstoke (to a lesser degree). They devolve into places where pimp-oppressed immigrant prostitutes jump off the higher floors to end the pain (yes, that was an actual incident). High-rise accommodation are just crime machines with a fire risk. Don't build anything over four floors.
Chunks of London look exactly like this. Until very recently, building residential towers was what every developer applied for.
See the residential towers at Canary Wharf, for example.
Canary Wharf has really transformed. It used to be all office blocks and was dead at the weekend. Now most of the towers are residential and the place is humming at weekends and evenings.
On a smaller scale similar had happened down the hill from me in Lewisham and Deptford. Loads of new high rise flats in what used to be borderline wasteland, car parks and single storey retailers.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
That's what happened in Basingstoke (to a lesser degree). They devolve into places where pimp-oppressed immigrant prostitutes jump off the higher floors to end the pain (yes, that was an actual incident). High-rise accommodation are just crime machines with a fire risk. Don't build anything over four floors.
That's a stereotype. It depends very heavily on where, how and who.
Hmmm. The proportion and numbers of successful high-rises is low. Grenfell was a warning we've ignored. They are a bad solution and better are available.
What we need is more low rise. 5-8 floors. Somewhere that can feel like a family home rather than a box in the sky.
Reform are now on 30/70 in Lincolnshire, and will win a comfortable overall majority.
And will thus create an interesting experiment. Lincolnshire is seriously anti. Put the anti people in charge of the council and what policies will they promote? Why aren't the politicians listening to ordinary people who just want all these foreigners out of our towns and the jobs back?
Well now you get to run the council. Let's see what you decide to do to reclaim Boston for locals.
Reform have gained Labour's safest seat on Durham Council.
BURRISS, Rhys Reform UK 508 Elected COLLEDGE, Malcolm Conservative Party Candidate 63 KELLETT, Bill Labour Party 356 TALLERMAN, Maggie The Green Party 54 WHITE, Stephen Charles Liberal Democrat 443
Early returns suggest a decent LD showing in Durham?
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
Public sector pensions are a scandal. It is interesting that those on the left bang on about "fairness" except when it comes to the imbalance between public sector and private sector pensions. The recently retired head of HMRC will be getting a pension that is paying him £107k a year for being idle.
I also read recently that the average council in England pays out one pound in every four they receive to prop up the gold-plated pension fund. Then they bleat on about "lack of resources". There would be "more resources" if they stopped thinking that there senior "public servants" should be able to retire on larger incomes than many people earn in full time jobs.
Some interesting things happening in County Durham. Eye-test town goes Labour thanks to a split on the right(?)
Barnard Castle Name of Candidate Description (if any) Number of votes* BEWLEY, Christopher Paul Reform UK 436 FOOTE-WOOD, Chris Labour Party 456 Elected HENDERSON, Ted Local Conservatives 421 HOGG, John Edward The Green Party 97 HUZZEY, Richard Liberal Democrat 63
Reform are now on 30/70 in Lincolnshire, and will win a comfortable overall majority.
And will thus create an interesting experiment. Lincolnshire is seriously anti. Put the anti people in charge of the council and what policies will they promote? Why aren't the politicians listening to ordinary people who just want all these foreigners out of our towns and the jobs back?
Well now you get to run the council. Let's see what you decide to do to reclaim Boston for locals.
I was thinking just that this morning. Though of course, if Reform think they are going to be judged on that policy rather than delivery of reasonable services (which in my area at least have been fairly decent - roads excepted - over the years) then I think they are in for a shock.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
That's what happened in Basingstoke (to a lesser degree). They devolve into places where pimp-oppressed immigrant prostitutes jump off the higher floors to end the pain (yes, that was an actual incident). High-rise accommodation are just crime machines with a fire risk. Don't build anything over four floors.
That's a stereotype. It depends very heavily on where, how and who.
Hmmm. The proportion and numbers of successful high-rises is low. Grenfell was a warning we've ignored. They are a bad solution and better are available.
What we need is more low rise. 5-8 floors. Somewhere that can feel like a family home rather than a box in the sky.
That stuff is being built everywhere in London you can't get permission for towers.
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
The woman is vile in the extreme.
Not sure where she's been, housing migrants/homeless in tents seems to have been unofficial policy for a while.
If the promised improvement in processing asylum applications is achieved then this problem should reduce and hence become less of a campaigning point for Reform. Hence Jenkyns' suggestion, migrant camps will be more unpopular than migrant hostels.
“If…”
Record Number of Channel Crossings so far this year.
The Channel Crossings are noise.
The real fun is in the selling of work visas for non-existent jobs. All you need is a bunch of barely existent companies.
1) Create a job that pays £45K 2) Get the visa paperwork started. 3) Sell the visa to some poor shmuck in a developing country 4) He arrives and finds no job...
