Ku Klux Klownz

A better running order for the songs on "Overkill" by Motörhead

Being a traditionalist, I have tried listening to the whole album in the original running order with the two B-sides tacked on at the end (available on the CD version), but it gets a bit wearing and I don't think I ever managed it all the way through.

Yesterday, I tried again but had left the iPod on shuffle. The order in which it played them just flowed better and made much more sense - I listened to it twice all the way through as follows:

Overkill
Like A Nightmare
Too Late Too Late
Capricorn
Metropolis
Limb By Limb
(I Won't) Pay Your Price
Tear Ya Down
No Class
Stay Clean
I'll Be Your Sister
Damage Case

If anybody has any better suggestions, please leave a comment.

Business Rates revaluation: Government missed a right old trick.

Much squealing about something that has been in the offing for seven years, people act surprised that it actually happened. Tenants or buyers should have used a likely upwards revaluation as a bargaining chip in rent or price negotiations over the last few years.

From the BBC:

The new rating list for England and Wales will take effect in April 2017 and reflects the rental values of properties.

Overall figures for Wales show a 2.9% cut in rateable values, with shops falling by 8.8% and offices by 7%.

Across England, rateable values rise by 9.1%, ranging from a 22.8% increase in London to a 1.1% fall in the north east.

The really huge increases are in central London, where nearly all premises are tenanted. A slightly more cunning government would have frozen the amount that tenants have to pay and sent the landlord a bill for any increases (secured on the title, in case anybody wants to play the 'foreign owners won't pay LVT' KLN).

That way, landowners wouldn't be able to use actual real businesses as human shields.

... or they could cut out the middleman and just build social housing.

Emailed in by Ralph Musgrave from Property Week:

The accelerated construction fund, announced at this week’s Conservative Party conference, will be used to guarantee housing developments, with the government effectively using its balance sheet to underwrite the risk developers take...

This week communities secretary Sajid Javid said the £2bn fund, which will be paid for through additional government borrowing, would only apply to schemes on public land and would back the construction of an extra 15,000 homes by 2020.

“We will take government-owned land and partner with contractors and investors to speed up house building,” he said. “We will create new supply chains using offsite construction. And we will encourage new models of building to make houses that people want, more cheaply and at pace.”

Sounds like a massive slush fund to me.

Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper just to employ all the sub-contractors whom the 'home builders' would have engaged to build social housing on the government-owned land? If offsite construction is the way forward (cheaper) then that is how they will be built, for half the price that Mr Javid wants taxpayers to pay (£133,333 per unit).

The waiting lists are far too long, so if there is a 'market failure' (Theresa May's phrase of the week) it is here. The effective interest rate on the money spent/borrowed is effectively zero and the principal can be paid off from the rental income/savings in Housing Benefit to private landlords, so it ends up at a modest profit for the taxpayer generally, not a cost.

Life copies satire

Echoing this week's egg-themed Brexit Poll, congenital Home-Owner-Ist and hereditary MP Jacob Rees-Mogg has said that he wants a hard white Brexit with a runny yolk.

The man is incapable of satire or self-awareness, everything he touches becomes unfunny. Which has now taken all the fun out of the fun online poll.

"Build homes with smaller rooms so landlords can afford them, Tory housing minister says"

From The Independent:

Private housing developers should build homes with smaller rooms that do not meet existing minimum space standards so that landlords can afford to buy them, the housing minister has said.

Gavin Barwell told the Conservative conference in Birmingham that he wanted the private sector to “innovate” to solve the housing crisis and that relaxing the rules on how cramped a flat can be might stop investors from being priced out.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From today's Evening Standard:

Regarding your article on business rates, there is hope for London's retail and office tenants. There is plenty of evidence to show that increases in rates are offset by equal and opposite reductions in rents, therefore the only losers from this in the long run will be landowners.

They have enjoyed substantial capital gains and increases in rents over the past seven years [i.e. since the last revaluation], so few will shed a tear for them.

Joe Momberg

A pity that either Joe or ES didn't add the 'Young People's Party' sign off.

Or to put it another way, Business Rates is just a super-tax on rents; total London rents have risen by £5 - £10 billion a year over the past seven years, and the government has finally got round to increasing this super-tax to what everybody with a little foresight expected it would be anyway.

Another Home-Owner-Ist milestone looms on the horizon...

Emailed in by Lola from CityWire:

Pensions minister Richard Harrington has said people should be able to use retirement savings to buy a house.

Speaking to New Model Adviser® at the Tory Party conference in Birmingham, Harrington, who was appointed as pensions minister in the summer following Theresa May’s post-Brexit vote reshuffle, said there is an ‘arbitrary’ line between saving for retirement and house purchase.

‘For most people there are two steps in their life [house purchase and retirement] and I think it is legitimate that the government should help with both,’ he said.

Previous Chancellor George Osborne had started gently swimming against the tide with his restriction for interest relief on BTLs and the extra 3% for buying second and further homes, but this man clearly is an utter, utter dickhead.

Sure, most people starting out in life would like to buy/own their own home rather than renting; and sure, retirees with some savings want to collect as much investment income as possible, whether that's dividends or rent from those people who would rather buy/own.

So it is a straight fight between young/poor and old/wealthy over available housing and it is impossible for the government to "help" (NewSpeak for subsidise) both sides as the effects cancel out! It's like sending weapons to opposing armies; good for weapons manufacturers and nobody else.

It would be a lot cheaper (for the taxpayer) and simpler to "help" neither side (again, current Chancellor Philip Hammond has had an outbreak of common sense and will shut down the Help To Buy subsidy at the end of this year) with a resulting fall in house prices. Win win win!

Guardian missing the point most gloriously as per usual.

From The Guardian:

To understand why, despite the recent funeral orations, liberalism is very much alive, you have to go back to the 1860s and the abolition of slavery in two key countries. To be precise, 1863, when – in one of the great coincidences of history – the proclamations of liberty for the American slaves and the Russian serfs came just five weeks apart*.

Both liberations were great victories for anti-slavery campaigners, more than half a century after the first successes of the campaign against the slave trade. But they were also great disappointments for radicals. Because, in both cases, the slaves and the serfs were catapulted from bondage into poverty.

In the US, slavery was replaced by peonage and debt bondage. In Russia, the land was valued at three and a half times its market value, and the impoverished serfs had to pay this to their former owners over a period of 49 years. It became clear that it wasn’t enough to release the slaves – you had to release them from debt, monopoly and the economic tyranny that replaced it...

All fine so far, if TPTB 'release' slaves/serfs but allow private 'land ownership' to continue and then collect most of their earnings from them in rent, the former slaves/serfs are no little or better off.

It is as simple as that. And that is pretty much where we are today. Anybody who has to hand over a large part of his earnings to private landlords/mortgage banks is in the same position as a newly freed slave/serf, who in turn is little or no better of than an actual slave/serf.

He then drifts off into a criticism of free trade, which is called 'neo liberalism' nowadays.

Why? What he refers to as free trade is in many cases no such thing, what he is talking about is corporatism, regulatory capture, government granted monopolies and protections, rigging the tax system to favour large businesses etc. Those things are the antithesis of free trade. And in terms of importance, these things are nowhere near as important as private landownership, end of.

* One of my favourite coincidences of history, along with FDR and Hitler coming to power and dying within a few weeks of each other.

Sam Allardyce