The Coalition of Expensive Chaos

[Ian_Wrexham]

So the autumn spending review yesterday from Osbourne, in the end looks like a review that wouldn't have looked out of place coming from an Ed Balls Labour chancellorship. Somehow think that basing welfare policy on £20Bn in additional revenue forecast by the OBR to be a little dangerous. OBR forecasts change from quarter to quarter and it's a risk that goes against Osbourne's usual style. But it was convenient timing for Osbourne that he could do rather a U turn on the tax credits issue, and steady the Police budget, theoretically without having to find money from elsewhere. Theoretically. It washes over the complete and utter hash Osbourne made of the tax credit issue.

Somehow think we'll see Osbourne becoming less and less 'Mr Nasty' as this Parliament goes on, and the Conservative leadership election and thus potential future Prime Minstership comes up for debate. Mr Nasty would win favour in some parts of the Tories and less in others, but is less likely to be popular with the electorate. Compared with Boris, would probably offer everyone the moon on a stick including a free space hopper for all.

As for John McDonnell's Chairman Mao book stunt, that was... weird... Almost like he didn't fancy actually debating anything of substance. Totally side tracked and distracted from what was an opportunity for Labour to crow about a statement they actually got some concessions from. Also gave the Tories an easy laugh / comeback. What was going through McDonnell's head?

The spending review is frightening because it shows how little grip Osborne has on economics. It also shows that the Tories are abandoning any commitment even to their own ideological positions.

Scary thing number one: Housing. The Tories are making steps to superheat the London housing bubble even further than it is at the moment. That will inevitably lead to increased rental pressure and further rent increases. Councils are being forced to sell council housing and therefore more and more people will be made homeless.

People will say "move out of London" forgetting that that's not actually an option for many of the poorest Londoners. Moving away from support networks; childcare; jobs - it's simply not sustainable. So there's going to be more pressure on councils' temporary housing provision and that's being slashed. So what's going to happen is slums (this is happening at the moment). Massive over-occupancy. Horrible conditions. Poor states of repair. More and more rough sleeping (also happening at the moment).

The creation of a housing bubble is, of course, Osborne's primary engine of economic growth. Fictional growth driven by a asset bubble. It won't last, and the result of it will be that we'll have gone from slums to universal social housing and back to slums in about one lifetime.

 

[Alty]

The spending review is frightening because it shows how little grip Osborne has on economics. It also shows that the Tories are abandoning any commitment even to their own ideological positions.

Scary thing number one: Housing. The Tories are making steps to superheat the London housing bubble even further than it is at the moment. That will inevitably lead to increased rental pressure and further rent increases. Councils are being forced to sell council housing and therefore more and more people will be made homeless.

People will say "move out of London" forgetting that that's not actually an option for many of the poorest Londoners. Moving away from support networks; childcare; jobs - it's simply not sustainable. So there's going to be more pressure on councils' temporary housing provision and that's being slashed. So what's going to happen is slums (this is happening at the moment). Massive over-occupancy. Horrible conditions. Poor states of repair. More and more rough sleeping (also happening at the moment).

The creation of a housing bubble is, of course, Osborne's primary engine of economic growth. Fictional growth driven by a asset bubble. It won't last, and the result of it will be that we'll have gone from slums to universal social housing and back to slums in about one lifetime.

Can the council kick you out of a house if it needs to sell it? If so, how much notice must it give you? If you do get kicked out, how likely is it you won't qualify for housing benefit? If you don't (presumably because you have income or savings), I guess your only option is to rent somewhere smaller of further away?

What are some of the areas you'd count as slums, out of interest?

The London housing market genuinely baffles me. The current prices are bonkers and surely it's totally impossible for prices to just rise and rise and rise faster than people's incomes...and yet it just continues. Everywhere I go there are soulless looking, unaffordable (on our oh so meagre £65,000 household income) flats springing up and people buy them for over the asking price as soon as they go on the market.

 

[Pliny Harris]

I don't get it, I thought McDonnell handing the Little Red Book to across the floor was class. The humour was down to McDonnell, Corbs et al frequently getting the McCarthyite treatment, so it was a nice little wedgie to point out that we are selling off to the Chinese, communist-run state that Osborne to admires. And because the Tories couldn't run a raffle, they constantly want to shed every public asset from our nation as it's one of the only ways they know of temporarily avoiding financial disaster. To show that the closest party to Mao are the Tories therefore was a display of irony, which is a genre of humour. Naturally it was lost on them though because the last right-winger with a sense of humour was Kenny Everett, who died twenty years ago and wasn't exactly nuanced himself.

