[spidermonkey09]

ignoring motions passed at conference (eg. they won't implement PR),

I guess this is where we probably start diverging but to me the idea that any major political party should decide national policy based on motions at their party conference is completely mad. Labour has 360k members, the Tories only 170k! The UK population is 67 million. I would like to see PR but it would need a national conversation, not just being forced through or it would surely just be rolled back whenever the Tories next won.

[ToxicBilberry]

Thanks for the heads up on Ayn Rand, after a quick look at the Ayn Rand institute website I think I'll spend a bit of time reading her stuff. Re - the vote. I think Stone answered that already - it doesn't matter who you vote for as in the words of George Galloway - 'they're two cheeks of the same arsehole'. I'd like to see the Conservatives get zero seats, you're right, they're awful! It might be worth spending time reading about Elite Theory, it provides one way of understanding how power works, it is quite mainstream and doesn't talk about Cabal's or Sheeple. Re - useless eaters, a good example of useless eater policy was the mass sterilisation of Indian women from the 50's to the 70's - 18.5 million.

That you have looked up Ayn Rand and thought "I should read her stuff" speaks volumes

I think it’s good form to try and understand the world from a variety of perspectives. At first glance her objectivism doesn’t appeal to me due to its lack of metaphysical thinking. In reality objectivism may be more in keeping with the current spirit of the age and the world view of those in power.

[andy popp]

Here's an interesting short article on how Denmark came to be one of the first countries in the world to adopt proportional representation. Change takes work.

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/how-did-denmark-get-proportional-representation/

[seankenny]

Here's an interesting short article on how Denmark came to be one of the first countries in the world to adopt proportional representation. Change takes work.

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/how-did-denmark-get-proportional-representation/

It didn’t just take work, it took a massive change in the structure of the society. According to this (https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-denmark/) Denmark started industrialising in the 1870s, increasingly so in the 1890s. Perhaps it was the Danish way of solving the same problems that we faced earlier in the 19th century, and which we dealt with via the reform acts? An answer to this is beyond my knowledge but we have two professional historians in the thread who might be able to shed some light on this.

More relevant to the PR in the U.K. argument, has there been a similar change that didn’t occur in the context of either the huge social changes of industrialisation or with the create/recreation of the state after war or colonial independence?

[stone]

Regarding the inefficient vote Labour got in 2017&19 -I think the huge mistake/flaw in the Corbyn project was a failure to actively recruit new party members in constituencies/wards under-represented in party membership. There is a feedback effect whereby friends and workmates introduce people like them to becoming members. That needs to be broken out of with effort. There was a huge influx of new members but they didn't represent the wider population at all. That really matters when a party relies on its membership for campaigning and policy development. Voters needed to see it as being "their" Labour Party, being run by people like them. A big policy shift like those manifestos required a lot of trust building and that requires such ownership by the electorate. A lot of the new "Red Wall" Tory MPs were local people voters could relate to.

Starmer also doesn't have relatable members nor candidates but that doesn't matter because he isn't trying a policy shift. People don't need to be persuaded or to put their trust in anything.

[Oldmanmatt]

I certainly think PR is a much better system than the current, in almost any iteration.
But I have to question whether it would have the massive effect on policy some seem to imagine (if I’m not mistaken).
Voting split by party has been really quite consistent over multiple elections, the swing from Con to Labour governments, seems, to mainly revolve around swing voters, centrists, moving one way or the other. They don’t actually vote centrist, otherwise the Libs would pull a bigger share. Now, probably under PR, they would. However, I can’t imagine that parliament under PR would look drastically different from the typical voting split. Maybe many customary Labour voter would go Green, Cons and Labour would lose some to the Libs, more would drift off to extreme R&L parties etc etc.
I don’t see it creating a parliament that will be able/want to push through anything more radical than current system, maybe even less so than where Cons or Lab have an overwhelming majority.

[Oldmanmatt]

Thanks for the heads up on Ayn Rand, after a quick look at the Ayn Rand institute website I think I'll spend a bit of time reading her stuff. Re - the vote. I think Stone answered that already - it doesn't matter who you vote for as in the words of George Galloway - 'they're two cheeks of the same arsehole'. I'd like to see the Conservatives get zero seats, you're right, they're awful! It might be worth spending time reading about Elite Theory, it provides one way of understanding how power works, it is quite mainstream and doesn't talk about Cabal's or Sheeple. Re - useless eaters, a good example of useless eater policy was the mass sterilisation of Indian women from the 50's to the 70's - 18.5 million.

