There is a way that could conceivably be addressed, and it would fit the Treasury’s insistence that large-scale public spending has to fit the definition of investment. Set aside large plots of land for mixed developments based around large amounts of social housing with lifelong tenure. Announce start-dates for building, and roll out apprenticeships and further education courses that will bring a lot of the work involved to local people. Badge the whole thing up as the final arrival of what some people called levelling up; frame it as a return to tradition and brand it with union jacks, if necessary. And as you sell the idea, try to update the kind of plain-spoken, communitarian words once spoken by that great Labour god Aneurin Bevan: “We shall persist in the building of new permanent houses until every family in the country has a good, separate, modern home.”
Why not just abolish the TCPA and have a housebuilding boom like we did in the 1930s before the TCPA?
Note that TCPA abolishment includes abolishing Section 106 and all the rest.
WTF have a plan when the correct answer is no plan?
We shall persist in the building of new permanent houses until every newly arrived immigrant family in the country has a good, separate, modern home.
Updated enough for them?
Rather surprising to see an article in the Guardian that grudgingly acknowledges Reform is going to win.
Rather than building permanent social housing with lifetime tenure, new arrivals should be issued with some free sheets of corrugated iron to remind them of home.
No no, new arrivals should participate in the worship of wind as part of the Nutty Zero dystopia.
Therefore they shall be issued some nylon & canvas sheets and given somewhere like Gruinard or the South Shetlands to get fully onboard with the net zero future envisaged for us.
Nobody in government, be it Whitehall or Westminster, is going to relinquish control over who builds what where. They may repeal the evil TCPA but they will replace it with something worse. Freedom is not on the cards in building or anything else.
“ WTF have a plan when the correct answer is no plan?”
Because your power and/or income depends on planning.
Abolition.
Why not just abolish the TCPA and have a housebuilding boom like we did in the 1930s before the TCPA?
Er…because it would cause chaos, destroy amenities and wildlife, harm areas dependent on tourism, etc. And UK population in 1930 was c.45 million; today, it’s c.70 million….
By all means reform the planning system – particularly, by ‘directed development’ (as in Japan?) with areas where building and planning controls are minimal – but a general free-for-all would be disastrous.
‘Freedom is not on the cards in building or anything else.’
I fear you’re right, Rhoda!!
“social housing with lifelong tenure.” Lifelong tenure, eh? And then there’ll be whines that children don’t get to roll over the tenure for a further lifetime.
Not that it matters to me; it looks as if our whole younger generation will have cleared off abroad, permanently. My parents had planned to move to Canada after The War but the Labour government put a spoke in their wheel. But it seems it’ll be only a two generation delay after all. Though Canada will no longer be our destination of choice.
Surely we won’t now need to build all these new homes because all those nice Syrian ‘refugees’ will want to go home as soon as they can….
There’s gold in dem dere Hills – let’s take a closer look pending the latest fisking of Murphy.
At last week’s Spectator parliamentarian of the year awards, Nigel Farage took the stage in front of a large chunk of the Westminster establishment, including journalists in need of a story. Honoured with a seat next to the magazine’s new proprietor, he was there to receive the newcomer of the year trophy and deliver a pithy speech written to spread fear through his audience.
You have a political establishment that has presided over the following:
– Serial child molestation, either through Muslim grooming gangs or genuflection to the Paedophiles in the Trans Lobby
– The invasion of the country by innumerable hostile enemies bent on the destruction of the country with their explicit encouragement
– The unilateral economic destruction of the country in sympathy with highly ideological fringe movements obsessed with removing 80% of humanity from existence
All of these, in a more civilised era would constitute acts of high treason. I’d say that the audience who approved such activities needs to feel very scared indeed.
And so it proved. “We are about to witness a political revolution the likes of which we have not seen since Labour after the first world war,” he said. “Politics is about to change in the most astonishing way. Newcomers will win the next election. Thank you very much.” Although booze and seasonal merriment were in plentiful supply, his words were reportedly greeted by a brief outbreak of complete silence.
I’m no massive fan of Farage per se but he is a reasonably impressive speaker and his diagnosis of many if the issues resonates with people who probably don’t attend the ‘Spectator Parliamentarian of the year’ – I don’t know if David Blunkett sits in the Lords but his dog used to be a shoo -in as Parliamentarian of the year as she was really among the only beings whose presence in the building wasn’t a direct insult to every genuine Conservative voter in the country post 1997.
