malk

Selling off council houses with no replacement meant the loss of a buffer stock of rental accommodation. That coupled with poor regulation on the rental sector afterwards led to the inevitable creaming off of value by parasitic rentiers. Building new houses is a good thing but I'd be as keen to see a mechanism where lots of privately owned houses are brought back into the social rent sector. Get rid of housing benefit completely along with new legislation to stop eviction of tenants unless the house is sold or there are new tenants to replace the existing, plus punitive taxes on empty properties. Then allow local government (or whatever suitable co-op/non profit/no leech organisation) to buy them at the new, crashed, market rate. Then also allow local government to boost local economies by employing people to properly retrofit to a high standard. Rent these houses back to the local community at maintenance cost thus reducing pressure on household finances, increasing disposable income and aggregate demand (or reducing competition for jobs). Bingo, cheap housing to live in rather than as investment.

What's the best/easiest to use dataset for household income in a given area? EDIT: Ignore that, ASHE by local authority is close enough.

Thank goodness indeed. The sooner people realise the better!

Leaving debts to future generations is a myth and flying will get a technological solution but for the others, the sooner we accept that they're unacceptable the better!

Bingo! Obvious this is a bit of a generalisation but single use plastics just need to be banned. They're a convenience but one we can, and have, live(d) without. There will be some issues to sort out, food spoiling for example, but I'm sure The Market will sort that out once the parameters are set. Seems a pretty classic example of not pricing externalities. If the market can't or won't do it, regulate for the public good. Stuff like this should be really simple. There was a similar thing, iirc, with a UK company that had designed coffee cups that didn't have the plastic liner that stopped them being recyclable. They didn't get much uptake at the time as companies didn't see the extra cost as worth it. Now there's lots of faffing around with different options and yet more expansion of the different types of recycling facility needed. Personally I don't need choice on what type of coffee cup I use so outsourcing that decision to a regulator to make a good, sustainable choice makes sense. Indeed, it's what Adam Smith suggests!

Tell you what, why don't you give up 8% of your income, it's only a p*ss in the ocean after all.

Did you intend to show up the poverty of your argument in a chart? 8% of the total tax take is hardly a p*ss in the ocean, and that's the amount taken once a shed load has been avoided, aggressively or otherwise. Now taxes might not pay for spending but avoiding them allows for distortions in the market that have real negative consequences.

I know this isn't directly apples to apples but I recently bought a Kia Soul eV for £16k nearly new. Less than 9k on the clock and five and a half years warranty remaining. At £1.25 per gallon that 50 miles is £5.68. A full charge of the Kia is £3.51 (13p per kWhr x 27 kW battery). I'm getting about 90 miles at the moment (with air con and not at all driving carefully) so 50/90 x 3.51 = £1.95. 34.3% of the fuel cost is quite a saving. Tax is £0 and, as established earlier in the thread, servicing and repairs should be less over the lifetime of the vehicle. Of course battery life is a potential issue but I'll be interested to see how the lifetime servicing costs compare even including the battery and history would indicate that the replacement cost will be much lower by the time it becomes necessary. So you wouldn't need to pay many multiples of the initial cost, even buying new you can get a Kia Soul eV for about £23k. Plus that £8k difference in purchase price would be recouped in just over 100k miles based on the figures above. This will be the next big difference. The generation of eVs that are 5 years old have a number of foibles, typically range. Already we're close to older versions of the Kia I have dropping under £10k. Of course that's a far cry from when I used to get whatever car for a couple of grand tops and then pile on the miles... but the fuel saving is significant and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't nice to have a much newer car with some mod cons.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/04/10/london-toxic-air-pollution-killing-thousands-every-year/100304958/ Yeah, I'd say it really does cause some problems. Death is generally considered to be all bad.

Diesel particulate filters barely work over short journeys and particulate matter doesn't need to be identifiable soot to be hugely detrimental to public health. It is more of an urban problem but most of the population is urban/suburban so that's neither here nor there. I'm with you on the rest of your post but the thing is, there's nothing stopping us sorting out both problems at the same time.

I just like lighting a fire under the collective arses of sclerotic corporations. If they had a hard deadline to meet or lose money they'd stop sitting on cash piles, buying back stock and instead do some R&D. Renewable might be taking off now but if we had forced development earlier we'd be further along. I can certainly see eVs being part of the storage solution. My guess is that capacities and charging speed will increase sufficiently in the relatively short term that range anxiety just won't be a problem. With all that storage grid connected we'd be able to get rid of the need for peaker generators for a start and I don't see any good reason there won't be significant local generation in the near future. Building regs could be changed so that most roofs are fitted with solar pV tiles. The tech around that isn't far from being economically viable and would make a massive difference if rolled out on national scales. That said, I suspect that a few iterations of home batteries will lead to those being an easier way of having fixed storage in the home and vehicles will benefit from reduced size and weight rather than needing to have the capacity to also help with home power.

