Strange thought - maybe Jeremy Corbyn was right all along (on this particular issue)...

I've pretty much ignored Labour's wafflings about Brexit because they are woefully unclear and contradictory, all they do is trot out some gibberish and repeat the mantra "avoiding a damaging Tory Brexit".

In among the waffle however, Jeremy Corbyn himself has been consistent on two matters - he refuses to say how he voted in the Referendum and has always said that he thinks the UK should leave the EU but remain in the Customs Union. This always seemed like a daft idea to me, and I automatically assumed it was wrong because he said it.

This is a perfectly plausible outcome - Turkey is in the Customs Union (actually, it's in a customs union with the Customs Union as this lengthy but informative article explains) but not in the EU.

The (a typical) CU only applies to goods, not services; Turkey is not in CAP or CFP; there's no free movement between EU and Turkey; a lot of EU rules simply don't apply there; Turkey doesn't have to impose VAT; and so on.

At our last YPP meet-up, Mombers (a moderate Remain voter) asked me what was so bad about staying in the Customs Union, given that the average tariffs are only 1.5% (a drop in the ocean compared to the current UK domestic tariff of 20% on most goods and services).

And to be honest, I struggled to think of anything really bad. Even the hard Leaver present (see comments!) couldn't think of any fatal flaws. Which got me thinking. Clearly, it's not a one way bet and there are downsides, but it would fix a lot of actual problems (car manufacturer supply chains) and perceived problems (chlorinated chicken, Irish border).

So not much changes, nothing changes for the better (but those who would gain don't know it so aren't protesting) but nothing changes for the worse either and everybody knows what they are doing. A price worth paying to get out of the EU.

The Week has a nice short article on the pro's and con's of leaving it (so the con's are pro-CU etc).

The advantages (actual or perceived) of staying in the CU make sense to me.

What are the disadvantages of staying in the CU, do they outweigh the advantages?

The first linked article lists some downsides for Turkey of the EU-Turkey deal, but these are individually negotiated and we should be able to do better. Turkey made a lot of concessions being a much weaker partner and seeing this as a first step to full EU membership. The UK is going in the other direction. I've read other articles and all the disadvantages, while real, are fairly minor.

The second article lists the following:

Hard Brexiteers warn that staying in a customs deal with the EU will prevent the UK from negotiating future trade deals.

That is true, but we've not done very well so far, in two-and-a-half years, we've managed an FTA with Switzerland and that's it (which we'd have in the CU anyway). I'd rather have free trade with Europe than with America anyway.

May herself has been vehement in her desire for Brexit Britain to be a “global leader in free trade”, arguing in her Mansion House speech that it would be a “betrayal of the British people” to stymie its potential by joining a customs union.

Ignore the grandstanding crap about "global leader in free trade". What does that even mean? We should be doing things for our own benefit, not to impress or influence other people. The deal which May (a Remain fifth columnist) is pushing really is a "betrayal of the British people", so she can shut up.

Environment Secretary Michael Gove has tweeted that “the referendum vote was clear - we need to take back control of trade - that means leaving the protectionist customs union”.

The vote was to leave the EU, full stop. Everybody had their own reason why they voted Leave. I doubt that many Leave voters put "take back control of trade" right at the top of their list of reasons.

Arch Brexiteer and chair of the European Research Group Jacob Rees-Mogg has argued that staying within a customs union would leave the UK paying Brussels huge sums each year while having no say on rules and regulations imposed on business and commerce.

He can f--- right off. The first part is either a lie or evidence that he knows nothing about it. If we were in the Customs Union, we would have to impose EU mandated tariffs (about £3 - £4 billion a year) but would not need to hand them over to the EU any more, pretty much the opposite of what he said.

True, the EU will no doubt stiff us for an 'access fee', but such is life, it depends on the numbers. As long as it's less than £10 billion a year (or whatever our net payments are now), that's a win.

It is also true that the UK would have no say over the rules, but:
a) EU rules on quality of food and goods seem fair enough to me
b) the UK is a fairly typical European country. Measures that 'protect' French farmers would also 'protect' UK farmers; measures that harm UK potteries would also harm German potteries etc. The EU would have to pretty devious to think up things which only harm UK producers or consumers while benefiting them in EU Member States.
c) UK services would be entirely outside the system anyway.