And then came an equally sobering opinion poll. A somewhat obscure outfit called FindOutNow gave the Tories the lead on a mere 26% – but the big headline was about Farage’s party, Reform UK, rising to second place on 24%, one point higher than Labour. In response, you could feel the government’s anxiety levels spiking – whereupon Farage made yet another appearance on BBC One’s Question Time and capped a week of mouthwatering promotion.
Of course the continued Green Party presence is absolutely fine even though their policies would murder 80% of the Uk population.
Developments in the real world show that Reform’s latest growth spurt should be taken very seriously indeed. The party says it now has about 100,000 members. It boasts of a rising appeal among young men: Farage cites his million TikTok followers, and the fact that half of them are under 25. In Wales, it fancies its chances of becoming the main opposition to Labour. Scotland, where there has long been a rather deluded assumption that hard-right politics will never find any space, has recently seen a run of council byelections in which the party won creditable vote-shares: 18% in one contest in Glasgow, and 26% in the Brexit-supporting port of Fraserburgh.
Those damned ‘Far right’ people who object to their children being assaulted and their country being invaded. Why can’t we just wipe them out now rather than progressively replacing them!!
Meanwhile, Reform’s profile on its English home turf continues to skyrocket. The UK Independence party’s members tended to be too consumed by Brexit ideology to be interested in the small change of grassroots campaigning. Now, although Farage still specialises in broad-sweep rhetoric, his footsoldiers are dutifully learning the argot of potholes and dog mess. In July, Reform came second in 98 parliamentary constituencies, the vast majority of which are held by Labour MPs. In such near-miss seats as Amber Valley (in Derbyshire), Barnsley South and Easington in County Durham, they are now plotting its careful, somewhat boring path to victory.
Nigel has never been one for the details in my experience, However, far more concerning than Reform is the emergence of The Muslim Vote – a pro Hamas party buoyed by the events in Syria. They have 5 Mps (with the Greens 10) and probably 30 or so Sympathetic Labour MPs. They are looking at 100 next time round with their traditional methods of vote rigging and intimidation. Is Harris at all fazed by this?
While party members look ahead to next May’s local elections, the national picture gives Reform boost after boost. Its latest uptick was undoubtedly triggered by news of net migration reaching a record 900,000. Rachel Reeves’s misfiring budget has also helped. At the same time, as I wrote last week, Keir Starmer and his comrades continue to speak the cold language of transactional politics, constantly fixating on figures and statistics. There is almost no “we” or “us” in what they offer, and Faragism is filling the void. But most of all, Reform is prospering because too many people are in the same political and economic rut where they have been marooned for decades.
This is the worst government in human history. Its members would struggle to boil an egg or peel an orange without recourse to a focus group. The fact that the Conservatives were almost as incompetent speaks volumes to where as a country we find ourselves.
Back in 2016, my former Guardian colleague Gary Younge pointed out that in lots of places, the choice presented by the Brexit referendum had been simple: a vote in favour of the status quo, or the chance to put your cross in a box that might as well have been labelled “fuck it”.
Although someone that has engaged in constant treason for 4 decades or more Younge does at least write coherently, at least in comparison with the innumerable proto feminist morons that currently proliferate within the Guardian pages.
Eight years on, far too many people’s political choices still seem to boil down to the same binary. The “levelling up” drive that began with Theresa May amounted to almost nothing.
And you are offering what precisely? A repudiation of systemic racism against the indigenous population? An end to the Trans lunacy? Enough energy to prevent rolling power cuts?
The new government has made a few moves in the right direction: witness the recent announcement that the funding of councils by Whitehall will finally be tilted in favour of more deprived areas of the country. There again, that is not an offer of success, but merely continued survival. People expect much more, and they are completely right to do so.
There’s something missing in that announcement – as the late Trans rights campaigner equivalent Rolf Harris said ‘Can you guess what it is yet?’
There is one huge issue I have always encountered while reporting from so many of the places now leaning Reform’s way: coastal towns, the parts of outer-east London that blur into Essex, the pancake-flat Fens beyond, and the old coalfields of the East Midlands, South Yorkshire and the south Welsh valleys. On a huge number of occasions, once conversations have got through immigration and the threadbare state of local public services, people have concentrated on one inescapable subject: housing, and how its scarcity compares with a past of relative plenty, which is exactly the kind of contrast that Reform trades on.
