Short List

Towns in England and Denmark with similar sounding names.

To kick things off: (East) Grinstead and Grindsted

Fun Online Polls: Is England (still) a Christian country & EU Parliament elections

The results to last week's Fun Online Polls were as follows:

Is England (still) a Christian country?

Yes, and that's a good thing - 54%
No, and that's a good thing - 20%
Yes, and that's a bad thing - 2%
No, and that's a bad thing - 24%

It was a good turnout (101 voters), thank you to everybody who took part.

Whatever you make of it, it would appear that 74% of people are reasonably happy with the way things are, case closed, I think.
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The next EU Parliament elections are looming (22 May), so that's our next Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

In total, 39 parties are fielding candidates, so I've narrowed it down to parties putting up candidates in at least half of all UK regions, plus the Pirate Party for luck (North West region only).

Fun Online Polls: Snails & Christian countries

THe responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Have you ever thrown a snail into a neighbour's garden?

Yes - 41%
No - 28%
I don't do any gardening - 31%

Thanks for responding. that seems about right to me.

The Royal Horticultural Society society did a similar survey and only a fifth of gardeners said that they did. Maybe they did their survey face-to-face and people were somehow ashamed to admit it?
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This week's Fun Online Poll.

David Cameron made the claim, for reasons best known to himself, that England was a Christian country, which generated many acres of verbiage, response and counter-response, a fine example by Peter Hitchens here.

So that's the question: "Is England (still) a Christian country, and is that a good or a bad thing?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Slow news day

From the BBC:

The rate of unemployment in the UK dropped to 7.7% between May and July from 7.8% in the previous three months. The number of people unemployed fell 24,000 in the period to 2.487 million.

The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has said that interest rates are unlikely to be raised before the rate falls to 7%.

Our new Homey-in-chief can whistle for it, long term rates have doubled over the twelve months (from an all-time low of 1.5% to a historically still very low 3%).

From the BBC: Wales unemployment falls by 7,000

From the BBC: Northern Ireland unemployment rate continues to fall

Three hundred fewer people claimed the dole in August, bringing the total claimant count to 62,200.

From the BBC: Scottish unemployment up by 10,000

As per usual, they don't publish a separate figure for England, let alone dedicate a whole article to it, but by adding and subtracting, it appears the number of "unemployed" in England has fallen by 26,700.

Glad to have cleared that up.

Short List

1. The leader of the Green Party of England & Wales was born in Australia.

2. The leader of the Australian Labour Party was born in Wales.

3. They are both women.

4. The leader of the Welsh independence/nationalist party Plaid Cymru is also a woman, but sadly appears to have no link with Australia at all.

Your challenge is to decide who's on the list and then to name or define it.

Roy Hodgson

No oil painting (2)

No oil painting

Roy Of The Rovers

From a fiscal point of view, Scottish independence would be a non-event.

This topic seems to generate a lot of passion on both sides, the Daily Mail article has so far attracted over 1,700 comments, which is unusually high even by the Mail's standards.

As to the finances, it boils down to three main items which more or less net off to nothing:

1. The Scots would draw a new boundary for the Continental shelf, basically a straight line heading due East from the English/Scottish border, see map here and collect North Sea oil revenues from their patch. According to that same link, Scotland's ninety per cent share of North Sea oil revenues would be about £10 billion a year. On the BBC yesterday, they quoted a lower figure of £6.5 billion.

2. UK government spending is skewed towards the three non-English nations and poorer areas in England. According to Wiki's write up of the Barnett Formula (as poor old Lord Joel Barnett has been saying for decades, it's not a bloody formula!), average spending per capita per year in Scotland is about £1,200 higher than the average for the rest of the UK. So the UK as a whole subsidises Scotland to the tune of £6.2 billion.