That you have looked up Ayn Rand and thought "I should read her stuff" speaks volumes

Pipesmoke is kinda right, but it wasn’t worth the punter.
It’s not reading it that matters, it’s what you take away from it.

[mrjonathanr]

I've said it before on here, but to me, the number one problem for why so many of the country are living miserable lives, is the cost of housing.  And that the government can start doing something about by simply getting out of the way.  ie: Essentially make a bonfire out of most of the planning regulations in this country.  You can't build anything anywhere in the UK.  Environmentalism has been weaponised by every NIMBY out there, to block anything being built.  That needs to end.

This is quite a surprising post to read Nemo. Has someone in Tufton Street hijacked your account?

The reason housing is so problematical has very little to do with restrictive planning. No doubt some improvements should be made, but a bonfire of the green belt will do nothing to ameliorate the problem. Namely, asset prices.

This isn’t being driven by a shortage of supply, but by an excess of money driving asset values up and out of reach of what used to be called the working classes. The middle classes will be similarly impoverished in a generation. Thatcher’s ’home owning revolution’ has been great for foreign owned capital owning UK homes. Bob and Brenda in Birmingham, not so much. You are talking about tinkering with symptoms, not causes.

Primary steps to address this:

1 Seriously high levels of tax on the very rich whose wealth has grown exponentially in the last decade are needed. Billionaires can leave, but their fixed assets can’t.

2 Legislate against housing being owned by funds rather than individuals or UK owned business.

Secondary steps:

3 Rebuild significant social housing stock.

4 Fix social care. Ideally, bring it back into the NHS, or set up a dedicated national body rather than the fragmented current state of affairs.

5 Raise IHT thresholds (eg £1m) so that ordinary householders can keep their homes. Currently, once forced to sell they are just another spiralling asset increasingly out of the reach of ordinary people.

6 Rigorously enforce high levels of IHT compliance above the threshold.

7 Introduce fair rent legislation.

8 Increase house building, especially on brownfield sites.

Without 1 and 2 we are all going to be renting in a generation or two.

[Davo]

I've said it before on here, but to me, the number one problem for why so many of the country are living miserable lives, is the cost of housing.  And that the government can start doing something about by simply getting out of the way.  ie: Essentially make a bonfire out of most of the planning regulations in this country.  You can't build anything anywhere in the UK.  Environmentalism has been weaponised by every NIMBY out there, to block anything being built.  That needs to end.

This is quite a surprising post to read Nemo. Has someone in Tufton Street hijacked your account?

The reason housing is so problematical has very little to do with restrictive planning. No doubt some improvements should be made, but a bonfire of the green belt will do nothing to ameliorate the problem. Namely, asset prices.

This isn’t being driven by a shortage of supply, but by an excess of money driving asset values up and out of reach of what used to be called the working classes. The middle classes will be similarly impoverished in a generation. Thatcher’s ’home owning revolution’ has been great for foreign owned capital owning UK homes. Bob and Brenda in Birmingham, not so much. You are talking about tinkering with symptoms, not causes.

Primary steps to address this:

1 Seriously high levels of tax on the very rich whose wealth has grown exponentially in the last decade are needed. Billionaires can leave, but their fixed assets can’t.

2 Legislate against housing being owned by funds rather than individuals or UK owned business.

Secondary steps:

3 Rebuild significant social housing stock.

4 Fix social care. Ideally, bring it back into the NHS, or set up a dedicated national body rather than the fragmented current state of affairs.

5 Raise IHT thresholds (eg £1m) so that ordinary householders can keep their homes. Currently, once forced to sell they are just another spiralling asset increasingly out of the reach of ordinary people.

6 Rigorously enforce high levels of IHT compliance above the threshold.

7 Introduce fair rent legislation.

8 Increase house building, especially on brownfield sites.

Without 1 and 2 we are all going to be renting in a generation or two.

I wholeheartedly agree with all your points and ideas here. Housing should quite clearly be for accommodation and not another asset that the already wealthy accumulate and put of the reach of most people.