So for you Mr. Harris immigration and housing are unrelated??
Four decades ago, many of Reform UK’s older supporters had their lives transformed by Margaret Thatcher’s policy of encouraging people to buy their council houses at huge discounts; now, their daughters, sons and grandchildren live with the dire housing crisis that policy caused. If you understand at least some of the rising ire about immigration as fear of even more competition for scarce resources, housing is right at its heart: in my experience, no other issue comes near its impact on everyday life.
I will actually concede ‘Right to buy’ in both its incarnation had an impact – yet it is dwarfed, to the extent a rat is by an elephant, by unlimited garbage immigration.
In among the mess of numbers and statistics scattered through Starmer’s recent “plan for change” speech was the government’s oft-repeated aim of overseeing the building of 1.5m new homes (which even Labour councils have condemned as “wholly unrealistic”). As usual, how many of these will be rented from councils and housing associations remains lamentably unclear: there is talk of about 30,000 a year being constructed, but that is scarcely more than a third of what is reckoned to be needed. The government, it seems, is largely sticking to New Labour-ish visions of swing voters in commuter towns who have the means to join the property-owning democracy.
Again you miss the point completely.
But post-Brexit politics has a new and very different element: a large part of the threat from Reform centres on areas of post-industrial Britain where people’s needs are much more urgent.
They need fewer people, and those that don’t belong here to be sent away.
– End the supremacy of the mythological concepts of ‘universal human rights’ and ‘international law’. The Human Rights Acts needs to be set aside immediately within a return to the 1996 status quo.
– UK adherence to the Refugee convention needs suspending. Immediate transfer of the DFID budget in its entirety to offshore processing centres in Kazakhstan and Mongolia needs to be facilitated with no legal right of redress for ‘refugees’ designated as being transferred.
– Any lawyer opposing this on fraudulent ‘human rights’ pretexts needs to be suspended, with a view to being struck off and imprisoned.
– Separate tribunals along the lines of the German ‘Volksgerichtshof’ staffed exclusively by Right wing judges needs to be set up specifically to run the processing.
– As for the smugglers themselves, the repeal of the HRA would mean reinstatement of the death penalty.
– Additionally ‘Bills of Attainder’ whereby the perpetrators family can be arrested and imprisoned need to be decriminalised.
– All people imprisoned as a result of the June/ July riots needs to be freed and pardoned unilaterally.
– Prisoners from the current regime, which will include the entire cabinet and all Left wing MPs, who will face multiple charges of high treason, need to be deported to either North Korea or Eritrea, again using money from the DFID budget.
– Am guessing none of this is on Harris’ radar.
There is a way that could conceivably be addressed, and it would fit the Treasury’s insistence that large-scale public spending has to fit the definition of investment. Set aside large plots of land for mixed developments based around large amounts of social housing with lifelong tenure. Announce start-dates for building, and roll out apprenticeships and further education courses that will bring a lot of the work involved to local people. Badge the whole thing up as the final arrival of what some people called levelling up; frame it as a return to tradition and brand it with union jacks, if necessary. And as you sell the idea, try to update the kind of plain-spoken, communitarian words once spoken by that great Labour god Aneurin Bevan: “We shall persist in the building of new permanent houses until every family in the country has a good, separate, modern home.”
And they will all be filled by a city the size of Birmingham which is coming in on the boats annually, John boy, with your full and unadulterated blessing.
By modern standards, that might sound impossibly ambitious. But as Farage well knows, the same was once true of the vast, unwieldy, confounding project that he successfully sold to the country, before Brexit collided with reality, and he washed his hands of it. If Labour wants to even begin to see him off, this is surely how it should start.
The very fact that you think Brexit was delusional is proof of how far you are from the real desires of working people. The very fact you have mentioned immigration once in the entire article shows how far you are from confronting reality.
This is all missing the point. It’s as if a doctor presented with a patient suffering faintness and dizziness debated whether to recommend a better diet or to prescribe iron tablets, rather than treating the bleeding wound on the patient’s leg.
There will be no end to Britain’s housing problem until mass immigration is ended. 750,000 people are added to the population each year, which means the 300,000 new homes target isn’t enough to deal with that demand, never mind a shortfall for previous years.