This is now an industry. Visas priced at 15K plus, they say. Some small companies are doing a few hundred visas. A year.
That sounds criminal! 😠
Yep but try and prove it and remember the people charging are probably intentionally not in the UK and never will be given that it’s illegal
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
That's what happened in Basingstoke (to a lesser degree). They devolve into places where pimp-oppressed immigrant prostitutes jump off the higher floors to end the pain (yes, that was an actual incident). High-rise accommodation are just crime machines with a fire risk. Don't build anything over four floors.
That's a stereotype. It depends very heavily on where, how and who.
Hmmm. The proportion and numbers of successful high-rises is low. Grenfell was a warning we've ignored. They are a bad solution and better are available.
What we need is more low rise. 5-8 floors. Somewhere that can feel like a family home rather than a box in the sky.
That stuff is being built everywhere in London you can't get permission for towers.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
That's what happened in Basingstoke (to a lesser degree). They devolve into places where pimp-oppressed immigrant prostitutes jump off the higher floors to end the pain (yes, that was an actual incident). High-rise accommodation are just crime machines with a fire risk. Don't build anything over four floors.
That's a stereotype. It depends very heavily on where, how and who.
Hmmm. The proportion and numbers of successful high-rises is low. Grenfell was a warning we've ignored. They are a bad solution and better are available.
What we need is more low rise. 5-8 floors. Somewhere that can feel like a family home rather than a box in the sky.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
A dark day for Germany. The former DDR has gone from having its democratic wishes suppressed from the East to having its democratic wishes suppressed from the West.
Well, no, that's complete bollocks. The AfD can still stand, people can still vote for them.
I didn't bet on the mayorals but that's due to tardiness. If the bookies had offered mayoral bets (they took them off the machines and wouldn't do it over the counter) by the time I had got there, I would have bet a Reform clean sweep. So lots of losers there, but...
Some interesting things happening in County Durham. Eye-test town goes Labour thanks to a split on the right(?)
Barnard Castle Name of Candidate Description (if any) Number of votes* BEWLEY, Christopher Paul Reform UK 436 FOOTE-WOOD, Chris Labour Party 456 Elected HENDERSON, Ted Local Conservatives 421 HOGG, John Edward The Green Party 97 HUZZEY, Richard Liberal Democrat 63
victoria wood's brother has won apparently.
He used to be Mr Lib Dem locally, was a candidate for multiple GEs - I wonder when/why he switched?
Some interesting things happening in County Durham. Eye-test town goes Labour thanks to a split on the right(?)
Barnard Castle Name of Candidate Description (if any) Number of votes* BEWLEY, Christopher Paul Reform UK 436 FOOTE-WOOD, Chris Labour Party 456 Elected HENDERSON, Ted Local Conservatives 421 HOGG, John Edward The Green Party 97 HUZZEY, Richard Liberal Democrat 63
victoria wood's brother has won apparently.
"Let's do it, let's do it, do it on the ballot box..."
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
Bits of London do look like that, with some more new developments in the east of the city being built along those lines.
Also lots of comments along the line of Bobby J is a disreputable shit but he’s best to take on Farage.
So as this turns into a rout, she'll be gone?
I can understand why - the party are practically irrelevant in public discourse. And from what I read she is a terrible communicator even to her own office, never mind communicating "I have a cunning plan" back to the wider party.
Also lots of comments along the line of Bobby J is a disreputable shit but he’s best to take on Farage.
Jenrick could not take on Starmer, and does he even want to take on Farage or form a non-aggression pact?
I had speculated here the other day that the flurry of articles defending Kemi were placed by anti-Jenrick elements waiting for their king across the water. It could of course be Jenrick himself who has noticed that since the average term of a Tory leader is two years (TM 3 years; BJ 3 years; LT 2 months; RS 2 years; Kemi 6 months) he should aim to replace Kemi in 2027 for the run-up to a 2029 election, else it will be him who is deposed then.
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
The woman is vile in the extreme.
Not sure where she's been, housing migrants/homeless in tents seems to have been unofficial policy for a while.
If the promised improvement in processing asylum applications is achieved then this problem should reduce and hence become less of a campaigning point for Reform. Hence Jenkyns' suggestion, migrant camps will be more unpopular than migrant hostels.
“If…”
Record Number of Channel Crossings so far this year.
The Channel Crossings are noise.
The real fun is in the selling of work visas for non-existent jobs. All you need is a bunch of barely existent companies.
1) Create a job that pays £45K 2) Get the visa paperwork started. 3) Sell the visa to some poor shmuck in a developing country 4) He arrives and finds no job...
This is now an industry. Visas priced at 15K plus, they say. Some small companies are doing a few hundred visas. A year.
