Stop voting for fucking Tories

[_Os_]

- No to more houses. Because 99% of them are the wrong houses in the wrong locations. Yes to ending the BTL madness, making homes homes rather than investments for the few and normalising house prices to young people can get out or rented and into ownership.

Since 1970 France has built 17m homes, the UK has built 7m (numbers may be slightly off, I'm going on memory, but it will not be by much). French and UK economies, demographics, population growth, are all very comparable. France has had house price inflation half that of the UK.

That's all from a (lengthy) report I read years ago authored by a Tory MP during the May era. He's still an MP now and was willingly part of the Johnson government, he knows the issues and he doesn't care. What I don't think it said (again from memory, it was years ago), was the reason France has built more is because the UK government stopped building houses during the Thatcher era and instead relied on the private sector.

The housing crisis is fixed by the UK government making sure there's 500k houses built each year for at least a decade, even if that means the state building at a loss if necessary. Or not and it's the Hong Kong solution, which means an average house price reaching £1m, people starting families later or not at all (because they cannot afford it) and mass inward migration to fill the gaps. The Tories are implementing option two, because their supporters demand their house price increase every single year and nothing is built anywhere near them.

[Paddington Bear]

Houses are built in the wrong locations because planning restrictions prevent building in the right ones. So change the restrictions. London could be much denser and has the infrastructure to support it.

[Ovals]

I know robmatic is being facetious but I do believe it's true that the right in the UK and the USA are more likely to vote for their main party over anything else, while the left in both countries is more fractious with loyalty to policy + ideology far more than party. Obviously not all Tory voters are ignorant tribalists. Some of them are ignorant _racist_ tribalists.

I jest. I mean that as a country who has largely voted Conservative since the war, we have a large number of voters who are happy with the status quo and who are either actively against changing that or just passively happy to vote how they've always voted. Meanwhile the left and some of the centre is full of people with very different opinions on how things need to change, with 2 major parties and at least 1 minor one (Greens) that vie for their votes.

I would add that the Labour manifesto was a mistake as they basically threw in every single thing they can think of plus several that clearly did not make any sense, completely failing to understand that credibility was Labour and Corbyn's biggest problem. They hadn't properly campaigned on this stuff prior to the election run and when they did unveil it, it was met with understandable skepticism.

I know plenty of Momentum types who are all WELL JEREMY WOULD'VE DONE X but there's a big difference between having something in your manifesto and being able to deliver it, and Labour under Corbyn had the double whammy of having a muddled mess of a manifesto and no public confidence they could deliver on it.

I am 'tribally' a Labour voter - but I wouldn't vote for them while Corbyn and Momentum were running the party.

[JM2K6]

It's more I can't be bothered to argue about it. If you're willing to have a PM who takes Russia's side on a chemical attack in a British city and indeed the side of terrorists against Britain on a number of occasions the fact that you are not personally corrupt does not make you a moral choice. This is before we get onto the anti-Semitism and I could go on further, but as I say what's the point? He lost and deserved to lose, and 'I voted Labour not Corbyn' is a cop out you would not allow for someone who voted Tory but not Boris. Bar a real turnaround under a new leader, the Tories will suffer the same fate soon enough.

Never go full Bimbo.

It is not a cop-out - I would not allow for someone who voted Tory because the Tories have been in power for 12 years and are fully responsible for the mess we are in, which is a very different thing to your tabloid version of Corbyn's failings meaning anyone voting Labour is complicit. I don't think Corbyn was a perfectly moral person. I think history has shown that the guy who said stupid fucking idiot things regarding Russia and terrorist groups is still wildly less compromised than Boris and a big chunk of the current Tory mob. I think a Labour government would have been a massive improvement over the Tories.

Trying to equate voting for Labour - who if nothing else were representing a chance to change the status quo after several years of awful austerity and a Tory shift to the right - with voting for the Tories after all the shit they've said, done, and tried to hide, with all the blood on their hands, their looting of the country, and their conversion of Brexit to a hardcore Libertarian dream, is absolutely fucking mad.

This is in no way full bimbo. Passing off Corbyn's lifetime foreign policy judgements that continued during a chemical attack on Britain as just saying stupid things is disingenuous given he could have been PM during the Ukraine war. Roughly 30% of people will vote for either main party regardless of who their frontman is or what their record is, and pretending not to understand this is daft.

Claiming that voting for a party is voting for the head of that party with no other considerations, while attacking anyone who voted Labour, is indeed going full bimbo. It is your stated opinion that everyone on here who voted Labour in the last election is as bad as anyone who votes Tory now. That is offensive nonsense. It is also disingenuous to reframe your argument as "pretending to not understand that 30% of people will vote for either main party regardless... is daft", especially as I have explicitly said that there are plenty of people who will vote 'their' way and I believe it's more cohesive on the right. Your framing is an argument I've never made.

Corbyn did just say stupid things. Because he wasn't in a position to do anything else. I am not defending his record on foreign policy; I agree it would've been a real problem. I think his archaic and sadly stereotypical fringe-left views on certain groups is one of the major weaknesses of him and his supporters. I also think they bear comparison with how compromised by Russia is turns out the Tories are - it's one thing to say a bunch of a shit, it's another to block reports and actively assist the "enemy". We can only speculate on Corbyn, but we know the truth about the Tories.