I very much agree with bringing social care funding back into the NHS. The current system where a person gets discharged from hospital into care and then becomes almost immediately a council/social care problem is a nightmare and just creates lots of perverse incentives that do not help the person involved one little bit.


Cheers Dave

[spidermonkey09]

This is quite a surprising post to read Nemo. Has someone in Tufton Street hijacked your account?

This is a lazy generalisation surely mjr? The YIMBY movement, for want of a better term, which calls for a vast acceleration in house building, has proponents from across the political spectrum.

Starmers proposals to bulldoze the planning system are one of the things that excite me the most. Green belt land is not all the same and the current system is far too restrictive. There are large swathes of green belt land where there should be no objections to building; referred to as the grey belt in this piece.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/11/labour-keir-starmer-pledges-to-build-new-towns-utilising-grey-belt-areas

Local activists and objectors have for too long leveraged the planning system for their own ends and blocked totally sensible development. In my own town a decaying brownfield site has sat derelict for years while councillors of all political stripes played to the nimby gallery and rejected applications for housing.  These people should be ignored, which Starmer has commendably said he will do.

From today, relating to YIMBYism from an infrastructure perspective: https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/will-labour-actually-get-britain

[mrjonathanr]

Revising planning is no bad thing but to focus exclusively on that when the real danger lies elsewhere is a dangerous red herring imo.

Apologies to Nemo if that reads as insulting, you never know on the internet. That wasn’t the intention. It was a little sarcastic poke because our friends in Tufton St would love us to focus on anything but the true cause: the accumulation of massive wealth at the top of society. Taxation is the answer.

[mrjonathanr]

I very much agree with bringing social care funding back into the NHS. The current system where a person gets discharged from hospital into care and then becomes almost immediately a council/social care problem is a nightmare and just creates lots of perverse incentives that do not help the person involved one little bit.


Cheers Dave

Agreed. Its cost is also where property will get cannibalised and wealth concentrated upwards. I suspect a lot of people who imagine that they can pass on homes to their children will find that they won’t be able to, for this reason.

[Nemo]

@MrJonathanR - completely agree about fixing social care, although it's not a cheap thing to do, so will involve tough choices elsewhere.
And agree with at least some of the other points - I'm generally in favour of whatever will work when it comes to sorting out housing.  But +1 to everything SpiderMonkey said - to me, any solution very definitely requires radical planning reform. 

And whilst it's certainly a part of the problem, and whilst I agree with doing something about it, I don't agree that the super rich are the biggest problem in terms of housing (although in some specific places you're certainly right). 
A bigger problem to me at least is that large swathes of people from relatively modest backgrounds from the late 90s onwards were in a position if they owned one home, to get a buy to let mortgage and buy another one.  And another one.  And another one.  So that the ex electrician nearby owns over 50 houses and retired when he was 35.  And the little old lady nearby retired when she was 40 and rents out 20 houses.  And yet the neighbours (who rent) kid will never have a chance of owning one.  You can't blame that on foreign billionaires. 

Noone is critisizing those people for buying up large amounts of property.  It was the rational thing to do given government policy.  But government policy should have completely changed the incentives for doing that a very long time ago.  When swathes of the middle class for decades have been using the housing market as their pension pot, there's a problem.  So yes, as you say, completely changing the tax incentives around investing in property, short term rents (airbnb etc) all play a part. 

But there's also just a fundamental shortage of housing.  And what does get built is tiny, shite quality houses, crammed into the tiniest plot of land imaginable.  So fundamentally changing planning laws and building large amounts more housing, very definitely needs to be part of any solution. 

[stone]

I thought the history of the buy-to-let mortgage bubble was fascinating. John Major kicked it off in 1996 eliminating restrictions on buy-to-let mortgages. That set off crazy house price inflation but of course by then Blair was in power and made out it was Blairite economic genius that was making everyone rich.

[ToxicBilberry]

I'm enjoying reading Labours plans to manage mass migration, including the euphemistic - 'tackling humanitarian crisis at source', I wonder what this means? 

[seankenny]

Slightly bigger aid budget. Maybe even have a dedicated  international development department again. So yeah, helping very poor people. I’m sure you’ll find a way to hate it.

