Huguenot

I think the CML figures are pointlessly and cynically misleading. Mortgage interest payments don't buy you a house, they're just rental on a loan. You still have to pay off the capital. At 6:1 ratio, the only people 'first time borrowing' are either on huge salaries or with large deposits paid for by wealthy parents. No suprise that in this market interest payments are only a low part of salary. The average couple simply cannot buy. Can I also, for the record, state my absolute revulsion with the pompous asses who talk about 'the British obsession with home ownership'? The only people who talk about this are greedy and grasping land owners who want to milk the masses like goats. They sound like victorian throwbacks. This current ridiculous system undermines modern capitalist society. This is not because I'm a prating left winger, but because I understand modern economics: "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." 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. Make NO mistake here. 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. Edited for shocking typing...

I don't think that's true. The benefit of an amnesty is that it incentivises self-declaration. Applying even massive resources couldn't possibly achieve the same effect.

I don't agree DaveR. Residential Property should not be a business like any other. It is perfectly reasonable to legislate that interest on loans should not be tax deductible on residential property, and housing associations can be accommodated effectively through a charitable status. Local planning committees would not be interested in reclassifying residential property as commercial to accommodate aggressive landlords as it would create pressure on their own housing budgets. It would be a self-sustaining proposition. The fact that ic currently runs as a business is not a reason for it continuing to do so. This approach has wreaked tremendous damage and must be addressed.

In defence of MPs or local councillors, it's worth noting that all of them are restricted by resources: whether time, money or support staff. In the UK the average constituency size is 100,000 people. In practice this means on average they each have 14,000 people living below the poverty line and 1,500 illegal immigrants or asylum seekers, let alone those troubled by healthcare or policing injustices. MP's are hypothetically funded to have three full time staff each. Not many. This situation rather creates a requirement for prioritization. It means that even the most well-meaning MP cannot serve everyone. It would be easy to understand that this could be characterised by those that feel neglected as being arrongance or disinterest.

Hi dc, sorry about the lack of clarity. I was trying to compare the number of people voting compared with the number of people paying taxes. To make that calculation I used the 'full time' employment figure, since I assumed (incorrectly or not) that those working part time for a hundred quid a week rarely breach the annual income tax threshold. The full time employment figures in the latest document you showed came in at 21m, so although my 19m figures might have been a little out of date they weren't far off. Just as an aside on david carnell's post, most of the skilled blue collar workers in the building or plumbing trade I've met during my house renovation years were self-employed and staunchly conservative.

I think it's a bit of a poor show to fire someone for their personal convictions. I've sat round many boardroom tables where the consensus didn't meet my own beliefs, but part of the brief is that you deliver according to the consensus. Otherwise you have anarchy and achieve nothing. Theresa May could well be a dinosaur, but you don't judge a person by their thoughts, but by their delivery. Let the lady do her job. (I think there's some Nietzsche in that) Many of the petitioners are attempting to prejudge Theresa in a way that would be illegal if you tried it in a job interview.

Is it a toilet overflow or roof tank overflow? If so it's because the water is continuing to fill your cistern even though it's full up. Either your ballcock/float is obstructed, or more likely either your filler valve is furred up or the rubber washer that seals it has perished. Hopefully it's the latter, because it's relatively simple to fix - just turn off the filler pipe at the wall, flush the loo and unscrew the filler valve to expose the washer. If you take the washer into Dulwich DIY they'll almost certainly have a replacement.

LOL! You seem to have a bizarre wish to prove that there are no advantages to BTL landlords based on a technicality! Put it this way then: the law isn't sufficiently clear to stop this practice taking place. In a similar way to MPs, couples can flip which property they refer to as their main home almost at will. The 'tax break' is the lack of clarity that can be exploited. This was probably because MPs benefitted from it themselves!

I have an electro swat - they're absolutely fantastic. All that snap, crackle and pop when you get one just right. It's also hilarious to walk up behind office colleagues and douse it on their ears. They go completely beserk.

Yes it would be illegal, but so is expenses fraud and the MPs got away with that for decades. Yes, CGT is scheduled for change, but you asked what the current tax breaks were? I thnk that the most effective remedy is the removal of mortgage interest from the allowable expesnses list. That's what turns residential property monopolies into a lucrative business. You'd need to do it in stages though. Nothing to do with 'uncontrolled immigration'. When will people grasp that our problems are not caused by fantasies about jack-booted foreginers raping rose-cheeked British innocents?

You don't pay any capital gains tax on your 'main' home. In practice this means a couple can buy two homes and pay no tax at all on the gains made from a 'buy to let' property. Retal income can be offset against 'allowable' expenses before tax, and all properties own are treated as a single business. This means that you can offset all tax against the capital purchase of multiple properties, or even your own furniture: the government effectively pays you to furnish your house and expand your empire. For the BTL landlord this means new property is cheaper than a first time buyer. Interest on mortgages is an allowable expense. This means that for a BTL landlord on an interest only mortgage, the house, and the capital gains are all 'free'. Buy a house to actually live in it, and you have to pay the whole lot. Tax on dividends and savings accounts is similar to income tax - rising to 40%. Capital gains tax on property is only 18%. This means it's cheaper/wiser to build a property empire than invest in stocks or shares. That's a hell of a lot of tax breaks, and so much cheaper than buying a property actually to live in it. It goes without saying that I'd like to see all of these breaks removed. Bit by bit, so it doesn't create a run on the market, but in the end I'd like to see them all removed.

Coz I don't reckon you were completely joking ;-)

I don't think in general 60 days averages should remove zero values - but it should in this case as it was 'suspension' not audience activity that caused it. But either way HAL, I've made the mental leap to remove the suspension from the graph and I'm not paying attention to the apparent rise in the last two month average data. It's clear that activity remanined fairly consistent across the last 6 months, which means that activity must have increased on non family and non Drawing Room material to compensate for the appearance of those sections. That's why I'm saying the Lounge is even more successful now than it was in the past. Mind you, all these graphs feel a bit like looking in the loo after you've done a whoopsie ;-)

Good heavens, I know you're just having a laff steve, but I don't think you realise how deeply disturbing that view is. A casual approach to violence is exactly what the OP was concerned about - and here's you proposing it as the perfect solution to a social misunderstanding.

"and why should we kowtow to those who fly to their second home in the south of France every two weeks?" Is that what you really think it is? People who try to introduce fictional wage-envy in order to deliberately misrepresent an argument of critical economic importance should have their vote suspended. You're trying to make the flights issue an 'I hate yuppies' issue. It's not only blind prejudice, you're actually proud to be perverse! Unbelieveable. The fact is that everyone wants the planes that take them to Benidorm each year, they just don't want the planes that take other people to work or on their holidays.

I think if you've deeply offended someone, even unintentionally, violently assautling them afterwards could only compund the error.

All of them :))

Out of the UK population of 60m, only 19m are working. There does seem to be a significant lobby preoccupied with the 'rights' and 'benefits' of the 68% of the population sponging off the efforts of the rest. Allowing for the 15m under the age of 18, that still leaves us with 26m who are voting on how much of other people's money to take, and how much of it to spend. Doesn't seem fair. I credit the population with recognising this. I'll be betting that a significant swathe of Labour support doesn't come from olde skoole flatte cappe 'workers' at all. I'm guessing they don't even total 500,000. New Labour's achievement was to recognise the need to cater for a bigger slice of the population, coloured with an altruistic bent. However, I think they just lost the plot at the end. There's no knowing what the hardcore Labour politicians would have done had they remained in power. Their refusal to negotiate with the Lib Dems is a reflection of this. If Socialist Worker types have returned to the fold, then they'll simply accellerate the demise.

Lol! Ladymuck sounding up bit like Gollum talking about his ring.... :))

Have you been on the Baltic Porter again HB?

I don't see how a 'greenranger' could complain about the Lib Dems increasing recycling from 3.6% under Labour to 24% under Lib Dem? Sure, we'd all like to see more, but that kind of delivery is nothing to be sniffed at. Southwark's very high density housing (blocks of flats), wealth gap and cultural diversity make recycling far harder in Southwark than it is in leafy West London commuter belts. Political posturing is all well and good, but councils have to live in the real world.

ED's service to London Bridge is scheduled to be uprated from the current 6/4 peak/offpeak to 8/6 service in 2015. So far as I know the beginning and end times of the service remain unchanged, and peak is only Mon-Fri. Until that date it will remain unchanged. As James B points out, this is largely due to the timing of infrastructure changes at London Bridge.

As I said on another thread, I try hard to be contentious, illiberal and definitely not wishy washy ;-)

I don't know whether the Lounge is on the slide or not - I don't think that's right in 'real' terms. I'm surprised it kept its end up - until the split all the family discussion stuff and drawing room stuff went in the lounge. Since these two added together are half of Lounge's overall traffic, I'd have expected to see the Lounge halve in size if it didn't attract new and growing audiences. So for me the Lounge 'plateau' actually represents a doubling in size!

I meant from the tax revenue perspective Ladymuck ;-)