Of course houses aren’t even the half of it. 750,000 is about the population of Leeds. The city of Leeds comprises a lot more than just the houses 750,000 people need to live in. It has hundreds of shops, offices, schools, hospitals etc etc. If the government declared a plan to build a city the size of Leeds, in a year, everyone would think they were off their rocker.
Getting rid of the TCPA and letting the free market would only mean blighted countryside and slums everywhere. It’s like computer modelling; if you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out, however cleverly the model works.
Address the root causes first. I’d start with a blanket ban on benefits and public services for non-citizens. Add a 20% super tax to every foreign worker to cover the extra cost of services, payable in advance by the employer. Start kicking the able bodied off benefits. Impose 20 year sentences for those who employ illegal immigrants. Invest a couple of billion of the foreign aid budget in a refugee processing centre in Western Sahara. All illegals get shipped there for processing without setting foot on British soil.
I appreciate that none of the above will ever happen. But then the 300k new homes target will never be met either.
“… public spending has to fit the definition of investment. “
Definition of public spending investment: urinal.
Everyone’s a liberal until they come across something they don’t like.
Do those that oppose the repeal of the TCPA think that all the green parts of the country will be covered in tacky & shoddily built boxes occupying 10 acres each?
Any if it were, what does it matter? Aesthetics? Someone got a larger garden than town dwellers? Lack of food production (LOL)?
‘As for the smugglers themselves, the repeal of the HRA would mean reinstatement of the death penalty’
Van Patten
Does sound as though you’ve got something there!!!!
@ Joe Smith – I don’t fancy living in or near a favela, thanks. Nor do I welcome the British countryside’s ruination. Gosh, what NIMBY I am.
Debating repeal of the TCPA is, as I said, spectacularly missing the point. Britain doesn’t have a planning problem, it has an immigration problem.
Uncontrolled building would lead to massive housing estates with insufficient capacity to support them.
We also need sewage works with sufficient capacity to handle the new dwellings, water storage and supply, power distribution, schools, doctors, dentists and nearby space to build shops and sport facilities. And lots more. These are all things that need to be planned and not unpleasantly discovered shortly after the builders have gone and wound up the development company set up specifically for that estate.
I’m hoping all this stuff what the planners currently do behind the scenes under the auspices of the TCPA. That said I don’t see any evidence around me to support this.
Don’t worry.
When the large-scale exchange of missile technology begins with Russia, we will be glad that all these people have come to join our country and will fight to defend it, right?
Of course, they’ll be the first to sign up to fight, given how much they want to be here…
@ Van Patten
Young man, Starmer has not yet generated hyper-inflation at 25% per annum, nor an abandonment of refuse collections, nor soaring unemployment (despite massive concealed redundancies in stste-owned industries), nor concealed the status of the Chairman of the Labour Party as an agent of the KGB, nor …
@ rhoda klapp
Exactly – Angela Rayner is replacing the pseudo-democratic controls under the TCPA with freedom of the Planning Officers to grant or refuse permission for developments which opens wide the door for corruption. It is possible, though thankfully rare, for local Councillors to be corrupt: however they cannot approve illegal developments without the complicity of corrupt planning officials; the new rules will mean that corrupt officials may approve illegal developments without the knowledge, let alone complicity, of councillors.
John77
I take it in the spirit it’s intended but I would make a couple of points
Young man ,
This government has aged me a decade in 4 months
Starmer has not yet generated hyper-inflation at 25% per annum,
He and Sunak certainly managed well above 25% P/A on booze (for example) and its only Temu and Shein that is preventing it otherwise
nor an abandonment of refuse collections
Nope although they aren’t weekly and you are charged a lot more relatively than the rates were in 1978. It’s surely coming
nor soaring unemployment (despite massive concealed redundancies in stste-owned industries)
You’ve got it – there’s around 4 to 5 million in academia and the public sector doing nothing useful expect absorbing taxpayers money
, nor concealed the status of the Chairman of the Labour Party as an agent of the KGB, nor …
Almost all the Labour front bench work for China/ North Korea or the WEF, or alternatively are being compromised by hardline Islamist regimes like Iran.
No mention of the ‘Unholy Trinity’?
– Big Trans
– DIE
– Net Zero
All of these make any regime adhering to them automatically worse than any prior government as all are directly Satanic.
