DaveR

DJKQ, this is what you said: "This is what I found out. A CID car was chasing a stolen car towards the junction of ED Grove from Peckham Rye before having a head on smash (on the opp. side of the road). Three cars written off (including the CID car)." and then: "He was being chased by a CID car. I thought the police had a policy of not pursuing high speed pursuits in urban areas.." It appears that you were wrong, and it was pointed out that wrongly attributing some fault to the police (which was the clear implication of your posts) is not helpful. I think you need to take that on the chin rather than complaining about bad manners.

I would also recommend Simon. He usually involves one or more kids directly in each trick, and gets the others shouting out etc., so should be fine.

Great speech, but not so easy to write a manifesto on the back of it. This is the closest it gets to a policy statement: "First, it is a covenant of reciprocity: ?of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you?. People give to others ? as good citizens, workers, neighbours and parents. In return they are given a fair and just tax system, universal social protection, a minimum income entitlement. A living wage, secure employment and pensions. Homes for people to live in. Second, the covenant is for an ethical economy, organised for human well being and equality. That means reform of the banks. Securing capital and employment in localities. Reform of corporate governance to make business accountable. Third, the covenant is for liberty. Strong democratic cultures for active participation and deliberative decision-making. Freedom of information, and a plural media ownership. Civil liberties cherished, not given away cheaply. Now a new covenant will not work top-down." Wonderfully aspirational, but what does it all actually mean? Take a few examples; what is an economy "organised for human wellbeing and equality"? How does it differ from what we have now? "Homes for people to live in" is an understandable desire, but does that mean more public housing, subsidised private housing, interventions in the market to make housing more affordable? "Reform of corporate governance to make business acountable" - accountable to who? The owners of the business? The government? Me? More fundamentally, he claims a novel role for a putative future Labour government i.e. as "the defender of society against the power of the state". I'm not sure exactly what this means, but it has a libertarian flavour that is utterly at odds with the current reality of Labour politics, and, fundamentally, with the history of the Labour movement in the UK. The speech can be read as being supportive of almost any set of policies between that of the current coalition, and that of Cuba under Castro. I'd prefer something rooted a little more in reality.

Barry Road is a residential road, not a main road - it just happens to be long and straight. A significant proportion of drivers do drive too fast down it, and do not take account of the fact that there are likely to be other vehicles trying to cross at a number of points. I would be in favour of restricting parking either side of the junctions and looking into improving visibility generally, and some measures to reduce driving speeds.

Franklins maybe...

I would recommend Gracia - close to the centre but with a distinct identity, nice shops, restaurants etc. We have friends there with young kids who we visit regularly and it seems to be a popular place for families. I suspect it's quite pricey for accommodation by local standards, though.

"You still seem to assume that because one person is less well off than another they should buy the other person a second house while never having access to their own." Every single f*cking penny you, I, or anyone else spends, on anything, finds it's way into someone else's pocket, and that someone may be a lot better off than you. If you rent from a commercial landlord, what you pay finds it's way into the pockets of shareholders anf probably highly paid executives. If you buy a house with a mortgage, where do you think the money goes? You want to buy a house, you can't afford what you want, boo-f*cking-hoo, frankly. Some other person, who may or may not be particularly wealthy, owns a house that they are not living in, and offers it for rent at the market rate (definition - what people are willing to pay for it) - and you can choose to live there or not. It's not criminal, it's not immoral, it's not wrong - it's life. You, together with 95% of the people in this country, and I'm betting 99.5% of the people on this forum, are so much better off than nearly every other f*cker on the planet, as well as being a shitload better off than almost everybody in this country ever expected to be one single generation ago, and what do we get - 7 pages of complaining about house prices. Half of it from someone who has been forced by poverty to move to f*cking Surrey! I'm going to post something on the World Cup thread now

They say you should never let statistics get in the way of a good argument, but what the heck. "Let me ask you this, do you really think it is ok for rent to be as high as it is in proportion to most people's salaries? And do you think it should keep on rising at the same rate it has for the past 30 years?" How high is it, do you reckon? There are stats, and they can be found here: www.communities.gov.uk/documents/507390/pdf/14657171.pdf (apologies, I couldn't insert a proper link for some reason) Figure 7, page 26. Rent as a proportion of household take home income Outside London, relatively stable, or increasing slightly, and at between 13 and 20% depending on the region, over the last 8 years. It's not quite the tale you're telling, is it? The whole document makes for interesting, and refreshingly non-alarmist reading. 2 key affordability factors identified - building more houses, and lenders easing their current policies, particularly as regards deposits. Not tarring and feathering private landlords then.