That sounds criminal! 😠
Yep but try and prove it and remember the people charging are probably intentionally not in the UK and never will be given that it’s illegal
"Our investigation found that Efficiency for Care employed - on average - 16 people in 2022, and 152 in 2023. Yet a letter sent from the Home Office to the company dated May 2023 - and seen by the BBC - showed it had issued 1,234 Certificates of Sponsorship to foreign workers between March 2022 and May 2023."
By using a network of companies, with obfuscated ownership, all that happens is a company loses it's rights to grant such visas
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
That's what happened in Basingstoke (to a lesser degree). They devolve into places where pimp-oppressed immigrant prostitutes jump off the higher floors to end the pain (yes, that was an actual incident). High-rise accommodation are just crime machines with a fire risk. Don't build anything over four floors.
That's a stereotype. It depends very heavily on where, how and who.
Hmmm. The proportion and numbers of successful high-rises is low. Grenfell was a warning we've ignored. They are a bad solution and better are available.
I think it's telling that in Scotland we keep knocking our high rises down, but our highest population density areas are actually those with four-storey tenements, and can be some of the most desirable parts of the country.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Should London look like this? City centre Brisbane with a concentrated centre. Some up to 80 floors. Would provide accomodation in the limited space - but would be the reversal of the trends of recent years.
That's what Manchester looks like. And Leeds is following.
That's what happened in Basingstoke (to a lesser degree). They devolve into places where pimp-oppressed immigrant prostitutes jump off the higher floors to end the pain (yes, that was an actual incident). High-rise accommodation are just crime machines with a fire risk. Don't build anything over four floors.
That's a stereotype. It depends very heavily on where, how and who.
Hmmm. The proportion and numbers of successful high-rises is low. Grenfell was a warning we've ignored. They are a bad solution and better are available.
What we need is more low rise. 5-8 floors. Somewhere that can feel like a family home rather than a box in the sky.
That stuff is being built everywhere in London you can't get permission for towers.
Also lots of comments along the line of Bobby J is a disreputable shit but he’s best to take on Farage.
So as this turns into a rout, she'll be gone?
I can understand why - the party are practically irrelevant in public discourse. And from what I read she is a terrible communicator even to her own office, never mind communicating "I have a cunning plan" back to the wider party.
The thing she hasn’t done is injected any dynamism or optimism into the party.
Now that’s not an easy task coming off a defeat, but even when Labour are on the back foot she finds it hard to force home an advantage without messing something up.
She said it was important to take time to regroup, but they frankly don’t have much time.
I know she faces an historically difficult position, but she’s meeting that with mediocrity at best, when they need to be much more fleet-footed.
Comments
It's the sort of situation where a collective decision is better than an individual one and the government needs to make the case. You can put more money into public health and into treating conditions affecting working age adults (e.g., mental health). One big problem was public health was moved to local councils around the same time that council funding was eviscerated under austerity.
‘Roger that, chuck the nose gunner out.’
Froth incoming in 5 ..4 ..3 .. 2 ..
That said, tactical voting is often overstated. You do tend to be able to squeeze smaller parties in a contest, but there will just be people who, say, voted Lib Dem or Green in Runcorn because they genuinely want to show their support for that party. There are plenty of voters out there who do behave that way; though I think the number is reducing.
I think the problem for the not-reform bloc is that individual votes do not see Reform as the anathema that some of the more involved activists and politicians do.
If he was a LibDem Mark Pack would have said 'thanks for getting us one the ballot paper."
https://x.com/JohnRentoul/status/1918244831807324609
John Rentoul
@JohnRentoul
Petrol in the UK is the cheapest in real terms that it has been since 1993
Rachel Reeves must raise fuel duty
2. You're against democracy anyway.
https://www.lincolnshire.gov.uk/homepage/197/elections-live-2025
The Teal Tsunami hasn't reached South Kesteven (my area) in the West yet but Isuspect it will envelope us as well.
For the record I voted for a local independent.
Large multinationals are successful - those that are* - because of economies of scale, and because they segment their supply chains globally rather than doing everything everywhere (though Trump seems to be trying to reverse this).
So they will source or manufacture for the world or a region in one company, will do their R&D somewhere else, have shared services in a low cost location and strategic brand and marketing at the HQ. Local operations, especially in the retail industry, are either 3rd party franchisees or in-house limited risk distribution outfits. They focus on managing the shops and running day to day operations. For that, they generally earn a return that’s benchmarked against similar third party / independent operations. If a tax authority thinks a multinational is leaving too little profit locally, they will challenge and assess more tax, as HMRC and others frequently do.
*important caveat: many, many such multinational retailers are much less successful than they seem. It is quite common that the local distribution subs are earning their predictable, low-risk annual profits, while headquarters is making a whacking great loss. I don’t know about this particular one, but it’s extremely common.