I don’t see how a free for all (designated spaces like SSSIs, NNRs, municipal parks and the best two of the Nat Parks excepted) leads to more sewage and water use.
Whether you live in a HMO or a spacious town house with room to piss on the rhododendron in the garden, your water use shouldn’t going to go up.
But we had sewage treatment, electricity, doctors, dentists and all that other stuff the marv andyf mentions before 1947, so if there’s a problem repealing the TCPA it must be some new thing, you can’t appeal to considerations that were already solvable using the pre-47 free-er enterprise system.
“I don’t see how a free for all (designated spaces like SSSIs, NNRs, municipal parks and the best two of the Nat Parks excepted) leads to more sewage and water use.”
It doesn’t. It leads to more sewage and water demand in places where the infrastructure either does not exist, or is at capacity already.
If you had a free for all for example, how exactly are houses that someone decides to build in the middle of nowhere (ie not near an existing sewage network, and completely economically unviable to build or connect to one)? Septic tanks of course. So the entire countryside would be flooded with septic tank outfalls.
Nice.
I’ve never understood why social housing should have a lifetime tenure. It’s reasonable to argue that there is a need to house people who have fallen on hard times in whatever way. But because you were in need once, what makes you in need for life?
I would argue that cheap and secure tenancies can serve as a trap. Trapping people in areas they no longer should be in, or subsidising behaviours that got people in trouble in the first place such as addiction.
If we are to have a social housing safety net then the cheap rent should be limited. Maybe 2 years then it ratchets up to market rent over the next 3 years. Feel free to stay, if you can’t afford it then jog on, I hear Syria is cheap
@andyf – “Uncontrolled building would lead to massive housing estates with insufficient capacity to support them.”
We cannot allow more houses to be built because they would have insufficient shops, GPs, electricity, sewage etc. We cannot allow more shops because there is no need for them yet. We cannot allow more reservoirs to be built because we don’t yet need to extra capacity. etc etc. With the centrally planned approach, nothing ever gets done because some other thing is higher priority or needed before this thing. We should stop this nonsense and allow a free market approach.
@Bongo – “Whether you live in a HMO or a spacious town house with room to piss on the rhododendron in the garden, your water use shouldn’t going to go up.”
That rather depends on whether you do things like water the garden of the spacious house, or take frequent baths in the spacious bathroom instead or just having showers in a cramped flat.
@Charles
It also deep ends on what you were previously doing with your excess income when you lived in the HMO. You might have spent that on gym, holiday, McPiss, other. You might not be spending that now you are paying mortgage on your own gaffe.
Britain doesn’t have a planning problem, it has an immigration problem.
Marius nails it. And Jim +10.
“. . leads to more sewage and water demand in places where the infrastructure either does not exist, or is at capacity already.”
Under the TCPA blown up scenario, there will be a premium to get that infrastructure installed. The home buyer isn’t typically going to buy in such places when there are cheaper alternatives with spare capacity. But if they want to go to where the supply is scarce, and there’s a willing seller then let them, they’ll pay a higher price for that.
@ Van Patten
I assume you are relatively young even with that extyra decade because those of us who have lived through (all or most of) the four previous Labour governments know that Wilson was far worse and find it difficult to forget that. Running/ruining the UK for the benefit of the public sector unions including following Marx’s diktat to grind the middle classes between the upper and nether millstones of taxation and inflation – Rachel Reeves is not even a pale imitation of Denis Healey – abolition of capital punishment in the teeth of scientific evidence that it saved scores of innocent lives, worse than halving the value of “the pound in your pocket” in five years thereby destroying the savings of the responsible working class and their occupational pensions creating misery for OAPs (a 25% rise in drink prices is a minor irritant compared to a 25% rise in all prices), renationalising steel, destroying industry in the Scottish Lowlands and the North-East# by granting Frank Cousins his “national pay rates” when the cost of living in Scotland and the North was lower and transport cost differentials meant that value-added by the workforce was lower so the excessive pay rise generated bankruptcies and unemployment, massive increases in civil service numbers creating a boom in office demand in London and fortunes for property speculators and also a housing shortage and unaffordable rents for those who didn’t already have a house/flat or subsidised coucil housing, pay policies designed to squeeze the pips for those working the way up the ladder expecting to get pay rises and finding the limit on their pay rise was less than the inflation of their costs, turning parliament into a career choice for the likes of Cameron and Miliband and other student politicians instead of guys who, like Sir Alec, wanted to do something helpful rather than just make money (pre-Wilson there was a bunch of decent Trade Unionists on the Labour benches who were sponsored by their unions to the extent that they had a decent but not luxurious lifestyle).
