ElPapasito

Much as I regret it, the plebs will tug a forelock to their masters and give the Tories a 40 seat majority.

I would buy now with a looooong fix if I thought IRs were on the rise soon from a record low. Maybe EAs are feeding that line to people.

Surely an inheritance is just additional income at the point of receipt by the benficiary. Tax the income received. Simples! Ok so the inheritance assets will get put into Trusts but the benefit can't easily be realised without creating a taxable benefit.

No the EU isn't circumscribing the UK's ability to make constitutional reform internally at all. It dramatically impacts our statute law and governmental policy choices in many areas but not our constitutional structure (within the bounds of commonly accepted democratic principles). It didn't even intervene when we did the Scottish referendum.

Sorry to be boring but houses are not being built because house builders are better off restricting supply in a 'slow' market to prevent pressure downward on prices. Solution: move most of the government's tax requirement onto land, according to planning status and NOT on whether the land is occupied, built on or vacant. That means all the 'value' locked up in land becomes a liability not an asset to an under-utilizing owner, and they will have to properly use it, rent it or sell it. No more land banking. Suddenly we will see all land zoned for housing being built on and sold / rented with the eventual house price /rent being just the costs of assembling the bricks and mortar / general upkeep for rental but the occupant will have a much higher council tax bill (probably paid directly through PAYE so it isn't so visible). Nothing else removes the rentiers, hoarders and parasites as effectively with no loopholes or unintended consequences which price caps and subsidies and 'help' always introduce.

NO it is only responsible for ALL the BAD STUFF everywhere.

ROFL. Classic!

Surely the real question is what the hell is a smallish European governmental agency renting for £25M per year in Canary Wharf? They could get an office block for 1/10th that in any major other city in the UK. That alone is enough to reassure me leaving the EU is a good move.

“Prime central London is probably now enduring its most protracted period of price suppression since records began,” a report to investors in the London Central Portfolio Property Fund said Poor suppressed house prices! What causes this vile demagogic suppression that manages to overcome all the favoured status and subsidies loaded onto property investors??

Thank you. Keep bringing it back to the basic truth.

One aspect of the current parliamentary chaos not much mentioned is Labour's dillemma. On the face of it May is making such a hash of it and looks like the worst leader the Tories ever had, possibly a PM on a par with Neville Chamberlain. So Labour can't help themselves in directling events towards a new general election. Their solution to ALL problems is to call for a GE. They think the electorate will punish May massively, repeating and redoubling the beating they gave her for opportunistically calling the 2017 election. Corbyn has an open goal to win a huge majority for himself they think. I think they are wrong. The electorate can see that Labour have no more unity of approach on Brexit than the Tories can muster. They can see that forcing an election now is the worst of timing for the UK. Many people think that between 3 options - no deal, May's deal and Remain that May's deal is the most nationally uniting of options, and that the ERG et al are overstating the drawbacks. So Labour could be outed for being self-interested politicos trying to snatch a win with no plan for any of our very real and urgent problems. And people might think that now giving May the majority of May Deal supporting MPs is the only real solution. So we could see Tories winning well where the tory challenger is pro - May deal. So the GE might be able to resolve the Brexit log-jam swinging away from Remainers, hard Brexiteers and Labour. (I myself would never vote for the Tories, but can see Labour are potentially misreading public opinion catastrophically)

That is an idea that might have legs.

What funding do they need exactly? Bus fares into Paris?

A must read from the briliant Tim Morgan on Surplus Energy Economics https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/ Here is a small quote, but do go and read the whole article, and support alternative economic thinking... [snip] World prosperity, thus calibrated, was $83.5tn last year, an increase of 24% since 2000. Unfortunately, two other things have happened over that period – debt has more than doubled (+125%), and population numbers have expanded by 22%. The former number means that, worldwide, people have 85% more debt now than they had in 2000. The population increase means that they have become only marginally (+2.4%) more prosperous over the same period. The plateau in overall world prosperity per person since 2000 has, of course, masked starkly divergent regional trends. Whilst people have become 120% more prosperous in China, and 87% better off in India, the citizens of most Western economies have been getting poorer, typically since the early 2000s. Prosperity in the United Kingdom, for example, was 10.2% lower last year than it was in 2003, whereas Americans have become 7.3% less prosperous since 2005. The average Italian is 13% poorer now than he or she was back in 2001. [snip] We can, though, conclude that, from here on, prosperity becomes at best a zero-sum game, stripping away the logic of ‘mutual benefit’ founded on the Ricardian calculus of comparative advantage. This “transition to zero-sum” logically marks the start of three new trends -the retreat of ‘globalism’, the rise of more nationalistic politics, and a new and growing emphasis on redistribution. Beyond redistribution, the political emphasis now is likely to swing towards opposition to immigration, based on perceptions that this process dilutes prosperity.

Thank you. I was going to be less generous in countering his murderous drivel.