"Normal people should be able to own their own homes." Why? In lots of other countries they don't, and don't expect to. That has never been an expectation in the UK before the last 25 years, and arguably the expectation was created by precisely the 'deregulation' that you are all complaining about. And actually you are saying much more than that - that people should be able to own a home of the type they want, broadly where they want AND that being a private landlord is immoral and effectively criminal. And you are calling yourself a 'victim', although I suspect that you would accept that there are a sh!t load of people in this country who are significantly worse off. People are not starving or freezing to death for want of food or clothes, and people are not being deprived of their health, nor rioting in the streets, because they can't buy the house they want, where they want. In terms of quality of housing, the vast majority of the UK population are better off then they have ever been, and those in real housing need are not a bunch of peiople complaining that they can't find a house they like that is close enough to the office.

Pretty much everything that has been said on this thread comes down to this, from Huguenot: "If you have a BTL house and the tenants are paying off your mortgage, you are simply stealing their property and the proceeds of their honest labour from them for personal gain" which is clearly b&llocks. The only real suggestion that anyone had made to deal with it is straightforward price control i.e. an imposed rent cap, which should cause capital values to fall until the level of investment returns is restored to a realistic level. And it still wouldn't work. It will make renting cheaper, but it won't make buying property significantly cheaper because demand will stay strong for as long as the economy is in OK shape and people are willing to pay lots to buy a house. I note that there was absolutely no attempt to rationalise the jump from this: "The fundamental purpose of property rights, and their fundamental accomplishment, is that they eliminate destructive competition for control of economic resources. Well-defined and well-protected property rights replace competition by violence with competition by peaceful means." to this: "The current BTL systems is just a way to replace feudal lords with modern property tyrants. Both systems rely on the existence of a massive community of disenfranchised serfs from whom self-determination is withheld." probably because the latter is equally b%llocks. Landlords are just exercising the basic property rights that underpin our legal and economic system. Those rights are already (and properly) curtailed for various reasons re health and safety and security of tenure. I can also see a very good argument that if we are moving towards a scenario where more people are expecting to rent for longer periods then there should be greater security of tenure, but you need a balance - under the old Rent Acts, if you had a protected tenancy you were laughing, but if you didn't you were stuffed, and (unsurprisingly) there wasn't a lot of mobility in the market. And finally, this is absolutely about left and right, because it's about economic freedom - two people saying I'm willing to sell you something for a price you're willing to pay, and vice-versa - and shouldn't involve the state unless its really, really necessary. We don't have price controls for food or clothes so why housing?

DjKilla, I understand the conversation perfectly thanks, and I've been patronised by incoherent left wing types before as well... I've had a quick skip back through the thread to see if you or anyone else has come up with some concrete ideas about how you go about guaranteeing nice affordable homes for all (or any example of any place, any time, any where in the world where that has been achieved). I also remember the 70s and early 80s, when far fewer people actually owned their own homes, and far more people were council tenants, and anybody who thinks that was some kind of paradise is seriously deluded. The mortgage market is demand led. There's no doubt that some lenders made stupid loans, but that was bad business practice rather than a result of any fundamental change in the legislative or regulatory environment, and most of the bad loans were to owner-occupiers rather than landlords. The key driver of demand in the housing market in the last 20 years has been growth in the economy, pure and simple (coupled with the British obsession with home ownership - ownership rates continued to rise throughout the 80s, 90s and dropped back slightly, for the first time in decades, in 2007). Just look at this thread - everybody wants to buy a house (or wants everybody to be able to buy a house) - that's where the demand comes from. And finally, despite everybody saying 'the market doesn't work', prices are falling. Not in East Dulwich maybe, and less in London than elsewhere, but they are (13% in Liverpool in the first quarter of this year, for example). This was an interesting stat, I thought: "The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) has said that the proportion of the average first-time borrower's income spent on mortgage interest payments dropped in November 2009 to its lowest level for six years, at 14.4%."