3. Alex Salmond conceded yesterday that Scotland would assume a share of existing UK government debt, proportional to population or GDP. GDP per capita is about the same so we can split it proportional to population and Scotland's share would be 5.2 million/62 million = 8.4% and if UK government debt in 2015 is £1,400 billion or thereabouts, then Scotlan's share would be £118 billion. Let's guess the average interest rate on UK government debt at 3%. As a small/new country, Scotland would end up paying a bit more than that, say 3.2% and the interest rate on the residual UK's debt would fall ever so slightly.

The net position is thus as follows:

1. Scotland gains £10 billion a year;
2. Scotland loses £6.2 billion a year;
3. Scotland loses £3.8 billion a year interest (assuming debt is rolled over in perpetuity).

Scotland's gains = rest of UK's losses and vice versa.

To my untrained eye, that looks like a nil overall position. Of course, oil revenues can go up or down quite markedly; there are different ways of calculating per-capita overspend in Scotland; and interest rates can go up or down (and we don't know what the Scottish premium would be). So each team of negotiators has to do its own forecasts and then bring them into balance by increasing or reducing Scotland's share of UK national debt accordingly. Provided that each party expects to at least break even on the final agreed deal, then the deal is worth doing, end of.

There are of course lots of other bits and pieces that have to be looked at; whether UK nuclear submarines will stay in Faslane and whether the UK Navy will still pay for ships to built in Scotland; who is responsible for paying the old age and public sector pensions for people who have worked and lived both in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK, but we can apply the same principles. It is not an intractable problem.

Mildly interesting, totally irrelevant

From The Metro:

A ComRes poll for the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror found 39 per cent of voters believe Scotland should be a separate country, while 38 per cent disagreed. When the same question was asked in May, only 33 per cent of Britons backed independence for Scotland.

Among Scottish voters, 49 per cent were in favour and 37 per cent disagreed. In May, the figures were 38 per cent for and 46 per cent against independence....

So much to mildly interesting.

... However, a spokesman for the Scottish Office suggested the poll's findings did not reflect the true picture, as only 176 of the 2,004 people surveyed were from Scotland.

The Scottish Office are clearly complete jokers. Scotland's population is just over eight per cent of the total UK population, so if you are interviewing 2,004 people, it seems correct to interview just over 160 people from Scotland (so if anything, they interviewed slightly too many from Scotland).

A great day's work by the UK bansturbulary

Cigarette vending machines banned in England

Scots ban on supermarket alcohol deals comes into force

Carrier bag charge for shoppers in Wales introduced

Controlled explosion is carried out in Belfast alert

Short Lists

In the comments, DBC suggested: "Which common British bird,featured in popular song, is known for its addiction to marijuana?" and Bayard suggested "Queens of England that were born commoners?"

Fair enough, you can be getting on with those, but, having spent a lot of time staring at maps and railway timetables while on holiday, my suggestion is "Towns in different countries with similar sounding names". To get the ball rolling, how about:

Friedrichshafen (Germany's most southern port) and Frederikshavn (Denmark's most northern port)

Epping (outer suburb of London) and Eppingen (outer suburb of Heilbronn in Germany)

Kempton (town where they do horse racing) and Kempten (town in Bavaria)

UPDATE: Bayard submits Burgau (Germany), Burgau (Austria) and Burgau (Portugal).

Joseph Takagi submit Bayreuth (pronounced Buy-roit) and Beirut.

I spotted another corker this afternoon while explaining to my sisters where we'd been on holiday: Hereford, England and Herford, Germany.
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I'm not aware that there are any other towns named in honour of women's breasts, but if you know of one, please leave a comment!

UPDATE: Wolfers submits Brest (excellent) and Bristol, but that doesn't count because Bristol City is rhyming slang and the town is not called after its own football team.

Anon submits Nork.

Expat submits Titiwangsa.

We can harvest these from Google Maps, actually. There's Boobery, United Kingdom and Bubry, France, which would thus qualify for the first short list as well. See also Titisee, Germany, Tytsjerk, Netherlands, Mammari, Cyprus.

UK land use at a glance

The BBC did a handy chart on different types of land use in the four nations of the UK. Remember, England is just over half of the UK by surface area and sixty-two million of us are living, working and commuting back and forth on those little grey bits:

Which population explosion, exactly?