Look, I appreciate you didn't want to argue about this and I accept that your view of Corbyn is more extreme than I am willing to go along with. To me that is less important than the declaration that anyone voting for the opposition at the time - who put forward a pipedream of social improvement as their manifesto - are as tribal as those voting Tory now. It genuinely misunderstands why people vote in the first place. If nothing else, Corbyn being Labour leader explicitly gave the lie to the idea that we just vote for the guy in charge. We don't. It's not a Presidential election. Plenty of people with reason to dislike Corbyn and his crew voted Labour, because a) they (we) genuinely believed Labour to be a positive alternative to a frankly horrific Tory party, and b) policies matter and comparing the two manifestos AND the direction of traffic with regards to Brexit meant we were facing a choice with incredible consequences for the future of our country.

Voting Labour was definitely tribal for some people. Momentum and co for sure. But there's also plenty of people on that side of the divide who had previously voted Labour who voted Lib Dem, or Greens, because they better represented what people wanted out of a new government. The same can't be said on the right - Brexit essentially swallowed up UKIP so now you have the Tories, and then genuine far right groups that are getting no traction because the Tories keep stealing their thunder.

I voted Labour. I argued with Bimbo about this, who used the same lines as you only in a more personal fashion - accusing me of voting for a terrorist sympathiser, a Russian stooge (oh, the irony!), an anti-semite, and an existential threat to the UK (even more irony!). You want to know what's really funny? Bimbo bragged about joining Labour and voting for Corbyn to be leader.

The idea that I voted Labour out of tribalism when I've voted for every major party at one point or another is absolutely bonkers. Unless by tribalism you mean "recognised the damage the Tories had done and would continue to do and wanted to vote for the best option to replace them".

[JM2K6]

I know robmatic is being facetious but I do believe it's true that the right in the UK and the USA are more likely to vote for their main party over anything else, while the left in both countries is more fractious with loyalty to policy + ideology far more than party. Obviously not all Tory voters are ignorant tribalists. Some of them are ignorant _racist_ tribalists.

More or less. Liberalism and socialism are definable universal ideologies, you can tell if someone/something passes the smell test or not, there's little that's context dependent. Conservativism is not like that, a conservative in Saudi Arabia isn't the same as in the UK, it's almost entirely context dependent. In the UK people were told conservativism was about protecting the institutions of the state almost unchanged and about moderation in any changes which were made. When it became about supporting the implementation of the most extreme utopian version of Brexit no matter what, demolishing conventions and ignoring parts of the UK's unwritten constitution with no teeth (which is most of it), even making international treaties with the intention of breaking them almost immediately. People still supported the Tories much as they had before, because "context dependent" is another way of saying "identity". It's the identity of many English people to support the Tories regardless of what they do, the smell test for them is "Tory, yes or no?".

This happens with Labour to, but as the polling shows it afflicts far less people. Corbyn's Labour was polling in the low twenties through much of 2019.

I jest. I mean that as a country who has largely voted Conservative since the war, we have a large number of voters who are happy with the status quo and who are either actively against changing that or just passively happy to vote how they've always voted.

This is the big problem the UK has, the attitude of much of the UK electorate is that any problems are small. A large chunk of the UK electorate (60+, home owners, Tory voters) simply doesn't understand the long term structural damage something like the housing crisis is doing, the only solution is to increase house building substantially which this group of voters opposes. The Tories cater to this group because they're its members, so Mordaunt/Truss/Badenoch have all criticised house building targets and Sunak has waffled some stuff about increasing building in cities like Mordaunt/Truss have. It's the same on every issue. If the Tories remain in power it's a certainty the problems keep getting larger and less solvable. The Tory plan seems to be to turn the UK into Hong Kong, which is a dystopia (massive monopolisation of the private sector, higher cost of living than other East Asian cities, not enough house building therefore insane property prices and people living in literal cages the size of a bed, total death of the manufacturing sector because the government refused to support it, large inward migration from China).

How much to write my posts for me? I have some savings still

[Torquemada 1420]

- No to more houses. Because 99% of them are the wrong houses in the wrong locations. Yes to ending the BTL madness, making homes homes rather than investments for the few and normalising house prices to young people can get out or rented and into ownership.

Since 1970 France has built 17m homes, the UK has built 7m (numbers may be slightly off, I'm going on memory, but it will not be by much). French and UK economies, demographics, population growth, are all very comparable. France has had house price inflation half that of the UK.

That's all from a (lengthy) report I read years ago authored by a Tory MP during the May era. He's still an MP now and was willingly part of the Johnson government, he knows the issues and he doesn't care. What I don't think it said (again from memory, it was years ago), was the reason France has built more is because the UK government stopped building houses during the Thatcher era and instead relied on the private sector.

The housing crisis is fixed by the UK government making sure there's 500k houses built each year for at least a decade, even if that means the state building at a loss if necessary. Or not and it's the Hong Kong solution, which means an average house price reaching £1m, people starting families later or not at all (because they cannot afford it) and mass inward migration to fill the gaps. The Tories are implementing option two, because their supporters demand their house price increase every single year and nothing is built anywhere near them.

I'm afraid you've largely not understood the root causes of the problems and used a mainly invalid comparison.

1) Something like 5% or more properties in France are owned and occupied by none French nationals i.e. basically foreigners who retire there. Also, a lot of those properties are in places the French don't actually want to live in : your quaint, countryside, barn conversion. Mainly because that's not where the jobs are. That's nothing like the picture in the UK.

