You can see why people assume London is full of pretentious wankers.

From the Evening Standard:

[Re-elected London Mayor Sadiq Khan] vowed to “work day and night” to deliver “safer streets” saying: “On crime – we’ll continue to be both tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. This includes putting even more police officers on the streets at the same time as investing record amounts in new opportunities for young Londoners.”

This is especially bitter - he's the one who took the police officers off the streets in the first place.

"The key thing is to make sure our city recovers. It’s the biggest challenge our city has faced since the Second World War, and that’s what Let’s Do London is about - getting our city back on its feet after the awful 15 months we have had, and try to bring our city together and our country together.

"We have got to avoid this culture war which is tearing our country apart. We have got to make sure we have the Brexit scars healing and we ought to try to bring people together. My mission in the second term is to bring our city together.

"Next Monday restaurants will reopen, many theatres will reopen. On June 21, fingers crossed, our city will return to a semblance of normality. It’s going to be an amazing summer."

... he insisted he had a "decent mandate" overall, having secured more than 1.2m votes. "I didn’t realise I secured the biggest vote ever received by a candidate, other than myself, of course, in 2016," he said. "But also I discovered I have got the biggest majority, other than myself in 2016. Quite a decent mandate, if I say so myself."

City Hall promised “the biggest domestic tourism campaign the capital has ever seen” to help London’s economy get back on its feet as Covid restrictions are eased. There will be a series of one-off events, outdoor film screenings and late-night openings under the London Lates initiative to ease social distancing.

None of that really means anything to a normal voter, does it?

As contrast, from Politics Home:

[Re-elected Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham] used his victory speech to accuse the Prime Minister of failing to deliver on his promises to areas like Greater Manchester... He pointed to a perceived "widespread cluelessness" in government as to what "levelling up", and offered to spell it out for Johnson.

"Here is where I can help you, Prime Minister. Let me define it," Burnham said. "It can't be achieved by scattering funds across a few favoured places.

"It can be achieved when you give millions of people in a city region like this one a modern, affordable public transport system, when it costs the same to catch a bus in Harpurhey as it does is Haringey. £1.55, not £4 or more that people pay here".

He continued: "Levelling up is achieved when you give all people the dignity of decent work and wages that don't have to be topped up by visits to the food bank, and when you have the kind of jobs here which mean our young people don't have to move south to get on in life, which I had to do 30 years ago."

I've no strong opinion on Andy Burnham one way or another, but at least he says real things that actually mean something and are within his remit as Mayor.

Roberto Mancini. Or possibly "Manciti"

They own land! Give them money!

Today's instalment is a game of two halves up in Manchester:

Council chiefs have unveiled radical plans to help the housing crisis... £25m of pension cash is to be used to build new homes. Bosses have identified five sites on which it aims to build nearly 250 properties for sale or rent as part of a pilot scheme. The Greater Manchester Pension Fund will pay for the construction costs and the programme could be rolled-out over 10 years if it proves successful....

Fair enough. That's peanuts against a population of a half a million, but it's a start. The council can grant itself planning permission for free (no doubt they'll end up buying expensive land which already has planning, from the council chief's brother-in-law, separate topic), so it's good money for them/their pension fund (not even local councils can mess this up), more houses built, jobs for people, might even get prices down a tiny bit etc.

... As part its plans, Manchester council also wants to create a mortgage guarantee scheme to help people get on the property ladder by underwriting up to 20 per cent of their loan.

Why?

Doesn't that just wipe out all the financial advantages of building more houses in the first place? Building them is risk free profits for the council; once they are built, they get their money straight back from the purchaser's mortgage bank, and like I say, it's good news for people locally, whether that's jobs or housing.

But if you lend out the pension fund to merely try and keep prices high, that's a very risky investment for the pension fund and makes things worse for young people. The best thing that could happen to young people is for lending criteria to become much stricter, like in the good old days.

Sir Alex Ferguson

M People?

From the BBC:

[Manchester Council] Leader Sir Richard Leese said: "The unfairness of the government's financial grant settlement for Manchester, one of the five worst in the country, has been widely reported. We now have to find £110m in savings next year - £60m more than expected - because of front-loading and the redistribution of money from Manchester to more affluent areas...

"At the same time we will continue to invest through our M People employee programme to improve the skills and the productivity of the majority of our staff who will stay with us."

The M People programme, developed in conjunction with the unions, aims to match the skills of the existing workforce to roles that can improve services.

I guess that those employees will have to find the heroes inside themselves and move on up, or something.

On a lighter note: "to match the skills of the existing workforce to roles that can improve services"?? In other words, M Council didn't decide which services to provide first, and then recruit people who could do them. It appears that M Council just recruited an extra ten thousand people (they say that they have 24,000 on their payroll, about one-twentieth of the population of that great City) and then let them decide what they wanted to do.

Big Society. Big Prices.

From the BBC:

The prime minister has voiced support for councils wanting to stop the sale of cheap alcohol. David Cameron said plans in Greater Manchester to introduce a minimum price of 50p per unit would be looked at "very sympathetically"... But he said while he supported local decisions, he did not want to introduce a national minimum price.