Rees-Mogg believes that, after leaving the union, the UK should phase out all tariffs in order to reduce consumer prices and stimulate competition.

Oh does he now? The average EU tariff is only 1.5% for crying out loud, that is the least of our worries. I bet he loves VAT though.

Jeremy Corbyn wasn't the first politician to have his own theme song.

Who can forget Motörhead's classic "It's Obama", written from the point of view of somebody in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen or Syria?

Diagonal comparisons: Corbyn edition

From City AM Forum:

One part of Labour’s economic offer which really did strike a chord with the electorate was the promise to nationalise industries such as rail and water. To anyone with direct experience of the old British Rail or the Post Office (which made you wait six months to get a phone installed) this almost defies belief. But only those over 55 can remember...

What on earth do rail and water companies have to do with installing telephones? Corbyn might possibly have said re-nationalise the Post Office, this is now a quite distinct body to BT, the one which does the telephones and competes on a pretty level playing field with lots of private businesses. As anybody under 55 understands perfectly well.

(Both Corbyn and May both accused mobile phone companies of market abuse or something IIRC, which seems a bit off piste to me, they do a great job all in all. It's the internet providers who insist you pay top dollar for a landline you will hardly use if you want broadband who are taking the piss).

Prior to rail privatisation just after the 1992 election, the peak number of passenger journeys made each year was some 1.1bn in the mid-1950s. Faced with rapidly rising road competition, the rail industry saw journeys fall steadily, to a trough of around 750m in the mid-1990s.

After privatisation, massive investment programmes have been carried out and, in the form of the train operating companies, there is now a distinct part of the industry whose priority is the consumer. Journey numbers rose, passing the 1bn mark in 2003, to the current level of 1.7bn, a figure not seen since the early 1920s, when road competition was weak.

So the revealed preference of consumers seems to be that they rather like the current structure. They actively choose to use rail in massive numbers.

We've done that one. Yes, the number of passenger journeys on private rail has doubled in the last twenty years - but so has the number of journeys on the government-run, union-controlled, highly regulated etc London Underground network, so that proves nothing. Rail passengers couldn't care less who owns it or runs it, they just want a reliable service.

If only Corbyn talked about RENTS instead of waffling on about PROFITS

Corbyn was on the telly just now, muttering about the "obscene profits" made by privatised utilities. By doing so he misses the point and lays himself open to the knee-jerk Tory response, for example from The Telegraph:

Jeremy Corbyn will take Britain back to the 1970s by nationalising industries, forcing wage caps on businesses and giving huge power to the unions if he gets into power, a leaked copy of Labour's draft manifesto reveals.

The 43-page document, obtained by the Daily Telegraph, shows that Mr Corbyn plans to nationalise energy, rail and mail and will introduce a 20:1 pay cap for businesses...

Nationalising "industries" generally and the government running them is always a disaster, of course, we know that.

There's nothing wrong with a genuine business making large profits. If VW make a million good quality, affordable family cars and make a thousand pounds profit from each one, good luck to them. Nobody's forced to buy a new VW, you can buy a second hand one, buy from another manufacturer, or arrange your life so you don't need (another) car etc. If VW fuck up with the 'emissions scandal' (a storm in a teacup if you ask me), they make a loss. Tough.

Punishing successful businesses regardless of how they earn their money is a stupid idea anyway, or else we'd punish VW (or their British equivalent) for making good cars and reward them for the 'emissions scandal'.

But if you think about the list of things he'd like to (re)nationalise*, you'll realise that the bulk of their so-called profits are not profits in the economic sense or the cost-accounting sense. They are "rents".

Rents are notoriously difficult to define, but you know 'em when you see 'em.

1. You are stuck with one water supplier, you have to use their services (although this is sensibly alleviated with price caps). In the absence of these, they could double or treble water and sewage charges and 99% of people would just pay up.

2. You can choose from a small number of gas and electricity suppliers, they themselves don't make super-profits and shouldn't be the target here but the people selling oil, coal and gas to the power stations are very much collecting rent (natural resources). The National Grid on the other hand really does have a monopoly as between power stations and end users, it only exists because the UK government set it up back in the 1920s and 1930s, no private enterprise could ever have achieved that (the biggest problem is getting rights of way over land, not the technical stuff).

3. If you work in any larger town, you have to get in by public transport, they can set their season ticket prices at a large chunk of the extra salary you can earn by working in town and not stacking shelves in the village shop.