2) You don't say what types of homes have been built, but I can tell you that
- a significant portion in France would be low cost housing. Especially flats. Take a look at the urbanisation North of St Denis which practically reaches CDG now. Cheap(er) homes in places where work exists.
- in the UK, f**k all has been affordable housing. Most of it has been your "3-5 bed executive homes"....... because that makes the builders the most profits. The wrong houses (few flats) and mostly in the South.... rather than trying to (re)generate the North and so you end up with economic migration from places where all round cost of living was lower to where it's much higher.......... ergo they can't afford it.

3) In France (and most of the world other than the US)**, banks sensibly limit the LTV you can have on mortgages. You really don't see much more than 75% LTV and the notion of BTL mortgages barely exists. In the UK, we had banks lending up to 110% LTV on BTLs with no earned income requirement on the borrower. Consequences?
- the UK has seen massive property price inflation
- fuelled by cheap debt made available to property speculators to drive prices up because it was easier for them to borrow than genuine buyers
- which has locked low incomes and younger people (I say young: average age of first time buyer in 34 FFS!) out of the market. It's not the lack of homes: it's the lack of the right homes at affordable prices.

4) Unless something is done to curtail the BTL market (e.g. for decades I have advocated a max LTV on 2nd properties of 50%), building more homes will solve f**k all. They'll simply continue to be bought by BTL speculators (as they have done for 30+ years now) and nothing will change. Unless supply exceeds demand i.e. you advocate building so many houses that you collapse the prices that way.

5) The UK Govt stopped building houses because Thatcher sold off the council housing stock. Cheap. Here's a graphic I did from a research doc I wrote around 2010 but updated in 2020.


Ownership is falling. Rented (BTL) is on the march. Council housing has been obliterated.

** The route cause of the banking crash which was down to the US and UK banks' lending policies.

[_Os_]

More or less. Liberalism and socialism are definable universal ideologies, you can tell if someone/something passes the smell test or not, there's little that's context dependent. Conservativism is not like that, a conservative in Saudi Arabia isn't the same as in the UK, it's almost entirely context dependent.

Not convinced this is true. A liberal reformer in Saudi would have almost nothing in common with a liberal in the West.

It would depend which era in the West you were comparing to, even then the basics would be shared with liberals in the West today (more individual liberty not less).

There's not many conservatives in the West which would be pro what Islamic conservatives want, even the rough outline is completely different. The starting point for an Islamic conservative is theocracy to the exclusion of all else which is heretical and subject to harsh punishment. Conservatism is very different even in comparable and contemporary countries, Rittenhouse killed multiple people in a place he didn't need to be and is a hero and celebrity among US conservatives for doing it, the closest the UK has to him is Tony Martin and it's not really the same at all. Not hard to imagine a Rittenhouse in the UK being condemned as an extreme far right terrorist (by all) and being jailed for life.

[I like neeps]

Also it's laughable to bring up the Salisbury chemical weapons attacks because the Tories did sweet FA. Kicked out the diplomats for a week and continued as is building ever stronger links with dodgy members of the Kremlin for some monies.

Corbyn's response was pathetic but the Tories who were leading the country and could act yet decided not to because acting in a way to upset Russia was against their interests was even worse.

[Torquemada 1420]

Claiming that voting for a party is voting for the head of that party with no other considerations,

I don't want to overly simplify your argument with Bear but isn't that basically the position the UK has reached post Blair i.e. the US system of politics of personality with a total disregard to policy?

[JM2K6]

Not really, Torq. Personality has a big role to play but we've had multiple changes of PM and changes in direction without that person explicitly being elected leader by the nation. Policy still matters. Frankly even with Boris it mattered - it's just that the policy was "GET BREXIT DONE" without any substance.

(And also plenty of people voted for Labour because of the alternative they were offering to the Tories, not because they wanted to vote for the Magic Grandpa)

[Rhubarb & Custard]

I am 'tribally' a Labour voter - but I wouldn't vote for them while Corbyn and Momentum were running the party.

I'd be pretty much a Lib Dem voter and if presented with a choice tomorrow of Corbyn or Boris the sad, feckless, amoral, lying, corrupt clown I'd still pick Boris.

Maybe in time Labour can move the public to a position where sufficient number support Momentum and a candidate they'd want such as Corbyn, but it's a very hard sell in the here and now

[_Os_]

- No to more houses. Because 99% of them are the wrong houses in the wrong locations. Yes to ending the BTL madness, making homes homes rather than investments for the few and normalising house prices to young people can get out or rented and into ownership.

Since 1970 France has built 17m homes, the UK has built 7m (numbers may be slightly off, I'm going on memory, but it will not be by much). French and UK economies, demographics, population growth, are all very comparable. France has had house price inflation half that of the UK.

That's all from a (lengthy) report I read years ago authored by a Tory MP during the May era. He's still an MP now and was willingly part of the Johnson government, he knows the issues and he doesn't care. What I don't think it said (again from memory, it was years ago), was the reason France has built more is because the UK government stopped building houses during the Thatcher era and instead relied on the private sector.

The housing crisis is fixed by the UK government making sure there's 500k houses built each year for at least a decade, even if that means the state building at a loss if necessary. Or not and it's the Hong Kong solution, which means an average house price reaching £1m, people starting families later or not at all (because they cannot afford it) and mass inward migration to fill the gaps. The Tories are implementing option two, because their supporters demand their house price increase every single year and nothing is built anywhere near them.

I'm afraid you've largely not understood the root causes of the problems and used a mainly invalid comparison.