"Residential Property should not be a business like any other" It's not. There are already all sorts of legal restrictions on the way that landlords deal with properties and tenants. What people are arguing for is a fundamental change to the residential property market, which is different. There is no contradiction between, on the one hand, boosting social housing, changing planning laws etc., while at the same time recognising that it is pointless and (in my view, wrong) to try and legislate the property market out of existence.

The 'problem' of the housing market is not so easy to diagnose or fix, and a bit of class warfare is not going to do anybody any good. Buy to let took off because property prices had risen over a long period and were still rising, so lots of people had a bit of capital and the prospects of both an income stream and capital appreciation. Credit was cheap and easy to get, and in the main it made good commercial sense for lenders to lend against property (and lots of people benefited from that). Prices were rising primarily because the economy was growing, incomes were rising fast, and restrictive planning rules limit supply, not because of buy to let. In any event, if individuals hadn't got into the property rental market their places would have been taken by commercial landlords, because the returns were so good. As for the tax position, property rental is/was treated the same as other businesses - no specific tax breaks, but no different treatment (interest on business loans is always a deductible expense, for example). Calling people 'scumbags' and talking about human rights is a diversion that makes people feel better about themselves but is f&ck all practical use to anyone. I'm all in favour of tweaking the tax regime to make sure that landlords pay their share, relaxing planning restrictions to get some high density housing built in areas of high demand, encouraging key worker schemes etc. but you have to face up to the fact that not everybody has the right to live where they want to. London is expensive, but if you want a 3 bed house for ?150k within 40 mins of the City, here's one: Dartford Now, you might not want to live in Dartford, but that's another issue entirely, and probably not high on the government agenda

I'd go with that starting XI except I'd start with Lennon rather than Walcott. I thought we looked v. unconvincing last night - Mexico had more chances and looked more comfortable in possession. I would expect the starting XI to be a lot tighter, but if Barry, for example, can't get fit/stay fit, we may struggle.

HAL9000, where do you get your ideas from? Are you seriously suggesting that a lawyer MP is 'conflicted' if a constituent complains about a doctor, because of some kind of 'code of professionals'? The Bar Code of Conduct is a public document: here as is the Solicitors' Code: here It's all there. Lawyers are not above the law, and have no duty (ethical or otherwise) not to undermine public confidence in law and order. The idea that a lawyer MP is not going to be interested in a complaint about the police is crazy, given that plenty of lawyers spend most of their working lives arguing that their clients should be acquitted because the police are lying, incompetent and/or corrupt. I'm not sure I understand your second point - a lawyer MP might have a commercial interest in legislation or policy that affected the way lawyers are paid, but equally an MP who has a retail business has an interest in the level of VAT, an MP who owns an off licence (there may be one!) has an interest in levels of excise duty, and so on. Why is a lawyer more likely to be conflicted than any other?

"On the grounds of traceability, the identification of cyclists/bikes, simplification of insurance claims/police reports, the ability to reunite owners with lost/stolen bikes" If this is for the benefit of bike owners, then it seems excessive to make it compulsory If this is for a wider 'public good' reason then it needs to be clearly articulated to justify compulsion - presumably with penalties for non-compliance.

Going back to the very first post, what would be the purpose of the National Database, and how do you justify making it compulsory? More generally, there have been stacks of threads on here about bikes and cars which have pretty much always descended into "bloody cyclists, jumping red lights and riding on the pavements" vs "bloody car drivers, think they own the road" - not v. productive. I cycle and drive, and I suspect there are very few cyclists who don't also drive, whereas suspect the majority of drivers don't also cycle. I have some dificulty getting outraged about the behaviour of cyclists because the actual risk of serious harm to anybody other than the individual cyclist is tiny (there are anecdotal examples, obviously, but the stats don't lie). Drivers, on the other hand, need to be aware that relatively minor bits of bad driving can have serious or fatal consequences for cyclists, and the risk is substantial. In my experience of commuting by bike for the last couple of years, most drivers understand this and drive accordingly, but there remains a minority who appear to resent the presence of cyclists on the road and drive like idiots.