I suppose you could argue, if it's just some local councils who do this, then once it provably and demonstrably hasn't had any measurable positive effect, at least they'll drop it all again.

Nope, actual facts and evidence count for nothing in this game, and more and more councils will do it - anybody who voices objections will be accused of wanting to encourage binge drinking or being an alcoholic - and once there are only a few councils left who don't impose minimum prices, that's when they'll go national with this.

"Greater Manchester considers minimum price for alcohol"

From the BBC:

... some fear it could lead to people going to neighbouring counties to buy cheap alcohol in bulk."

Well, duh.

And who's this bunch of shysters...

Andy Walker, of wellbeing and health organisation Our Life, said he hoped a by-law in Greater Manchester would be passed and create a "domino effect" nationally.?

I'd never heard of them before. From their website:

We passionately believe that people have a fundamental right to better wellbeing and health. We also think that local citizens and local communities should have more say over the decisions that affect their lifestyle choices.

But what if 'local citizens and local communities... have their say' and decide they don't want minimum alcohol pricing? Have you even considered that possibility, Mr Walker?

PS, the website looks distinctly fakecharity, but it does not mention a charity number, neither does it have a companies house number (so it is not necessarily a fakeprivatecompany either). Apparently, it was " Set up in 2009 as an independent, campaigning social enterprise by NHS North West, Our Life is a membership organisation..." so I assume it's basically a lobbying front for somebody or other or a slush fund or something.

Another lousy excuse for having ID cards

From The Metro:

Residents in Manchester will become the first people in Britain to be able to apply for ID cards. They can now directly apply to attend appointments from November 30 to have their photograph and fingerprints taken for the £30 cards at Manchester's passport office.

Junior Home Office Minister Meg Hillier said the cards would be particularly useful for students and young people as they would "save the cost and hassle" of getting into clubs and bars. "Really for a lot of people it's a day-to-day convenience thing. For a lot of young people ... they often take their passports to prove their identity in nightclubs and bars and the Passport Service sweeps these up every week. So for a lot of people it'll save the cost and hassle of taking your passport, risking losing it and instead you've got this very convenient little credit-sized card. I've got one and it's very useful."

They are really scraping the barrel now. If they wanted more people to go to clubs and bars, they could just scrap the smoking ban. We've had pubs for centuries and it's never been a problem to get in.

Then it gets absolutely laughable:

The ID cards are very hard to copy and are very secure, with biometric information stored on a database, she added. "This is not a database that can be downloaded onto disks," she said. "It's going to be held in different places so there'll be fingerprints and your picture on one database and your biographical information (on another), which is I must stress just the same as what's held by the Passport Service anyway ... and they will be linked together by another database."

The database would only be used for "serious crime issues" or identity concerns at a border...

Sam'n'Dave

We all love stealth taxes, voters and politicians alike (part 94)

From The Grauniad:

The Conservative leadership would aim to push through an emergency budget, including spending cuts and a possible rise in VAT, with the support of the Liberal Democrats if David Cameron fails to secure an overall majority in the Commons at the general election...

A rise in VAT to 20% in an immediate post-election budget would raise as much as £13bn. Shadow ministers have not ruled out the move, saying such a rise would not necessarily choke off the recovery. In his conference speech Osborne was strongly critical of the VAT cut from 17.5% to 15%, saying it had had little or no effect on stimulating the recovery. VAT is due to be put back to 17.5% after Christmas and other taxes, including a 50p tax rate for those earning over £150,000, are due to be introduced in April.

Yup, they suggest a stealth-tax rise of £13 billion (which will do more than anything to choke off the economy and divert what little resources we have left into VAT-exempt or zero-rated activities, like, er, banking and new residential construction), and nobody bats an eyelid, while waffling on about "freezing" Council Tax for two years (in other words, not increasing it from current receipts of about £25 billion), which both major parties now see as a vote winner.

Yippee.

William Vague

George Osborne

House-price-crash porn (4)

From today's FT:

One owner, who bought a £190,000 flat there 18 months ago, is trying to offload it for £150,000, a local estate agent said. Gary Wilkinson, of Thornley Groves, said other developments along Whitworth Street were falling even faster. The asking price for a two-bed in the W3 building had dropped from £282,000 to £209,950 in months. “There were a lot of people buying off plan who were overextended. There are loads of repossessions.” One flat in the nearby Northern Quarter bought last year for £222,000 has just gone for £151,000... The nearby Regency House building is worst hit. One flat there bought for £302,000 at the end of 2002 sold for £203,311 in July [2008].

Schadenfreude? Who, me?

Fun on-line poll - results

In his speech at the Nulab conference, The Goblin King claimed - without the slightest shred of evidence, of course - that "Some people have been asking why I haven't served my children up for spreads in the papers."

In the spirit of Carrie in Sex And The City, I set up an online poll to establish whether this was true. The responses to the question "Have you been asking why Gordon Brown doesn't offer up his children for spreads in the papers?" were as follows:

"Yes" - 6 (3%)
"No" - 58 (29%)
"I couldn't care less about his stupid children, the man is responsible for ruining the country, FFS" - 143 (69%)

So there we have it. Another Big Fat Lie from Mr Shit.