1) Something like 5% or more properties in France are owned and occupied by none French nationals i.e. basically foreigners who retire there. Also, a lot of those properties are in places the French don't actually want to live in : your quaint, countryside, barn conversion. Mainly because that's not where the jobs are. That's nothing like the picture in the UK.

2) You don't say what types of homes have been built, but I can tell you that
- a significant portion in France would be low cost housing. Especially flats. Take a look at the urbanisation North of St Denis which practically reaches CDG now. Cheap(er) homes in places where work exists.
- in the UK, f**k all has been affordable housing. Most of it has been your "3-5 bed executive homes"....... because that makes the builders the most profits. The wrong houses (few flats) and mostly in the South.... rather than trying to (re)generate the North and so you end up with economic migration from places where all round cost of living was lower to where it's much higher.......... ergo they can't afford it.

3) In France (and most of the world other than the US)**, banks sensibly limit the LTV you can have on mortgages. You really don't see much more than 75% LTV and the notion of BTL mortgages barely exists. In the UK, we had banks lending up to 110% LTV on BTLs with no earned income requirement on the borrower. Consequences?
- the UK has seen massive property price inflation
- fuelled by cheap debt made available to property speculators to drive prices up because it was easier for them to borrow than genuine buyers
- which has locked low incomes and younger people (I say young: average age of first time buyer in 34 FFS!) out of the market. It's not the lack of homes: it's the lack of the right homes at affordable prices.

4) Unless something is done to curtail the BTL market (e.g. for decades I have advocated a max LTV on 2nd properties of 50%), building more homes will solve f**k all. They'll simply continue to be bought by BTL speculators (as they have done for 30+ years now) and nothing will change. Unless supply exceeds demand i.e. you advocate building so many houses that you collapse the prices that way.

5) The UK Govt stopped building houses because Thatcher sold off the council housing stock. Cheap. Here's a graphic I did from a research doc I wrote around 2010 but updated in 2020.


Ownership is falling. Rented (BTL) is on the march. Council housing has been obliterated.

** The route cause of the banking crash which was down to the US and UK banks' lending policies.

The report also compared the UK to the Netherlands and I think Belgium and Germany, the correlation to "not enough houses built" was the same in all cases. I just focused on France because it's immediately more comparable to the UK without as many variables to get past/explain. There's a hard fact in all this, that the UK isn't building enough, it's not easy to get around.

1. Is it so different in the UK? There's a lot of second homes owned in the UK by UK residents (Wales and Cornwall particularly, as they can be reached from the South East without much hassle/expense). There's also foreign nationals buying UK property as an investment, the UK has created the structural conditions for house price inflation and a significant pool of the UK electorate loves (and basically demands) house price inflation. There's advertisements in SA to buy UK property as a pension option, some UK developers market first to Chinese/East Asian buyers. I don't think the UK is immune from foreign buyers and second home owners, I think it has purposely created the conditions to facilitate that.

2. Supports what I'm saying? If the state is going to build, it's going to be for ordinary people that want a house in their late teens/twenties (which is reasonable in a prosperous country, making people wait until their mid 30s isn't). Part of the reason this doesn't happen, seems to be just actively wanting young people to struggle tremendously hard so hard that they end up not even being young when they're financially able to start a family. In other words, that it doesn't happen again seems to be in large part because a significant pool of the UK (English?) electorate doesn't want it to happen.

3. 110% mortgages haven't existed since the GFC have they? You're correct that demand has been persistently fuelled (help to buy and low interest rates are also part of this, not just free money), with the outcome being higher prices.
Does "It's not the lack of homes: it's the lack of the right homes at affordable prices." make sense though? The market has provided what it has, so if you want something different it means point 2. Which means either the state building new homes, or the market being paid by the state (one way or another) to build new homes that meet the criteria you want (probably at greater cost than the state just building them).

4. I'm not sure at all that BTL is solely to blame for house price inflation, do you have any data on that? The UK building less than multiple comparable nations seems the root cause to me. Increasing supply to outstrip demand is the only solution I can see. It will end the psychology of a house being an investment and the illusion of people getting richer if their house price increases (when a house is still just one house, and is usually exchanged for another house of similar value).

5. Agree with that, and it's what I said too.

[Torquemada 1420]

3. 110% mortgages haven't existed since the GFC have they? You're correct that demand has been persistently fuelled (help to buy and low interest rates are also part of this, not just free money), with the outcome being higher prices.
Does "It's not the lack of homes: it's the lack of the right homes at affordable prices." make sense though? The market has provided what it has, so if you want something different it means point 2. Which means either the state building new homes, or the market being paid by the state (one way or another) to build new homes that meet the criteria you want (probably at greater cost than the state just building them).

4. I'm not sure at all that BTL is solely to blame for house price inflation, do you have any data on that? The UK building less than multiple comparable nations seems the root cause to me. Increasing supply to outstrip demand is the only solution I can see. It will end the psychology of a house being an investment and the illusion of people getting richer if their house price increases (when a house is still just one house, and is usually exchanged for another house of similar value).

Short of time now so will stick to these 2.