How about this as a decent starting point for non-negotiable principles: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness"

How the f*ck did I miss this thread? Squatting is not 'legal' - it's just that it's not a crime per se. There is a big difference. It is trespass, and the person with the right to possession is entitled to possession subject to going through the right procedural hoops. Did someone really post "all property is theft"? I've seen it all now.

Anything that is assessed on a country-wide basis will be an aggregate of such differing experiences as to be essentially meaningless. This quote: 'Romantic Paris offers the best of everything, but services don't fall away in Alsace's wine villages, in wild and lovely Corsica, in lavender-scented Provence. Or in the Languedoc of the troubadors, bathed in Mediterranean sunlight.' doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the degree of analytical rigour employed in this survey. If I had to live in a small town I'd pick France or Italy over the UK in a heartbeat (but at least part of the attraction is to live there as a foreigner - if I was a native in small town Italy I'd want to get out). If I valued sunshine over intellectual stimulation I'd move to Australia but as it is I'd rather live in Luxembourg - at least it's close to lots of more interesting places.

PS the laffer curve is the theory, but the actual experience of almost every western econonomy (including the UK) in the 80s and 90s was that reducing tax rates did in fact increase revenues, as was the case for Ireland with corporation tax during the first half of this decade. Who's ridiculous now?

The guy behind this website is the same one who reckons that Edward Heath was a secret Nazi spy.

"they're just the same old Tories" The complete sum of the Labour campaign for re-election.

LM, I suspect we're going to have to agree to disagree about this one, particularly when you say that whatever practical steps are taken to address poor education, drug addiction etc. "In any event, this wouldn't address the underlying problem ? the inequality " which kind of lends support to my suggestion that it is a symbolic rather than practical issue. On some of the specific points: Incapacity benefit (now known as ESA). Between October 08 and May 09, 352,000 claimants were medically assessed for their eligibility. 38% were found to be fit for work, and another 38% stopped claiming i.e. voluntarily gave up the benefit rather than be assessed. The report is on the DWP website, here Tax rates. It is pretty much accepted by economists that there is an optimum tax rate, above which increasing the rate will result in a fall in revenue, and that consequently a cut in rates (from a high starting point) will lead to an increase in revenue. Try googling "the Laffer curve". This was the actual experience of the UK and a large number of other European and other countries in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently Ireland in relation to corporate taxes. It is also the reason why goverment projections for the amount of revenue expected to be raised from the imposition of a 50% top rate have been widely considered to be optimistic, to say the least. Obviously I am not, and have not suggested that voluntary giving can replace taxation. However, I am suggesting that doing more to encourage and incentivise giving may be more effective at curing some of societies ills than using the blunt instrument of higher taxes. Despite the slightly sneery attitude towards the idea of philanthropy of you and H, encouraging the idea reflects current government policy: and you yourself, in an earlier post, used the words 'social obligation', which is precisely the idea that I am saying ought to be promoted. In the US, the wealthiest 10% of the population account for 50% of charitable donations. In the UK, the wealthiest 10% give 20%.

What difference does the purpose make if the outcome is the same e.g. some people pay a lot more? The pretty much universal experience of modern economies is that cutting marginal tax rates increases the overall tax take, because it reduces the incentive for avoidance and because lower taxes = higher employment. I would also suggest that the wealthy are more likely to feel that they are contributing towards a better society if they are able to exercise some control over what they give and to whom (over and above basic taxation). Do you feel that the money you give to a charity of your choice is more likely to increase the sum of human happiness than your income tax deductions? There are, again, lots of practical things that can be done to encourage the wealthy to give something back to society, and it should be seen as the norm.