Have you ever wondered why insulting your political opponents gains you few votes? The problem the BBC still faces is that it's Metropolitan, middle class, and always assumes
it's correct.
Unfortunately, it faces a major problem with funding. It seems to pump out as many adverts as the commercial channels. Although the BBC only advertise their own programmes, having to sit through them incessantly isn't the best advert.
COLLEDGE, Malcolm Conservative Party Candidate 63
KELLETT, Bill Labour Party 356
TALLERMAN, Maggie The Green Party 54
WHITE, Stephen Charles Liberal Democrat 443
It's all a bit unsatisfactory of course, but then if you are stuck with FPTP what are you supposed to do?
As it is now it’ll look like she’s forced into doing it, hence it will be more unpopular.
The idea that many companies or individuals will volunteer to pay tax when there are perfectly legal ways not to is the naivety that only someone who does not understand business would suggest.
I was trying to think what a Labour Chancellor with a huge majority might do to improve the structural position of public finances, while still being a Labour party member.
That would help mitigate the housing pressure for a generation. And there is no shortage of candidates, including by the river in East London.
Add that to appropriate use of Brown Belt bits of Green Belt inside the M25, and it is perfectly possible to manage housing growth effectively and practically.
This may settle into UK becoming permanent coalition territory, like so much of Europe, but more likely it settles into two camps; if that occurs, its identity looks like being Camp Reform/Toryreform v Camp Lab/LD.
This is mainly because of the marmite nature of Reform. They are a possible option for X% (up to 35%?) and impossible option for Y% (65%?) much more clearly so than other parties.
The Thatcher government rejected this out of hand.
These days, probably would be implemented before lunch.
BARTCH, Victoria Conservative Party Candidate 49
CRUTE, Rob Labour Party 629 Elected
JOHNSON, Gary Reform UK 621
THOMPSON, Neil Liberal Democrat 114
See the residential towers at Canary Wharf, for example.
Shippers reports that his Tory Whazzapp is full of anti-Kemi messages
https://x.com/ShippersUnbound/status/1918249027524558891
Someone was the future once.
I’m not convinced having Andrea Jenkyns as their most visible local politician is going to pay tremendous dividends but let’s see.
Barnard Castle
Name of Candidate Description (if any) Number of votes*
BEWLEY, Christopher Paul Reform UK 436
FOOTE-WOOD, Chris Labour Party 456 Elected
HENDERSON, Ted Local Conservatives 421
HOGG, John Edward The Green Party 97
HUZZEY, Richard Liberal Democrat 63
On a smaller scale similar had happened down the hill from me in Lewisham and Deptford. Loads of new high rise flats in what used to be borderline wasteland, car parks and single storey retailers.
Well now you get to run the council. Let's see what you decide to do to reclaim Boston for locals.
I also read recently that the average council in England pays out one pound in every four they receive to prop up the gold-plated pension fund. Then they bleat on about "lack of resources". There would be "more resources" if they stopped thinking that there senior "public servants" should be able to retire on larger incomes than many people earn in full time jobs.
Too late for the Beeb or others to notice. It’s always the early results that set the narrative.
“We won’t stand any candidates in Liverpool, to give you a free run there, if you don’t stand any in Yorkshire.” ?
Also lots of comments along the line of Bobby J is a disreputable shit but he’s best to take on Farage.
https://www.createstreets.com/front-page-2/our-story/
https://www.createstreets.com/front-page-2/research/
https://xcancel.com/createstreets
And Reform wins the second, again from the Tories, with an Indy winning the third, previously held by another Indy
I can understand why - the party are practically irrelevant in public discourse. And from what I read she is a terrible communicator even to her own office, never mind communicating "I have a cunning plan" back to the wider party.
https://x.com/StaffordshireCC
I had speculated here the other day that the flurry of articles defending Kemi were placed by anti-Jenrick elements waiting for their king across the water. It could of course be Jenrick himself who has noticed that since the average term of a Tory leader is two years (TM 3 years; BJ 3 years; LT 2 months; RS 2 years; Kemi 6 months) he should aim to replace Kemi in 2027 for the run-up to a 2029 election, else it will be him who is deposed then.
"Our investigation found that Efficiency for Care employed - on average - 16 people in 2022, and 152 in 2023. Yet a letter sent from the Home Office to the company dated May 2023 - and seen by the BBC - showed it had issued 1,234 Certificates of Sponsorship to foreign workers between March 2022 and May 2023."
By using a network of companies, with obfuscated ownership, all that happens is a company loses it's rights to grant such visas
Now that’s not an easy task coming off a defeat, but even when Labour are on the back foot she finds it hard to force home an advantage without messing something up.
She said it was important to take time to regroup, but they frankly don’t have much time.
I know she faces an historically difficult position, but she’s meeting that with mediocrity at best, when they need to be much more fleet-footed.
I still think she’ll get another year though.