A question for the lefties (that's politics)

If you legalised drugs the criminals would just undercut you on price

Like they do now with alcohol, tobacco, and Lemsip?

pushing down house prices to any large degree is not going to be popular or get you elected

This thread isn’t about getting elected.

How about industry acknowledging that a job needs more people than claimed and not expecting appalling overtime hours or work spent on laptops AF home to get the job done…t

A reduction in wages because of immigrants doing jobs that don’t exist? Are you ok Jamba?

pushing down house prices to any large degree is not going to be popular or get you elected

It won’t, if you assume that everyone owns a house…..

pushing down house prices to any large degree is not going to be popular or get you elected

I’m a home-owner, and I’d be happy to see a massive crash in house prices.

( I’d like a slightly bigger house with a garage, right now that’d cost me an extra £100k)

If you legalised drugs the criminals would just undercut you on price

Seems more likely to me that the government would be able to undercut all the crims, but it’s an interesting point.

I’d go for a German style level of taxation, with if being more graduated, it’d be more complicated, but it’d spare people the sudden jump from one band to the next.

My labour party would look something like this..

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militant_tendency

The thing that’s always bugged me about house prices is this:
(all figures are completely made up to illustrate the point, it doesn’t matter what the real pay increase/house price inflation rate is)

Let’s say I buy a house for £100k in year x, when I’m earning £25k.

House price rises are good, says the Daily Mail, and 5 years later, my wages have gone up a bit too to, say, £27.5k (up 10%) and house prices have risen by 50% in the same period. So my house is now worth £150k. Wahey, I’m up 50 grand, I’ll use that extra money to buy a new, better, house.

So I look at a house that would have cost £150k when mine cost £100k. When I bought my house I was 2 times my annual salary short of being able to buy this nicer house (the £100k I had, plus 2*£25k). But now I’ve got £150k of house to sell, and I’m earning a bit more.

But the new house cost £150k 5 years ago. Its price, just like every other house, has gone up by 50%, so now it’s worth £225k. So if I sell my house for cash, I’m even further away from affording the nicer house than I was 5 years ago (near enough 3x my salary, rather than 2x my salary).

The longer house prices increase by more than wages, the bigger the problem gets.

If (like most people) I’m selling my house so that I can buy another house, a house price rise means nothing because the thing I’m buying is worth more too. Obviously I want MY house to get more valuable, but I want every other house to stay the same/get cheaper so I can upgrade.

@bails 68% of people in the UK own their own home (can’t recall where I saw that stat). House prices more than just a function of wages, you have factors like cost of loans (interest rate level), availability of mortgages, availability of houses, demand (immigration, inward investment etc). The UK has a huge stock of cheap housing its just in places where there is little work, hence its cheap.

@TimothyD – with VAT on food at 8% ?

If you legalised drugs the criminals would just undercut you on price

You can already buy dodgy ciggies and booze, and yet overwhelmingly folk don’t. They buy them legit. Why? Would you interact with Crims if you don’t need to, just ’cause it’s a few quid cheaper?

makes no sense

I agree with molgrips.

We all know how this ends, we have 1 year of molgrip-mania, he enters coalition with Captain Flashheart and before you know it he’s been strung up and nailed to a cross as a class traitor…..

jambalaya:
I know that house prices rise due to demand, and that affordability isn’t just related to interest rates. But it doesn’t really matter (in this, admittedly simplified, discussion). Prices go up because demand is greater than supply. If we’re looking at “is a price rise a good thing” I don’t really think it matters too much whether demand is up, supply is down, or it’s a mix of both.

So if I own my home, and it increases in value by 50% against an inflation rate and pay increase over the same period of 15%, why is that A Good Thing? Especially when the thing I’m buying with it has gone up by the same amount, so my purchasing power hasn’t changed at all.

but it’d spare people the sudden jump from one band to the next.

There isn’t a sudden jump in the tax you actually pay, just the rate. A lot of people seem to think that if you go from just under the 40% threshold to just over it, you suddenly lose a lot of money. You don’t.

So if I own my home, and it increases in value by 50% against an inflation rate and pay increase over the same period of 15%, why is that A Good Thing? Especially when the thing I’m buying with it has gone up by the same amount, so my purchasing power hasn’t changed at all.

It’s a good thing if you own multiple properties like most of the Tory government and the rich 😉

For the average person who owns their own house, it is a mirage.

Woohoo my house has gone up in value x amount, I am richer! Vote tory they are doing a great job!

The naivety of the masses is amusing.

I’d go a bit further than some.

– Free childcare
– Free higher education
– Abolition of private schools and private health industry
– Massively subsidised nationalised integrated public transport system.
– Nationalise the renewable portion of the energy industry, leave carbon based private and tax it via carbon pricing
– Legalised drugs and nationalised production (a la Uruguay)

I’m not even going to attempt to work out how to pay for all that but if we can find the billions/trillions to spend on wars and weapons we can find the money for this sort of thing.

The thing is, if you move too far left, like comrade dazh and his abolition of private schools, you’ll never get voted in.

Although I do think it would be brilliant!

Since when were we ever talking about getting voted in?

