Will Cooling

Don't know if this is still true but an other issue is that because of the dominance of America in the erm Americas, most Spanish speaking countries are better at speaking English than Francophone ones. So learning French opens up more people/countries to speak to.

This might actually be funnier than the retired UKIP voter thing

Hah! I hadn't thought of it like that but you're absolutely right. Even though the Stuarts were Scots they would ultimate rebel against a Catholic regime in London

Oh yeah, I mean more that the sense that Ireland might be a redoubt for Toryism isn't as a strange as it might seem today given we're so use to Irish communities being part of progressive parties away from Ireland. Even now Ireland is to the right of most English-speaking countries in many ways

Well not really because you have to remember that in England the Anglicans who were Tories were also the most high church. If the 1801 Act of Union hadn't been bodged then Southern Ireland would have almost certainly become a Tory heartland, in the same way the French Peasantry was very conservative

You can't keep pointing at the same country as the exampler having changed your views on several key issues!?!

Can't I?????????

Broke: old Japan as an inspiration for British patriotic centrism (www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...)

Woke: new Japan as an inspiration for British patriotic centrism

Again. Do you actually disagree that it would be better for councils to have a diverse range of properties spread across their catchement area rather than concentrating tenants into a few estates?

I think your understimating how many houses you could fit on the average plot if you become more aggressive with house size - I say this as someone who spent a lot of time in my nan's huge council house and for a couple of years lived in an army house.

Or it can be knocked down and a replacement buildings built on top?

It really wouldn't. We already have plenty of areas where housing prices are depressed due to lack of demand.

If it is easy to build housing, then its to knock down a house in a high demand area and build a bigger one that you can fit more people (i.e. a HMO) into it. So the value goes up not down

Not if you're ignoring what I wrote, where I clearly said that more social housing is good but that it should be structured differently.

Sigh. Please read what I wrote or stop responding. I never denied that social housing wasn't a great support to the poorest. The question is whether it could be anything more.

😂

Again you need to reread what I wrote. I didn't argue against building more social houses. I said that if you're going to do it as anything other than part of the social net you need to do it in a different way i.e move away from big council estates & instead councils have varied property portfolios

Again, I wasn't saying it would help the housing market. I wasn't even saying do it.

What I'm saying is, if you are encouraging people to buy their own home, then any form of rental property will become a last refort that shuts people out from the easiest way to build wealth

Yes. They want to be in social housing now. But they want to be in it in 20 years time, or would they use the breathing room to save the money to put a deposit down on a house?

You can take the province out of France, but you can't take the France out of the province

There are also other schemes where people can get cheap loans or first-time buyers are exempted from certain costs

What do you think France would do in IndyRef3? Could they openly weigh in, in favour of Quebec staying in Canada?

No...its the inheritance tax thing 😂

Making it more difficult to build houses actually reduces land prices in high demand areas because it makes it harder to realise the potential value of the land

And typically mortgages are cheaper than rent, because the rentier has a mortgage that they're looking for the renter to cover plus some profit on top.

No. But when you die, your primary home is exempt from inheritance tax. So you dramatically better off putting money into a house than the bank.

As credit is more available than it was in the 195/60s, we really do need to revisit what we mean by social housing. It would clearly be better for councils to have housing spread across public-private developments that they rent out. Likewise more public services should offer housing to key workers

And of course the danger is that this because a viscious cycle where neighbourhoods become clusters of people with problems, so anyone who can, gets out even if it means moving into private rental accomodation. Or rather than exercise their right-to-buy rights, they buy a house away from the estate

Because if you can you clearly need to get on the property ladder given all the subsidies given to investing in your owning your own home in terms of building wealth. And the Council can't leave desperate people homeless because they'd rather have upwardly mobile families take the nice houses

You see this in council estates across the country. They may begin with a mixture of the upper & lower working class but the former will ultimately move away when they buy a house. The Council then has a waiting list where the neediest are the immediate priority & so the demographics shift downwards

So the problem is that unless you drastically change how council housing work it *is* just for the neediest & unless you change society's attitude to housing wealth it *is* aspirational to move from any form of tenancy to home ownership.

Forever and always. Amen.

It's a good line, but surely they'd actually just be Mountbatten because the royals would have less attachment to the name and so the family would have just taken Philip's name?