I'd recommend this podcast (https://www.reknr.com/latest/5-a-job-guarantee-jg-vs-a-universal-basic-income-ubi/) that goes into a little about your first paragraph, well in a roundabout way. There is a brief mention about how current policy around disability is actually more to remove "disabled" from working society as it they were too difficult to integrate into the workforce and by giving them a token payment society can abdicate their responsibility to all. There's a destructive trend in the hard centre (Blair/Brown and their follow ons, Cameron and the Liberal Tories, the Lib Dems etc.) who have a patrician, paternalistic view of Liberalism (full disclosure, I'm not a Liberal) that seeks to entrench negative liberty, ignore positive liberty and assumes that anyone can have their success merely with hard work, i.e. ignoring their own personal circumstances. So when you say the lefties on the Labour side I think you're referring to those people. Corbyn isn't like that even though he isn't radical. I back him because he will promote greater democratisation and a return to more honest, less opaque politics. Certainly it won't be a sea change and there are forces that will try to stop him, even if he wins. Hell they may well succeed. Little reason not to try though, there aren't any other options. On housing, it's a subset of understanding money to me. I'm frustrated that Labour hasn't taken on a proper view of Modern Money, seemingly because they're scared of a Magic Money Tree backlash from the Tories, the Austerian Centre and their press cheerleaders. Certainly that would come but there are argumentless to win irrespective. I am frustrated that the new builds being thrown up are awful, more so than the pricing as that can change whilst the quality of the slave box can't. What I really want to see is Labour's "Fully Costed Manifesto" replaced and enhanced as a "Fully Resourced Manifesto". Show how Modern Money would allow for a large expansion of the public sector to properly staff healthcare, social care, education etc. along with rebuilding and expanding our crumbling infrastructure. Once that's in place the next step is to expand democratic decision making and accountability to the most local level practicable. Anarcho-communism for the win. On Brexit, this is a good start https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/brexit-labour-party-socialist-left-corbyn

I'm with you all the way. All of the above is already nice and I'm already happy that I don't need to go to petrol stations any longer, driving out of my way on my commute to fill up is a thing of the past. I just wish that we'd legislate better to accelerate the changes. Banning diesel engines by 2040 is utterly pointless, why not ban the sale of any new ICE vehicles in five years and force anyone who wants a piece of the UK market to be better. My lungs would be very happy at the prospect!

It's legit, I'm not running a cable out of the window or anything! It's a green initiative along with cheaper parking. Hence why it won't last forever, once they're de rigueur they'll charge unless... Governments sadly don't understand what tax does/is for! Since taxes don't pay for services they should be happy to forgo taxation on things that don't need it. Now perhaps they'll want to modify the behaviour of drivers via taxation, which would be fine, but I'd hope we'd invest in infrastructure (plus R&D) to the point where we had abundant renewable energy. A better system/grid with some combination of local storage, flywheels, ultra capacitors, cheap batteries (saltwater etc.) and advances in wind, solar etc. and we'll be able to generate plenty of energy. At that point we could effectively give it away for free with maintenance delivered by state funded (money creation) locally delivered/administered services. Not that that will happen any time soon but there's no good reason for us not to do so. I don't think this is a valid argument. The pure drivetrain element of an eV isn't any more complicated than an ICE one. All cars seem to be getting more complicated and computer controlled but I don't see a particular reason why the kind of older, more simple, car couldn't be replicated with an electric drivetrain. Yup, the lack of moving parts in the drivetrain is a huge plus for me. These things should run and run, especially if replacement batteries are on the cards, a big if admittedly.

They're so much nicer to drive. I bought one recently after realising my 50 mile per day commute over b roads was likely to cost around £2k per year in fuel. Now I can charge for free at work (which admittedly won't last forever) which is quite a benefit! It's a Kia so I'm not looking at Tesla performance but up to 60mph it's a dream, instant torque and great acceleration even in the low power mode I use. That's a car with a range of 70-120 miles. Stick in a solid state battery and that range goes up massively and charge times drop, we're probably one major upgrade away from them being better than ICE drivetrains in every area. Plus that's without mentioning the huge reduction in maintenance from removing loads of moving parts. And if that needs more infrastructure, great, more jobs.

Have all the sockets in your house got cables dangling out of them waiting for something to be plugged in? You have a cable in your car and you plug it in when required. It doesn't matter if there is space for 4-5 cars between each lamppost as you don't have to fill up your car every time you stop. Most current generation cars get 100+ miles a charge so you don't need to top up every day as few people, particularly those in urban apartments, drive that much. We're not that far away, hopefully anyway, from next generation batteries which will increase range drastically. One example, solid state batteries, could be a game changer https://www.wired.co.uk/article/what-is-solid-state-battery-toyota-dyson. Good! The health benefits of getting rid of local emissions, particularly diesel particulates, will be massive. On taxation, if more people realised that tax destroys money (as well as giving worth to the currency) then we wouldn't have to worry about them switching tax over to electrics. Tax to control inflation and charge negative externalities? Cool. Let's push for that rather than worrying about paying it per se. More generally on how we'll pay for all of this? With the pounds that only the UK government can create. We should be leveraging the university sector to research this tech and then making sure we have the real resources to build the infrastructure. The funding is a cannard.

