Driving for the sake of driving is apparently not an "essential journey"

The lock down rules have the aim of reducing person-to-person contact as far as possible.

Misguided or not, that's a clear enough basic principle.

So no more going on holiday by 'plane or train (fair enough); work from home if possible (fair enough); try and cut down on your shopping trips (one big shop a week instead of popping out for what you need - fair enough); no driving to beauty spots for a walk or picnic (too many other people there - fair enough). They classify this as "non-essential travel".

There is no earthly logic that says simply driving round in a circle for the joy of it goes against the basic principle (especially on empty roads with petrol at 102.9/litre). You get out of the house - with significant benefits for your mental health (doesn't mental health count as 'health reasons'? The alternative is hitting the booze much earlier in the day) - and you come into contact with precisely nobody.

In terms of person-to-person contact, driving is better and safer than going cycling or walking (which people still do in groups). Driving to your holiday home does not increase the number of person-to-person contacts so does not go against the basic principle either. But if you are employed by killjoys and banstubators, you have to toe the line I suppose.

A copper at a roadblock in the middle of Epping Forest yesterday informed me in no uncertain terms that joy riding is "non-essential" and therefore basically against the law - which they just made up on the spot. The logic is arse-backwards. Even more galling was the fact that said copper was standing well within two metres of me; and the road block was near a car park full of people going for walks or cycling.

There aren't expletives enough in all the world's dictionaries to describe the mentality of whoever decided that joy riding goes against the basic principle (which it clearly doesn't). According to The Telegraph, Mr Loophole even says that you might be void your insurance by doing so.

Oh Great. Just Bloody Great.

Hammond hires HSBC 'economist'...

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1280TT

http://uk.businessinsider.com/hsbc-eu-referendum-analysis-brexit-precarious-calm-before-storm-2016-6

"It's again a story of managing to keep the recovery hobbling along but due to much more stimulus both from the ECB and government spending. Less private sector expansion, more public sector expansion, and all the while we're just muddling through. We're not solving some of the key underlying problems, such as income inequality, high unemployment, and a disenfranchised youth — which is what is fuelling support for populist parties around Europe. And as we've seen with the UK last week those risks can materialise — so this remains a very precarious calm."

What about your role in all that?  The total failure to reform banks? The massive credit expansion?  The eye-watering rent seeking?  The taxes on production and subsidies to landowners and banks?  The total screwing of the poor and the prudent for the benefit of the already rich and parasitical speculators?

Another remainer or at the very least anti-leaver 'economist' from the same serial inflationist home-owner-ist club as all the rest of them.

Update  h/t DBCR

Seems that I have been a little (not a lot) unfair to La Ward.  Seems that she had spotted some issues in 2008 - somewhat after we did, may I add.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/constructionandproperty/2787692/UK-housing-bubble-is-bursting-and-its-serious.html

Any excuse is good enough for another land price/credit bubble...

From the BBC:

The Bank of England has warned there is evidence that risks it identified with Brexit are beginning to emerge. In a major report it states: "There is evidence that some risks have begun to crystallise. The current outlook for UK financial stability is challenging."

To help lubricate the financial system it has eased special capital requirements for banks. The move potentially frees up £150bn for lending, the bank's Financial Policy Committee (FPC) said. That could help if uncertainty caused by leave vote causes the economy to slow down and banks to be cautious.

"This is a major change," said Bank of England governor Mark Carney. "It means that three-quarters of UK banks, accounting for 90% of the stock of UK lending, will immediately - immediately - have greater flexibility to supply credit to UK households and firms."

… It said there were risks apparent in the commercial property market, with vital foreign inflows falling by 50% in the first three months of 2016.

The FPC also has concerns over "the high level of UK household indebtedness [and] the vulnerability to higher unemployment and borrowing costs" for some households. House prices could also come under pressure, particularly if buy-to-let investors abandon the market, it said…

The Bank would reduce the level of the buffer - set to be introduced next year - from the planned 0.5% of a banks' lending "exposure" to 0%. The 0% rate would be maintained until at least June next year, the FPC said…

"These measures are really about Carney aligning the Bank of England's guns in case the UK economy enters a downturn. Markets are going to be reassured by his pro-activity," said James Athey from Aberdeen Asset Management Investment. "He's not waiting for anything bad to happen but rather acting in case it does. It also means that both halves of the BoE: the monetary policy and financial policy are pulling in the same direction."

A glorious mess of contradictions there. They've got "concerns over the high level of UK household indebtedness" and their knee jerk is to encourage more borrowing by scrapping one of the few sensible measures introduced the last time the land price/credit bubble looked like popping?

And how can they justify measures on the basis that "risks… are beginning to emerge" or "have begun to crystallise"? What sort of double-think is that? The commenter from Aberdeen Asset Management is a bit more honest about it at least - to paraphrase "We've got to take measures to pump up the land price and credit bubble as long as there is a perceived risk that Something Bad will happen. If we sit tight, the likelihood is that nothing bad will happen and we will have missed a golden opportunity."

George Osborne scales new heights of hypocrisy

From the BBC:

George Osborne echoed this message in his Peston on Sunday interview on ITV, saying:

"There is no turning back. It is a one-way door to a much more uncertain world, where people's jobs and livelihoods are at risk.

"British people can't take their money out of Britain. Brexit may be for the very rich but it is not for the working people of this country who will be paying the price for many years to come."

George's Help to Buy is also for the very rich and is not for the working people of this country who will be paying the price of it for many years to come etc. So what's the difference?

Sneaky!

From the BBC:

Although Chancellor George Osborne abandoned cuts to tax credits in the Autumn, cuts to UC announced last summer will still go ahead.

From this April the amount that anyone on UC can earn before their benefits are cut will be reduced. This so-called Work Allowance will be £4,764 for those not claiming for housing costs, or £2,304 for those who do.

Once claimants earn above that amount, they lose 65p for every pound they are paid.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From CityAM:

Cameron constantly refers to "Paying down our deficit".

How do you pay down a deficit? You reduce a deficit and pay down* a debt.

@CJCHowarth

* In this country you "pay off a debt", but hey, his point stands.

"Nobody move, or the puppy gets hurt!"

Landlords on fine form in The Times:

Landlords have threatened to raise their tenants’ rents if George Osborne uses the budget to end tax perks for buy-to-let borrowers.

1. We all know perfectly well that they can't, but if they could, why don't they do it now? Answer: because they are already charging as much as they can get.

2. They also know perfectly well that they can't - because if they could simply 'pass on' the higher tax bills then they wouldn't really care about the higher tax bills.

Compare them with the cigarette industry, they don't particularly like tobacco duty, but as supply is elastic and demand is price-insensitive they genuinely can pass on 99% of tobacco duty onto smokers, leaving their net profits pretty much untouched. Ditto petrol.

3. A tax is the opposite of a subsidy. How would landlords respond if Georgie Boy said "OK, keep your interest deduction, instead I will get that £5 billion a year back by halving the Housing Benefit you get". It's more or less exactly the same thing - but we know that if Housing Benefit were halved then rents would go down, however slightly.

4. They never say what non-leveraged landlords would do. Would they keep rents constant while leveraged landlords try to increase them? How's that going to work? Suffice to say, what would happen is that over-leveraged landlords, the highest cost operators, would sell up so we could argue that as a result, the average interest paid by landlords goes down so rents would go down (using their twisted and circular logic back at them).

5. In particular, it will be higher earning tenants who now buy the homes up for sale, meaning that remaining tenants have lower average incomes and so rents will come down to match.

6. If their logic were correct, they might as well call on the Chancellor to make all rental income entirely tax free.

In a letter to the chancellor, seen by The Times, the National Landlords Association warned that an assault on buy-to-let would damage the economy and work against first-time buyers.

Highly leveraged buy-to-let are a threat to the economy - even the Bank of England says so - not an assault thereon, we all know that as well, and how the f*** do they work out that squeezing a few buy-to-let landlords out of the market would not be interests of first-time buyers, i.e. the sitting tenants to whom the exiting landlords sell?

Landlords enjoy tax breaks that cost the exchequer about £5 billion a year, according to HM Revenue & Customs, the equivalent of more than a penny on the basic rate of income tax.

Yup. These greedy fuckers are 'investors' not businesses when it comes to grubby little taxes like National Insurance and VAT, so unlike proper businesses they don't pay those. But unlike proper investors who invest in shares, they can deduct their interest expense from taxable income... just like proper businesses. Best of both worlds, that is called. And then there's the 10% wear and tear allowance/giveaway.

Buy-to-let borrowers are allowed to deduct the cost of mortgage interest payments from their tax bill, a perk that makes buying property cheaper for landlords than for first-time buyers.

No, false comparison. Owner-occupiers pay less tax on their homes than landlords; strictly speaking, owner-occupation gets the most tax breaks. But at least an owner-occupier is only getting it on one home.

The fair comparison is with people who invest in shares (who can't claim a deduction for interest paid, see above). A perfectly sensibly policy, because it discourages credit-fuelled speculation in shares, which is what caused the 1930s Depression.

The letter from the NLA states: “...Landlords would be left with no other option than to recoup their increased costs through higher rents.”

Option 1 - accept lower net returns, option 2 - sell up. And that is the more likely one.

As a counter-point to all this, there are some interesting facts and figures in This Is Money:

* Average interest rate paid on BTL mortgages down from 5.77% to 4.69% over the last three years - so if tax relief for interest were withdrawn, the effective interest rate paid would be the same as three years ago (i.e. 5.77% less 20% tax relief = 4.69% without tax relief). Did landlords reduce their rents to 'pass on' the interest saving..?

* Nope. Average rents up from £660 to £734 over the last three years. If their logic were correct, then rents would have fallen to about £600.

If you're going to make up statistics, at least make up plausible ones, you twats...

From The Guardian:

From 2003-13 – a decade which saw the introduction of a ban on smoking in public places and a rise in cigarette prices – the proportion of all deaths in the 35+ age group estimated to be caused by smoking fell from 19% to 17%...

Fewer than one in five people over 16 smoked in 2013, the lowest proportion since recording started in the 1940s. More than a quarter smoked in 2003...

So if just under a fifth of all adults smoke, and just under a fifth die from smoking, that means that all smokers die from smoking, yes?

Nope:

The British Heart Foundation said tobacco products still killed about half the people who used them and doubled a person’s chance of having a heart attack or stroke.

Unlike non-smokers, who live forever, presumably, placing absolutely zero cost on the social security system or the NHS or anything whatsoever.

Moving on:

The number of prescriptions for treating smoking dependency dropped from a peak of 2.6m in 2010-11 to 1.8m in 2013-14. Cheeseman [policy director at Ash] recognised rising use of e-cigarettes might be a factor, but said people who found quitting smoking most difficult would benefit from properly structured, evidence-based support from the NHS.

When a lot (i.e. all) of the evidence shows that smokers who start vaping tend to smoke a lot less - which is the whole bloody point of vaping - and very, very few non-smokers start vaping.

Mike Hobday [The British Heart Foundation's] director of policy, said: “These figures show current strategies to help people quit smoking aren’t going far enough... The government urgently needs a new strategy to help people stop smoking. With tobacco companies continually raising their prices...

Cigarette prices are dictated largely by the amount of duty on them; the cost net of taxes is around 50p wherever you go in Europe.

... this needs to include an annual levy on these companies to fund tobacco control and stop smoking services to help support people to quit.”

Actual tobacco company profits are a few per cent of the total tax already imposed on a packet of cigarettes.

Chris Woodhall, senior policy adviser at Cancer Research UK, said: “We want to see a tobacco-free country within the next 20 years – where fewer than five per cent of adults smoke. Falling smoking rates among adults and children show that we’re moving in the right direction, but we must do more to realise this ambitious public health goal.”

Tobacco free = fewer than five per cent smoke?

FFS.

"Tory housing minister Brandon Lewis said"

From The Daily Express*:

"Thanks to our long-term economic plan, house building in England is at its highest level since 2007.

"Our schemes are helping hundreds of families every month to buy their own home and we will go further by allowing new homes to be built specifically for young first-time buyers.

"Our Government-backed schemes will help a million more people become homeowners in the next Parliament.

"Our long-term economic plan is getting Britain building again and is helping people achieve their dreams of home ownership – the biggest threat to this is Ed Miliband in government."
--------------------------------------------
The English Housing Survey said:

2009-10
25 to 34 age group
Owner-occupiers - 47%
Private renters - 36%

2013-14
25 to 24 age group
Owner-occupiers - 36%
Private renters - 48%

To me that looks like a catastrophic fall in owner-occupation rates with a corresponding catastrophic increase in private renting. Clearly Mr Lewis knows something we don't.

The fact that the rot set in under New Labour is a separate topic, the 2013-14 survey tells us that the figures for 2003-04 were::
25 to 34 age group
Owner-occupiers - 59%
Private tenants - 21%

* Emailed in by MBK who knows I love this shit.

Daily Mail on top form

Spotted by Pyotr Wasik (who I still assume is Flashman) in The Daily Mail:

[Complete and utter bastard] Andreas Lubitz was signed off by two different doctors for the day of the Germanwings disaster but failed to tell his employers, it has been reported...

It also emerged today that his parents only discovered that their son was a mass murderer just minutes before the bombshell press conference by prosecutors in Marseille. His mother, a piano teacher, and father, a successful businessman, were understood to be in the French city at the time of the announcement, but kept separate from the victims' relatives...

The couple's £400,00 two-storey detached home in Montabaur, a town 40 miles from Bonn where Lubitz is thought to have grown up, was also searched by detectives.

Ed Mililband and The Parable Of The Talents

From Matthew 25:29 and 30:

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

From the BBC:

Unemployed young people could be denied out-of-work benefits unless they agree to training, Ed Miliband is to say.

In a speech, he will say those aged 18-21 should get a means-tested "youth allowance" rather than Jobseeker's Allowance, if they train in key skills...

Mr Miliband will also propose an increase in Jobseeker's Allowance from £72 to £100 a week for those who had been in work for the previous five years - rather than the current two years.

Or as Frank Zappa put it "And the meek shall inherit nothing".

If the flight path were over a grim 1960s housing estate or a new town, then that would be all right, of course.

From The Evening Standard:

Boris Johnson’s mother-in-law has joined furious residents protesting against the “unbearable” effects of plans for a new Gatwick flight path over their picturesque village.

Three weeks ago the tranquillity of the quintessentially English village of Warnham, West Sussex, was shattered without warning when aircraft taking off from Gatwick began thundering overhead – part of a six-month trial by Gatwick and air traffic control service NATS.

The £1,000 a year bung should soften the blow a bit, eh?

LVT will sort all this out. If the noise from the new flight path reduces the enjoyment value of your house, then its rental value will fall £ for £, and hence your LVT bill come down £ for £.

The really strange thing is that house prices under the Heathrow flight paths are higher than elsewhere, all things being equal. So it is possible that in a bizarre sort of way, the rental value and selling price of the houses in Warnham will go up.

It's so amazingly popular, they can rely on word of mouth, they don't need to pay for expensive TV adverts or anything...

“I’m not doing it because I have to, but if I get a chance, I find it immensely therapeutic.”

From The Evening Standard:

Television presenter Kirstie Allsopp has said she secretly enjoys mundane tasks such as washing, ironing and churning out baseless arguments against property taxes as she revealed she finds it “therapeutic”.

Location, Location, Location star Allsopp, 42, said: “I’m absolutely convinced that those repetitive tasks that one does every day, organising and regularising one’s home and constantly mentioning one's elderly parents who are sitting on a £2 million unearned windfall gain which one hopes to inherit, are enormously therapeutic.

“I know it is for me, and I have many, many working mum friends who feel the same. To know that their child is going to school with clean hair, clean teeth, clean uniforms and that their house is going up in value is what keeps her sane.”

Mother-of-two Allsopp, who also has two stepchildren with her partner, property developer Ben Andersen, said: “I’m not spouting economically illiterate scare stories because I have to, but if I get a chance, I find it immensely therapeutic.”

She told the Western Daily Press she tried to mention the asset-rich, cash-poor at least twice a week to try to stay in touch with other Home-Owner-Ists whose children attend the same school as hers.

"Two million quid for doing absolutely nothing. And all that'll be mine. Just think about that."

Joined up government

From The Evening Standard:

A massive £12 billion of welfare cuts are needed in the two years after the 2015 general election, George Osborne announced today…

People living in council houses and earning more than £60,000 should be told to find homes in the private sector, he also suggested.

I wonder how long it will take them to update the DCLG's Right To Buy guidance to make it absolutely crystal clear that council tenants earning more than £60,000 won't be eligible for the tasty £75,000 or £100,000 discounts.