[ToxicBilberry]

Slightly bigger aid budget. Maybe even have a dedicated  international development department again. So yeah, helping very poor people. I’m sure you’ll find a way to hate it.

Not hating on it. Starmer is a puppet of the dark Lord Blair who has a pretty good record of manufacturing humanitarian crisis.

Edit : Should read Dark Lord Sir Tone Blair

[mrjonathanr]

Hi Nemo, I’m on board with the need for planning reform. But this is where it gets messy as data take time to find, but…

I think concentrated wealth is a highly significant driver of asset price inflation. As for the tradesman made good as landlord, I’m inclined to think that’s a very minor part if the pie. Assets aren’t getting snapped up by ordinary folk, especially as it’s difficult to maintain a profitable portfolio. Although there may be the odd unicorn on ukb..

Honestly, in a generation, I think home ownership for ordinary people will be a thing of the past, replaced by rental contracts known as ‘50 year mortgages’.

[BrutusTheBear]

Keir Starmer declares he's a socialist but 'we can't afford to' raise taxes on the top 5% to pay for tuition fees etc. etc.  He has to be 'honest with the electorate'. 
Can't make this  up.  

[ToxicBilberry]

Keir Starmer declares he's a socialist but 'we can't afford to' raise taxes on the top 5% to pay for tuition fees etc. etc.  He has to be 'honest with the electorate'. 
Can't make this  up.

You’ve forgotten to apply the 1st rule of politics Brutus, run everything back through the reality inverter.

Socialism = expansion of the useless people under techno-feudalism

Humanitarian aid = forever war, resource stripping, globalisation etc

Health policy = making money from the misery of useless people

Etc etc

[Oldmanmatt]

Keir Starmer declares he's a socialist but 'we can't afford to' raise taxes on the top 5% to pay for tuition fees etc. etc.  He has to be 'honest with the electorate'. 
Can't make this  up.

You’ve forgotten to apply the 1st rule of politics Brutus, run everything back through the reality inverter.

Socialism = expansion of the useless people under techno-feudalism

Humanitarian aid = forever war, resource stripping, globalisation etc

Health policy = making money from the misery of useless people

Etc etc

Have you swallowed a shipping container of, badly translated to Chinese and back to English, dystopian novels and are now vomiting up random paragraphs from 1984 and such?

[ToxicBilberry]

Lol you might not be wrong!

Techno-feudalism is a real theory though.

‘ Feudalism refers to the medieval-era social system that dominated Europe. Its basic idea is that peasants (also known as serfs) served their lords through farming and labour and in return, got to live within their kingdom. Technofeudalism is the notion that we serve our big tech overlords (Amazon, Google, Apple and Meta) by handing over data to access their cloud space.

Technofeudalism suggests our preferences are no longer our own, they're manufactured by machine networks — commonly known as the cloud. It's underpinned by the theory that the cloud has created a feedback loop that removes our agency. We train the algorithm to find what we like and then the algorithm trains us to like what it offers.’

[stone]

The Faiza Shaheen deselection is really making me question whether I can vote Labour. Starmer may come across as offering a slightly softer, more egalitarian version of government than we've been getting. But I'm scared of empowering a team of people who seem to revel in exerting power by way of lying, manoeuvring and abuse of process.

Perhaps it could be argued that they will respect democracy, fairness and norms of decency when dealing with the wider country in a way that they manifestly don't internally with the Labour Party. But I'm not at all sure. Some truly horrible authoritarian regimes have actually be relatively liberal/benevolent in some ways. Saddam Hussein protected womens' rights and was a bastion against Islamic extremism.

To me, respect for democracy and treating people fairly is perhaps the most important political benchmark. I find this all very hard indeed.

[monkoffunk]

It’s probably worth trying to understand the inner workings of the Labour Party, although I don’t fully. However this decision will be from the National Executive Committee, not Starmer directly, even though he is part of it. The internal workings of the party do have their own logic that might be disagreeable to an outsider at times. But as you mention I really don’t think any of that then applies to how the elected representatives then govern.

Certainly the reported reasons for deselecting Faiza look pretty weak right now, a really bad look.

[Wellsy]

They look pretty weak for not letting Abbot stand too. Like if you're letting her be in the Party, why can't she stand?