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LemonDrizzle posted:London currently has 1.01 bedrooms per person; And about 0.1 rooms that aren't bedrooms per person.
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Jun 7, 2014 12:53
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How do you keep kids from skipping school? Make the little buggers and their families starve.quote:BBC education correspondent Gillian Hargreaves said she understood Mr Gove wanted to deduct money from child benefit if parents refused to pay truancy fines. I agree with Mr Gove; children only have one chance at education: make sure they come out wealthy people's vaginas. I swear there used to be several chances for everybody regardless of their household income, including free higher education and free/affordable adult learning. I might just be misremembering things, though.
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Jun 7, 2014 12:53
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at the low truancy levels that Britain has, you would think that these would be mostly fringe cases and hence that fines are dubiously effective I guess the local governments have better data on effectiveness than my layman intuition though
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Jun 7, 2014 13:05
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ronya posted:at the low truancy levels that Britain has, you would think that these would be mostly fringe cases and hence that fines are dubiously effective Problem is when you're talking about a population of 60 million+, even 0.1% truancy becomes a huge number of affected families.
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Jun 7, 2014 13:21
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large numbers, sure, but still on the 0.1% end of the social situation scale. Monetary (dis)incentives can have very weird effects in such extreme family environments - it's not at all obvious that in the 0.1% of most dysfunctional families with schoolgoing children, that the household decisionmaker (if one exists at all) is the recipient or even main de facto consumer of the childcare benefit. Who exactly is being penalized? The deadbeat father or the mentally-ill mother?
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Jun 7, 2014 13:46
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ronya posted:when certain elements decided to try and hold highways hostage in order to bargain for social services funding, [Thatcher and friends] happily shot the hostage and the funding Can you provide more specifics on this? Who was using highway funding as a bargaining chip?
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Jun 7, 2014 13:50
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LemonDrizzle posted:Can you provide more specifics on this? Who was using highway funding as a bargaining chip? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homes_before_Roads was the largest of road protest groups in the era, which leveraged what was initially a niche rural greenism into attracting wider urban left-wing support and thence into a much noiser protest movement in London itself, without envisioning that they might eventually get neither and council building just vastly scrapped
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Jun 7, 2014 13:53
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There was a short letter in the Evening Standard yesterday from someone who presumably works at City Hall. Apparently, it's unfair to criticise the Mayor for his poor record on building homes. 1200 are being built right now!.
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Jun 7, 2014 14:14
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Carecat posted:How long has the lack of housing been going on? Someone posted election posters from the Thatcher era, I believe, which promised building 200k houses a year. Have we really been underbuilding since the 80s? Well, the other thing to note is that there was a huge property bubble in the Thatcher era that popped in 1990, just as she got kicked out of office. That was the great housing crash prior to the 2007 one. You then had a about decade of pretty sane house prices until this last bubble. House price graph.
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Jun 7, 2014 18:26
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ronya posted:maybe nobody's building there because the whole triangle has already been slated for a future green corridor park That's a tiny proportion of the land I'm talking about (and notice the "major development areas" that are marked - these are the areas LBTH and LBN have basically been saying to developers "Look, we won't even glance at the planning applications, just loving build something there" and the developers have been ignoring for at least a decade, while pouring money into Blackwall and Langdon Park which are already overcrowded. Literally everything that developers say are reasons why they can't build more homes (difficulty in clearing space, planning entanglements, lack of transport infrastructure) have been swept aside for them free of charge - and still they won't build there. They make rumblings about the brown-field status but they're merrily throwing up houses on the old Beckton Gas Works and around Barking Creek, which may be the most polluted bits of land in the country, and it really comes down to them preferring to chase the rapidly-inflating house values in that area than building somewhere entirely new. Tiran Dirth posted:Can you really expect developers to put houses where people don't want them? Considering hundreds of the Olympic village houses are still empty it seems entirely unsurprising that companies are not lining up to build in Bromley and similar spaces. If suburban developments are what people are buying, why shouldn't we produce more? People are willing to live in hobbit holes and cupboards, because they literally can't afford anything else - but equally developers are completely unwilling to put a shovel in the ground unless they can be certain they'll earn the same ridiculous prices they are elsewhere in London. Like I say, it's a false scarcity. There's space there to pretty much entirely clear the housing lists in Tower Hamlets, Newham, and probably a couple of other London boroughs if they just had the will and the money to throw up a new super-estate there but they won't. Obviously the boroughs themselves can't afford it on their own so they need to use property developers to do it and guess what...
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Jun 7, 2014 18:29
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Quote-Unquote posted:I agree with Mr Gove; children only have one chance at education: make sure they come out wealthy people's vaginas. I swear there used to be several chances for everybody regardless of their household income, including free higher education and free/affordable adult learning. I might just be misremembering things, though. Or, you know, just go to loving school. How about that?