4. The Royal Mail (used to) have a monopoly on posting letters and unless you are couriering urgent stuff a short distance, they still do in practical terms. I'm all in favour of bottom-up privatisation i.e. allowing private businesses to deliver letters, but a top-down privatisation i.e. sell off of The Royal Mail with all its criminally undervalued land and buildings merely to generate fees for merchant bankers was a straightforward scam.

5. Urban land is the largest chunk of rent in any modern economy, Corbyn gave that less importance**, but we know that banks get most of their income by acting as debt collectors for land sellers, so they are just collecting rent. This is why the largest salaries and largest salary discrepancies are in businesses that primarily collect rent (banks, insurance and privatised utilities etc). If VW are happy to pay their chairman ten million quid a year, good luck to them, that's a spat between bosses and shareholders and doesn't affect the price of VW cars or even the wages of VW workers.

* Of course, most of our so-called privatised utilities are still state-owned. The German national railway owns our railways, the Spanish government owns our airports, the French national electricity company owns our water companies etc, heck knows what the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund and the Arabs own.

** The "rents" which Corbyn would never mention are the obscene salaries which a few public sector fat cats pay themselves, as well as everybody working for a government department that has no reason to exist in the first place, but that's Socialists for you.

There are endless examples of rents and rent-seeking, they add up to about 50% of the whole economy, so he could double most people's disposable income if he either eliminated them or taxed and redistributed them (preferably by reducing or eliminating taxes on earnings and output).

Here endeth today's rant.

Top tips on negotiating with the EU

From The Daily Express:

YANIS Varoufakis has urged Britain not to get caught up with EU negotiations in a stark warning to the Prime Minister.

Speaking to the Telegraph, the former finance minister of Greece said: “My advice to Theresa May is to avoid negotiation at all costs. If she doesn’t do that she will fall into the trap of [Greek PM] Alexis Tsipras, and it will end in capitulation.”

Said is said, he knows more about this than most people.

From ITV News:

[Jeremy] said a Labour government would approach the negotiations with "respect and sense".

"She (Mrs May) seems to be sending rather mixed messages. To start negotiations by threatening to walk away with no deal and set up a low tax economy on the shores of Europe is not a very sensible way of approaching people with whom half of our trade is done at the present time."

Correct, nobody should ever 'threaten' anybody, that implies that it is something you don't really want to do, leads to all sorts of confusion and might harm your own position*. You start off by saying what you actually intend to do, i.e. "set up a low tax economy on the shores of Europe". If the EU objects to this, they are perfectly entitled to say so and request politely that you do something else in exchange for concession X, Y or Z on their part.

* Some sick bastards kill people because they enjoy doing it. A kidnapper usually has no interest in actually killing the hostage. What he wants is the ransom money and to leave as little evidence as possible, not a corpse to hide and a murder charge hanging over his head.

Fun Online Polls: Politicians, sugar & "hard" brexit.

The results to last week-and-a-half's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Which of these politicians avoids sugar?

Jeremy Corbyn - 54%
Nigel Farage - 6%
Both - 16%
Neither - 24%

A bit of an anorak question, but 16% of participants got the right answer. Well done!

Top (and only) comment:

View From The Solent: Who cares?

Answer = not many. Only 50 people took part and only 16% of those chose the right answer (and one of them was me). It was multiple choice, so if people had chosen an answer at random, 25% would have chosen the correct one :-)
-------------------------------------------------
The gamble which some Brexiteers made appears to have paid off in some quarters, pint-sized former French president M. Sarkozy has said that if re-elected he would offer the UK a new treaty for a new Europe.

Clearly he could't care less about British votes, so presumably what he means is a new deal which will  favour France generally, the UK tangentially and placate some potential Le Pen voters. Former Tory leader 'Lord' Howard stretched his head out of his earth-filled coffin and "described the terms “hard” and “soft” Brexit as unnecessary and unhelpful."

In which he would be correct. So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

"Which kind of Brexit would you like?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Atmospheric temperatures, politicians and sugar

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

Why is the earth's surface 30C warmer than it should be, and 60C warmer than the top of Mount Everest?

