Curated from , written by microwale (Olawale Idowu)
The two previous twitts was from Birmingham mail and not Birmingham post. Apology!
The Chamberlain News
What's Hot…
The two previous twitts was from Birmingham mail and not Birmingham post. Apology!
Whether we agree or disagree on the need for such positions, one thing everyone will agree on is the importance of the police to the public, and that November’s elections usher in the single biggest change to policing accountability for nearly a century. Another point of agreement for those of us with doubts about police …
Your local council owns prime real estate and could sell it to build new social houses. Housing Minister Grant Shapps says the appeal of this is ‘obvious’. With a potential pot of £5.5bn to build up to 170,000 affordable homes, what’s not to like? Plenty, apparently: Labour MP Karen Buck warned of a risk to communities, and the importance of mixing groups within our population. Lord Prescott called the idea ‘gerrymandering’.
The empty slogans come from both sides. When someone says ‘nobody has a right to live in’ Chelsea they ought to remember that some people do have a right to live there, and that they pay for that right. This is a significant debate clouded by the use of language like ‘cleansing’ which is most harmful to the credibility of people using the word.
Anyone who has ever looked for property in London has found the location of council housing in prime areas of London staggering. Millions of working taxpayers couldn’t afford to privately rent the sort of council housing locations that some Londoners enjoy. It’s not about jealousy: it’s a problem of scarce resources. Too many opponents to Policy Exchange’s suggestion live in a state of economic denial in which you have the cake and eat it in SW1.
The most bizarre objection to selling overpriced land is that it will result in segregated communities. London is already segregated, in fact every part of the country knows what the economic segregation of the housing market is like. Look in an estate agent’s window That segregation is the symptom of a need for greater levels of employment, economic growth, and prosperity. There are certain parts of London where you can only live if you’re at one end of the spectrum or the other. The squeezed middle in this debate are the middle classes, and yet that’s a segregation which many on the left seem ambivalent about.
Those who condemn the idea as ‘cleansing’ inner cities of council accommodation celebrate the notion that some council tenants live in the smartest areas of London, as if it’s somehow more democratic to have a housing lottery which can drop a tiny few in Kensington, rather than an affordable solution for all. Nobody sensible wants ghettos, and we all understand that the architecture and design of housing are important factors in how the inhabitants feel and act, but the need to find efficient, cheap solutions to the affordable housing crisis shouldn’t be met with slurs from the opponents.
Wouldn’t it be great if we focused not on how many council tenants should live in central London, but on how to house all the people who need to be housed? People who worry about segregation should be worrying about the cost of living. The notion of ‘segregated’ and ‘mixed’ communities is unhelpful. After all, if you want to run the housing market as an exercise in social engineering, why stop with council tenants? Why not start worrying about how many disabled people live in a particular area, or establishing a quota system for ethnic minorities? The desire to intervene on allegedly ‘principled’ grounds to the detriment of the housing system is what’s at stake here, and it’s the right sort of battleground for the next election.
The post appeared first on .
The staggeringly low turnout that the Electoral Reform Society is predicting for November’s Police and Crime Commissioner elections comes as little surprise to those involved in organising the vote. In fact, I was quite surprised that the ERS expects a turnout as high as 18.5 per cent, and I suspect the Home Office might be, too.
Nick Herbert betrayed his nerves about the turnout earlier this week when he was . Today the ERS’ chief executive Katie Ghose predicted that this could be a ‘perfect storm, which could result in the lowest turnout for a national election in British history’ and could ‘degenerate into a complete shambles’. That extremist candidates could gain an unfair advantage in some areas is just one problem with this low turnout: the legitimacy of the decisions that the new PCCs will take is another. Ghose has a fair point when she asks ‘if the people elected to localise decision-making over how our streets are policed, do not represent local people, what is the point of having them?’
It was always going to be a struggle to pull in the voters in the middle of November, and if the Tories fail at their conference to muster the necessary enthusiasm for these elections, it will be read not just as a failure of the government’s policy, but also as a symptom of the growing disconnect between the party’s leadership and its grassroots.
The post appeared first on .
THE Government has pledged that the change in operator for the West Coast Mainline rail service will lead to new trains, more seats and better services for commuters – but what will these look l…
The far-right group the English Defence League is to put forward its first candidate for public office, it has announced. Joint leader Kevin Carroll will stand for election as the Police Commissioner for Bedfordshire, one of the anti-Muslim organisation’s strongholds.
BUSINESS confidence has deteriorated despite export growth holding up, according to the latest ICAEW/Grant Thornton UK Business Confidence Monitor. Key findings from the survey, which covers activity …
The Staffordshire MP who described the Olympics opening ceremony as “leftist multicultural crap” on Twitter has stood by his comments.
Today’s papers are stuffed full of Olympic reportage rather than analysis of the GDP figures. But down in the bowels of Whitehall, a list of policy options to try and boost economic growth are being drawn up. Decisions on what to do will be taken after the Olympics but that further planning reform is currently on the list.
The coalition announced a new national policy planning framework in the Spring. But it was not as radical as George Osborne and the Treasury wanted it to be: opposition from heritage groups like the National Trust and various environmental organisations led to it being watered down. With the economy shrinking and construction in particular decline, though, the Treasury wants to come back to this fight. I’m told ‘George has even less time now for all of the green groups’.
If Downing Street does come back for another bite at planning, it is sure to spark political controversy. The question is whether the continuing problems of the economy will enable them to win the argument that it needs to be made easier to build in this country.
The post appeared first on .