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Jun 7, 2014 18:31
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Carecat posted:How long has the lack of housing been going on? Someone posted election posters from the Thatcher era, I believe, which promised building 200k houses a year. Have we really been underbuilding since the 80s? Well yes, frankly. Thatcher made it illegal for local councils to pay for social house building from local taxation. Don't forget that because of Right To Buy, not only have we been under building, we've been actively removing housing stock from social ownership.
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Jun 7, 2014 18:39
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tentish klown posted:Or, you know, just go to loving school. How about that? You're a loving idiot.
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Jun 7, 2014 18:49
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Flectarn posted:You're a loving idiot. If only he'd gone to school.
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Jun 7, 2014 18:52
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tentish klown posted:Or, you know, just go to loving school. How about that? Maybe we should look at the reasons why some kids aren't going to school? For example, one woman I know is constantly getting threatened with fines for her son's truancy. He is truant so he can watch his younger sister because their mother has to work hours that don't allow her to do it herself and doesn't pay enough to afford childcare. A friend has a kid that bunks off because he is being bullied, and nothing gets done about it. I myself used to bunk off for the same reason. I also bunked off an English class because my teacher rarely turned up and when she did we'd do busywork and not learn anything. I got a part time job instead of wasting my time. How would taking money away from these families improve anything? How would it incentivise those with truant kids to make sure their kids get to and stay in school, thus missing out on their own jobs (or mandatory jcp appointments)?
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Jun 7, 2014 18:54
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Pork Pie Hat posted:Well yes, frankly. Thatcher made it illegal for local councils to pay for social house building from local taxation. Don't forget that because of Right To Buy, not only have we been under building, we've been actively removing housing stock from social ownership. Not strictly true - they were only allowed to use 30% of the money they raised from RtB to build new stock. Even then that wasn't enough - we've had more than two decades of non-Thatcher government, but unfortunately the Blair/Brown "solution" was to encourage councils to sell off even more stock in all but name by giving it to ALMOs and HAs, a process that removed far more social housing stock from government ownership than RtB ever did. Now we're at a point where thanks to atrophy of local government budgets, driven by the slow and sneaky process of slowly ditching central government responsibilities onto local government in the name of regionalism while not actually handing the money over, that no council can afford to build any new housing and so are dependent on private enterprise to provide for them through requiring them to build affordable and social housing in order to get planning permission. As they only need to make 30% of their housing affordable - and with an incredibly lax definition of "affordable" - this has precisely gently caress-all effect on the housing shortage, therefore guaranteeing profits for developers as well as the BtL holders of all that old council housing stock which the councils now have to rent back in order to avoid having thousands of people out on the streets. It's the most ingenious method of upwards wealth transfer since tax farming, with the added bonus that the people most being hosed over by it are those most fervently supporting it on the off-chance that one day they too will be able to live in 2-up 2-down pension scheme.
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Jun 7, 2014 18:56
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Quote-Unquote posted:Maybe we should look at the reasons why some kids aren't going to school? Decisions don't have reasons. Since we are Free beings*, human actions proceed directly from Free Will Under The Guidance Of Enlightened Reason, uncaused, and as they are uncaused they do not have 'reasons why', and you and I certainly have no responsibility for them. Unless you'd like to roll the clock back to the 1500s, you cryptofeudalist. *i.e. since the 80s
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Jun 7, 2014 19:05
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goddamnedtwisto posted:but equally developers are completely unwilling to put a shovel in the ground unless they can be certain they'll earn the same ridiculous prices they are elsewhere in London. Like I say, it's a false scarcity. 
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Jun 7, 2014 19:12
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Seaside Loafer posted:Christ what a load of bollocks. Ive said it before but I'm re-stating it, capitalism has its place, its for who has the best choccy biscuits or which fishmonger has the nicest smoked mackerel. I wouldn't call that capitalism. I would call that "markets". Markets are a tool, and as it turns out it is a tool that might just be the best fit in certain situations. I personally think that it is, such as in your examples. There's also a great load of situations where markets are a godawful tool and applying it is idiotic if not malicious. Capitalism is all markets all the time everywhere.
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Jun 7, 2014 19:17
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Does this Trojan Horse thing have legs then or what? Everyone here said it stank of racism but the story won't go away. What's going on?
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Jun 7, 2014 19:43
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thehustler posted:Does this Trojan Horse thing have legs then or what? Everyone here said it stank of racism but the story won't go away. What's going on? I'm almost certain it's complete bollocks. Every story about it is "Ofsted said they found no evidence of extremism, but said that not enough was being done to combat it."