It doesn't matter that 110% have gone. You can still get such high LTVs on BTLs that it's simply a matter of
- buy a BTL at max LTV
- wait a year or so for prices to rise, driven by BTLs
- remortgage to release the equity
- use the released cash as deposit for next BTL
- go back to 1...... except next time the cycle leads to 2 BTLs etc

Now, I know you are going to say "but surely home buyers/1st time buyers can rely on such lax lending policies (i.e. massive LTVs) to get in on the game too?". Answer. No. Because
- a home owner is restricted on the absolute sum borrowed based on a function of income (basically multiples). As house prices have soared in excess of wage inflation, the gap has accelerated.
- BTLs are measured on the prospective rental income from the property (usually what the AST says) and so the buyer can have zero earned income. And since rents rise with house prices (or faster), this gap never changes or actually became easier.
{EDIT} PS And no, you can't get a BTL and live in it yourself. Lenders won't even permit letting to your own family, even if on a commercial basis.

The market builds what there is a market for. 4-5 bed, "executive homes" which can be let as HMOs because that's where the biggest rental margins are. Take away the bias towards BTL and you change the market.

You are entirely wrong. The 2008 crash was pretty much down to the US and UK creating a leveraged, debt escalator predicated on house prices. Some part of the inflation was/is down to home owners benefiting from the same madness too i.e. low interest rates + high LTVs + high income multiple. If you are already on the ladder, then you are largely insulated from the problems that beset 1st time buyers because your own house acts as a hedge: sure, if you are moving up market, there is an £absolute bridge to gap but it's a rounding error cw what afflicts those locked out.

I'm afraid successive Govts have basically built the UK economy on the premise that the debt escalator can continue forever....... right up until the point enough Michael Banks asks for their savings back and the banks can't pay. Hello Northern Rock.

[Ovals]

PM's odds in free fall after the last round of voting - and Dizzy is now very close to Sunak in the betting - some bookies now installing her as favourite. I guess the thinking is that Dizzy will pick up the majority of Badenochs 59 votes in the next round.

And Bojo has withdrawn the whip from one of PM's supporters - So he can no longer vote !!

[Paddington Bear]

Never go full Bimbo.

It is not a cop-out - I would not allow for someone who voted Tory because the Tories have been in power for 12 years and are fully responsible for the mess we are in, which is a very different thing to your tabloid version of Corbyn's failings meaning anyone voting Labour is complicit. I don't think Corbyn was a perfectly moral person. I think history has shown that the guy who said stupid fucking idiot things regarding Russia and terrorist groups is still wildly less compromised than Boris and a big chunk of the current Tory mob. I think a Labour government would have been a massive improvement over the Tories.

Trying to equate voting for Labour - who if nothing else were representing a chance to change the status quo after several years of awful austerity and a Tory shift to the right - with voting for the Tories after all the shit they've said, done, and tried to hide, with all the blood on their hands, their looting of the country, and their conversion of Brexit to a hardcore Libertarian dream, is absolutely fucking mad.

This is in no way full bimbo. Passing off Corbyn's lifetime foreign policy judgements that continued during a chemical attack on Britain as just saying stupid things is disingenuous given he could have been PM during the Ukraine war. Roughly 30% of people will vote for either main party regardless of who their frontman is or what their record is, and pretending not to understand this is daft.

Claiming that voting for a party is voting for the head of that party with no other considerations, while attacking anyone who voted Labour, is indeed going full bimbo. It is your stated opinion that everyone on here who voted Labour in the last election is as bad as anyone who votes Tory now. That is offensive nonsense. It is also disingenuous to reframe your argument as "pretending to not understand that 30% of people will vote for either main party regardless... is daft", especially as I have explicitly said that there are plenty of people who will vote 'their' way and I believe it's more cohesive on the right. Your framing is an argument I've never made.

Corbyn did just say stupid things. Because he wasn't in a position to do anything else. I am not defending his record on foreign policy; I agree it would've been a real problem. I think his archaic and sadly stereotypical fringe-left views on certain groups is one of the major weaknesses of him and his supporters. I also think they bear comparison with how compromised by Russia is turns out the Tories are - it's one thing to say a bunch of a shit, it's another to block reports and actively assist the "enemy". We can only speculate on Corbyn, but we know the truth about the Tories.

Look, I appreciate you didn't want to argue about this and I accept that your view of Corbyn is more extreme than I am willing to go along with. To me that is less important than the declaration that anyone voting for the opposition at the time - who put forward a pipedream of social improvement as their manifesto - are as tribal as those voting Tory now. It genuinely misunderstands why people vote in the first place. If nothing else, Corbyn being Labour leader explicitly gave the lie to the idea that we just vote for the guy in charge. We don't. It's not a Presidential election. Plenty of people with reason to dislike Corbyn and his crew voted Labour, because a) they (we) genuinely believed Labour to be a positive alternative to a frankly horrific Tory party, and b) policies matter and comparing the two manifestos AND the direction of traffic with regards to Brexit meant we were facing a choice with incredible consequences for the future of our country.

Voting Labour was definitely tribal for some people. Momentum and co for sure. But there's also plenty of people on that side of the divide who had previously voted Labour who voted Lib Dem, or Greens, because they better represented what people wanted out of a new government. The same can't be said on the right - Brexit essentially swallowed up UKIP so now you have the Tories, and then genuine far right groups that are getting no traction because the Tories keep stealing their thunder.

I voted Labour. I argued with Bimbo about this, who used the same lines as you only in a more personal fashion - accusing me of voting for a terrorist sympathiser, a Russian stooge (oh, the irony!), an anti-semite, and an existential threat to the UK (even more irony!). You want to know what's really funny? Bimbo bragged about joining Labour and voting for Corbyn to be leader.

