The developers will make a packet, and the houses will be unsaleable in less than 100 years as the population shrinks, having had irreversible environmental impact. Utilising our existing housing better and not building quite as many new homes would surely be a better solution?

I suppose it depends whether you’re talking about “over housing” in relation to homelessness or space for stuff … But mass house building is not going to the floor space issue. We could build all the houses you want but they will be as tiny as developers can get away with.

I’m proffering an element of nuance to your blanket declaration. You have written off facts and statistics that don’t suit your narrative, that you simply “don’t accept”, and make assumptions about causation without giving weight to any other factors. That takes confidence.

I admire your determined subjectivity.

Housing is one of the factors (but absolutely not the only one). I agree we haven’t built enough in the right places (hence it’s great that they’re reviewing the “green belt”). But, by every metric I can find, we are also over housed across the board, including where people want and need to live.

Interesting. 90k is probably not accurate (the sourcing and analysis are unhelpfully opaque) but even if it were a 200% overestimation, it still confirms a serious over-housing issue. What it’s not is a solution.
Unsure what you mean by “not independent variables”.

Some of it is just maths - for example central London has over 90k vacant residential properties. And you’re right - we’ve been building cheap housing where we can rather than where it’s needed.
Thought experiment - how many of your friend with kids at home live in bigger homes than their parents?

Failing to counter this ludicrous narrative of British Exceptionalism and overwhelming exploitative immigration is bad enough. Legislation like this give credence to it, and it’s only a short hop to the Great Replacement Theory rabbit hole. Moderates pandering to the right is what lets in fascism.

You’re right. There is already a wealth of unfit housing! But that’s mostly down to unscrupulous landlords and overstretched councils. And commercial housebuilding has a place, but so does shifting the cultural reluctance to recognise personal over-housing and consider downsizing.

I’ve worked with people affected by the housing shortage and homelessness, mostly those with disabled children. It’s appalling.

What are the environmental impacts of construction materials? Understand the embodied ecological impacts of key construction materials like iron, aluminium and concrete.

If you can’t get your head around the environmental impact of mass building (or care), then perhaps consider the expense of it. We import 60% building material constituents.
I’m merely saying we should collectively recognise we could mitigate the problem if we wanted to.
ukgbc.org/news/introdu...

I understand that. But quite a lot are. Relying exclusively on building more houses is a VERY resource hungry way of fixing the problem. Particularly as the population is set to start shrinking in about 20 years (a deadline that is only ever revised down).

Even if every person in the country had their own bedroom (including married couples) and each property also had a spare bedroom, we still have something like 160M empty bedrooms …

A quick look at ONS stats shows the problem isn’t actually a shortage of housing, it’s that people don’t downsize and we have too many air b&b properties.

But the infrastructure is there. Easier to get more trains than build a rail line.

Who could have predicted?

As art, it’s questionable. But this is why they want it removed? So they can get on with their prejudice uninterrupted, with the humanity of their victims unexamined?

C'est du négationnisme assisté par ordinateur. Grok est peut-être artificiel, mais il est dépourvu d'intelligence.

With the greatest of respect, Martyn Oliver hasn’t worked in a school since 2016, and I doubt he would choose to now even if they doubled his salary. Teaching is a different ecosystem now from 10 yrs ago. The new framework is great for brilliant schools but crippling for the decent struggling ones.

“dig-whistle” 😑
DOG-whistle
🐕

Farage’s ability to dig-whistle in broad daylight is truly astonishing. “I don’t know! I’m just asking questions!”
It’s all a grift. He’s in it for wealth and power, and if the Untermensch gets a kicking along the way, so much the better.

If we think health and social care are expensive now, wait till the elderly are the majority of the population, we have fewer tax payers to share the burden, and no one can afford to work in care because of it.

Prescreen at embassies so they can travel with dignity from the first safe country they reach.

Has no one ever told her about internalised racism?

The problem is there isn’t really a dispute here. No one seems to be interested in the facts. In the context of our overall immigration, we don’t even have a problem with the number of asylum applicants. There were reasons our overall immigration spiked and it’s back down now.

If a problem has existed in the policy, it’s that we haven’t enabled people to apply from overseas. There’s no real natural barrier to that.
Funding asylum processing properly is the biggest ma made problem, and no politician has been willing to do that since they ratified the Geneva Conventions …

(Purchasing power parity just takes into account the internal currency value rather than exchange rate.)

Hmm looks like the Spectator has retracted the original article so I can’t comment. But I wouldn’t trust Fraser Nelson to split a bar tab if I couldn’t see the workings …

Again it’s not a like-for-like comparison. You’d at least need to deduct health insurance from US income.

Not if you compare disposable income. Healthcare, education, childcare etc etc are centrally funded out of taxation for much of Europe so their standard of living is significantly higher, even if their “take home” income is lower.