one out all out: a brexit from the modern world and every one of its problems please (we're all gonna die lol)

Back in the 90's (in my experience) and even the early 00's you'd see vacant council houses/flats with the steel shutters on for months at a time and if you wanted a council flat in your late teens - you'd get your mam to lie that you've been thrown out onto the streets. Then as licensee with notice - or whatever the term was you could expect a flat within a reasonable amount of time. This seems like some crazy talk from the 50's now!

Yeah we had a council flat in the late 80s or early 90s precisely because the council didn't want it lying empty

I got on the waiting list in 2005 after illness and a breakup and it took two years’ accumulation of points to get housed. That was quick by London standards at the time (I am fairly good at bureaucracy) and I got a huge amount of points just for being in the same borough for 10 years - a friend with more need spent 10 years in hostels, including mother/baby housing, and another friend spent 15 years on the list before Kier Starmer intervened on her behalf about a month ahead of Camden reworking the points system - she’d have been taken off the list if she had lingered in private accommodation any longer.

When I lived in London for a couple of years in the 90's I didn't even consider getting on waiting lists. But I'm sure the odds back then were much more favourable than now. Social housing is so fucking good, and all you ever get in the press - going back as far as I can remember is the HIVES OF SUBHUMAN SCUM variety. There should be a dialogue about how fucking good social housing is.

This country really bought into the homeowner thing propagated by Thatcher, it would be interesting to look at how widespread that aspiration was pre 1980

and of course how much of that aspiration has been driven by the size of rents under the nu slumlord culture that's risen in Thatcherism's wake

I'm thinking the right wing press have probably been demonising social housing at least since the 80's in my memory. I wonder if there is any current Tory as brave + emboldened enough as Cameron was about 5 years back when he was heard loudly dismissing council housing as "petri dishes for Labour voters" in the current climate.

Home ownership was growing steadily from the mid-50s iirc, Thatcherism kicked it up a notch but idk if there is any reason to think it wouldn’t have kept going in the same direction, albeit at a slower pace.

Sure and economically that would make sense but I'm thinking about the way people think about home ownership, from the classic "renting is just throwing money away" to the almost moral imperative to leave property for your children (big assumptions there obv).

No doubt none of the attitudes to this were invented from whole cloth in the 80s but as I understand it these aren't universal across developed countries and like calz I can remember a time when council houses were a fairly unremarkable fact of working class life, not the marker of marginalisation and/or deprivation that they've become in some circles.

I've lived in a housing association flat for many years (nearly 20, i think) and got it though exactly the means that calzino noted upthread - i.e. by pretending that my mother had thrown me out and that i was sleeping on friend's sofas. afaict the situation with social housing in scotland is a lot better than it is south of the border (and certainly a world away from london's situ).

I read somewhere that in the late 70s almost half the population of the UK lived in council housing, which is pretty astonishing from today's perspective if true

42% in 1979, according to The Guardian

Which suggests that social housing contained a much wider cross-section of people than just the very poorest. I think ideally - and this is not something you ever see proposed - what you need is a larger social housing sector, a larger owner-occupied sector and a significantly smaller private rented sector. Considerably more needs to be made of the fact that being in the private rented sector, if you're on a low or even middle income, is significantly worse than being in decent quality social housing.

Make no mistake that the vast majority of this is on the Tories/coalition and high housing costs are right at the core of a lot of in-work poverty. New Labour may have been naive to think that future governments would just keep subsidising people out of poverty, but at least they did it and the massive decline in rough sleepers under their watch is one of the indisputable successes of the Blair/Brown years. A few of the Labour 'moderates' who enthusiastically jumped on the welfare-bashing bandwagon from 2010-2015 would do well to remember that.