The idea that I voted Labour out of tribalism when I've voted for every major party at one point or another is absolutely bonkers. Unless by tribalism you mean "recognised the damage the Tories had done and would continue to do and wanted to vote for the best option to replace them".

It is somewhat rich to take criticism of political views personally, and bizarre to bring Bimbo's ramblings into something that I have not, and did not, engage with. Not to mention there are at best a couple of very bad faith interpretations of what I wrote above.
If you took my post personally please don't, it wasn't directed as a dig at you. The last election was a shitshow with no good outcomes, only differing bad ones. How people judged those varied.
Voting Labour for social improvement despite Corbyn is fine, I wonder if you'd treat someone voting Tory because of their Ukraine policy so kindly.

Anyway, appreciate you always want the last word but not convinced we're going anywhere here.

[Paddington Bear]

More or less. Liberalism and socialism are definable universal ideologies, you can tell if someone/something passes the smell test or not, there's little that's context dependent. Conservativism is not like that, a conservative in Saudi Arabia isn't the same as in the UK, it's almost entirely context dependent.

Not convinced this is true. A liberal reformer in Saudi would have almost nothing in common with a liberal in the West.

It would depend which era in the West you were comparing to, even then the basics would be shared with liberals in the West today (more individual liberty not less).

There's not many conservatives in the West which would be pro what Islamic conservatives want, even the rough outline is completely different. The starting point for an Islamic conservative is theocracy to the exclusion of all else which is heretical and subject to harsh punishment. Conservatism is very different even in comparable and contemporary countries, Rittenhouse killed multiple people in a place he didn't need to be and is a hero and celebrity among US conservatives for doing it, the closest the UK has to him is Tony Martin and it's not really the same at all. Not hard to imagine a Rittenhouse in the UK being condemned as an extreme far right terrorist (by all) and being jailed for life.

I'm not disagreeing that British Conservatism has it's own unique history and ideology compared to the US and others. Indeed I think a lot of us wish they'd rediscover more of it and remember they're not in Kentucky. The same is true of all ideologies though. Labour owing more to Methodism than Marx is a uniquely British form of socialism, for example.

[JM2K6]

It is somewhat rich to take criticism of political views personally, and bizarre to bring Bimbo's ramblings into something that I have not, and did not, engage with. Not to mention there are at best a couple of very bad faith interpretations of what I wrote above.
If you took my post personally please don't, it wasn't directed as a dig at you. The last election was a shitshow with no good outcomes, only differing bad ones. How people judged those varied.
Voting Labour for social improvement despite Corbyn is fine, I wonder if you'd treat someone voting Tory because of their Ukraine policy so kindly.

Anyway, appreciate you always want the last word but not convinced we're going anywhere here.

It's not criticism of political views to say that anyone voting for Labour when Corbyn was in charge was as tribal as anyone voting Tory now. Nor is it a criticism of political views to position voting for Labour under Corbyn as an immoral choice. At no point are the views themselves mentioned or critiqued. If you want to criticise my political views, go ahead! I haven't posted many, but I'm always keen to discuss.

And I brought Bimbo into it exactly because he made the same argument as you did: that Labour voters at the election voted for Corbyn, and that a vote for Corbyn meant a vote for a terrorist sympathiser, an anti-semite, and a Russian stooge. It's pretty easy to draw the line between those statements, no? As I said, Bimbo turned it into a personal attack, despite having actually cast a vote for Jeremy Corbyn to take control of one of the major UK political parties. I didn't say you attacked me personally, but it's very clear that you believe anyone who voted for Labour when Corbyn was in charge was making an immoral choice and you condemned voting for Labour then as being the same as voting for the Tories now. Which is patently absurd.

Someone voting Tory because of their Ukraine policy would baffle me somewhat - there's no sign any major party would do anything differently to the Tories. But I appreciate there's a difference between "probably would do the same thing" and "did actually do it".

We aren't going anywhere because you don't seem willing to examine your statements about the people who voted for Labour, which is what kicked all this off. I've tried to explain several times why it's quite different to voting for this Government again, but all you're prepared to do is rattle off your complaints about Corbyn and act like a general election is an internal party leadership contest. So yeah, what's the point?

[petej]

Many corbyn policies many are normal in northern European countries. Labour did panic and chuck out too many when they realised they were in the shit due to corbyn's own personal ratings.

Last election was awful on the national security front. Corbyn has some very stupid/dangerous views and historic sympathies and Johnson was absolutely swimming in Russian money and contacts that are part of putin's regime. Having got rid of corbyn you need a change in government to clean out the tory party. If national security was a major concern with corbyn then it is with Johnson and the Tories. The large scale war (the war actually started in 2014) in Ukraine has forced action that should have been taken years ago.

[_Os_]

3. 110% mortgages haven't existed since the GFC have they? You're correct that demand has been persistently fuelled (help to buy and low interest rates are also part of this, not just free money), with the outcome being higher prices.
Does "It's not the lack of homes: it's the lack of the right homes at affordable prices." make sense though? The market has provided what it has, so if you want something different it means point 2. Which means either the state building new homes, or the market being paid by the state (one way or another) to build new homes that meet the criteria you want (probably at greater cost than the state just building them).

4. I'm not sure at all that BTL is solely to blame for house price inflation, do you have any data on that? The UK building less than multiple comparable nations seems the root cause to me. Increasing supply to outstrip demand is the only solution I can see. It will end the psychology of a house being an investment and the illusion of people getting richer if their house price increases (when a house is still just one house, and is usually exchanged for another house of similar value).

