Yes, you too can be denied your beautiful right to be convicted by Ouija Board, and be forced to join our disgusting civil law cousins in Europe.

(Yes I know it only happened once (that we know about), and under the current proposals murder would still be tried by jury. One time is too many)

I suspect we will see it in Canada if a more right wing government come to office and try to start rolling back Charter jurisprudence.

You can see it in some of the Lord Reed era judgments on HRA/EU law here, and Edelman seemed to suggest you saw it with constitutional adjudication in Aus.

As I put to Edelman earlier this year, an entrenched unamendable control on democratic law making will inevitably require departure from stare decisis. I think that’s true everywhere such regimes exist.

Is it not a story of how unhappy Marbury v Madison, the Bill of Rights and 14A are? The document was simply not written to do the job it now does (nor expected to last for as long as it has, or be as unamendable as it has recently proved).

What were they arrested for?

People trust each other generally, but they believe there enough bad apples that you have to be taking precautions at all times.

I don’t think this proves that the UK is “high trust” in a way that eg Japan or Singapore are. When people default to leaving their bikes unlocked in London like in Tokyo or Osaka, then I might accept it.

Anyway, there is zero percent chance of people liking IHT, because it is dealt with by people who have recently suffered a bereavement, and people have strong feelings about being forced to sell property left to them by their recently deceased (particular multi-generational property like farms)

It might matter more when housing is scare because a large capital injection in your late 20s or early 30s will allow the children and grandchildren of the wealthy to get on the housing ladder.

Inheritance tends to matter a lot less than inter-vivos transfers, because most people are into adulthood before their parents and often even their grandparents die, and so things like education opportunities are already determined.

Must be the UK now has evil employers and Italy suddenly has good ones. Cannot be anything else that happened in the period 22-24...

And having been very future to have been in a position to pay stamp duty in the range of the example you give above, it certainly didn’t feel like 5%… albeit I suppose I wasn’t paying cash, so it more like 30% of the deposit.

The cost is of course marginal, but economics happens at the margins!

I suspect people don’t get to the stage of looking round to find the ideal flat to negotiate for. They say “I’m not moving again, because I don’t want to pay stamp duty“

Realistically, there is a disincentive for non-first time buyers in downsizing all the way down to the current tax floor, and that is a driver of allocation problems, particularly in London.

The people who it really disincentivises are relatively cash poor older people who bought their house in London and the SE in the 1980s but now don’t want to downsize to flat which costs £1m because SDLT will eat a good chunk.

Of course, some things like ‘affordable home’ requirements, second staircase and dual aspect rules, and site by site environmental remediation requirements make many developments unviable. That is why St George and Barratt basically only build one thing (luxury apartments and boxy new builds)

Contrary to received wisdom on here, regulation is favoured by large housing developers because it creates enormous barriers to entry. A St George or a Barratt can afford to spend years messing around with planners and appeals and the BSR. A new entrant can’t.

The decline in housebuilding is due to regulation (both planning control and more recently very very stringent safety and environmental regulation) and the unpopularity of council housing. That’s it.

SDLT is a bad tax, but it’s not the primary cause of the decline of housebuilding. That decline pre-dates the rise of SDLT beyond a 1% flat tax on average or above average properties in the last 1990s To the leviathan it now is.

For information - between 1984 and mid 1986, late 1991 and mid 1992 and 1993 and 1998 there was no SD at all on the average house sale price (don’t have data from pre1984).

However, the reason it started to catch so many properties and became so lucrative for gov was that house prices had started to rise rapidly by that period, driven by consistent population growth and unrestricted credit following a long period of under-building and mortgage famine.

It only started growing from a marginal flat tax on the sale of large houses to a substantial multi-tiered progressive system in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I was once told by a criminal practitioner that you never asked for the CPS to be ordered to pay costs as “it’s all the same pot money ultimately and they are slower than the LAA”. Is that true?

Closely watched by-elections are a sure fire predictor of national elections, which is why the Bermondsy by-election predicted the Alliance finishing first in the 1983 elections shortly afterwards.

Until a judge gets caught using an Ouija board to convict someone of murder, I will remain unrepentant.

Denning is hardly representative of a modern judge! And of course they aren’t a panacea, but (a) the deference to the guilty verdicts of the jury in those cases didn’t help (b) judges have to give reasons, in public. All things being equal that is better than a secret jury!

And of course immediately after he said that juries went on to oversee a variety of notorious miscarriages of justice.

Devlin is hardly a character to invoke, and in any event the jury in his time was totally unrecognisable to that we have today - property qualifications, far fewer women, no bad character or hearsay permitted etc.