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Jun 7, 2014 19:47
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The BBC has a recent article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-27743335 According to it, the letter appears to be fake, and there is no 'conspiracy', but there is supposedly a 'clique' of conservative Muslim governors who have acted 'inappropriately' in some fashion. Some schools are 'vulnerable' to extremism, but it's not clear what that means. There's also some generic corruption and incompetence in Bham schools being brought to light since the investigation turned the local stones over. The 'Trojan Horse' thing has just given a snappy title and a racist framing to the story and hasn't vanished completely since there's still at least one Muslim who has done at least one bad thing in at least one school in Birmingham. It's not like anyone is shocked when conservative Christians in the US try to get on school boards and this turns out to be a bad thing, so it doesn't surprise me that they found something, which is now going to be taken by a lot of people as some kind of vindication. If this was planned it's worked pretty well. e: christ that's a 'lot' of ''scare' 'quotes''
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Jun 7, 2014 20:01
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Well I'd be pretty happy if all religion hosed off from schools but if it's just being used as a racist stick to beat them with then gently caress that.
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Jun 7, 2014 20:04
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LemonDrizzle posted:Presumably, developers have finite resources (capital, skilled labour, building materials; there were a number of stores about brick shortages a couple of months ago...), so of course they're going to go for the sites that offer the best returns on their investment first. It's kind of hard to blame private builders for the current situation, really - their output has been relatively steady at 100k-150k new homes/year since the mid-70s. The problem isn't the reluctance of private capital to take on low margin projects. Shortage of capital is bullshit because banks and private investors will throw as much money at them as they'd ever need, plus they're insanely profitable, there's no shortage of skilled labour (wages are actually falling in construction, and even if there were we're talking at 10-15 year cycle here, and even the most advanced building trades are only a 5-year apprenticeship and we have 3 million unemployed people in this country) and bricks aren't really used that much for housebuilding nowadays, certainly not in central London (structural steel and limestone, two rather more important building materials, have been declining in price for almost ten years now). The problem is that THE MARKET has looked at the situation and realised that they can continue to extract massive profits from things exactly the way they are now. They have absolutely no incentive to actually fix the housing problem because if they do they might "only" make 50-100% profit rather than the >1000% profit some places make. If you were to try and write this as a hypothetical criticism of market capitalism people would dismiss it as too glib and simplistic any yet it's the actual situation we find ourselves in right now. It's pretty much the perfect illustration of a market failure (along with - perhaps not unsurprisingly - almost every other thing we've handed over to the private sector since 1979), and no politician is going to do poo poo about it because they know that to do so would not just make them unelectable for a generation but probably more damaging to a politicians psyche they'd have to admit that their ideology is fatally and provably failed.
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Jun 7, 2014 20:06
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The graph at the end turns into an absolutely perfect textbook example of a bubble. Jesus Christ.
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Jun 7, 2014 20:24
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Rigged Death Trap posted:The graph at the end turns into an absolutely perfect textbook example of a bubble. Don't forget that that graph massively under-represents the actual problem, because you've got massively-depressed areas like Liverpool counter-balancing the ridiculous near-hyperinflation in London. You want to see the genuine insanity of London house prices, check this poo poo out. These are some of the poorest areas in London (even with Canary Wharf distorting poo poo E14 still contains the poorest council ward in London) and they've seen >500% increase in house prices in the last 20 years. It's utter, utter insanity and it's what our entire economy is pretty much based on at this point.
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Jun 7, 2014 20:40
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Rigged Death Trap posted:The graph at the end turns into an absolutely perfect textbook example of a bubble. Bring it on. I've got spare cash ready. Quote-Unquote posted:Maybe we should look at the reasons why some kids aren't going to school? Sure, because the plural of anecdote is data. This isn't 'taking money away from families', this is 'giving families less free money'. I don't think this is the worst idea that Gove has ever had. I also don't think it's the best. However, I do think that there's a bit more to it than 'gently caress the poors'. What happened to the childrens' father? Does this mother not know anyone better suited to looking after her child other than her other child (thus compromising his education at the same time and ensuring a cycle of dependence)? This can't be the *only* solution. You used to bunk off school to get a part time job - did it pay more than the £20/week that child benefit gives you? In which case, what's the problem? As for the case of bullying, that's obviously an instance where the school failed and is very sad. However, it shouldn't be a valid reason to not attend school.
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Jun 7, 2014 20:55
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Lets play a little spot the difference: 
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Jun 7, 2014 20:57
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tentish klown posted:This isn't 'taking money away from families', this is 'giving families less free money'. How exactly is Child Benefit 'free money' in your world?
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Jun 7, 2014 21:12
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I always heard the reason for house pricing increase was the removal of government regulation on mortgages but I thought that was way before the 1997~ point where that graph spikes. Would we have reached that point early during the conservatives if not for the recession? It doubled in ten years of boom for Conservatives but tripled in ten years of New Labour.