I could go on but I’ve already filled the box twice.
#Not so much the North-West because Wilson (MP for Huyton) steered a lot of government spending to benefit Liverpool and Merseyside
The planning system will never be blown up because there are legitimate reasons for it existing. Developers will always try to maximise externalities, and once they’ve made their money and fucked off there is a general expectation that the public purse will step in and fix the mess. Built on a flood plain or occasional water course and get flooded every year because insufficient mitigation in place? Tough luck, try the local authority that issued planning probably in full awareness the land floods! Drains backing up because local drainage not upgraded to handle extra capacity, never mind, it’s trebles all round the for the developers etc…
There are already plenty of shoddy new builds out there, even whole estates marketed on the basis that ‘infrastructure’ or ‘facilities’ would follow, only for these things to be withdrawn once the developer had the profit in the bag. Yes, the consumer may be stupid for falling for sharp practices, but the house building/construction industry is infamously structured to diffuse accountability. The ‘developer’ is just one part of a web of contractors, subcontractors, suppliers and agents who all claim it was the others’ responsibility when the shit hits the fan. And it’s local authorities and tax payers who foot the end costs. If developers were allowed to just do as they please it would be an even bigger shit show. To blow up the planning system there would have to be much tighter regulation to crack down on dodgy practices and internalise costs currently dumped on general public. But could you imagine the whining from the grifters if this were imposed on them?
We have examples from history to justify the need for planners to restrict housing because it all needs to be planned & controlled under the TCPA.
Look at all the housing constructed prior to the TCPA in the 1930s, its all in line to be knocked down as below standard.
Meanwhile they are absolutely hellholes of estates.
They still don’t have water supply sewage roads schools or shops because developers seek to maximise externalities.
Nessimmersion
You are reminding me of the old house we rented before we migrated to the Old Family Home so many years ago.
The street was unsealed and the dunny man came every week to hoist the shit bin up on his shoulder and cart it away. Though the house was connected to the water and electricity systems.
Our new house was connected to the sewerage system, by the way. Because it was built on the site of the WW2 American Naval Hospital. It was only in the 1960’s that the evil Labor Lord Mayor Clem Jones managed to have what was then the whole of Brisbane sewered.
So I can imagine that preparation of a housing estate would cost quite a bit more these days. A good reason for stopping the immigrants. Because we can’t afford to house them.
John 77
Various gremlins bedevilled the site yesterday. I don’t disagree the Wilson governments were not great – were they as bad as today’s fiasco?
assume you are relatively young even with that extyra decade because those of us who have lived through (all or most of) the four previous Labour governments know that Wilson was far worse and find it difficult to forget that.
From recollection in the 70s there was no such thing as DIE or Net Zero and Trans was medically impossible so arguably the three things that are the most immediate danger, certainly to every White male in the country hadn’t been conceived of.
Running/ruining the UK for the benefit of the public sector unions including following Marx’s diktat to grind the middle classes between the upper and nether millstones of taxation and inflation
That is exactly what this government has been doing.
– Rachel Reeves is not even a pale imitation of Denis Healey
I don’t think Healey ever had yhe chutzpah to go after the farmers and they still have four years to go. A lot has changed since 1978 of course economically and socially but I do feel the cultural aspects of this administration – which basically wants me destitute or dead – may not have been as marked in 1978.
abolition of capital punishment in the teeth of scientific evidence that it saved scores of innocent lives, worse than halving the value of “the pound in your pocket” in five years thereby destroying the savings of the responsible working class and their occupational pensions
This government is following on from Blair/ Brown which I’d have to contend was worse than Wilson. Complete abolition of private sector Final salary schemes while massively raising those of their own. Don’t think Wilson or Healey managed that..