Greenhouse gases like H2O and CO2 - 20%
Gravity and Boyle's Law warm the lower and cool the upper atmosphere - 67%
Other, please specify - 14%

Which was of course the correct answer. I was told that more specifically I should have said Gay-Lussac's Pressure-Temperature Law:

"The pressure of a gas of fixed mass and fixed volume is directly proportional to the gas's absolute temperature."

(Though having re-read this, they seem to be saying the same thing.)

Atmospheric pressure at ground level is higher than at the highest altitudes, ergo it is warmer than it would be from sunshine alone, and at the top of the atmosphere, it is colder than the average temperature of the whole atmosphere.

Clearly heat can't come from nowhere so what the lower atmosphere gains (in terms of average number of molecules per unit volume with a correspondingly higher total kinetic energy of those molecules per unit volume, which can be measured as 'pressure' or 'temperature', same thing in this context) must be balanced out by lower numbers for density, temperature, pressure etc in the higher atmosphere .

There is an equilibrium, which depends on how thick the atmosphere is, the air at the bottom can only warm up so far before it rises and cools again; the air can only rise so far before the force of gravity pulling it down overrides its tendency to float up etc.

It's all well and good coming up with an explanation why the surface temperature is higher than it would be from sunshine alone (and yes, 'greenhouse' gases like H2O, CO2, CH4 contribute a couple of degrees but not a massive amount) but if that does not also explain why the upper reaches of the atmosphere* are colder than they would be etc, then that explanation is not coherent or plausible.

* Don't start with the thermosphere, that is high up but hot for very different reasons.
--------------------------
Going back to a Fun Online Poll of a few weeks ago, 71% thought that Merkel would never realise it was wrong to let a million Muslim refugees into the country.

Interestingly, she sort of did today, although it wasn't really an apology as such, more that she regrets having lost votes over it and wishes she had prepared the ground better before she pressed ahead and did it anyway.
-------------------------
On the topic of politicians, another politician-avoiding-sugar story popped up again today, I don't know why some people are so obsessed with other people's diets but hey, I try to avoid sugar where poss so he has my sympathy (although I don't make jam, don't really like the stuff).

From The Daily Mail:

* The Labour leader made the comment during a chat on Mumsnet
* Said he shunned biscuits because he was 'anti-sugar on health grounds'
* But mocked as he has a jam-making hobby, which usually involves sugar

Luckily, the internet never forgets. For contrast, there was another politician-avoids-sugar story a while back, which raised no eyebrows whatsoever.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll (without following that last link first!)

"Which of these politicians avoids sugar?"

Vote here or use the widget in the side bar.

The Brick has Landed ...

This popped up on my facebook feed via a labour voter, and I'd have thought they'd be more sympathetic.  

So I clicked for some more comments, and realised that Labour really is well and truly screwed up beyond all recognition:

Beyond satire.

Exhibit One:

Tony Blair has said it would be a “very dangerous experiment” if Jeremy Corbyn or a populist politician like him were to form a government.

In an interview with the BBC, the former Labour prime minister said populist politicians, whether on the left like Corbyn or on the right, were worrying and he spent a lot of time thinking about how people in the centre should respond.

Blair famously said last summer that anyone thinking of voting for Corbyn as Labour leader because it was what their heart told them to do should “get a transplant”, but his latest comment may be his harshest yet.

Exhibit Two

An unfortunate mobile phone salesman was tied up and beaten by an angry crowd in Cixi City, China, after he was mistaken for a baby snatcher.

Exhibit Three

Channel 4 comedy Raised By Wolves is being adapted for American TV by Diablo Cody, the writer of Juno...

Now The Guardian has reported that Moran and Cody have been in contact about reworking the action from Wolverhampton to the US…

The remake is being made by Berlanti Productions, whose credits include the less down-to-earth shows Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow.

Exhibit Four

Lack of unity on the EU, UK government challenges and UKIP all contributed to the Welsh Conservatives losing seats at the assembly elections, leader Andrew RT Davies has said.

But...

Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, has declared herself a “John Major”-style Conservative, after leading the party to its best election result in Scotland for almost 60 years.

I saw another good one last week but I've forgotten it.

Jeremy Corbyn vs The Taxpayers' Alliance - what if they are both right?

In the Red Corner, Jeremy Corbyn, suitably fired up by Richard Murphy and his ilk, wants to reduce corporate subsidies, which they claim amount to £93 billion a year.