Changes in the population of England & Wales (from ONS - I chose E&W rather than UK because the UK figures only go back to 1971), banded by age. It's up to you which type of chart you prefer (the first one shows the changes in each age band much more clearly but the second one also shows the increase in the total population):
To cut a long story:
* the number of children aged 0 - 17 has declined ever so slightly (by quarter of a million)
* half the increase in population of 13 million between 1961 and 2020 is down to longer life expectancy - there are 6.5 million more people aged 60+ (an increase of two-thirds in that age band, or a compound growth rate of 5% per year).
* the other half of the increase is in people aged 18 - 59 (an increase of a quarter in that age band, a compound growth rate of less than 0.5% per year). You can see it's a fairly straight line from the mid-1970s onwards, so although Labour did open the immigration floodgates in 1997 or thereabouts, this did not lead to a step-change in the pace of growth of the middle age-band.
* So the increase in the number of 18 - 59 year olds is down to a combination of there having been more 0 - 17 year olds earlier on; better health care; and net immigration (let's allocate a third of the increase to each cause, for sake of argument).

House prices vs earnings, England and Greater London

Sources:
1. Average price for a semi detached house in each local authority area from the BBC
2. Mean gross annual pay from Table 8.7a from the NSO
3. I then bunged the two data sets into a spreadsheet, deleted local authorities for which I had earnings but not house price (or vice versa) and did a couple of X-Y scatter charts, click to enlarge:
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That doesn't look like much of a correlation, but Excel tells me that the correlation is 0.75, which is high enough for these purposes.

The line of best fit is House price = (earnings minus £6,750) x 10.53, which makes sense. People have to pay for the bare minimum of existence first and the bulk of whatever is left over goes on housing. With an average marginal tax rates of about 50%, and average mortgage interest rates of 5% (or average rental yield of 5%), for a single-earner household, nearly all the extra income you can earn by moving to a higher wage region (assuming you want the same standard of housing) goes in extra rent or mortgage payments.*

The bulk of the fluctuations can be explained by how desirable an area is to second-home owners, for example an average semi in Torridge in Devon costs £195,583 and average earnings are £16,980; and an average semi in Colchester costs £203,921 and average earnings are £30,466.
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The figures for Greater London are, as ever, completely off the scale, but the correlation between house prices and wages is even higher than for the rest of England at 0.86.

The line of best fit is fairly nonsensical, it approximates to House price = (earnings minus £24,195) x 45. This would suggest that Londoners need two or three times as much money (after tax) to cover what they consider to be essentials as do the rest of England, but once those essentials are covered, they are prepared to spend more than the rest of their income on housing - unless, of course, rental yields or mortgage interest rates are very, very low (about 2%).

In a house price bubble (which is popping slowest in London), people see hoped-for capital gains as a source of cash income and deduct them from interest costs (or add them to rental income), i.e. it is the same whether people expect house prices to rise 3% and interest rates are 5% or whether people expect house prices to stay flat and interest rates are 2%.

Other people for whom the effective interest rate is 2% or less are people who have paid off their mortgages - they could in theory sell up and start renting, so the cost of being an owner-occupier is the interest foregone on the theoretical pile of cash. As it is difficult to earn more than 2% after tax on a savings account with a UK bank, their effective/notional interest cost is thus 2% or less.
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Nonetheless, the overall picture is, as we would expect, that there is a fairly high correlation between earnings and house prices (taking England as a whole, including Greater London, the correlation is 0.79), so replacing all taxes on incomes and output with a flat tax on land/building values doesn't seem particularly radical to me, i.e. at my suggested rate of 'about' 8% of current averaged out selling prices in each area, and assuming 1.5 earners per working age household, eighty or ninety per cent of people would be paying the same or less in publicly collected tax (i.e. those households with a house price-to-gross income ratio of seven or lower).
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* This is as suggested by Ricardo's Law of Rent, because labour within the UK is mobile but houses aren't. So if people expect the same living standard wherever they are and net wages in Town B are £10,000 more than in Town A, people will move from Town A to Town B, thus increasing demand for homes in Town B, thus hiking rents and prices in Town B. This process continues until rents and mortgage payments in Town B are £10,000 more than in Town A, at which stage there is no advantage in moving from Town A to Town B and the whole thing reaches a new equilibrium.

