Fun Online Polls: Rents & The Bank of England

Thanks to everybody who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll, results as follows:

Which factor has more impact on the rent that a landlord can charge?

What tenants are willing and able to pay - 86%
The interest that the landlord has to pay - 14%

Good. Eighty-six per cent of you chose the correct answer. I'd be interested to hear why anybody thinks that the amount of interest that landlords have to pay is a factor.
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After yesterday's long and tiring thread, I establish that a lot of people (honourable exceptions: Lola, Bayard, Former Tory, and one of the Anon's) will believe any old nonsense they read in the papers or which politicians say, and confuse anything with anything.

The core assumption behind that post is that the Bank of England is a UK government department; it is owned by the UK government; it is controlled by the UK government and Banking Acts passed by the UK government; its senior officials are appointed by the UK government; the UK government decides what the inflation target is which the Bank of England has to achieve (ha!); it has to pay its profits to the UK government (i.e. to HM Treasury) and so on and so forth.

But a couple of people (here and elsewhere) genuinely seem to believe that it isn't. I sha'n't waste your time with links to all this, because no doubt there are conspiracy web site which maintain that the Bank of England is a privately owned and independent company. The fact that the Bank of England is run for the benefit of a narrow clique (i.e. bankers, landowners etc), or that this same narrow clique tells the UK government which monetary and fiscal policies to adopt is a separate issue.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: "Is the Bank of England owned and controlled by the UK Government?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Poll Results: some of you don't get out much.

I first ran this week's poll on this 'blog and then linked to it over at HousePriceCrash. The final results, split into people responding from here or there are as follows:

So well done two-thirds of you - the correct figure is indeed 'about ninety per cent'. Page 44 of this gives estimates for developed/urban areas of between 8.9% and 13.%. And those are figures for England, which is just over half the surface area of the UK, but five-sixths of the population and an even greater fraction of the economy.

In other words, my suspicions are confirmed. A third of the better-educated people who read this 'blog or HPC have either never looked at a map, taken a long car or train journey, looked out of an aeroplane window or bothered to google the topic.

Even worse than that, The Barker Review commissioned a poll among less-well-educated folk, i.e. the general public, which asked "What proportion of land in England do you think is developed?", and the responses were as follows:

Between half and three-quarters - 21%
Around half -23%
Between a quarter and a half - 19%
A quarter or less - 13%
Don't know - 15%.

Which is pretty terrifying. Who is pumping out the propaganda to make people believe this and why? There's no way I can fight it, is there? I've argued with NIMBYs who insist that half our country was already built on; when I point out that it's a tenth they just reply "Well, that's still too much," instead of the rational response, which would be "Only a tenth? Oh, that's brilliant! That means there's plenty of scope to build a few more houses and factories etc."
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Anyhoo.

Prompted by a post over at Steven_L's Place, this week's Fun Online Poll asks "Who poses the biggest threat to 'our way of life'? The BNP, the Islamists, both or neither?" I'm not including 'The Nanny Statists' as an option, because they are exactly the people who created the conditions in which both the BNP and the Islamists can thrive and then assumed more powers to meet the alleged threat(s).

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

You don't get out much!

The interim results from this week's Fun Online Poll are as follows:

How much land in England (by surface area) is still undeveloped?
30% - 6 votes
50% - 9 votes
70% - 15 votes
90% - 51 votes

I do wonder some times whether people in this country have ever looked at a map of England, or taken a long car or train journey, looked out of an aeroplane window, or, failing that, tried googling the stats.

I've now linked to the poll over at HousePriceCrash to see whether the overall response is any different.