I have a nasty feeling that they started at the wrong end when they calculated this, see e.g. here. In other words, they are looking at the extra tax which they think businesses ought to be paying; and that £93 billion figure is plucked out of the air.

But I do have some sympathy with the general approach and, as we will see, their £93 billion number is - probably by luck rather than judgment - actually not far off.

In the Blue Corner, we have the Taxpayers' Alliance, who know bugger all about 'tax' and deny there is an implicit subsidy to landownership, but do absolutely sterling work when it comes to identifying public sector waste and overspend see e.g. The Bumper Book of Waste.

I have a lot of sympathy with their approach as well.*

How do we reconcile the two? Always start with the facts.

According to HM Treasury's Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses 2014, Table 5.3, govt spending on goods and services acquired from the 'private sector', plus grants and subsidies are £258 billion a year (38% of total govt spending); public sector pay and pensions are £174 billion (26%) and welfare and pensions are £242 billion (36%); and out of that 36%, two-thirds is old age welfare and one-third is working age. (The other bits and pieces net off to nothing, ignore those).

How much of that £258 billion paid to the 'private' sector is waste and/or overspend? What does the TPA say? Think about Ministry of Defence, NHS IT projects, PFI projects, all this nonsense. The cost of over-employment in the public sector is small change in comparison, despite all the revolving door quangocrats on six-figure salaries.

If we conservatively assume a quarter of that £258 billion is pure waste/theft/overspend that's £65 billion straight off. Add to that most egregious tax break of all, tax relief for pension contributions of £30 - £40 billion, all of which is creamed off by 'the pensions industry' and none of which actually goes into higher pensions? Bung in third world aid and gross EU contributions (about £20 - 25 billion in total), which are largely recycled back to 'private' UK businesses, and £93 billion a year is not far off, and might well be an understatement.

That's how you plug deficits, not by twatting about persecuting welfare claimants to shave of a few billion a year at most.

* Where it gets tricky is because people draw an artificial distinction between cash spending, subsidies and overly generous tax breaks i.e. exemptions. The biggest single subsidy/tax exemption is the fact that the £200 billion a year implicit subsidy to residential land is not clawed back with a direct tax/user charges. Most households pay far more in taxes on income and spending than they get back in land freebies; it is only the top One Per Cent who cash in. But put that to one side for now.

There's a first and last time for everything.

I found myself in agreement with Richard Littlejohn. Weird feeling, but there you go.

This child's death was tragic but it was not our fault

The father told the Mail that the family were fleeing the war in Syria when the recklessly overloaded rubber dinghy capsized. Miraculously, he survived, although he couldn’t save his wife and two children.

But here’s what puzzles me. They’d been living in Turkey for the past year. So why didn’t he apply for asylum there? After all, surely culturally Syria has more in common with Turkey, another Muslim country, than with Tunbridge Wells or Trondheim.

I had to remind myself that I also agreed with a fair chunk of what Jeremy Corbyn said yesterday on the Sky debate to balance things out. I mean, at least Corbyn was saying something rather than just spewing out Labour-insider politico-gibberish like the other three.

"Jeremy Corbyn backs women-only public toilets"

From The Evening Standard:

Labour leadership frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn would push for women-only public toilets to be introduced to curb sex attacks, he has said. The Islington North MP, currently the bookies' favourite for the party’s top job, made the comments while launching his campaign against sexual harassment.

“Some women have raised with me that a solution to the rise in assault and harassment in public toilets could be to introduce women-only facilities. My intention would be to make going to the bathroom safer for everyone whether in the pub or on a train.

"However, I would consult with women and open it up to hear their views on whether women-only make-up sessions in night clubs would be welcome – and also if piloting this where harassment is reported most frequently would be of interest."

British Toilet Police recorded 1,399 sexual offences in 2014-15 in Britain’s toilets and washrooms, an increase of nearly 300 on the previous year and a new record.

Richard Murphy points out the futility of Article 123, Lisbon Treaty

From The Telegraph:

[Jeremy Corbyn] has proposed a “People’s Quantitative Easing” scheme in which the Bank of England would “be given a new mandate … to invest in large-scale housing, energy, transport and digital projects”...

Mr Corbyn’s proposals would clash with Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty, which forbids central banks from printing money to finance government spending. Lawyers warned that a lengthy fight with the EU would be a certainty, and could mean that infrastructure projects end up incomplete.