creating misery for OAPs (a 25% rise in drink prices is a minor irritant compared to a 25% rise in all prices), renationalising steel, destroying industry in the Scottish Lowlands and the North-East# by granting Frank Cousins his “national pay rates” when the cost of living in Scotland and the North was lower and transport cost differentials meant that value-added by the workforce was lower so the excessive pay rise generated bankruptcies and unemployment,
So the price of drink has gone up by double under this and the last government (so 100%) and Chris Witless has said he wants to raise it even further and reduce pub opening hours. The ‘Nanny state’ didn’t exist in 1978 and you could still smoke almost everywhere. Real inflation figures produced are outright lies –
Certainly grocery inflation in the U.K. is into double figures, if not 20%.
massive increases in civil service numbers creating a boom in office demand in London and fortunes for property speculators and also a housing shortage and unaffordable rents for those who didn’t already have a house/flat or subsidised coucil housing,
There’s 5 million or more in the non productive public sector and legions more being created every day. That’s who voted this government in. There was no such thing as a ‘diversity co-ordinator’ in 78. There’s probably over a million people whose productivity is wholly negative in the public sector now.
pay policies designed to squeeze the pips for those working the way up the ladder expecting to get pay rises and finding the limit on their pay rise was less than the inflation of their costs, turning parliament into a career choice for the likes of Cameron and Miliband and other student politicians instead of guys who, like Sir Alec, wanted to do something helpful rather than just make money (pre-Wilson there was a bunch of decent Trade Unionists on the Labour benches who were sponsored by their unions to the extent that they had a decent but not luxurious lifestyle).
So the current rot began back in the 70s? Dont demur but that’s 5 decades of corruption to allow the rot to deepen. I can remember the 80s and the Labour politicians were far more impressive than the current crop. Every single Labour cabinet member is a criminal on a scale that seems unprecedented in British history and they revel in it.
I could go on but I’ve already filled the box twice.
Fair enough – I think we can agree that both administrations are terrible. However, I feel entitled to say and maintain this is the worse government in terms of sheer incompetence,
Malice and malevolence in human history given where it is set and the relatively benign legacy of U.K. history. I appreciate people are entitled to different opinions and both governments are and were terrible so it’s really like arguing over the merits of two types of turds but I can assure you on a personal level this Regime is going to take some beating.
#
Clement Attlee, Bevan, Bevin et al say ‘Hold my champagne’.
Tim, you’re not going to get a housing boom, because they’re aren’t the people to build them. The capacity in the industry matches current demand. Why would it be any greater?
How were previous housing booms supplied? The one at around the end of the C19th was done by using a lot of un & semi-skilled labour for the bits didn’t show, using the skilled for the bits that did. And not being too choosy about materials. That gave you all those late Vicky/Edwardian terrace shitholes. I spent decades working with them. I know how appalling built they are. The 30s was similar. With much the same results. A lot of 30s builds are dreadful.
In both periods they could get away with it because building control was very light touch. And houses were bought for cash. Caveat emptor.
You’re now in an entirely different word. Hordes of jobsworths peering over your shoulder ready to condemn anything doesn’t tick the right boxes. And the lenders are going to be the same. Then you have credentialisation of the trades. And it’s credentialisation all the way up. Quantity surveyor. Site management. Rest of the penpushers. On the regulatory side, where are the building inspectors coming from? You know how long it takes to get stuff signed off now? Half of these people expect to be working from home 4 days a week.
I bought one of those 30s bungalows out in Essex & completely underpinned it. Why I bought it. Why it was so cheap. It was completely unsaleable. No lender would touch it.
@Nessimmersion
Quite a lot of the housing constructed before the 1930’s has indeed been demolished. Whole slums were cleared in lots of places. And there is a substantial issue with overloaded infrastructure in lots of places too. S104 and CiL are supposed to be part of the solution, but quite often developers get out of them.
“I don’t think Healey ever had the chutzpah to go after the farmers and they still have four years to go.”
I beg to differ. My late father had a large IHT tax bill to pay when he inherited his farm from his father. I think it was in the region of 30-40k in 1974. Equivalent to 300-350k today. He only managed to pay it off because a) the UK had just joined the CAP and it was the Happy Time for farming and b) high inflation eroded the value of the debt. I grew up in a very dilapidated farmhouse as a kid, because for a decade all the spare cash was going to HMRC.
@bloke in spain – “you’re not going to get a housing boom, because they’re aren’t the people to build them”
Don’t be silly, there are plenty people. The world’s population is eight billion, so we only have to attract a tiny fraction of competent builders to allow enough for anything we want.