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Over at Bloomberg, columnist Matthew Brooker notes that a mix of policies have caused London’s housebuilding sector to almost stop.
Homebuilding in London has all but ground to a halt. The capital is on track to deliver less than 5% of its annual target of 88,000 homes with half the year gone, by far the worst performance in two decades. Such a collapse in the UK’s largest and richest city would be a poor omen for economic growth and productivity at the best of times. For this to be occurring under a one-year-old Labour government that arrived in office promising a generational uplift in housing supply is extraordinary.
The figures almost defy belief. Housing starts have fallen by more than 90% compared with the financial year ended in 2023, official data from the Greater London Authority show.
The reasons:
Why is this happening and what can be done? The words “perfect storm” crop up frequently. A thicket of interlocking factors is at play, some of which have built up over years. On the supply side, the immediate trigger is the creation of a new Building Safety Regulator, or BSR, with a set of more stringent requirements for high-rise buildings in the wake of the 2017 Grenfell fire, which killed 72 people. Delays in approvals have compounded post-pandemic challenges of inflated construction costs and higher interest rates.
Meanwhile, successive tax changes, some dating back more than a decade, have driven away offshore investors, according to Molior founder Tim Craine. Developers build only in response to demand, he points out. Investors who buy apartments “off plan” before they are complete play a crucial role in financing construction and providing a signal of likely end-demand. Their declining presence has raised speculative risks and undermined the financial viability of projects.
Former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne targeted a series of tax measures at buy-to-let investors in the belief that they were driving up house prices and squeezing out first-time buyers. The trouble is that the private-led investment model is intimately connected to the delivery of affordable housing for deprived communities. London boroughs grant planning permission for apartment complexes on condition that developers designate a portion, typically 35%, as affordable. These are bought by housing associations that then sell or rent them out at discounts to the market. If there are no private buyers, there will be no affordable housing either.
The article makes no reference to the current immigration issue in the UK, but it is fair to say that even without large net inflows of people to the UK, the low level of house building and new residential accommodation is a problem if we want a refurbished, modern housing stock. Add in the immigration issue, then we have a crisis. The current UK government made much of housing when it was elected last July. The data for London is lamentable.
The article also reminded me of the planning dysfunction, among other things, that was identified as problems in last year’s major “Foundations” report into why UK seems unable to get anything built, and certainly erected on time, and on budget, these days.
Remember, when the grooming gangs hit the news again in January, after decades of these gangs operating, the official line from No10, repeated by the regime media, remained that ‘the real story here is the tech oligarchs spreading disinformation and the spread of the Islamophobic far right’.
They briefed fake news to the media that ‘Cummings is writing Elon’s tweets’. The PM gave a speech about it. Useless regime hacks like Lewis Goodall called it ‘his best speech’. Goodall explained that the ‘real story’ is the influence of Elon, social media radicalising the right, ‘the emergence of a common UK/US online right … making extremist, until recently fringe politics mainstream in British conservatism… Far right thinking … has become mainstream. Remember that the notion of ubiquitous Muslim grooming gangs has long been a trope of extremism, despite little evidence’ — and the idea that there’s been a national conspiracy to deny victims justice ‘is dangerous nonsense’ (Goodall, Jan 2025).
This was ‘the mainstream’ pundit view in SW1-media-land only 6 months ago. Being pathological and pathologically incompetent, the regime then tried to organise another layer of coverup with a report but this went wrong because the scale of evidence is so vast the author rebelled and told enough of the truth to make the No10 line untenable. Narrative Whiplash kicked in: suddenly the gangs were no longer ‘far right disinformation’, they’re real, there’ll be an Inquiry, though of course the core Insider belief hasn’t changed — the purpose of the Inquiry (from Whitehall’s perspective) is to control the story and suppress as much as possible voters connecting the collapse of border control and the systematic rape/abuse/killing of English children.
– Dominic Cummings
When Israel struck Iranian targets on June 13th, something strange happened four days later—thousands of Twitter accounts tweeting about Scottish independence just… stopped.
That silence? It wasn’t just suspicious. It was evidence.