Traditional QE was introduced by the Bank in 2009, since when it has intervened in the bond market to buy Government debt. Key to this is that the Bank buys bonds from the so-called secondary market - from private investors rather than directly from the Government.

Buying the instruments directly from the state is illegal under Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty. Richard Murphy, who Mr Corbyn has named as the architect of People’s QE, has proposed “a ruse” in order that the Labourite’s plans not attract the ire of EU lawmakers.

“The bonds have to be sold into the financial markets first, but there is no reason at all why this could not be for an agreed fee akin to underwriting, after which the bonds are, indeed purchased by the Bank,” he has said.

Mr Murphy said that Article 123 was clearly a piece of legislation whose “sell-by date had passed”, and that some fiddle would be required to get around it. But the EU may not look kindly on attempts to bypass its rules.

Whatever the merits or otherwise of Corbyn's suggested projects are (housing is a great money spinner, you'd struggle to lose money on that), Murphy is bang on with that one.

The Bank of England was originally set up to borrow money from the general public and give it to the government to spend on enlarging the navy. It has somehow turned into a 'central bank' over the years, but that is a question of fact and degree.

HM Government, HM Treasury and the Bank of England are all different parts of the same thing. Why would it make any difference which one of them borrows or prints money to finance public expenditure? Who cares what the book debts between different parts of the government are, it all nets off to nothing.

To cut a long story short, if I need money to pay for my loft conversion, it doesn't make any difference whether I borrow the money in my own name; whether my wife and I borrow it jointly; or whether she borrows it and then lends it on to me. Our total household indebtedness and our total household assets are exactly the same. The only relevant question is this: "is it worth getting a loft conversion done?", that is all.

Fun Online Polls: Hiroshima, Nagasaki & Jeremy Corbyn

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

If you had been the US President in August 1945, what would you have done?

Ended the war and allowed Japan to get away with it - 10%
Allowed the war to drag on for another few months or years - 1%
Dropped The Bomb on Hiroshima then given them a couple of weeks to surrender - 52%
Dropped The Bomb on Hiroshima and another one on Nagasaki out of spite - 36%

So a clear winner here, and I was with the majority on this. A good turnout of 77 voters, thank you everybody who took part.

My view is, as the US President, you have to think about
a) what's best for the American people as a whole (and sod the Japanese) and
b) what will get you elected President in a three years' time. Harry Truman was of course not elected President the first time, he took over when FDR died.
-------------------------------------------
This week's Fun Online Poll.

"Who will/would you vote for as new leader of the Labour Party?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar, multiple selections allowed if you're in two minds.

I'm in several minds about this (although luckily I am not registered vote so I'm not losing sleep over this).

On the one hand, he is likeable, has principles and I agree with some of his policies while the other three are just faceless mishmash self-promoting machine politicians. I don't agree with any of their policies for the simple reason they don't actually have any.

But Corbyn's policies miss the point and he will make life more difficult for the Young People's Party by offering superficially attractive solutions to our core voters which will not actually address the underlying issues.

Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn on top form

Spotted by Random in The Independent:

The ‘Right To Buy’ policy that lets council tenants buy their homes at a big discount should be extended to the tenants of private landlords, a Labour leadership contender has said.

Jeremy Corbyn said Labour needed to go further in tackling the housing crisis and that extending Right To Buy could help more people find a secure place to live.

“We know that Generation Rent faces an uphill struggle simply to get into long-term housing. We have seen some good ideas from Labour to establish more secure tenancies for renters. Now we need to go further and think of new ways to get more people into secure housing,” he said.

“So why not go with Right to Buy, with the same discounts as offered by way of subsidised mortgage rates [this sentence is not entirely clear], but for private tenants and funded by withdrawing the £14 billion tax allowances currently given to Buy to Let landlords? I believe this idea could open up the possibility of real secure housing for many currently faced with insecurity and high rents.”

I attended a talk by Lib Dem leadership candidate Tim Farron recently. He said he opposed Right to Buy. I pointed out that he was on the back foot with that one ("You are preventing millions from achieving the aspiration of home-ownership" etc), so why didn't he change tack and say it was a brilliant idea, so brilliant in fact that he would extend it to private tenants. I actually got a laugh and a round of applause for that.

Unsurprisingly, he did not answer the question, thank God that Corbyn has picked up the slack.