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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • Of course we can’t do anything about this in the short term, but long term we should be doing everything we can to fix property pricing. It’s such a stranglehold on both citizens and businesses.

    People can’t afford to go out and spend because it’s all servicing a mortgage or rent, which goes to wealthy landlords or banks, rather than circulating locally/improving government tax intake.

    Businesses have to hike prices to pay for exorbitant rent rates, which further reinforces people not being able to go out and spend.

    The government spends several billion per year on housing benefits, which has went from a benefit to help the few who fell through the cracks and needed a bit of assistance, to huge numbers of people completely reliant on it else they can’t afford to house themselves. And who gets the money? That’s right. Landlords.

    We obviously can’t snap our fingers and have more houses overnight, but I hope the upcoming planning reforms and mandatory building targets actually bear fruit.

    I’m a home owner by the skin of my teeth (I worked 84 hour weeks, saved relentlessly - destroying my social life, and moved to the North East where housing is cheap), but I’m fine taking a hit in house value if it’s for the good of the nation. Fuck the people who pulled the ladders up after them.



  • The effect of this would be extremely minimal. Almost all empty homes in the UK are homes that are temporarily empty pending sale or between renters. Having empty homes is actually extremely normal, you can’t really not have empty homes, as people are always moving.

    With rare exceptions, empty homes aren’t just sitting there empty for years, like this article implies. The landlords would much rather rent them out and make money.

    The UK has far fewer empty empty homes than anywhere else in the developed world. Our housing stock isn’t enough.

    There’s no other option but to build more. I hope Labour’s plans can help with that, but who knows. And it’d need to be sustained.








  • You keep saying Labor, are you from the UK?

    And tbh, while Labour is far from socialist, they’re doing some left wing things:

    • Nationalising rail. Seems left wing to me.

    • Nationalising steel. Seems left wing to me.

    • Nationalising parts of our energy sector. Seems left wing to me.

    • They’re increasing workers rights in a bunch of different ways. Seems left wing to me.

    • They’ve significantly hiked minimum wage. Seems left wing to me.

    • They’ve implemented a windfall tax targeting profiteering energy firms. Left wing.

    • Placing VAT on private schooling. Left wing.

    • Means testing WFA. Left wing.

    • Placing taxes on non-doms. Left wing.

    • Invested a great deal more in infrastructure. Left wing.

    • Capped public transport costs. Left wing.

    • Implementing stricter rules for landlords. Left wing.

    • Essentially restarting SureStart in all but name. Left wing.

    • Changing inheritance tax to squash loopholes surrounding buying up farmland. Left wing.

    • Ending the use of offshore trusts as a way to avoid inheritance tax. Left wing.

    • Bringing the NHS back under direct public control. Left wing.

    • Expanding green energy. Left wing.

    There’s probably more I’ve not thought of, too.





  • Reading into this, it seems like there’s actually a lot going on right now when it comes to sorting out our decaying (ha) dentistry services.

    Good.

    If this gets well and truly sorted, this will be a visible, tangible thing people can point to and say they’ve done well there.

    People can’t really conceptualise the less visible things like “wages have gone up by 2% more than inflation this year”, “inflation has dropped by 0.3%”, “infrastructure investment has been raised by X%!”

    We’re bad at understanding numbers like that and visualising what impact they will make on our lives over a longer period of time.

    The difference between “I’ve not been able to get a dentist appointment for 4 years” and “I can trivially have one booked every 6 months” is something that everyone will notice and appreciate.



  • Really frustrating that children are 3x likely to be in poverty as pensioners, yet a disproportionate amount of money is redirected towards pensioners, the richest demographic by a long shot.

    And as has been made clear, any attempts to address that will not be tolerated by media or by the electorate. Labour couldn’t even get the original WFA cuts through, despite the poorest still being entitled to them!

    Labour restarting SureStart in all but name will surely be a big help for young children and new parents, as will things like the sizable minimum wage increases, and the expansion of free school meals. But it won’t be enough to fix this problem entirely.