The problem, as with most of the beneficial New Labour reforms, was that it was all about tackling the symptoms rather than the underlying causes. It was the private rented sector that drove the Blair-era housing boom (and with it a lot of the economy) and they were too scared to touch that. (With some good reason - pretty much the one thing guaranteed to get you hurled out of office is presiding over a collapse in house prices, as Major and Brown found out, and it'll probably happen with May post-Brexit.*) So you ended up with the Labour government indirectly subsidising a housing boom through a massive housing benefit bill. That doesn't give you a properly functioning market (free or otherwise) and it's a colossal waste of resources that could be going into publicly-owned housing that pays for itself and represents a proper balance-sheet asset.

*I'm genuinely lost as to how you get of this trap. The only thing I can think of is that the owner-occupier sector is shrinking at such a rate, particularly among younger people, that it will be a less potent electoral concern in the future. Not wasting precious brownfield land on empty glass box investment vehicles would probably be a start.

As far as I know the idea that the private sector should provide near enough 100% of the new housing supply doesn't really exist pre-Thatcher, at any point in history. I was passing some old Peabody estate housing the other day and thinking that we might actually be worse off in this regard than the 19th century because we don't even have that kind of large-scale philanthropic housing investment, and that's just insane to think about. Nowadays it's just someone else's problem.

(One of the reasons May's social care reforms were so politically toxic was that they pretty much whipped the tablecloth out from under the Thatcherite property-owning dream. 'We've been slashing away at the social contract so you can have a house for life and one you can pass onto your children but whoops now we've slashed so much that you'll have to sell it to pay for your care now you're old' - it's one of the most brutal examples of Thatcherism eating itself and it left the whole con trick looking particularly exposed).

one of the effects of the huge cuts to councils is that they can't really afford to say no to any development, or even necessarily enforce affordable housing quotas. there are plenty of flats being built atm that are only advertised for sale abroad, funded by ppl in hong kong's pension etc.

It's telling that this is the one area of policy where even the conhome commenter crew's line is "the free market isn't working, government has to get involved"

xp That's OTM I think (at least if "history" starts in about 1860, but for these purposes it kind of does so I'm quibbling really.)

There was a good book about the history, successes and problems of council housing ("Municipal Dreams" by John Boughton) that ends up making a similar case I think - also that a properly funded and maintained state housing sector makes the private rented sector work better.

A decent investment in good-quality council housing would be a start - that takes a lot of political will over a long time. So fixing the UK's messed up housing market would have to be the work of several parliaments and would have to align with the demographic changes that are coming over the next three or four decades. You'd have to fix the state pension at the same time, because one of the key reasons the middle class got into providing big chunks of the private rented sector was that it became the only obvious way of turning savings into something that looked like growing into a good pension.

You will no doubt be amazed to discover that the problem also begins with the banks - post-2008 they've been highly reluctant to finance any development that doesn't have a significant proportion of pre-sales before it even goes ahead. Which means foreign investors. (xpost)

I've been meaning to read Municipal Dreams since reading a review but had entirely forgotten both the title and the author so cheers Tim.

(It's a bit dry in places but I think it's really worth it.)

Lads.

Times EXC

Whitehall planners will tell Britons to “vary your diet” in event of disruption at the border
- Cumbria amongst the locations of big hangars needed for food storagehttps://t.co/IpqwNAWLcW

— Sam Coates Times (@SamCoatesTimes) December 21, 2018

Eat your words but don't go hungry.

*I'm genuinely lost as to how you get of this trap.

In my more fevered moments, I start to wonder about No Deal silver linings. Just as the legacy of WWII was a set of conditions ripe for the creation of the welfare state, you could see how the economic shock and house-price collapse of a No Deal would leave a (presumably) Labour government free to have an economy-restarting social house-building boom. And there'd be a neat schadenfraude in all the property-rich boomers being the ones who ultimately voted for it to happen.

1945 : Lord Beaverbrook.

2019: Gove's beavers.

xpost That's the hopeful analogy; the more pessimistic one is that no deal is more like WW1 than WW2 and we end up with depression, fascism and another war...

ivan lewis has resigned from labour, his letter is shit

oh no, another blow to socialism

Another schmuck with a raft of harassment allegations - quite a few women’s orgs and Young Labour people weighing in with how unsafe he was to be around, so much so that young women were discouraged from even canvassing with him. Also good to see Jewish members of Labour calling out his bullshit.

