UK General Election 2024

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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.
 
Davo said:
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.
 
@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.
 
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.
 
I'm enjoying reading Labours plans to manage mass migration, including the euphemistic - 'tackling humanitarian crisis at source', I wonder what this means?
 
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.
 
seankenny said:
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
 
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’.
 
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 :shit: up. :lol:
 
BrutusTheBear said:
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 :shit: up. :lol:

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
 
ToxicBilberry said:
BrutusTheBear said:
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 :shit: up. :lol:

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?
 
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.’
 
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.
 
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.
 
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?
 
Are you not in fact guessing the reasons and not in possession of all the information?
There’s a difference between the publicly stated reasons and the full story, that often neither side wish the full story to become public.
Seems a reach to go from any of this to authoritarian regime.
 
Lets look at the comparison and remember that at the end of the day it’s going to be a Tory or Labour government.

Labour attempts to have processes to deal with complaints and concerns that are open enough that they are discussed and reported. They have recently updated these procedures in response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission into their dealing with antisemitism. This was Starmer’s first priority taking over. I’m sure they aren’t perfect but the aim is to have them reasonably independent and distinct from the leadership making proclamations.

On the other hand you have the democracy at the top of the Tory party that has given us Johnson and Truss. Look at the real world implications of that. And in terms of processes for complaints; what are they? They just deal with the scandal after it breaks. Think ‘Pincher by name, pincher by nature’. And they end up with scandal after scandal from tractor porn to serious sexual misconduct.

The fact that the Labour Party is more democratic is being weaponised here, because Starmer simply can’t just decide who is in each seat, no further questions thanks.
 
Wellsy said:
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?

There's a big difference between letting someone be in the party and trusting them to stand for parliament and be in the parliamentary party.

Abbott lost the whip for writing stupid things in the Observer and not running it by the press office. When she had the whip restored she got straight on the phone to the BBC to slag off the leadership during a GE campaign.

Party discipline, especially during campaigning, is really important. As much as Abbott may have some admirable qualities and achievements she's proven herself a liability.
 
stone said:
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.

I feel there's a massive leap from thinking that the Labour leadership is handling some of the candidate selection in a way which is at least inept (given how it's blown up in their faces) and possibly unfair to thinking that they're a threat to democracy in the UK or in any way even vaguely comparable to Saddam Hussein!

Also, they're not the party threatening to repeal human rights law, campaigning against the right of the courts to over-rule their illegal decisions, removing protest rights, introducing photo ID requirements with the explicit intent of suppressing votes from groups that tend not to vote for them, etc. etc.., so in terms of the long-term preservation of democratic institutions, I'd be rather more concerned about the other lot.
 
monkoffunk said:
Lets look at the comparison and remember that at the end of the day it’s going to be a Tory or Labour government.

No it isn't. It's going to be a labour government. The only doubt is the size of their majority. The defence of this bullshit by the "centrists" is pretty awful.
 

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