erat_forte

Trouble is, it really isn't against the GFA. It is an international trade agreement between UK & EU. International trade agreements are reserved to Westminster, and have no bearing on the GFA.

Actually that's a very difficult situation, that is the whole point of "addiction" - there is no simple answer. It's like if there is a person who is stuck at the bottom of a very deep hole that's about to be filled in - its easy to give them simple advice, "just get out now!" but that's not very useful advice without some practical sequence of achievable steps they could take to deliver the suggested outcome.

I suppose we should look at how things have changed in the last year or so to see how the system expands. The Furlough schemes, the changes to Universal Credit eligibility, the self employed support. These all have many times more people on than the old benefits system (I think?) I know the Universal Credit system has been kind of interesting, basically a lot of the admin seems to have been "waived through" so as to process more people and avoid the various flaming hoops usually required to jump through. Do you think this is how it might go in the future? Nominally the same systems

I disagree, there are two different options. 1 as you very sensibly suggest, collapse the housing market 2 collapse everything else to save the housing market. Like in "round the world in 80 days" when they basically dismantled the ship and fed everything into the boiler furnaces to keep going as fast as possible

I don't understand that. Sure, if you can control other people and command them to do what you want, you can increase your real prosperity, at the cost of a decrease in theirs. But it all comes down to resource use - at the very basic level you and they all need to eat. Both on an individual and an aggregate level real wealth is pretty much equal to resource use. you're just talking about different resource allocation structures and different shaped distributions of the resources over the population.

Hmm... Poster called "myusernameistaken", New Members, 2 posts, opens a thread soliciting suggestions for policy for the Treasury to try and get them out of this mess they have created. Rishi... nice to see you here mate. Hope you get some good ideas. Don't forget us all here when you pocket your next million.

I didn't say it was specifically I was meaning a crash, and massive destruction of financial wealth, were related things that could lead to... etc. But actually I would have thought that a house price crash would be a destruction of financial wealth in its own terms, since people generally include housing equity in their calculations of how wealthy they are. Maybe I used the wrong terms, I was trying to distinguish between real wealth (e.g. a house standing on a plot of land) and financial wealth (e.g. how much it is worth). I suppose this is massively simplistic from a financial poi

On "sustainable development" surely its root is not running out of natural resources catastrophically? But in which case, yes, massive transfers of wealth to the rich away from the poor is one "stable" way to get there - if the poor get poorer they consume less, as the rich get richer they don't consume correspondingly more, they merely preserve their previous way of life. By controlling the assets they can stop the (shrinking) real wealth being shared equitably around an ever growing population. The other possibility is what bears and Green optimists hope for - a crash, massive dest

Perhaps the Government should intervene in cases like this where there is a long chain. When the chain gets stuck, the estate agent could call in a special government scheme "Help to Proceed" which would offer an interest free bridging loan to whoever was holding up the chain. That way all the sales could proceed at the highest possible price.

Typical, so-called "experts" spreading confusing technical stuff trying to bamboozle people with science. We're smarter than that. Now if you don't mind I need to shut my computer for a few hours because I can feel the 5G radiation making my mutant cells tingle. I'll be back online later once I've had a little lie down.

They pay the local professional dog walker to pop in every day and take the animal for an hours exercise. It only costs £20 per hour per dog, bargain really.

Right, if they are properly set up as a business then they should have no problem furloughing staff or getting loans or grants just like a wedding organiser or cruise ship operator or cake decorater. That's not the story here, its like saying the government should give grants to couples to help them pay for their wedding costs so as to help the wedding organisers, and to cake eaters to help them pay for their cakes.

Doctor! Will I be able to play the trumpet after my surgery? Yes, definitely you will. Oh that's great, I always wanted to be able to play but I'm tone deaf and could never get a note out of the thing!

I think the Green parties generally used to be like that, quite "conservative" as well. Perhaps being fringe or being seen as fringe attracts the weirdos and being small makes you easier to take over by entryism. Actually I think entryism is a big thing nowadays, not sure if it always was. Perhaps driven by social media echo chambers / amplification of fringe worldviews. Look at the people getting embedded in the SNP, nothing to do with constitutional reform, all to do with single issue lifestyle promotion.

There's three totally separate "Green" parties in the UK, with no connection to each other except they use the same name (a bit like the Liberal Democrats, the Liberals, and the Literal Democrats I suppose, except they don't stand in the same areas as each other) England and Wales has one (it has subsidiaries in Wales and in London, but they are part of the same E&W party), Scotland has a second, and Northern Ireland has a third. They don't share any kind of structure or anything so have separate policies etc. For some reason they all do social engineering things as much as