Short of time now so will stick to these 2.

It doesn't matter that 110% have gone. You can still get such high LTVs on BTLs that it's simply a matter of
- buy a BTL at max LTV
- wait a year or so for prices to rise, driven by BTLs
- remortgage to release the equity
- use the released cash as deposit for next BTL
- go back to 1...... except next time the cycle leads to 2 BTLs etc

Now, I know you are going to say "but surely home buyers/1st time buyers can rely on such lax lending policies (i.e. massive LTVs) to get in on the game too?". Answer. No. Because
- a home owner is restricted on the absolute sum borrowed based on a function of income (basically multiples). As house prices have soared in excess of wage inflation, the gap has accelerated.
- BTLs are measured on the prospective rental income from the property (usually what the AST says) and so the buyer can have zero earned income. And since rents rise with house prices (or faster), this gap never changes or actually became easier.
{EDIT} PS And no, you can't get a BTL and live in it yourself. Lenders won't even permit letting to your own family, even if on a commercial basis.

The market builds what there is a market for. 4-5 bed, "executive homes" which can be let as HMOs because that's where the biggest rental margins are. Take away the bias towards BTL and you change the market.

You are entirely wrong. The 2008 crash was pretty much down to the US and UK creating a leveraged, debt escalator predicated on house prices. Some part of the inflation was/is down to home owners benefiting from the same madness too i.e. low interest rates + high LTVs + high income multiple. If you are already on the ladder, then you are largely insulated from the problems that beset 1st time buyers because your own house acts as a hedge: sure, if you are moving up market, there is an £absolute bridge to gap but it's a rounding error cw what afflicts those locked out.

I'm afraid successive Govts have basically built the UK economy on the premise that the debt escalator can continue forever....... right up until the point enough Michael Banks asks for their savings back and the banks can't pay. Hello Northern Rock.

Torq you can't disagree with me saying "you are entirely wrong", by first agreeing with parts of my original reply, then ignoring those parts of my reply where I agree.

I'm familiar with the UK PRS. The reason why I'm sort of doubting BTL being the sole reason for house price inflation (above the UK building considerably less than in comparable nations), is the numbers don't really stack up for it. Most landlords have a portfolio of one property (this accounts for about 80% of all UK landlords), the reason for this is simple, they think it's easy money then they actually try it and discover it's fucking difficult, then they quit but keep the property they have already (the property could've been acquired to rent, or from something like forming a new household with their partner, either way the equation is "being a landlord is difficult = fuck that"). These are usually sold by the owner eventually and do not become a viable stand alone business. There's a lot of limiting factors on your BTL get rich quick scheme, not least the renovation/maintenance costs (do you want to buy at the ceiling price? Or do you want to buy at below ceiling price/renovate/remortage at ceiling?), what about voids (lost income), what about yield (there are some houses that aren't viable as renters, it's not a case of buy anything), as well as what you do mention like the time it takes to appreciate (it will not be 1 year). Only about 5% of UK landlords own more than 5 properties (and they account for about 40%-ish of the PRS, and not the majority last I checked). Nor is the PRS the majority of UK housing stock, it's about 20%. Lastly there hasn't been some astronomical rise of the landlords since the GFC, there's actually been a small decline in the amount of houses in the PRS over the last half decade or so (for many reasons, the short version is it's not easy money).

What you describe was true in the 2000s, it doesn't really hold up anymore though.

What's actually happening right now, is there's a shortage of houses to rent (because as I say, there's not enough houses full stop). People will fight over a house to rent, like other people do over buying a house.

[GogLais]

Many corbyn policies many are normal in northern European countries. Labour did panic and chuck out too many when they realised they were in the shit due to corbyn's own personal ratings.

Last election was awful on the national security front. Corbyn has some very stupid/dangerous views and historic sympathies and Johnson was absolutely swimming in Russian money and contacts that are part of putin's regime. Having got rid of corbyn you need a change in government to clean out the tory party. If national security was a major concern with corbyn then it is with Johnson and the Tories. The large scale war (the war actually started in 2014) in Ukraine has forced action that should have been taken years ago.

I went off Corbyn when he said that he'd never use nuclear weapons. Not because that's a major real-world issue for me but because he seemed to miss the point of deterrence, it still works even if your enemy isn't 100% certain that you'll use it.

[JM2K6]

Many corbyn policies many are normal in northern European countries. Labour did panic and chuck out too many when they realised they were in the shit due to corbyn's own personal ratings.

Last election was awful on the national security front. Corbyn has some very stupid/dangerous views and historic sympathies and Johnson was absolutely swimming in Russian money and contacts that are part of putin's regime. Having got rid of corbyn you need a change in government to clean out the tory party. If national security was a major concern with corbyn then it is with Johnson and the Tories. The large scale war (the war actually started in 2014) in Ukraine has forced action that should have been taken years ago.

I went off Corbyn when he said that he'd never use nuclear weapons. Not because that's a major real-world issue for me but because he seemed to miss the point of deterrence, it still works even if your enemy isn't 100% certain that you'll use it.

Oh yes, it was dumb as fuck but hE hAs PrInCiPlEs

[_Os_]

Not convinced this is true. A liberal reformer in Saudi would have almost nothing in common with a liberal in the West.

It would depend which era in the West you were comparing to, even then the basics would be shared with liberals in the West today (more individual liberty not less).