I know, lol polls, but this one is pretty brutal if it can be maintained and reflected in others

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/20/polls-stay-eu-yougov-brexit-peoples-vote

This analysis prices in the poll drop for Brexit and its still tough for Labour:

This is more like the reality: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2018/12/it-s-said-another-referendum-could-be-disastrous-labour-so-will-party-back

I'm not sure that just sitting back and letting the disaster happen is exactly going to work out well for them in the long run either. There are no good options for them here.

The problem with that Kellner article is the idea that support will just drift to the LibDems, whose performance has been a long way short of competent the last couple of years. That might work in some Tory/Lib Dem marginals, but there's no way of stopping or reversing Brexit that does not involve first removing the Tories from power.

That percentage increase for the Lib Dems is very suspect. Its unlikely they'd be able to convert that over an election campaign.

I wouldn't be reading too much into (some) judges' kneejerk distaste for reform/technology above - every government digital project, whether it ultimately succeeds or fails, is dogged by masses of gatekeepers and knowledge hoarders who want it to fail and do their best to make sure it does.

I don't personally think virtual hearings has had much thought but for many civil cases the point should be avoiding the need for members of the public to have to go to court at all, eliminating the need for solicitors etc, especially for routine civil procedures or small claims.

That court reform project is a billion pounds of reform - which is ludicrously big but lol government - there's a good case in any country to be made for not trying to move away from court cases and the vast warehouses of paper that sit around waiting to be processed and the call centres which exist mostly to say "no we haven't processed that paper yet"

I'd say the truth about these big reform projects is much more mixed - they need to be done, risks are taken, the goals are too lofty and too much is done at once, but good changes do happen as well, I would take the criticism of powerful stakeholders like judges with a gigantic pinch of salt when it comes to anything like this.

*for trying

Nothing wrong in principle with reform and looking for a more efficient ways, but it's hard not to be cynical about any reforms this lot are behind at this point.

It will be interesting to see if anything positive in the name of reform has been achieved in the CamDem/May era. If there has it must have been some kind of lucky accident and it has gone by completely unnoticed.

earlier S Bush was saying that governments that achieve anything worthwhile have leaders that are ruthless with incompetent ministers and don't gaf about loyalty. I can remember reading that Atlee was a ruthless mother. Anyway he also said Cameron's weakness was preferring loyalty over competence and that's why they haven't achieved shit. And Corbyn not getting shut of worthless detritus like Williamson shows will be just as weak a leader. maybe harsh but true.

I'm entirely happy saying I have no clue what Labour should be doing. Or what anyone should be doing, it's all a mess.

aye, it's quite a clusterfuck.

I didn't mean to say worthwhile, just meant achieving goals.

It’s possible the Lib Dema might do better in the next election with a new leader (Swinson, maybe Moran or lol write in non-party member nonsense candidate), but third parties tend to benefit most when the outcome of an election seems a foregone conclusion (you can vote Lib Dem or Green without worrying you’ll let a Tory candidate or government in) and we have a big piece of evidence in last year’s GE where they picked up seats but got squeezed by the two main parties. They haven’t made any arguments in favour of the EU much removed from your average #fbpe person; Nick Clegg has been banging on about controlling borders too iirc. As much as they continue to attack Labour, they’ve made absolutely no progress themselves in terms of policies, vote share or anything of note.

I think any passing football managers might do well to read the fucking article they're discussing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiEkElKmGbw

Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll went against the clock to see if he could make something beautiful out of vocal samples from a variety of British politicians. Why? He says it best himself: “Why not make some sense out of a load of old rubbish?”

The Breunion Boys are the European boyband on a mission to win back the United Kingdom.

“BRITAIN COME BACK”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncHAwux70u8

then there's that EU concept album with the sampled claude juncker speech. what a time to be alive.

god, I can't imagine a Breunion going well; I assume the Euro would be a non-negotiable point for the EU at that point

Possibly Schengen too

Possibly Schengen too

Which might all be for the best, who knows.