Endangered species ...

Take a good look at this prime example of patios heaterus before they disappear for good...

Advocates for self-government

Surreptitious Evil has found the quick, self test on where you stand politically. Here's my result



The test takes about 30 seconds, go on, you know you want to...

"Youth project joins fraud inquiry"

Will Lee Jasper, one of the 100 greatest Black Britons, get the all clear yet again, or will something come of these new enquiries?

* Lest ye wonder, Deshbangla is in fact a proper word, it seems to mean Bangladeshi.

EU parliament votes to ban patio heaters*

Nigel Farage comes out fighting on this one (as a smoker who hates shivering in the rain, he knows what he is talking about), culminating in:

"What are the EU going to ban next? Central Heating? ... Surely people should be able to sit outside their houses in the evening without the EU granting them permission.”

Personally, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did suggest banning central heating, that involves burning gas**, doesn't it? If that's an argument against patio heaters, then the same argument must apply to central heating. And cooking. And about one-third of our electricity generation.

* And yes, this doesn't just mean outside pubs and cafés, this includes patio heaters in your own back garden.

** Sure, patio heaters use butane gas, derived from oil, rather than natural gas, but it's the same general principle.

Britain's biggest property deal

Some chaps called the Candy Brothers have shelled out £1,ooo million for a 12.8 acre site in a prime London location.

£1,000 million ÷ 12.8 acres = £78 million per acre
£78 million per acre = £16,000 per square yard
£16,000 per square yard = £12 per square inch

In other words, they could have bought 12.8 acres of agricultural land for about £50,000 and covered the whole area two inches deep in £1 coins for much the same overall cost.

Frank Field MP puts it in perspective ...

From today's Metro:

Labour MP Frank Field questioned whether [Derek Conway's ten-day suspension] was adequate [punishment]. He told MPs: "If this example of what I would see as embezzlement had occurred in the refreshment department on this scale, we would have expected that person to leave the employment of this establishment on that day. I believe we should treat ourselves in a similar manner."

Frank Field, you rock!

I am also awarding Frank Field a belated "rock" for this suggestion for good measure.

VAT and Employer's NI are the worst taxes (3)

The European Central Bank's economists* have established that sales/turnover taxes** and social security contributions are the worst taxes, and have a far more damaging effect than taxes on personal or corporate incomes, see page 19 of this.

I told you so! I told you so!

* As well as admitting that government spending is bad for economic growth, well, duh...

** The delicious irony of all this being that VAT is imposed by the ECB's Lords and Masters, the EU ...

Hat-tip, Stumbling & Mumbling

"Sarkozy sues Ryanair over advert"

For verily, the French are humourless gits of the worst kind.

NB - Carla Bruni may be Italian-born, but she grew up in France. It says so here.

The cost/value of an average plot of residential land

As I suggested here, the best way to look at house prices is to look at the ratio of house prices-to-earnings. The cost/value of a property consists of two elements, the bricks/mortar and the land/location value of the plot itself. The way that plot values have changed as a multiple of earnings since the early 1980s looks like this (click to enlarge):

NB - there are two ways of estimating the cost/value of the average residential plot:-

1. By looking at the cost of building land ("how much a builder will pay"), which can be taken from the VOA's Property Market Report (figure for E&W, excl. London), divided by a typical density of 12 homes per acre, as suggested here.

2. The residual method is subtracting the rebuild cost of an 'average' new home (say, a terraced house with 750 sq ft) using the ABI's calculator, expressing this as a multiple of average earnings (2.8, in this example) and deducting it from the chart of house-prices expressed as a multiple of earnings (see first link).

As you can see, the two methods come to pretty much the same figures.

Petition on cost-benefit analysis of EU membership

There's another petition here. We've tried this several times before, one day it might just snowball and get us somewhere. So please sign up if you have a spare minute* and pass it on.

* I guess most people who visit this blog have a spare minute!