There's not many conservatives in the West which would be pro what Islamic conservatives want, even the rough outline is completely different. The starting point for an Islamic conservative is theocracy to the exclusion of all else which is heretical and subject to harsh punishment. Conservatism is very different even in comparable and contemporary countries, Rittenhouse killed multiple people in a place he didn't need to be and is a hero and celebrity among US conservatives for doing it, the closest the UK has to him is Tony Martin and it's not really the same at all. Not hard to imagine a Rittenhouse in the UK being condemned as an extreme far right terrorist (by all) and being jailed for life.

I'm not disagreeing that British Conservatism has it's own unique history and ideology compared to the US and others. Indeed I think a lot of us wish they'd rediscover more of it and remember they're not in Kentucky. The same is true of all ideologies though. Labour owing more to Methodism than Marx is a uniquely British form of socialism, for example.

Going to have to agree to disagree I think. Both socialism and liberalism come from the enlightenment and are universal value sets, a socialist anywhere is going to be talking about worker's rights and nationalisation, a liberal anywhere is going to be talking about freedom of speech (in my Saudi Arabia example, I expect they're going to limit it by not condoning blasphemy, the direction is still more free speech) and individual rights through equality under the law (again the Saudi Arabia example is going to be about direction of travel). For both liberals and socialists there's a lot of built in presumptions about the state existing and what type of state it is, today under a liberal world order most states have a similar type of outline (like socialist states during the Cold War also had an outline similar to one another). Conservativism seems entirely different from one place/culture/civilisation to another, the presumptions of one conservativism aren't the same as another, the direction of travel and final destinations all look entirely different.

I think what happened to the UK was the liberal party died, and the two party system then forced liberalism into both the dominant parties (not precise, but good enough for a one liner). The religious impulse/background in Labour is more interesting maybe, in most other countries that fed into Christian conservatism or liberalism, those sorts of people (that today may not be religious at all) tend not to be regarded as socialist inside Labour though and are seen more as liberals.

[sefton]

The dream lives on.

LT for PM.

[petej]

The dream lives on.

LT for PM.

Dizzy lizzy for PM.

[_Os_]

The dream lives on.

LT for PM.

Dizzy lizzy for PM.

Looks like there could be enough Sunak supporters in the Badenoch group of MPs (including Gove and Badenoch?) for Sunak to pick the second place.

Polling doesn't show he's certain to win against either Mordaunt or Truss though. So who does he pick?

[C69]

Whoop whoop.... All aboard the Truss bus

[dpedin]

Whoop whoop.... All aboard the Truss bus

Given that for the vast majority of us the choice of next PM is a bit like having to choose which STD you want get off your mother I would love Truss to become PM. She is a dick head of huge proportions and will get eaten alive at PMQs. She is nothing more than a useless puppet PM for the ERG and big Tory funders and will be a monumental failure.

[fishfoodie]

Does the Bumblecunt play the violin ?



When he was Mayor, he closed down Fire Stations, & he missed all the COBRA meetings, because he preferred to scratch his arse, & go for a joyride in a Typhoon.

[dpedin]

Does the Bumblecunt play the violin ?



When he was Mayor, he closed down Fire Stations, & he missed all the COBRA meetings, because he preferred to scratch his arse, & go for a joyride in a Typhoon.

He knows a violinist very intimately apparently!

[petej]

Does the Bumblecunt play the violin ?



When he was Mayor, he closed down Fire Stations, & he missed all the COBRA meetings, because he preferred to scratch his arse, & go for a joyride in a Typhoon.

Surprised he could fit in a typhoon but I guess you could squash him into a cockpit and the flight suit will hold him in place.

[tabascoboy]

Whoop whoop.... All aboard the Truss bus

Given that for the vast majority of us the choice of next PM is a bit like having to choose which STD you want get off your mother I would love Truss to become PM. She is a dick head of huge proportions and will get eaten alive at PMQs. She is nothing more than a useless puppet PM for the ERG and big Tory funders and will be a monumental failure.

Pork markets!

[fishfoodie]

Does the Bumblecunt play the violin ?



When he was Mayor, he closed down Fire Stations, & he missed all the COBRA meetings, because he preferred to scratch his arse, & go for a joyride in a Typhoon.

Surprised he could fit in a typhoon but I guess you could squash him into a cockpit and the flight suit will hold him in place.

They probably took out the ejector seat, & strapped him into a child seat.

Someone probably had to disconnect every electrical system in the rear as well ...

[C69]

Truss is now the bookies favourite

[Paddington Bear]

Ukrainians dropping strong hints that they prefer Truss to Sunak.

[ASMO]

rishi.jpg (48.52 KiB) Viewed 1759 times

[robmatic]

Truss is now the bookies favourite

In some ways it's funny but she will actually be running the country and imagine how shoddy the Cabinet will be.

[GogLais]

Ukrainians dropping strong hints that they prefer Truss to Sunak.

My support for Ukraine may start to wane if they tie themselves too closely to the Tories.

[C69]

Ukrainians dropping strong hints that they prefer Truss to Sunak.

My support for Ukraine may start to wane if they tie themselves too closely to the Tories.

Locking up 600 Russian spies does not look good either.

[Hal Jordan]

The dream lives on.

LT for PM.

I had a dream like that last night. My arm was bleeding and I couldn't staunch the flow, and no one cared. Fun!

[Mahoney]

Mordaunt focussing on the stuff that matters: