love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

assuming it's legally enforceable

I say you can't make an omelette without running roughshod over a few landlord scumbags

If thousands of landlords are bringing legal challenges to the high Court about rent cancellation, then just simply make them illegal - taps head - I've cracked it!

Hope everyone realises that this thread will be the 21st-century equivalent to the Pepys Diaries, so make sure you're all looking your best for posterity.

Anything would be better than both main parties working in tandem to carry on as normal as much as possible when radical thinking will be needed not just minor adjustments here and there.

I have a secure middle class desk job but I would be hard pressed to essentially pay double rent for ~ 6 mos

Hope everyone realises that this thread will be the 21st-century equivalent to the Pepys Diaries, so make sure you're all looking your best for posterity.

Xp, At the same time, if you have a secure middle-class desk job, you probably don’t need to have your rent cancelled.

idk, I don’t think means-testing rent cancellation would work. The only solutions I can see would be a Ilhan Omar-style stimulus jamboree where everyone gets their rent / mortgage paid by the government for a few months, a removal of the cap on housing benefit or the government extending guaranteed incomes. Again, the question remains how sustainable any of the proposals would be if this goes on for a year, etc.

*Buries cheese wheel frantically*

Growing your first parmesan tree is always the most difficult one

SV my point was more that pretty much no one has the kind of buffer that will allow them to pay several months of rent arrears while continuing to keep up with current rent. Particularly if they have no job! (fwiw I think there are plenty of furloughed white collar workers who will be in this position once the govt tightens the taps)

No, I absolutely agree with you. The expectation that all rental arrears can be paid back is implausible for a bunch of reasons.

I’m just sceptical about how feasible blanket cancellation would be when it would cover millions of people who can currently work from home, pay their rent, etc, particularly if things are not back to something approaching normal within the next few months.

France had just decided not to quarantine arrivals from the UK---I hope (and expect) we'll now reconsider.

This is an interesting suggestion.

The govt could actually purchase the entire UK private rental market for £1.3 trillion (2018 data). In all seriousness, buying up housing stock as the market crashes to then let out is probably the simplest way to help private renters (ie de facto convert them to social renters)

— Luke Cooper (@lukecooper100) May 9, 2020

Does that include the bill to make them fit to live in?

Lower prices are a function of no buyers of course - one deep-pocketed buyer would change that.

Housing is not really a market ofc, this wld be a fantastic time to buy up all private rental properties. Doing a universal but weighted rent cut wld be a compromise option.

it's good that the politically homeless from 2015-2020 now have 3 homes to choose from, just like in reality

— LEXIT_LOVER69 (@coso9001) May 9, 2020

Hey-heeeey!

Boom

good one!

1.3 trillion is a lot but then how long would it take to pay it back?

quicker than a standard mortgage term i’m guessing

interesting thinking about the effect it would have on the market for mortgage-backed securities if the most flippable properties were essentially removed from circulation

Some interesting points here:

https://nearlylegal.co.uk/2020/05/a-five-point-plan/

Highlights that you’d need to scrap the right to buy if you nationalised the rental sector and has some background on why rent cancellation would be subject to legal challenge. Also suggests the weak-sauce policies put forward are going to need to be subject to review or revision if this goes on much longer.

I did not know the CoA is issuing a judgment on the legality of the three-month eviction ban on Monday.

No need to purchase the entire sector even, you could allow private rentals for properties above some ridiculous level

if only they could pull their finger out and fast-track some landlord bills through parliament as rapidly as they sneak bills through increasing police powers. solutions can be found if there is a political will to crack some eggs and make a nice fuck-off-and-die landlord souffle for the sake of almost a third of the population.

Just lounging around like cattle. If you're going to spread disease at least do it celebrating age old British cultural traditions. I bet none of these smug hipster tossers had a celebratory VE Day Hokey Cokey dressed in a Spitfire costume. https://t.co/wzdnMjsmdj

— Simon Hedges (@Orwell_Fan) May 9, 2020

if that pic is genuine it's all on the govt and the UK media throwing out a cacophony of conflicting messages

that nearly legal blog is interesting. right to buy has been a total fkn disaster in so many ways and should be universally regarded as such. is there an obvious reason no one is discussing an enforced reduction in rent as opposed to outright cancellation?

iirc it would need new legislation. I think the time to have done it might have been the introduction of government-backed of furlough, it’s not needed by people currently on 100% of their salary and not much help to those on 0%. I could see it tied in to an expansion of housing benefit, though - ‘the government twill pay market rate minus 20%’ for x months’ or w/e rather than having a fixed cap.