Great British Understatement

From The Guardian, no less:

... in a letter to Treasury select committee chairman Andrew Tyrie, published on Thursday, Carney makes clear that while the Bank's financial policy committee (FPC) could advise the government at any time if Help to Buy is putting financial stability at risk, the final decision about if it should continue will lie with the Treasury.

"The FPC has no power to require the Treasury to vary the terms of, or close, the Help to Buy scheme," Carney writes in reply to a letter from Tyrie earlier this month asking him to clarify the Bank's role. "The FPC only has the authority to make recommendations in connection with such matters … the FPC is not constrained by the government's timetable for any such advice; it could make recommendations at any time."

That message appeared to contradict statements by senior coalition figures, including Conservative chairman Grant Shapps, who told BBC Radio in September: "We put the Bank of England solidly in charge of this scheme. We've said to them: 'You look at this every year, and if you're not happy with this Help to Buy Scheme, then you'll be [able] to cancel it."

Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg said of the policy last month: "Of course we need to moderate it, even turn it off if we think it is not appropriate and is providing inappropriate stimulation to the housing market. That is precisely why we have transferred the right to do that to the Bank of England so they can keep an eye on it – not politicians, not George Osborne, not the Treasury."

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (308)

A comment at localgov.co.uk:

Land Value Tax was tried by Labour in the 1960s and was a catastrophic failure. Landowners simply refused to sell: why should they?

And we already have a near-equivalent: S106 roof tax running at £20K per house, and builders obliged to give away 40% of their sites as social housing. The result? Barely viable sites and a reluctance to build.

Why bother when planning policies starve builders of sites and taxation policies make most of them financially unviable?

Antony Atkins, Added: Friday, 22 November 2013 09:17 AM

This is a fairly standard smart-arse Homey tactic, and can be politely referred to as "Telling a Big Fat Lie". The planning gains supplement, in all its names and guises is not Land Value Tax, it is the opposite of Land Value Tax and has predictable effects.

And he's obviously not read any homebuilders' financial statements in which they boast of their massive landbanks (about nine years' worth of supply) and state quite clearly that these are long term investments expected to produce super-returns whether they are built on or not etc.

Homey f-ers miserably fail to get their own story straight (part 94)

From this morning's City AM:

ONE of the perennial myths about this country is that we are somehow uniquely keen on home-ownership and are culturally averse to renting.

That’s nonsense: 70.7 per cent of those who live across the EU’s 27 member states are owner-occupiers, against just 64 per cent (and falling fast) in England and Wales.(1)

Housing Minister Grant Schnapps in this evening's Evening Standard:

When I was housing minister I got used to meeting couples who put up with cramped accommodation, or were living with parents well into their thirties. They shared the same aim — that first moment of putting the key into the door of a property they could call their own.

The dream of owning your own home is a truly British aspiration. But over the years it has become harder to do.(1) That’s especially true here in our capital.

So what is it, guys? Is the desire to own your own home "uniquely British" or not?

Make up your tiny addled deranged twatting stupid minds pls, and then I will take on the winner and point out that either way, this is completely irrelevant to any discussion about anything.

1) On the factual point, they are both correct. The whole point of Home-Owner-Ism is to reduce the number of home owners by whatever means (and to burden aspiring homeowners with the largest possible debts) and they are achieving this, it is not actually that difficult.

The period in which owner-occupation levels were steadily rising (in the UK) was exactly the period with relatively un-Home-Owner-Ist policies. You can hardly call those policies Georgist, but in relative terms and with the benefit of hindsight, they were.

NIMBYs Of The Week

Via Khards at HPC, from The Leamington Observer:

PROTESTERS in Southam have a "very good chance" of blocking the Holy Well housing development, according to town MP Jeremy Wright.

Mr Wright joined residents for a 'protest picnic' on the the field adjacent to the historic monument where Redrow Homes hope to build up to 85 homes.

Despite heavy rain, dozens turned out to show their support for the Save Holywell field campaign on Friday (August 16). At the gathering, Mr Wright said: "This is about setting and landscape. Make no mistake about it, if permission is given to build on this field, then these other fields around will also be in danger.

"An important part of Southam’s heritage, a place where people love to walk and sit by the river will be spoiled forever. I think we have got a very good chance of defending this land, but this protest is just the start.”

OK, here's that field marked on a map. The bits coloured green are fields (they go on for ever to the south) and the bit coloured grey labelled "Coventry" is the nearest large city:

Mark Carnage