 

[Ian_Wrexham]

Can the council kick you out of a house if it needs to sell it? If so, how much notice must it give you? If you do get kicked out, how likely is it you won't qualify for housing benefit? If you don't (presumably because you have income or savings), I guess your only option is to rent somewhere smaller of further away?

Depends on the tenancy, but for most council tenants, the council can't just evict them. They can if the property is being demolished, but it's a fairly painful and costly process. In Elephant and Castle, the (now demolished) Heygate Estate, tenants who rejected (unsuitable) replacement homes were evicted. Virtually none of those tenants remain in Southwark. And even so, Southwark Council spent more removing tenants/leaseholders from the estate than they made selling the thing off to developers.

Councils are becoming much quicker to evict for arrears etc now. Seen people who've been model tenants be evicted when DWP has made a mistake in paying their housing benefit late and they've gone into arrears.

What are some of the areas you'd count as slums, out of interest?

Massively over-occupied houses in London's outer boroughs. Not an expert on this by any stretch, but places like Newham, Illford, Tottenham, Edmonton, Redbridge etc have large numbers of dangerously overcrowded properties. I would call those properties slum housing (though not the areas themselves). The councils barely enforce it.

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/lond...s-and-raked-in-100k-rent-a-year-a3107781.html

e.g. this example where someone has been fined twice for overcrowding in three years, yet was fined about a fifth of what he makes letting them out.

 

[silkyman]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...s-will-be-1600-a-year-worse-off-a6749831.html

 

[smat]

Nice of the Independent, who told everyone to vote for the Conservatives, to keep us abreast of the parlous household budgets they helped to destroy.

 

[silkyman]

Sells papers.

 

[Alty]

Nice of the Independent, who told everyone to vote for the Conservatives, to keep us abreast of the parlous household budgets they helped to destroy.

Be fair. They wanted the LDs to be in there too getting some policies through that at least nodded to notions of compassion and decency.

 

[smat]

Be fair. They wanted the LDs to be in there too getting some policies through that at least nodded to notions of compassion and decency.

Nah, they wanted to protect their billionaire owner's cash by keeping Labour out.

 

[The Paranoid Pineapple]

Tbf I rather doubt that editorial reflected the prevailing view of the Indie's beleaguered hacks.

There was a fairly unremarkable article in the Graun yesterday which contained the following passage

Today, the average house in the capital costs half a million pounds – more than you could borrow on the prime minister’s salary.

I'm not entirely sure about the veracity of that statement, but the fact that we're even talking in those sort of terms - that the PM of this country couldn't, were he not independently wealthy, afford to buy an average home in the nation's capital - is fucking bonkers.

 

[Dr Mantis Toboggan]

that's ludicrous

 

[silkyman]

Ah, democracy.

http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...cracy-disenfranchised-voters-boundary-changes

 

[Alty]

Ah, democracy.

http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...cracy-disenfranchised-voters-boundary-changes

I'm still unconvinced by the whining about voter registration. If you want to vote, register. I've had plenty of stuff through the post and a bloke came to the door on a Sunday evening (i.e. a time the vast majority of people would be home) to make sure we'd registered. This is in a Labour dominated part of Wandsworth.

Re boundaries...both big parties have been trying to shaft each other there for years. Just another reason we should bin off FPTP.

I agree with the thrust of the part about trade unions though.

 

[silkyman]

It does seem simple, but the fact is, if you ask a population to do something, then a certain % will forget, not be bothered, not think it applies to them or whatever.

Even the electoral commission think 1.9m people will just not vote next time. And that, along with all the other changes is playing right into the Tories hands.

On an individual level, yeah, it's not hard, but when you try and sweep the entire population, people will fall through the gap. And you can bet your right bollock that if those in power felt it was more likely to be Tory voters to miss out, they wouldn't be doing it.

 

[Aber gas]

while I agree that it's a cynical move by the government, Labour aren't helpless. This gives even more incentive for grass roots activists to get involved. Labour should be mobilising unregistered voters anyway with or without the changes. Whining about it achieves nothing.