"Generalised Land Use Database Statistics for England 2005"

In order to try and dispel and lingering suspicions that there's no land left in the UK on which we can allow any new houses etc to be built, allow me to summarise the statistics produced by the Department for Communities and Local Government for England only. The spreadsheet, which you can download from here, gives a break down of ten broad categories of land use for each of 7,969 local council wards and which can be briefly summarised as follows:

Homes and gardens - 5.4%
Non-domestic buildings - 0.7%
Roads, paths, railways - 2.4%
Other - 1.4%
Sub-total developed land - 9.9%

Farmland, forests, parks etc - 87.5%
Water - 2.6%

England is only 54% of the UK by area, but 83% by population, so across the UK as a whole, developed land is probably only about 6.4%. So potentially available agricultural land is in the order of 0.9 acres per person (even ignoring all the stuff we could grow in our back gardens), which is more than enough for the UK to be self-sufficient in food (should we so wish), provided farmers were allowed to use these dratted newfangled inventions like greenhouses or polytunnels.

The other useful statistics we can glean are to divide the total area of homes and gardens by the number of homes, which gives us the nice round figure of 400 sq yards per home and of those 400 sq yards, only a fifth, or 80 sq yards is covered by the actual buildings. I'm surprised it's as much as 400 sq yards, given how many people live in terraced houses or flats; I'm also surprised that it's as much as 80 sq yards 'foot print', given that most of us live in buildings which are two or more storeys high.

Just sayin', is all.

Houses Of The Holy

Cross posted at Nourishing Obscurity:

Today, let's look at the relationship between house prices and earnings in the various regions of England & Wales. A simple scatter graph with an auto trend line shows a relationship, which might be skewed by the one in the top right hand corner (London), so let's try that again without London (click to enlarge).


Yup, definitely a correlation.

So let's plot the house price-to-income ratio for the ten regions of E&W, in order of increasing 'gross' incomes (the lower series, double line). As you can see, the trend line for that series slopes upwards slightly (so in areas with higher incomes, house prices are disproportionately higher).

You can flatten off the trend line by deducting an amount to represent bare minimum living costs excl. housing costs of £5,500 per capita (this figure arrived at by trial and error, but seems reasonable enough) to arrive at 'disposable' income. The result is the upper series (bold black line). I can suggest a couple of reasons why the South West ratio is so high*, but I'm not immediately aware of any reason for the East Midland ratio being so low. Click to enlarge.

What conclusions do we draw from this, if any?

How about this:

i. There are no massive regional differences in the standard or quality of housing, so it must be fair to say that the main driver of the price differences is the extent to which regional incomes exceed a basic level of spending on other necessities (i.e. £5,500 per capita in this case).

ii. The rent or mortgage payments for an 'average' household in any area will be x% of the value of the house or flat, or y% of that household's gross income minus £5,500 per person.

iii. We also know that income tax/National Insurance are calculated as 43.8% percentage of your gross income above an arbitrary amount of £6,064 per annum.

iv. Your rent or mortgage is just a payment to live in that home in that area, of course, but if you live in a higher income region, a large part of what you are paying for is the fact that it is easier to find a high paying job in that area. Similarly, income tax/NIC increases the more you earn; it is the 'rent' that you have to pay for the right to go about your trade or profession.

v. We all know that income tax/NIC are 'publicly collected taxes' (boo! hiss!), but if rents and mortgages are calculated on more or less exactly the same basis, are they not just 'privately collected taxes'? It's fair enough for a landlord to charge you for what he provides (a roof over your head, repairs etc.) but isn't he also charging you for 'stuff that havs nothing to do with him' or even worse 'the right to work'?

vi. In other words, while it is conceptually easy to scrap 'publicly collected taxes' you can never get rid of such 'privately collected taxes'. We already have Land Value Tax, it is just that it is collected privately (in non-cash form in the case of owner-occupiers).

vii. There will never be such a thing as a 'tax free' society - the only question is whether LVT should be publicly collected** and spent on things that benefit us all (like scrapping income tax, NIC, VAT and so on, let's get rid of the taxes that we can do something about), or whether we ought to allow it to be privately collected.

* A high proportion of second home owners; a slightly higher proportion of pensioners that rest of UK (so GVA per non-pensioner is higher), rabid NIMBYism and the fact that it's just a nice place to live, with the beaches and everything.

** Yes of course there'd be exemptions or discounts or a deferment option for pensioners.

Population Density Fun

From The Daily Mail:

England is now the most overcrowded country (1) in Europe... Officials said that by next year England will have 402.1 people for every square kilometre, overtaking the figure of 398.5 in Holland and 355.2 in Belgium... (2)

Recent EU figures have shown that Britain accounted for nearly a third of the total increase in population across the whole of Europe last year (3), with 412,000 extra people in this country in 2009.

Whitehall has also acknowledged that 100,000 new homes will be required each year for the next 25 years to cope with the growth of population as a direct result of immigration. (4)

The figures have underlined concerns over the effects of rising population on transport and housing (5), and on both cities and countryside, as numbers rise towards the officially predicted level of 70 million by 2029.

James Clappison, Tory MP for Hertsmere, said: 'Population density of such a level is an issue which politicians must address. Immigration is the major driver of population increase.' (6)

Two can play at that game:

1) 'The most overcrowded' is a tautology at best.

2) As I've said before: "From Wiki, UK population 61 million, surface area 94,526 sq miles = 645/sq mile (249/sq km). Not spectularly high, so they strip out S, NI and W and look at England only. From Wiki, population 51 million, surface area 50,346 sq miles = 1,000/sq mile (391/sq km).

But why don't we go one further and strip out Greater London? English population (excl. GL) 43.5 million, surface area 49,727 sq miles = 874/sq mile (342/sq km). That gets us down to well below The Netherlands and only a quarter of Malta's density."

Conversely, Greater London has a population density of 10,596/sq mile. If a high population density were such a terrible thing, then nobody would want to live there, would they?

3) Which underlines the point that it's net immigration from outside the EU that's behind this, which is entirely self-inflicted.

4) I cheerfully agree that Labour were letting in far too many of the wrong sort of people, but, being The Daily Mail, they merrily ignore another factor that is just as important: increases in life expectancy.

The UK population pyramid at the ONS shows the number of people aged 60 or under going up from 46 million to 52 million between 1971 and 2029, which is a compound annual increase of 0.2% [=(52/46)^(1/58). The number of people aged over 60 goes up from 10 million to 19 million over the same period, a compound annual increase of 1.1% [=(19/10)^(1/58)].

And how much housing would we need to build to accommodate an extra 9 million people in 58 years? Call it 1.5 old folk per home = 6 million homes, which is just over 100,000 per year.

5) What 'pressure on transport'? Seeing how many bus or train drivers are fairly recent immigrants, we'd be in a bigger mess if they all left.

As to 'pressure on housing', see (4). Is building 100,000 new homes, i.e. expanding our housing stock by 0.3% every year (=100,000/27,000,000) really that terrible, seeing as it'll be recent immigrants doing a lot of the actual work?

Even if we leave the floodgates open (which I do not recommend) and have to build 200,000 homes a year (for the immigrants and to accommodate for the additional old folk), that's an increase of 0.6% a year, against compound annual increase in overall population of 0.4% per year between 1971 and 2029 [=(71/56)^(1/58)], big deal.

6) No it's not. See (4).

UPDATE: Adam Collyer dissects a similarly hysterical article in The Torygraph, illustrated with some bonus Top A-Level Totty.

Russian Oligarchs vs English Landed Gentry Aristocracy

Is there really any big difference between the two?