I’m wondering about the accommodation bit because I remember reading conflicting articles about it, including some suggesting that it’s not so much that the physical housing doesn’t exist, but they just don’t tend to be where they need to be, and in the case of London, many of them are lying empty as investments or more nefariously, ways to evade capital controls or taxes.
For the former problem, I’d say a huge effort has to be focused on one of the things that Labour keeps paying lip service to, but doesn’t seem to be investing actual money in, that is diversifying investment beyond London. Bring jobs to dying towns, so that young people who want to can actually stay there and revitalise these places.
Stop being so soft on companies and strengthen workers’ rights, including remote working rights, so that local economies can be strengthened again. If you have people working where they live, you’ll see local businesses become more vibrant and do better. You’ll also stop the housing pressure on hot property markets.
The governments own economists have been banging on about this for years, particularly in terms of infrastructure investment. Unfortunately, I suspect the decision makers have far too many vested interests.
Sometimes, I genuinely wonder if it’s the case that they have too many vested interests, or if they have too many blind spots. Look at the number of CEOs who keep trying to force returns to offices.
I was reading this old article from November, which suggested that Starling’s CEO was trying to force employees back into offices despite not even having enough desk space.
And whenever I read interviews with CEOs and other leaders, it’s always about “conviction” and “belief” and never about the data, despite organisational psychologists and the data being pretty much in consensus that most of these CEOs and “leaders” are full of shit.
Actually with the moves to nationalise infrastructure like trains, why wouldn’t the government start a long term programme to build quality apartments in self contained neighborhoods and subsidizing citizens when they meet certain criteria. Right now I understand that government housing in UK is seen as low quality housing?
Do you mean social housing? Council houses themselves tend to be very well built, but they are usually reserved for low income families. The bulk of them were built between 1950 and 1980 and many of these have since been sold off to private owners - originally to the tenants, but they are often used as private rental properties.
Oh yes council housing, that’s the term my friend told me. I think the problem for us in Singapore was always the middle class. Too rich to get government help, too poor to buy private housing. So the government in the 70s and 80s started building good quality housing in self contained neighborhoods and subsidized first time family buyers to own their first property and put in mechanisms to prevent unnecessary flipping for profits.
The population growth given is itself only a projection, and yes, I am expecting any future immigration to follow the path of current/ previous movement, particularly given the tighter immigration rules following brexit, some of which prohibit the bringing of family across.
A lot of people come here as students but I think most people moving here are doing so for work. They tend to be younger and so will often not have family with them, if at all and will not use public services as much as those already here, so they tend to provide more money for the government than it spends on them (Resolution Foundation estimate a figure in that BBC article you link to of £5bn less borrowing needed by the Government if the ONS projections turn out to be correct.)
We have shortages across a wide spread of industries, which is itself limiting growth in the economy. The ONS figures suggest that from mid 2029 we will see more deaths in the UK (due to the ageing population) than births and so have a shrinking population without an increase in births or immigration.
@Lynch04’s post is only possible without an understanding of immigrations figures, what contributes to them, what the demographics are, and what the immigrations system is like.
In other words, it reads entirely like a tabloid article.
Gilt fluttering a little, but the BoE clearly feels it has room to cut and while the yield curve has reacted it has not spiraled out of control. Sterling losing ground against other major currencies is practically inevitable, and may not be a bad thing.
Lots of criticism for Labour, but if they can get through a year of this they start developing some options.
The problem is, even if Labour can pull through this, will the country? Will the people struggling to make ends meet pull through this? Will the people who desperately need the government services being cut back pull through this?
At the most basic level, people in the UK need to become accustomed to a lower standard of living. They chose that in 2016. Unfortunately, there are severe distributional inequities in that are very hard to address.
That said, I have seen a lot deeper holes than this one (Canada 1993 being the one that comes to mind).
The amount going to service debt is already trending downward, and every % that is freed up opens up the question of paying it down faster versus social priorities.
They simply will never learn. No “mainstream” party will ever learn, it seems. You don’t beat them by adopting their attack lines, because they will always beat you on that.
This is just a sticking plaster over the problem, and probably won’t work, for the reasons that the people reacting in the article state: the key issue is the platform announcements.
Also, it annoys me that the reporting says “rail bosses”, when in reality it’s Network Rail and not TOCs.
It’s really bloody annoying because there are some good points made in there, and the observation about younger people should make one curious and concerned, not rush to judgement and condemn them.
But hey it’s the latter that gets all the tabloid readers frothing at the mouth and seems to be the tone that Starmer wants his government to have. It’s frankly quite pathetic. People voted for this government because they wanted change, not because they wanted the same old bullshit trotted out over and over again.
If they want to talk about workshy people bleating excuses over and over again, they’d do well to take a look in the damn mirror.
