2024 UK politics - now with Labour in charge

Here's an example of a subsidy which ultimately doesn't benefit the consumer... just goes in one end and out the other.

Maybe not, but you can tax a country into happiness it seems. https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2022/04/07/tax-more-happiness-alan-kohler

Given a choice between prosperity and happiness I know which I would choose.

And the link between low tax and prosperity isn't particularly well established either, it very much depends upon how you measure prosperity.

Even by the standards of history's second craziest Pol (Toynbee; Pot just edges her on balance) this is a weird article.

George Osborne is a walking ad for a wealth tax. Labour should target the inheritocracy | Polly Toynbee | The Guardian

The first two paragraphs are blatant Osborne-bashing. Obviously as an ex-politician, he deserves bashing every day, and in his case, I would make occasional exceptions to my rule against physical violence. However, even Osborne-bashing has to be grounded in logic.

Paragraph 1 has a general rant about how people born into wealth tend to accumulate more wealth, quoting Osborne as a flamboyant, flaunting example of this, with no justification bar perhaps a photo of him with his glamorous new partner from 2022. (Definitely punching above his weight there, but that's another story.)

Paragraph 2 then references Osborne benefitting from being a partner at a highly profitable financial advisory firm, even going as far as to describe this benefit as being like a salary, as though being paid a salary is a bad thing. Mad Pol may write her nonsense for free, but most sane people understand the concept of being paid for your work. But putting this logic fail to one side, the bigger logic fail is that Osborne's "salary" is very little to do with being born into wealth and mainly to do with his "address book" from his days at Number 11.

There's probably a decent article to be written about potential issues arising from some ex-politicians being able to command high paying jobs based solely on their contacts built up from their days of "public service". The most obvious such issue being whether the potential for post-politics earnings is the draw into politics rather than the motivation to serve the public. But anyway, that article wasn't written.

Paragraphs 3-7 are then a broadly sensible discussion of the issues associated with wealth inequality and the difficulties associated with taxing wealth. Despite the initial Osborne-bashing, Pol's "hero" does not feature in this discussion, from which we can maybe deduce that he hasn't indulged in any egregious tax avoidance. Or maybe Pol has done no more homework than reading a couple of other Guardian articles.

Paragraphs 8 and 9 then discus changing Council Tax to be a general national-level tax based on ability to pay (as measured by current value of house) rather than it being a tax to contribute to the local services that the household might consume. Definitely worth a discussion, despite no reference here to Osborne's role in the failings of the Council Tax system due to being paid by Robey Warshaw LLP.

The final paragraph then completely loses the plot by proposing that CGT should be levied on primary residences.

Osborne gets a final kicking in the last sentence, with Pol describing him as the Poster Boy (she uses the word "exemplar" which I think is progressive-speak for "Poster Boy") for the societal damage caused by wealth and inheritance, which at the risk of sounding like a broken record are nothing to do with Osborne's "crime" referenced early in the article, namely being highly paid. He gets another shoeing for greed, which sounds all virtuous, but who would turn down a multi-million £ payday? (Honest answers only!)

But that's aligned with pretty much all public services being up shit creek too. Being worse off and everything being broken is why Labour got in.

Agree that a "strong economy" (as perceived by the public in the UK) generally requires good pay packets and good public services.

Apparently though the two biggest reasons for people voting "Not Tory" were Partygate and not wanting to be associated with a party that chose Liz Truss as PM rather than the economy per se. Though maybe the state of the economy put people in a position where these two events were the straw that broke the camel's back.

The important part in my case was "and everything being broken."

12 years of austerity and "efficiency" as in cutbacks, has just lead to most feeling worse off and everything being broken.

Blair literally made millions on the back of being PM. He also went to probably the poshest school in Scotland.

Brown has done pretty well from it too.

Toynbee regularly proves to be an utter idiot.

I mean, they let Simon Jenkins write about housing and planning.

It's all just satiation. Pick your flavour

I guess opinion columns are much cheaper than actual journalism.

I feel like that's the same story every year...although clearly I'm misremembering as Muhammad wasn't the most popular name last year.

I think so in certain areas. It is very catchy.

I suspect my good friend who's a director of a housing company and has to deal with these sorts of things will be happy at these sorts of noises. I remember one large development he was working on needed lots of work doing because of dormice habitat (I think), but he reflected that new residents' cats would appreciate the remaining dormouse population for a few meals thus making the mitigations quickly pointless.

I suspect what happens is that Nimby's sometimes abuse the wildlife regs to inordinately delay developments that are going to happen anyway, but @rjsterry will have a more informed opinion than my "my mate says that..." one.

Part of the problem is that with the previous deregulation of Building Control , Planning is the only opportunity to enforce some condition on a development. Not entirely unreasonably, local authorities think they should be addressing various environmental and social concerns for their constituents, but have insufficient funds and the planning system is their best, possibly only, opportunity to get someone else to contribute to these goals. So these worthy causes get bolted on to planning consents.

The thing is planning officers only know about planning so they consult other specialists on the additional areas that have been bolted on to the planning system: heritage, waterways, highways, schools, ecology, trees, etc. Each consultee looks at the problem purely from their point of view without any consideration of the wider goals of the planning policies, and sends back to the planning officer a list of conditions that they would like appended to a consent. In theory the planning officer is able to take a view on the relative merits of each set of conditions and edit these into a balanced set of requirements, but the reality is more a case of aggregation resulting in unweildy lists of sometimes inappropriate conditions attached to even quite modest applications. These then need to be discharged via further applications and submissions.

For a recent application to change the roof covering on a house in a conservation area we were required to prepare a statement detailing how the change from artificial slate to natural slate reduced CO2 emissions from the property. The same local authority forbids the replacement of single glazed sash windows with double glazed versions for heritage conservation reasons.

At the other end of the scale: bat tunnels.

A lot of this boils down to local authorities adding requirements to their planning policies that their planning departments then don't have the expertise or resources to assess or administer.

This is the thing: each thing sounds fine in isolation but it's become a collection of competing and contradictory requirements that cannot be simultaneously satisfied. All administered by an underfunded, chronically understaffed and demoralised workforce.