The fall of the Tory party

Sorry to use the term, but I mostly use it for pretty large issues. It's kinda hard not to call those things out, after so many years of those things you mention getting worse, without using loaded terms as a shorthand.

I do think this forum's generally pretty good at analysing this stuff, so it's not as if that's all there is.

What's nuts is that it's a quicker rise out of London than in...

https://youtube.com/shorts/ZNfFIzquONc?si=6OAkrpHeN_edRETN

Yeah, London's been pretty flat (well, ish) since around 2017.

I think I remember the North East being the highest rental growth (as a %) in the country a year or so ago.

Not unsurprising though really, inflation tends to have specific locations and sectors that increase first before spreading out (the Cantillion effect), and housing is no exception.

London has understandably always had the highest rent to income ratios, but has also seen the second largest drop in real earnings since 2008. Housing costs elsewhere are obviously a much smaller multiple of wages, and starting at a lower level, so there's effectively more potential to increase housing costs as a proportion of wages. Rents are raised, rents capitalise into house prices — hey presto.

Bit of a mish-mash of rental/income sources, but you get the picture. Sources:
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bulletins/indexofprivatehousingrentalprices/latest
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/752217/household-rent-to-income-ratio-by-region-uk/
[3] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8456/

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Well those images are massive, sorry all

(Edit: And sorry, i've turned this into a housing thread… must stay on topic)

Before working it out, I thought London would be higher too to be fair

I was looking for a new bed online and got summonsed to a management meeting they weren’t sure why I wanted to copulate with bedding. I had been browsing a company who had done a portmanteau of Mattress and Essex.

An ex-colleague was speaking to a customer about creating rules to look for bad words. In his description, he bashed out a rudimentary regex designed to look for the word "tits". He made it clear that he hadn't actually put much thought into it and the client shouldn't use his example as it could cause some loops. The client copied it verbatim, put it into production and crashed their mail server. So the client's entire email platform fell over because it was too busy looking for tits.

.

Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the house, defended Donelan on the grounds that she did not take a severance payment after she resigned as eductation secretary in 2022, even though she was entitled to one. Mordaunt said:

"When [Donelan] was entitled to redundancy payments from being a secretary of state, which was £16,000, she did not take that and handed it back to the department, because it was the right thing to do. I would just remind people of that and I think that speaks volumes about her character and how much she values the fact that it is taxpayers’ money that we are talking about."

Mordaunt did not remind MPs that Donelan only spent about 36 hours as education secretary.

It was /(.)(.)/g, wasn’t it?

What's the Tories motivation for wanting to remove National Insurance? I assume it's in bad faith somehow, or would replacing it with Income Tax be a reasonable thing to do.

Partially political and potentially a little ideological, I suspect.

Political because NI is a regressive tax, so reducing it shows they're in the interests of working people before the election.

And potentially a little ideological because the framing of national insurance is that it pays for a public pension, which they're not a big fan of?

How do you explain the triple lock then?

(I’m not really serious, I think it’s clear that the current government like the state pension for those who are already receiving it, but young people can fuck off if they think they’ll be getting one).

young people can fuck off if they think they’ll be getting one

Yep! "Demographic ageing is a bitch, why don't we let the private sector deal with it"

I haven’t posted on here for absolutely ages but I came to ask you to stop being a cunt about things

It's one thing when you assume Donelan's case is 'idiot who shouldn't be in Cabinet unthinkingly tweet-libels academic for cheap culture war point-scoring'.

It's another when you realise it's 'idiot etc. proposes libelling academic, asks for government advice, gets the big official double-thumbs up, then does it on the basis that the public will pick up the tab if they complain'.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/07/uk-science-secretary-michelle-donelan-government-advice-tweet

It's almost as if they're a nest of massive cunts.

It's almost as if they're a nest of massive cunts.

Just replace the U innet

The fraud that made poor old CallMeDave have to get another job.

Don't apologise - your answers are great! I'm sure I'm not the only one who's mostly just reading this thread, and having some real evidence behind the comments I find really helpful. So, thank you :)

Thanks/you’re welcome! 🙂

Westminster Voting Intention:

LAB: 46% (+1)
CON: 18% (-2)
RFM: 13% (+1)
LDM: 10% (=)

Via
@PeoplePolling
, 7 Mar.
Changes w/ 25 Jan.

https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1765910523952918586

The May elections could be a humiliation so grievous for Sunak he won't even fight the general election. Billy Zane voice: "It's falling apart".

What's the Tories motivation for wanting to remove National Insurance? I assume it's in bad faith somehow, or would replacing it with Income Tax be a reasonable thing to do.

In the public mind it pays for welfare and the NHS, both things the Tories would like to see transition to the private sector.

Reducing NI creates a narrative expectation that those services funded by said source are 'unsustainable at the current level" and "will need private sector investment".

Theresa May packing it in now too.

Theresa May standing down at the next election.

As broken by the Maidenhead Advertiser.