UK Politics Thread 🇬🇧

[merklman]

Ohh, what a surprise

Zionist ex Labour MP caught by Pedo hunters

@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow come get your brethren

x.com

x.com

 

[DaRealness]

This agent grifter clown Andrew Tate really started a 'votebruv' political party.

 

[LuuqMaan]

This agent grifter clown Andrew Tate really started a 'votebruv' political party.

He lost the Muslims that welcomed him.

Guess he wants that Elon money.

 

[DaRealness]

He lost the Muslims that welcomed him.

Guess he wants that Elon money.

The day he becomes PM is the day I'm President of the USA.

 

[null]

 

[DaRealness]

 

[O³ (O cubed)]

All porn sites must 'robustly' verify UK user ages by July

 

[null]

All porn sites must 'robustly' verify UK user ages by July

JBO brehs

 

[DaRealness]

 

[null]

...

 

[FAH1223]

 

[88m3]

Mia Shay St Hilaire died from a severe reaction to nuts

The 12-year-old girl's milkshake was contaminated with nuts used to prepare a previous drink.

www.bbc.com

loss for words

 

[Kasgoinjail]

4 day work weeks full pay

Two hundred UK companies sign up for permanent four-day working week

More than 5,000 workers to benefit from reduced hours with no loss of pay

www.theguardian.com

 

[Heimdall]

Home truths: the only thing Labour is building is a bigger, more dysfunctional housing market | George Monbiot

Private developers offer politicians a simple solution for bulldozing through this crisis – build more. But it won’t work, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

www.theguardian.com

Some snips:

Build baby, build. That’s about the intellectual limit of the government’s housing strategy.

As soon as anyone challenges the policy, the government brands them a nimby – another of the crude truncations that pass for debate on this issue: nimbys versus yimbys. So before I go further, let me state that I want to see lots of new social and genuinely affordable housing built as part of a massive programme to solve the worst housing crisis of any wealthy country. I’ve been making similar calls for years, not least in the report I co-authored for the Labour party in 2019: Land for the Many. I oppose Labour’s current approach for a different reason. It will fail.

The plan to build 1.5m homes over five years now depends on just six volume housebuilders. No other mechanism is proposed at scale: Labour’s extension of the home building fund to incentivise small and medium housebuilders will deliver only 12,000 homes. But volume builders have an incentive to limit construction to the “market absorption rate”: in other words, they won’t dent their profits by building enough homes to reduce the selling price. They also minimise the release of affordable homes: they tend to promise them, then pare down their promises as development proceeds. Unaffordable homes are more profitable. The government has proposed no measures sufficient to change these incentives.

Moreover, without either a capital gains tax on the value of primary residences or rent controls, housing is almost a one-way bet – a near guarantee of making money without effort. Rent controls are dismissed out of hand by ministers, who claim they would reduce the size of the sector. But experience in other countries suggests this is a myth. Instead, as private rents continue to soar, the government has frozen local housing allowance, ensuring that people on low incomes will struggle even more to find a decent home. So much for its housing policy being driven by concern for the poor.

Just as mindless is the government’s belief that housing can be made more affordable through mortgage market liberalisation. Only last week, in response to government pressure, the Financial Conduct Authority proposed that mortgage rules should be further loosened to increase home ownership and promote growth. But if you flood an asset with money when returns are guaranteed, its price will rise. Are ministers really so simple-minded, or do they just pretend to be?

So what the government intends to do is leave the dysfunctional system intact while building more homes. Result? A larger dysfunctional system. Oh, and massive environmental damage. Again, where we might hope for thoughtful and effective policy, we hear crude and ignorant pronouncements.

 

[Heimdall]

and comments:

Spoiler

since 2016, more homes have been bought as “additional dwellings” (second homes, holiday homes, Airbnbs, buy to lets, and so on) than by first-time buyers.

And that one sentence sums up Britain's dysfunctional housing market.

I live in an area of South West London that has, over the past 20 - 30 years been transformed from a pretty market town to a Manhattan-like metropolis, where the council has allowed every available patch of land to be used to build massive, multi-storey tower blocks of 'luxury apartments' with starting prices around £300,000.

These are usually sold to a combination of buy-to-let merchants and overseas buyers, mainly from South East Asia, China and Russia, many of whom purchase 'off plan'. Young people cannot afford these places, unless they're on mega salaries, or have been helped by the bank of Mum & Dad.

I know of no other country where the property market offers so little protection to its own people than England. Both my kids now live and work abroad because, despite previously having decent jobs here, they are unable to live in the town they were born in.