 

[silkyman]

Whining about anything is the first step. You have to start out by being pissed off and getting other peop to know why you are pissed off.

Anyway....

Amber Rudd.

Ditch all subsidies, tax breaks and incentives that could encourage the UK to be world leaders in green tech, and kill off what could have been a huge indigenous industry...

And replace it with fracking the Peak District.

Brilliant....

Absolutely.

Fucking.

Brilliant.

 

[Pliny Harris]

I'm not one to form opinions on politics where science is involved until I have some sort of summary on the practice itself. Like you might hear a lot of BAN GM CROPS OMG here and NUCLEAR POWER = THE HOLOCAUST there, and if I'm honest I do respect opposition to both, but I think both in and of themselves, used in the correct manner, are very good things indeed. So because I've never been properly arsed by looking into fracking, I can't sincerely be against it. What I do hear isn't great, but I'm always so suspicious as laypeople tend to make emotional and fear-based decisions on current affairs in science. I shadowed my brother selling solar panels for a few days this summer and even the occasional fear surrounding a few silicon plates locked onto your roof is very strange, all these people who'd implicitly prefer half of Siberia to be layered in slag and ash over any new technology. I'm sure fracking's not as simple as that, but does anyone have decent resources on its advantages and disadvantages?

 

[Ebeneezer Goode]

I'm far too lazy for that. I can tell you that the downsides range from earthquakes to water you can set on fire though.

 

[SUTSS]

It is also very short termist when we should be looking at weaning ourselves off fossil fuels and embracing renewable energy but then we are crippled by short termist thinking by government and have been for some time.

 

[silkyman]

http://m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/8837776

 

[HertsWolf]

I'm far too lazy for that. I can tell you that the downsides range from earthquakes to water you can set on fire though.

The "earthquakes" from fracking are less than the rumble of a passing lorry and less in frequency and intensity than from geothermal power stations which is.... ummm... popular.
Water you can set on fire? Really?

 

[AFCB_Mark]

I was recently at a birthday party for a friend who's misses and in law family are (self labeled) rather hippy hard left types. Made for interesting conversation. The highlight for me being when discussing energy, I was pretty much labeled as utter scum for my interest in the (slow) development of nuclear fusion technology.

That'd be the goal of non toxic waste producing, non greenhouse gas producing, consistent and uninterrupted nuclear fusion reactors that are based around deuterium which comes from sea water.

No amount of attempting to explain the difference between fission and fusion helped. It's a little complicated and has the word 'Nuclear' in it = it's evil and anyone who supports it is sub human scum.

Regarding the end to certain green tech subsidies, I can understand the point about having to make them commercially viable and stand on their own merits at some point, not least to encourage innovation. But a more gradual phased reduction over a period of years would surely have been preferable. It's an area with a slow developmental lead time and it's not an industry that can react particularly quickly. I think the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.

 

[Mr. Scruff]

Yep to some on the left the word nuclear brings about the same connotations as 'asylum seeker' does for the right. Just as you struggled we often fail to get through that an illegal economic immigrant and a person fleeing for their life probably arent the same thing.

I'm about as lefty as you can get but I'd probably say that on balance

A- Nuclear weapons have probably been a good thing for the world.

B- Nuclear fission even with it's drawbacks, is a necessary evil right now.

That said, Trident is a huge waste of money that needs scrapping

 

[Ebeneezer Goode]

The "earthquakes" from fracking are less than the rumble of a passing lorry and less in frequency and intensity than from geothermal power stations which is.... ummm... popular.
Water you can set on fire? Really?

Indeedily

 

[Cheese & Biscuits]

Well bugger me.

 

[silkyman]

Mainly in the north, of course.

 

[silkyman]

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/george-osbornes-officials-blocking-emergency-7087871

 

[AFCB_Mark]

If that were true and reported in proper wider media, it'd be catastrophic for government opinion, because it's ridiculous.
And all that for the sake of holding up £60m, maybe rising to £100m or something, which is peanuts in the grand scheme.
I could believe that government / bureaucratic incompetence in organisation could delay the the money though, that would seem entirely possible.

 

[silkyman]

The wider media won't report it because they are up each others' arses.

 

[silkyman]

http://i100.independent.co.uk/artic...s-afraid-of-anal-sex-in-the-1980s--ZkKC5dt5sl

She was bang up for it in the 70s, though...