There's still a chance that Labour will get on board with the growing movement for a job guarantee and that will solve the problem you state in (my) italics. However, even if they don't, it isn't particularly an economic problem to give such handouts to anyone. For all the gumph about record low rates of unemployment there's absolutely a dearth of decent jobs. Until that is solved we're better off giving handouts to those who can't get decent jobs as otherwise you kill aggregate demand. Similarly with tax credits, they're an awful policy that subsidises business, often propping up unproductive or zombie businesses, but if we take them away without sorting the economy first then a) people die and b) it again kills aggregate demand. Obviously that's all in a nutshell! The other important thing I expect from Labour is an attack on rentiers. From rent caps to reversing the crony capitalist privatisation of profits and socialisation of losses. Renationalising these natural monopolies and levelling the playing field with tax would go a long way to bring back creative destruction in the market.

I don't get this line of reasoning at all (that it is a disaster for Labour). The changes are from 2014 when Labour were 4 years into their opposition of the Tory led coalition government. In 2014 Labour increased their vote share by 2pp, added 6 councils and 324 councillors. In 2018 a further 4pp was added to the popular vote, along with another 77 net councillors. In London in 2014 Miliband did very well with an 8pp swing from 2010, adding 3 councils and 185 councillors. Corbyn added a further 4pp, 1 council and 60 councillors. That's supposed to be a disappointment, a disaster? Labour won the popular vote in Wandsworth and in Westminster were only 1.7pp behind the Tories. Some disaster.

Teachers can't do this though. Their pensions start at 65 so if they retire before then they need to find the cash from somewhere else to plug the gap or, from 60 iirc, can take their pensions early for a pretty significant hit to the annual amount. That was the comparison I was making. They put in about £200k worth (at 3% interest, much more with a higher return) and the rest comes from the employer contribution which, to me, seems entirely reasonable. What kinds of contributions to private sector employers normally make? Is it less than 1:1? I'm highjacking the thread but the easy solution to pensions is just to have an earnings related state pension.

£21k is what they'll get under the terms of their defined benefit with a career average salary of £40k and 30 years of contributions.

And they pay in a good contribution to get that https://www.teacherspensions.co.uk/employers/managing-members/contributions/calculating-contributions.aspx. Annual Salary Rate for the Eligible Employment from 1 April 2017 Annual Salary Rate for the Eligible Employment from 1 April 2018 Member Contribution Rate Up to £26,259.99 Up to £27,047.99 7.4% £26,260 to £35,349.99 £27,048 to £36,410.99 8.6% £35,350 to £41,914.99 £36,411 to £43,171.99 9.6% £41,915 to £55,549.99 £43,172 to £57,216.99 10.2% £55,550 to £75,749.99 £57,217 to £78,022.99 11.3% £75,750 and above £78,023 and above 11.7% If you're dropping 10% of your salary into your pension pot I'd expect it to be pretty decent. Say £4k pa contributions with 3% interest over 30 years. That's a little under £200k without factoring in any employer contributions (incidentally 16.8%). That'd get you a £21k pension (30/57 x £40k). It won't work out like that as they'll earn more and contribute more but it's a decent rough estimate. Plus teaching is a bloody difficult job that's being made worse and worse.

Iraq is as stable as it has ever been... Loool!

Was being sarcastic, I'm absolutely with you.

Are you saying this might be our fault? That's the kind of anti-patriotic nonsense that makes us so attractive to economic migrants that love living in slums on the margins of society without hope of a future. People are queuing up to get into the Yarl's Wood holiday village don't you know!

But those weren't Soviet figures? Also see Robert Allen: Farm to Factory (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) To say that history's greatest economic experiment--Soviet communism--was also its greatest economic failure is to say what many consider obvious. Here, in a startling reinterpretation, Robert Allen argues that the USSR was one of the most successful developing economies of the twentieth century. He reaches this provocative conclusion by recalculating national consumption and using economic, demographic, and computer simulation models to address the "what if" questions central to Soviet history. Moreover, by comparing Soviet performance not only with advanced but with less developed countries, he provides a meaningful context for its evaluation. Although the Russian economy began to develop in the late nineteenth century based on wheat exports, modern economic growth proved elusive. But growth was rapid from 1928 to the 1970s--due to successful Five Year Plans. Notwithstanding the horrors of Stalinism, the building of heavy industry accelerated growth during the 1930s and raised living standards, especially for the many peasants who moved to cities. A sudden drop in fertility due to the education of women and their employment outside the home also facilitated growth. While highlighting the previously underemphasized achievements of Soviet planning, Farm to Factory also shows, through methodical analysis set in fluid prose, that Stalin's worst excesses--such as the bloody collectivization of agriculture--did little to spur growth. Economic development stagnated after 1970, as vital resources were diverted to the military and as a Soviet leadership lacking in original thought pursued wasteful investments.