Jump to content

UK Politics VIII


Maltaran

Recommended Posts

For those who don't get the subtitle, hereare Boris Johnson's remarks on the proposed cuts to housing benefit

"I'll emphatically resist any attempt to recreate a London where the rich and poor cannot live together," he said.

"We will not see and we will not accept any kind of Kosovo-style social cleansing of London."

While Boris is engaging in his usual overblown hyperbole, he does have a point - how many places to live are there in London for less than £400 per month?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

:stunned:

£400 a month? You'd have been lucky to find a place in Brighton that cheap. Ten years ago. In 2001 I was paying £370/month for a tiny attic bedsit with a single bed, a wardrobe, a bookcase and about 1 sq m of free floorspace.

I wonder how many BTL properties Boris has in his portfolio.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

While Boris is engaging in his usual overblown hyperbole, he does have a point - how many places to live are there in London for less than £400 per month?

The planned reduction to the maximum amount of housing benefit is to £400 per week (£21,000 PA divided by 52 weeks approximately = £400 per week) not per month.

Edit: what I find amusing/interesting in this move is that housing benefit functions to subsidise the private letting market not the public/governed by EU law/charitable sectors whose rents are set at below market levels by the government in any case.

So what outcomes can we expect? Will private landlords be able to reduce rent levels if they have mortages on those properties to repay? Will the properties that they have to offer be attractive to wage earners currently living outside London (I guess this is going to hit London most), or will they require debt funded investment to tart them up sufficiently to be attractive to potential renters currently living outside London?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For sure people will be obilged to move out of London, no doubt about that.

I wonder who will pay for families to move out of London to Hastings or Southend given that people on housing benfit are highly unlightly to have savings to be able to pay for removal vans to cart their goods and chattels out of our capital.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not to mention the cost of actually getting to London, where all the jobs are, especially now that the cap on rail fare increases has been removed.

The reporting on that was particularly shoddy, I don't know where they got their figures from. "The cost of an annual ticket from Brighton to London could increase to £4k within 4 years" - yeah, it was £3700 a year ago and goes up at least a couple of hundred pounds a year, I suspect it will hit £4k rather sooner than that. :unsure:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not to mention the cost of actually getting to London, where all the jobs are, especially now that the cap on rail fare increases has been removed.

I suppose I'm particularly unhappy wiht the numbers side of things. We have this policy announcement but we don't know how many households and how many indidviduals will be affected, so we have no idea how many of those will be working and might need public transport (and for the hard up we are talking busses and many chnages rather than the "relative" convenience of train travel) to get to their jobs, no idea how many are going to school and for whom additional schoolplaces will be required in new locations, and no idea of what level of additional capacity will be required at Doctors' surgeries and so on.

Given that Housing Benefit is paid out by local councils (who collect details of size of household, employment, earnings etc as part of the application) the Government could have collected the data and publically stated how many people would have been affected and to what extent before they made their policy announcement but it appears that they prefered to leep first and let the facts on the ground work themselves out somehow or other. It's only peoples lives after all, not like its anything important.

Edit: in a our market economy there are inevitably going to be people who are employed and people who are poorer than others. The question is if we are going to treat them as scum or as fellow citizens (or as fellow subjects of Her Majesty).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dare I ask why exactly people on housing benefit should be entitled to live in houses which the vast majority of taxpayers cannot and will not ever be able to afford themselves? I can't say I have much sympathy for people who will have to move out of central London and move to zones 2/3. It is, after all, what the rest of us have to do.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ordinarily a clash between the CIPD and the government on unemployment trends wouldn't be too interesting, but:

During the heated and, at times, bad-tempered exchange, the MP [Michael Fallon] said: "You are less reliable than a dead octopus."

Mr Philpott replied, saying, "Actually the octopus was pretty accurate while he was still alive."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok, just voted... Take that you teaparty douches (in general- not you guys on the board)! :commie:

Yeah, damn those British tea-drinkers!

(fitheach, you might want to check the title of this thread again...:thumbsup:)

ETA: Damn, MinD was too quick for me :ohwell:.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, damn those British tea-drinkers!

(fitheach, you might want to check the title of this thread again...:thumbsup:)

ETA: Damn, MinD was too quick for me :ohwell:.

Woops! :stunned: . Sorry, carry on.

Tea is wonderful to drink... Sorry again. :ohwell:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As long as we get crumpets with melted butter served up on a table while your watching the bbcs Lion Witch and the wardrobe series. Good times good times.

Only if the badgers look like people wrapped in rugs! or its the wrong LWnW How that series ever won an award for best costuming I will never know.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Getting back to actual UK politics for a second (I know, I'm letting the side down), I'd like to congratulate the government on their solution to English higher education funding. It really takes an extraordinary level of dedication to come up with a solution this bad. Fees tripled, but with no extra cash for universities to compete internationally? It's a hell of a solution - screw everyone. Graduates saddled with enormous debt, universities get no money yet government control is actually increased, early repayment of your fees will be penalised but paying up front is fine (so students with wealthy parents pay less than people from a poor background who graduate to a high-paying job), cap on fees retained, no extra cash for students to live on while studying: yeah, this is about as bad a solution as could conceivably have been found.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...