Good

After writing to @Keir_Starmer asking for clarification of the Labour Party's position on Kashmir, he responded, confirming the Labour position has not changed, supporting previous UN resolutions, & confirming the primacy of human rights. We will continue to engage on this topic. pic.twitter.com/1jeV79NzbJ

— MCB (@MuslimCouncil) May 9, 2020

ffs. well that’s good i guess.

he’s been getting a lot of grief from clps on this

This seems both accurate and also practically the worst thing you could say about Starmer
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/keir-starmer-labours-iain-duncan-smith/

I could personally say much worse things about him than Tories that have the political integrity to join the Conservative party

“However, the longer we leave the lifting of lockdown then it is inevitable that this second wave will occur later and later in the year. And we need to make sure we don’t let that happen in winter on top of the flu, norovirus and other outbreaks.

“That means there is pressure for the government to think about lifting lockdown soon.”

i'm unclear how this is supposed to work. we allow deaths/infections to rise now, so that they don't rise later? why wouldn't they just rise later anyway, regardless of what we do now?

is the idea really that the public won't or can't 'tolerate' uninterrupted lockdown, so we need to let more people die now because of these impatient people? and then we can batten down the hatches again in october, once people are 'ready' for it again, having got some non-lockdown time out of their system? (and then restaurants and gyms etc presumably close again??)

(i use the word 'lockdown' euphemistically, obviously; this weekend looked like a normal weekend in my neighbourhood apart from the lack of organised football and the inability to actually enter cafes)

Back to forensic’s much-maligned calls for an actual exit strategy here I think.

Staying Alert might be useful advice when you are crossing the road but it won't stop you contracting the Rona. Might as well bring back the green cross code man and droid.

They went to schools where bullying and abuse was “character building”. They took part in violent, exclusive drinking societies at university. They carry that mentality to the highest levels of government, abetted by supine client journalists. pic.twitter.com/krQr21jKE1

— Mic Wright (@brokenbottleboy) May 10, 2020

bunch of children running the show

You all realise that IF a vaccine is ever developed, this bunch of halfwits will almost certainly fuck up the purchase and distribution of it? A disaster which will then be recast as Britain's Greatest Victory or whatever in the press.

i'm unclear how this is supposed to work. we allow deaths/infections to rise now, so that they don't rise later? why wouldn't they just rise later anyway, regardless of what we do now?

is the idea really that the public won't or can't 'tolerate' uninterrupted lockdown, so we need to let more people die now because of these impatient people?

I don't know but is this what flattening the curve is supposed to be? A vaccine is at least a year away and potentially much longer and no guarantee of one? The messaging on this has been muddled everywhere not just UK

Not sure who the cartoon accompanying the article is but it's not Matt Hancock.

Catapult "To use on people who dare exercise outside"

Seems we're stuck with Jonathan Ashworth, who is really not very good.

a repulsive creep who did his best to wreck Corbyn's chances in the last election. Can't stand the cunt.

Sturgeon is distancing herself from the new garbled Westminster govt messaging and reiterating the Stay Home messaging.

i'm unclear how this is supposed to work. we allow deaths/infections to rise now, so that they don't rise later? why wouldn't they just rise later anyway, regardless of what we do now?

is the idea really that the public won't or can't 'tolerate' uninterrupted lockdown, so we need to let more people die now because of these impatient people?

The idea is that you removed all restrictions now you would end up with a very precipitous spike but they wouldn't keep rising later because everyone would be either dead or recovered. That line of argument appears to be an attempt to sneak the herd immunity strategy in through the back door - there would be a hell of a lot of people dead because the NHS would be overwhelmed.

At the same time there's a need to prevent the second spike from coinciding with the flu epidemic in the winter, that's crucial but creating a gigantic spike now isn't the way.

The government’s daily briefings on #Covid_19 are "not trustworthy communication of statistics" says Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter from the University of Cambridge#Marr https://t.co/TTJMcT0lgb pic.twitter.com/BEKFRhg23H

— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) May 10, 2020

eminent statistician who told Boris to stop misquoting him the other day laying into the govt. This must be that apocryphal "lefty bbc bias" that some tories keep talking about!

Also the line of thinking within Whitehall appears to be less that the public are impatient and won't tolerate a long lockdown and more that the longer lockdown goes on the worse the economic crisis is going to be. But at the same time no one understands the behaviour of the key variable - the virus - and therefore no one understands the economic damage that would be wrought by relaxing the rules too soon. Moving out of lockdown too quickly and allowing the virus to spread again could negate any perceived economic benefits of doing so - and you'd end up with a spiralling health crisis and an economic crisis at the same time.

When someone says “it’s important that we don’t time our second spike to coincide with winter flu” I’m always like okay then let’s just... not do that. Doesn’t seem it should have that huge a bearing on how we handle the immediate crisis.

Like I’m sure the places who have chosen to control this properly so far have also considered this and aren’t gonna suddenly go yes let’s have all our cases at once now flu season’s started

Strikes me as an admission that they haven't controlled it properly so far and have little confidence that they can do so in the near future.

Cases are rising again in Germany which is probably the clearest indication that we should not make any significant changes right now.

surely cases are going to rise at whichever point lockdown is eased? there may never be a vaccine. staying at home for the next year or two years or forever just isn't going to happen.