Can we agree at this point that Reeves is not the person for the job. Just yesterday she seemed to be priasing Trumps economic credentials in spite of all evidence. Today she is "suggesting " that there is support for a third runway. Which of course translates to " we have already decided and are trying to justify it after the fact". Gah I'm sick of these lying manipulative politicians.

Owning a home is NOT the only answer - Affordable Social housing is where many people's housing needs should be fulfilled. This should be Labour's focus in Government.

Social housing is not, and never was a dirty thing, nor is it unaspirational, nor does it mean you've failed at life. Social housing is where the money should be spent.

There are plenty of saleable properties, although many are either too expensive, or in the wrong place for this point in the 21st Century. Or they're owned as second, third, or fourth homes.
And of course, there are plenty of properties that were once Council Houses, but now make up investment portfolios of poorly maintained properties for BTL landlords, charging multiples of the rents the public sector would charge. I should know. I live in one.

Building affordable homes for sale still means homes of questionable size and quality, built to perpetuate a broken system. Homes without the infrastructure already in place to make them viable. Built to perpetuate a Ponzi scheme which is too big to fail, and makes too much money for those who it really benefits, the developers, the banks, and the bankers.

It's clear many have very short memories alongside the lies that the Tories like to make about blaming our then Labour Government for the crash that was a global crisis.

I finally got around to watching The Big Short recently. It was eye opening and revelatory.

Homeownership of 'your' former Council House for Thatcher wasn't just about creating a nation of homeowners, and Tory voters, it was also about turbocharging the mortgage and banking sectors. The Brokers, the Insurance sector, the legal sector. It was about letting the leash off, allowing them to make much more money. And as The Big Short reminds us, it was fine, until those in those industries got greedy. The regulations were gradually removed, if anyone ever really cared, as they realised, but we all failed to, that once somebody has a Mortgage, then there's nothing for you to make money on. Eventually, everyone has a mortgage. So what do you do? In our case we sold of the social housing stock, creating lots of new opportunities for lots of lovely money for the industry, at the expense of the public purse.

And when that source was done, then the building of more homes, 'affordable' homes kicked in, with huge profits for housebuilders, and more income for the finance sector. And well, if you couldn't meet the criteria of the 3.5 x income affordability check, well we'll just fudge it. And they did. Often on deals like fixed for 2 years, variable afterwards, or a fixed rate that jumped up as soon as your deal ended. Naturally, people would then look to remortgage, but it was fine, because prices would rise, and peoples earnings would rise, and everyone in the industry got another bite of the apple, and the money kept coming in. So if people couldn't afford the new mortgage, well it was ok, we'll let them borrow more than their 3.5x, 5x, 8x... And then here, we also let people declare whatever they wanted, it was open season. We learned all this from the US. Nobody cared, everyone was optimistic, nobody saw the timebomb ticking away, the Ponzi scheme kept rolling along. Until it all went to shyt. And the con, the fraud, that all the banks and bankers and brokers, perpetuated and profited from, blew up in our faces, and the Taxpayer had to ride to the rescue, and not a single person went to jail, and the people at the bottom, the ones who in all reality in a former era who'd have been in good quality social housing, were hit the hardest.

The Tories didn't care about those who needed Social housing. It's clear they only cared about the sectors that profited their chums, and sod the repercussions.

So, please, let's stop this insanity of perpetuating home ownership as the only answer.
The notion of 'Affordable Starter Homes' as the only option.
The 'Right to Buy', the 'Help to Buy' schemes that only benefit the finance industry and the housebuilders, as the only option.

Let's focus on good quality Social Housing first and foremost.

A home AS a home, not as an investment vehicle. A way for people who need one to get a roof over their heads without the punitive financial implications that brings - or being thrown to the wolves of the private sector.

Neither Starmer nor Reeves possesses the least concern for the poor. Perhaps there was a time when they did - after all, they might as easily have joined the Conservatives as the Labour party - but if so, those sympathies are moribund. The struggle of the poor to find homes in a market where rents are now way beyond affordable meets with zero awareness, let alone sympathy, from Starmer-Reeves today. Indeed, in any conflict between perceived economic growth and the welfare of poor and vulnerable citizens, the poor and the vulnerable are being sacrificed by Starmer-Reeves.

I loathe Starmer-Reeves' Labour so much more than I ever loathed any Tory government, because while we all knew that the Tories existed solely to advance the interests of the rich, and to this commitment they remained true, Starmer-Reeves have betrayed the values and principles of the Labour party. They have betrayed any hopes we might have had of an end to Tory government if Labour were to have won the last GE.

Toryism is alive and well, and rebranded as a supposedly Labour government. Of concern for the poor, of the desire to seriously address the most pressing social problem this country faces - that is, the scarcity and unaffordability of homes to rent if you are not wealthy - there is none.

I stopped here.