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Jun 7, 2014 21:14
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Shortage of capital is bullshit because banks and private investors will throw as much money at them as they'd ever need, plus they're insanely profitable, there's no shortage of skilled labour (wages are actually falling in construction, and even if there were we're talking at 10-15 year cycle here, and even the most advanced building trades are only a 5-year apprenticeship and we have 3 million unemployed people in this country) and bricks aren't really used that much for housebuilding nowadays, certainly not in central London (structural steel and limestone, two rather more important building materials, have been declining in price for almost ten years now). While that might be true in central London, the large majority of new homes built in the UK are of cavity masonry construction. There's a very problematic shortage of clay bricks at the moment which is causing a headache for the house building industry, to the point where the lead time for bricks is currently over a year.
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Jun 7, 2014 21:18
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tentish klown posted:Bring it on. I've got spare cash ready. Good god you're a soulless little poo poo. I know autistic people with more empathy than you. Are you seriously going to talk down at people barely scraping by from the heights of your giant pile of spare cash? Do you have the faintest idea what you sound like? I mean, look at this poo poo: tentish klown posted:You used to bunk off school to get a part time job - did it pay more than the £20/week that child benefit gives you? In which case, what's the problem? Bring back the loving workhouses, why the hell not?
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Jun 7, 2014 21:33
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Don't forget that that graph massively under-represents the actual problem, because you've got massively-depressed areas like Liverpool counter-balancing the ridiculous near-hyperinflation in London. Is there a simple to understand counter argument to anyone that's denying the impending crash due to living in a specific area? Like, i've cited those graphs to people I know who have bought recently and they just keep saying that those prices in the graphs, and thus bubble, don't apply to Edinburgh or Aberdeen for example.
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Jun 7, 2014 21:38
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tentish klown posted:Bring it on. I've got spare cash ready. Hmm yes, all good points. Clearly the answer is to financially penalise the families involved and make their circumstances even more stressful and difficult. I suppose you're suggesting extending this 'tough love' approach for those bullied kids too? Push them around a bit so they learn to fight back? It's 'gently caress the poors' because instead of actually trying to understand these problems and find ways to solve them, improving outcomes for everyone involved, it's a paternalistic 'these people need to learn their lesson' approach. Oh, and coincidentally it saves money instead of increasing the resources used to actually help people
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Jun 7, 2014 22:14
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Kin posted:Is there a simple to understand counter argument to anyone that's denying the impending crash due to living in a specific area? The bubble is inflating all prices, and if you look at those graphs I posted earlier and put in their postcodes, you'll be able to predict pretty clearly just how likely they're likely to get hurt by the crash when it comes. To be honest though if they've bought houses to actually live in then they'll probably be fine (or at least no more hurt than the rest of the economy), if they've bought them looking to flip them in the next 5 years then they're hosed and all you can do is not be too smug when it happens. The bigger problem though is that although I joked about the entire British economy now being based entirely on the London property market, there is a lot of capital - especially in the already-wounded financial sector - bound up in it and a 90s-style crash may just be enough to kick off Credit Crunch Two - This Time It's Personal. You'd think - hope - that they'd have learned the lessons of the last one but there's literally no indication that that's the case - e.g.: tentish klown posted:Bring it on. I've got spare cash ready.
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Jun 7, 2014 22:32
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Changing the subject entirely, on ITV1 right now is the greatest entertainment imaginable - a thunderstorm has led to England's friendly against Honduras being suspended, which means instead of boring old football we get a half hour of England's actual national sport - complaining about the weather.
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Jun 7, 2014 22:35
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So, have they started selling 'Team Michael' and 'Team Theresa' shirts yet? Cause this poo poo is getting funnier and funnier Furious Cameron slaps down Gove and May over 'Islamic extremism' row quote:David Cameron dramatically asserted his authority over two warring cabinet ministers on Saturday when he ordered Michael Gove to issue humiliating apologies and told Theresa May to sack her closest adviser, following their public row over policy on combating extremism in schools. yeeees eat your own
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Jun 7, 2014 22:37
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I hope it really kicks off! May would drop Gove like a bad habit.
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Jun 7, 2014 22:42
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Changing the subject entirely, on ITV1 right now is the greatest entertainment imaginable - a thunderstorm has led to England's friendly against Honduras being suspended, which means instead of boring old football we get a half hour of England's actual national sport - complaining about the weather. Speaking of football, this is an actual thing:  gently caress Paddy Power forever and their 'hilarious' stunts also gently caress English football
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Jun 7, 2014 22:43
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Answers Me posted:Speaking of football, this is an actual thing: Is this what it looks like? What the gently caress.
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Jun 7, 2014 22:55
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