Seriously though, if we’re ever going to have a truly meritocratic society, then people should not be able to buy an advantage via things like private schools. Also it would improve the state school system as the govt would be held to account by high achieving parents who want the same for their kids. Same goes for health services.

Prohibition works just fine – it’s just the case that we’re not in the club benefiting from it ..

I agree it’d be nice, but there are problems with that idea. What if the state schools are no good? You’re effectively then enforcing your values and ideas on everyone. Which is pretty way out communist type left.

The thing is, if you move too far left, like comrade dazh and his abolition of private schools, you’ll never get voted in.

Don’t put it in the manifesto then.

(Slightly Devil’s Advocate)

On free childcare: shouldn’t we be encouraging more parents to stay off work and look after their kids?

The thing is, if you move too far left, like comrade dazh and his abolition of private schools, you’ll never get voted in.

Other countries don’t have them.

There’s always the option to remove the benefits that private schools get (like charity status and not paying VAT) in order to make them unworkable?

How about we give the Peoples Republic of Sturgikistan full fiscal autonomy and then cut the Barnett formula? Would be a rather interesting social experiment to see how much a sample of what appears to be some of the most left leaning in the British population like paying Scandinavian levels of taxes for Scandinavian levels of benefit. You never know if they like it and it works it might catch on south of the border.

An alternative to free childcare/parenting issues (because your point is very valid mikeactually re. Stay at home parents) is to ensure workplaces/organisations offer maximum variety of work patterns to allow for parental issues/livea e.g. school runs, both parents wanting to work AND raise their children

This happens quite a lot in other countries and is seen as a very positive attribute to society. I’m not sure why the UK has been so slow to embrace it…

On free childcare: shouldn’t we be encouraging more parents to stay off work and look after their kids?

No. We shouldn’t encourage them to do anything. They should be given the choice. Free childcare would allow them the choice of staying home if they want, or either or both parents staying at work.

blimey at the previous page.

what dazh forgot to mention was the law prescribing the acceptable 17 regulation haircuts for men, and 11 regulation hairstyles for women, and that manufacturing would be “factory 17 – mens size 10 shoes, left”…

and while some tried anything to cross the fence/river/wall, others found that a utopia, and even in Germany today there are those who strive to return to those days.

You wouldn’t need to abolish private schools Dazb, they would all close down cos no one could afford them due to the amount of tax they will be paying. That would put even more demand on the state who would need to raise taxes even more to pay for it. Then all the higher earners would give up trying or emigrate and the tax burden would fall on the low earners, so instead of getting £10k tax free you’d probably get £5k at most etc etc

edit: and since the left are generally anti-monarchy they’d be more than happy to exchange a head of state inherited by birth for one that is passed down from father to son 😉

as already mentioned… “who said anything about being elected” 😉

The rich wouldn’t emmigrate. We’d confiscate their passports, so they’d have to holiday in the UK too instead of taking all their money to St Tropez or wherever they go.

Everyone will be so chilled out from legally blazing up big ass bags of weed that the NHS can close all their mental health units, freeing up more money to pay all the tripping mashed off their tits immigrants working to keep all our bogs clean and roads open, bring on the benefits!!

The op said aspirations; within the current feudal capitalist system, for me there’s nothing really aspirational, the best we can hope for is damage limitation. So I just hope for the best damage limitation we can have.

The main thing for me is support for the vulnerable. Out of work, disabled, unemployable, addicted, mentally ill and so on. They deserve help, and not handouts, of course, but that costs possibly even more money than handouts.

I also think free childcare for all would be a huge benefit. It seems like a lot of ‘benefit scroungers’ are there because they are either unemployable without some sort of help, they can’t arrange childcare, or it’s just not worth their while financially.

Then we should invest in things that people in a developed country should have a right to. Like healthcare and education, up to degree level.
This is what the Tories say they are doing isn’t it?

If the Tories can pull off this ‘blue collar conservatism’ thing then I’ll be a hell of a lot happier about their government.

Abolition of private schools and private health industry

I have never really understood what this would achieve, surely it is a good thing if people pay privately as this takes the strain off the state sector

Abolition of private schools and private health industry

I have never really understood what this would achieve, surely it is a good thing if people pay privately as this takes the strain off the state sector[/quote]

The kids who go to private schools wouldn’t be a strain on private sector education, and private healthcare doesn’t cover the really expensive stuff that the NHS provides.

Plus, equality.

And already the STW leftie party is showing signs of internal division. As leader I have some difficult decisions to make about the direction of the party.

This is what the Tories say they are doing isn’t it?

What they say and what they do are two completely different things.

For example, changing the law to require 2 years of employment to allow the possibility of access to an employment tribunal. That doesn’t unburden companies who treat their employees with respect, it is a charter for the companies who abuse employees.

And it also doesn’t match the frequently stated need for a flexible work force, where it now not uncommon to change jobs every few years. It is a policy that leaves employees vulnerable, unprotected and open to abuse for large chunks of their working lives.

They can spout all the rhetoric they like about ruling the country for the benefit of all, but they need to match it with real actions, and on that they have so far failed miserably.

As leader I have some difficult decisions to make about the direction of the party.

If you don’t get them right, just resign. And we’ll not accept the resignation.