In this video, I walk you through how a digital blackout in Iran exposed one of the largest Iranian disinformation operations targeting the West. Working with Cyabra, we tracked over 1,300 fake accounts—AI-generated personas pushing division in the UK, attacking the BBC, and praising Iran. And when the lights went out in Tehran, those bots vanished too.
Then they came back… parroting entirely new propaganda.
This is a masterclass in how modern influence warfare works—how state-sponsored actors weaponize your feed and how even silence can be a signal.
– Ryan McBeth
“Why is it so hard for the authorities to win public trust? Maybe because they keep lying to us”, Gaby Hinsliff writes in the Guardian:
If you were to invent a scandal expressly to convince conspiracy theorists they were right all along, the story of the Afghan superinjunction would be hard to beat.
A secret back door into Britain through which thousands of immigrants were brought, under cover of a draconian legal gagging order that helpfully also concealed an act of gross incompetence by the British state? It’s a rightwing agitator’s dream. “The real disinformation,” wrote Dominic Cummings on X, a platform notably awash with real disinformation, “is the regime media.” Yes, that Dominic Cummings.
She’s not wrong about dishonesty and censorship from the authorities causing people to rightly distrust them, but she cannot see the elephant in the room because she is looking at the room from inside the elephant.
Got that? Britain is a successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country, and the government has to show it has a plan to address people’s concerns and provide opportunties for everyone to flourish. And, er, there is a link between concerns people have about (checks notes) ‘where the government is acting on their behalf and on their interests with a range of factors’.
You have to laugh, even through the tears: these are the people who are in charge. Britain is a successful country? And this government has a…plan? But the important point to emphasise here is that Rayner, and the people around her, are simply constitutionally incapable of recognising the problem itself, or the solution. They actually think that ‘immigration and the impacts on local communities and public services’ is just one of a ‘range of factors’ destabilising society, alongside ‘economic insecurity, the rapid pace of de-industrialisation, technological change and the amount of time people were spending alone online, and declining trust in institutions’. And they actually think that the remedy for this is just ‘investment’ in ‘deprived areas’ so as to allow people to ‘flourish’.
British readers are familiar with this mindset: typically what it means is that money gets funnelled into regeneration schemes that kit out otherwise forgotten places like Newport, Dundee or Middlesborough with nice new shopping precincts and art galleries nobody visits. The idea, more or less, is that opposition to uncontrolled immigration is really just a feature of economic insecurity and, perhaps, a lack of civic pride. And if government can therefore just press the ‘grow’ button a bit harder, people will feel better off and pride will re-emerge, and our ‘successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country’ will simply become more successful yet.
– David McGrogan
“This [anti-abundance] mentality ultimately stems from the 1970s `Limits to Growth’ report, which predicted that natural resources would run out, prices would shoot through the roof, and there would be mass starvation.
“Reality has shown this to be bunk. Yet it lives on in decision-takers’ minds, reinforced by the belief that climate change requires a reduction in our global footprint as human beings and use less of everything. And it’s strengthened by a fundamentally elitist, snobbish mindset about economic growth, the view that growth is all about the hoi polloi buying more `stuff’ they don’t need, rather than what it is: the advancement of human possibility for all of us during our limited time on the planet.
“Look hard – actually you don’t need to look hard – and you see it everywhere. Consider the disdain for `cheap food’ and the moral panic about UPFs, surely a fabricated concept, and one whose principal benefit is psychological, allowing well-off politicians and campaigners to play Lady Bountiful telling ordinary voters how to eat. Think of the sneering at big cars, or worse still, people with more than one car, the suburban lifestyle, houses with gardens instead of egg-box flats, package holidays instead of leisurely eco-travel.
“Contemplate all the tedious lifestyle preaching, the hectoring of supermarkets about packaging, the determination to build houses with tiny windows and small rooms and then to ban air conditioning as it’s too damaging to the environment.”
– David Frost, Daily Telegraph.
Note: “UPFs” are ultra-processed foods, which now seem to have achieved the same Voldemort status as tobacco and booze.
Regarding the “abundance mindset” approach, I recommend this book, Fossil Future (2022), of a year or so ago by Alex Epstein. Another is Merchants of Despair, by Robert Zubrin. Last but not least is this book, written more than 25 years ago – The Intellectuals and The Masses – by John Carey. He shows how, from the 19th Century and into the 20th, a lot of supposedly clever people hated the rising prosperity of the broad mass of the public, not simply out of some concern for the natural world (much of which was sentimental bullshit), but because they hated people, and ultimately, themselves.
It has almost become a feature of the English sporting calendar, like the Epsom Derby and the FA Cup final, to watch a local heavyweight lose to Oleksandr Usyk in a packed football stadium or on prime-time television. Five Englishmen, on eight separate occasions, have tried and failed across two different weight divisions to beat the Ukrainian champion. None has succeeded. When Daniel Dubois was knocked out in the fifth round on Saturday night, before a sold-out crowd of 90,000 people at Wembley Stadium, it seemed like a sporting affirmation of Einstein’s definition of stupidity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
– Hugo Timms
Also this is amusing.
The High Court in England & Wales has handed down a judgment declaring that the Chief Constable of Northumbria Police – a force covering Northumberland, Newcastle and Sunderland, (basically the upper part of north-east England) acted irrationally in letting her officers participate in and support a ‘Pride’ event in 2024.
In short, the issue was that the Claimant (‘Plaintiff’ to our friends over the Ocean), a ‘gender-critical lesbian’, objected to members of the local Police Force Force and/or members of the Force associating themselves with the views of supporters of gender ideology and transgender activists by actively participating in the ‘Northern Pride Event in Newcastle in July 2024. The Claimant’s belief is that as a person who is ‘gender-critical’, she believes that a person’s sex is an immutable characteristic and that “gender ideology”, which recognises a person’s gender identity, is “wrong and dangerous“. To cut a long story short, the learned judge, Mr Justice Linden, upheld the complaint. Putting it simply, the judge looked at the Chief Constable’s reasons for authorising her officers to participate in the Pride Event and found them to be irrational, i.e. there was no way that the decision could have been taken by a rational Chief Constable.
The crux of the case was that police officers have a duty to be impartial and to appear to be impartial, the Chief Constable decided that the duty to be ‘impartial’ was subject to the ‘public sector equality duty’ (a general duty used wrongly here as a ‘catch-all’ to justify any deviation from the norms of acceptable conduct), but the judge said that it was the other way around, the duty to be impartial is an absolute duty, and the ‘public sector equality duty’ is a duty to have regard to the need to achieve equality, rather than the need to achieve it. The Equality cart was put before the Impartiality Horse. At the end of the judgment is a rather stinging finding about the Defendant, the Chief Constable, in paragraph 136:
I have already explained that the Defendant’s reasoning did not provide a rational basis for her decision. After careful consideration I have also concluded that the effect of the activities challenged by the Claimant was sufficiently obvious for the Defendant’s decision to be outside the range of reasonable decisions open to her.
I should point out for our readers that in England & Wales, judges are appointed by a commission, and the notion of a judge being akin to an ‘Obama judge’, a ‘Biden judge’ or a ‘Trump appointee’ is alien here, but of course the exalted echelons of higher legal circles contain in the main the sort of people who, holding a conference on law to all comers, would see nothing untoward in sneering at a Conservative government’s legal difficulties or Brexit, and the ‘Overton window’ in the legal community is more like a pinprick hole in a camera obscura, but that is not the point. What I would say is that in England & Wales, the more senior judges will tend to stick to the law and this may produce apparently surprising results, like this case.
So what happens now? Well in respect of last year’s event, nothing other than this court’s finding. However, this judgment, although from a judge who is in the first-level of the English courts, amounts to a legal ‘slap in the face with a wet fish‘ to activist police officers and will no doubt embolden those who seek to reduce or dilute the endless stream of ‘agitprop’ we see coming from our police forces, and to an extent in the wider public sector. It also helps to show that there is a difference between the activist version of the law and reality. Will the Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria take any steps like asking the irrational Chief Constable to resign? Well, I’d be more surprised by that than the Second Coming.
“Voting age to be lowered to 16 in UK by next general election”, the Guardian reports.
No, this does not mean you can leave school. You are too young and irresponsible to make such a big decision.
Back when the world was still damp from the Flood and Peter Davison was Dr Who, I was in the University Officers Training Corps. I don’t know if the term is still used by the British Army, but back then a green, typewritten piece of paper headed “Part One Orders” was always on display on the unit noticeboard. Well, I think it was green. It was certainly typewritten, because everything was at that time – that’s how I knew at once that the people saying that the “Rathergate” documents that purported to have been written by an officer of the Texas Air National Guard in 1973 were fake had a very good case. The big thing about Part One Orders was that they were orders. You had to obey them, which meant you had to know what they were. You were under orders to read the Orders, specifically to check whether they had changed since you last read them. Reading a short document once a week was not an onerous requirement for Officer Cadet Solent but I gather that proper soldiers had to check ’em every day and woe betide them if they did not. On the other hand, the existence of Part One Orders meant that if some almighty balls-up happened because someone did not realise that circumstances had changed, the tide of woe could be diverted away from the immediate ballser-upper if he could show that the change had never been announced on the P1s.
Poor lefties. They are under at least as strict a requirement to keep abreast with changes to their orders as that imposed by Section 5.121 of the Queen’s Regulations (1975) but nobody will ever openly tell them that the orders have changed. Not even on Bluesky. Maybe on WhatsApp if they are very high ranking, but the foot soldiers of the progressive movement just have to know by osmosis.
That is why I can find some pity in my heart for the teachers at Bilton School in Warwickshire who sent home a twelve year old girl called Courtney White for wearing a Union Jack dress on Diversity Day, and then found themselves being condemned by a Labour Prime Minister. Not a lot of pity, but some. Nobody told them that the world had changed since 2022. Obviously, they should have been able to work it out from the fact that Reform are leading in the polls but maybe they were too busy putting up posters to notice.
Homebuilding and Renovating Newsletter is not usually a place where one would expect to see a story to make the blood boil. But it has this: “Council’s £70k error stayed hidden for years, until one man refused to back down”.
Steve Dally never expected a minor tweak to his home improvement plans would end in a life-altering legal standoff.
What began as a routine planning permission amendment, spiralled into a punitive bill, threats of repossession, and five years of unrelenting pressure.
Now, Waverley Borough Council admits it got it wrong, but only after one man forced their hand.
In 2018, Dally received planning permission to rebuild his rear extension. It was exempt from the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL).
A year later, he made a minor amendment, but the council treated it as a brand-new build and to his surprise the council issued a £70,000 charge.
“I was blindsided,” Dally said. “It was a technicality. But it nearly ruined us.”
The council refused to budge. Letters, threats, and interest charges followed. “You wouldn’t treat a dog this way,” he said in 2024.
[…]
“The system was set up with no safety net,” admitted Liberal Democrat councillor Liz Townsend. “Even when mistakes happened, we had no way to fix them.”
“No way to fix them”… that awkward feeling when you admit that you wrongfully demanded tens of thousands of pounds from someone and you’d quite like to put it right but you can’t because there isn’t a procedure in the manual.
Evidently a way was found eventually, because on July 8th the council formally admitted its mistake and confirmed Mr Dally would have his money refunded – but I suspect that if it had been someone in the private sector making a spurious demand that the council pay them seventy thousand quid, the discovery of a way to put things right would have taken somewhat less than six years.
As Ferguson’s law states, any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defence risks ceasing to be a great power. While defence spending is expected to total £56.9 billion in 2025, debt interest is almost double that at £104.9 billion — comprising 8.2% of total public spending. All of this is to say that Army personnel would be vastly outnumbered by the Jihadists already monitored by foreign intelligence and MI5, plus those awaiting release in British prisons, and emigrating through legal and illegal means. Thanks to successive governments’ failure to prepare for this eventuality, and their exacerbation of the problem through permissive immigration policies, Britain is on the brink of the barbarians within its gates putting all we love to the torch.
– Connor Tomlinson
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