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I don’t get it.
Whenever housing is mentioned, a national programme for the building of council houses for rent, once again, is a very popular idea. So much so as to be widely considered a no-brainer. And it is, isn’t it? Proper public housing, that is, not houses owned by private developers and called ‘social’ to make it sound reasonable.
Housing supply is inadequate for the demand, by the numbers, the type and affordability – actually affordable, relative to wages. Prices are high. Deposits alone can be more than the total cost of the two-bed flat I bought in the mid-eighties. This market means rents are also high. Work is precarious, pay is too low and life’s basics are expensive. Anyway, we know this.
There are the usual and perfectly valid supply/demand concerns over such issues as negative equity, preservation of an older home-owning voter-base, protection of asset values, rising interest rates, the ‘freedom of…
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Amsterdam 1 – Milan 0
London is losing the European Medicines Agency to Amsterdam now that we’re leaving the EU. Brexit has led to a scramble for agencies – so far, the Medicines Agency and the Banking Agency. It was all a bit of a gamble, rather like greyhounds or horses. Or, in the case of the Medicines Agency, a cross between football and the way they choose who goes first in Snooker championships. According to The Guardian:
“Italy’s Europe minister Sandro Gozi said Milan’s loss to Amsterdam in a tie-breaker was like losing the World Cup on the toss of a coin.”
The European Medicines Agency sounds like an important institution to me, yet the language describing its fate would be familiar in the betting shop down the road in any European city. There were “fancied contenders”, says the Guardian report, and “outsiders”; the result was “very tight”, said Dutch minister Halbe Zijlstra; French minister Natalie Loiseau was saddened that Lille had “lost out in the race” (we are, I think, back to horses); Malta, Zagreb and Dublin are said to have “dropped out of the race” for the Medicines Agency, with Ireland hoping to “boost its chances of winning” the Banking Agency.
I suspect this is not good for any of us, and Daniel Zeichner argues, in a separate article, that “losing the European Medicines Agency is bad news for patients, jobs – and the NHS”, which reminds me: it’s not just about the Medicines Agency – it’s about health care in general. Our free-at-the-point-of-use NHS is very expensive at the point of purchase, with all kinds of outfits vying to become its “private partners”, its “providers”; faceless drug companies foisting their goods on to our doctors, with pressure to persuade all patients to take this or that medication whether they need it or not; and has the medical centre chosen the right computer system? Or have they been sold a pup and need to look for another “provider” next year? And will this year’s flu jab work?
It’s all a bit of a gamble.
London loses EU agencies to Paris and Amsterdam in Brexit relocation
Why losing the European Medicines Agency is bad news for patients, jobs – and the NHS
Poor decision-making, Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) and PIP appeals
Last night I spoke at an event in Gray’s inn which bore the title: The Citizen and the State: Poor decision-making and the role of the pro bono Bar.
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No answers, please – just bring on the clowns
An exchange between Emily Thornberry and Boris Johnson today in parliament slowly degenerated into yah-boo childishness. She shouldn’t let him draw her into his antics. Speaker John Bercow, after some incoherent yelling from Johnson, then joined in the circus: “I cannot believe the right honourable gentleman behaved in this way in his schooldays – or perhaps he did, which may explain a lot now.” He then told Thornberry off for calling the foreign secretary “Boris”.
Meanwhile, anyone in the real world who wanted answers to serious questions could be forgiven for despairing: the Foreign Office team got away with defending the rule of law in Spain (by which they meant the police beating up voters and wrecking polling booths) and refusing to say they would oppose Sudan joining the Commonwealth on the grounds of that country’s human rights abuses: any decision, apparently, would be up to the other Commonwealth members. But as many of them are human rights abusers themselves, we’d better not hold our breaths.
So at the beginning of this afternoon I am in favour of closing down our useless parliament and dismembering the “Commonwealth”. As for the EU, don’t ask. In any case it got lost amid the Johnson-Thornberry double act.
Ophelia
We have ex-hurricane Ophelia on our doorstep, well, Ireland’s doorstep mostly. Nothing like in the Caribbean, Texas or Florida, but bad enough. There are 3 people dead, I think. And as far east as London, and briefly in Hull, the sky turned orange because of the dust that it created. Why orange? I don’t know. But perhaps it has a symbolic significance in that the effects of climate change are the same colour as Trump’s face. Goodbye to the Paris agreement? Goodbye to the Iran agreement? All our faces will turn orange. Goodbye to us all.
impromptu response to a high court injunction against the CWU – a poem
Towards An Autocratic State
(apropos the ruling against the CWU)
Greater love hath no judge
than to lay down the law
against the working man –
Thou shalt not interfere
with the profiteers
whom we have gifted with
these former assets
of the nation state
Malcolm Evison
12 October 2017
Catalunya: now popular democracy v. EU and its states
Read Kevin Ovenden’s blog on Catalonia
She went to vote in Barcelona, a city in a European Union state
Do Rajoy, the Spanish state and their EU backers imagine there will be no consequence to the violent state repression in Catalunya?
It is a particularly brutal extension of elite contempt for democracy – referendums especially – across the continent.
That will not be lost among embittered layers at the base of European societies.
It signals something else. For decades the Spanish elites have sought to get beyond the politics of the Transicion 40 years ago and to have all the political questions contained within the less than democratic, and monarchist, constitution of 1978.
In much the same way Greek politicians have complained about being stuck in the Metapolitefsi, the residue of the great clashes of the mid-1970s following the fall of the Junta.
The repressive forces on the streets of Barcelona today resemble those of a…
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An article by Lindsey German of the Stop the War coalition
Afghanistan: There Is Only One Solution | The Bullet No. 1474
Peering into the pit
From julijuxtaposed
What?
It’s more complex
Than you’d assumed;
Than you’ve reduced it to?
Well: who knew..?
And whatcha gonna do, now?
Back down, gracefully,
Run away
Or fetch a bigger spade?
fire and fury
From julijuxtaposed
Fire and fury blazing,
Skin in the game schemes,
Glazed, flaming orange,
Power frankly keen,
As though it burned,
Mid-circles, in a furnace
Fit to raze,
With an arsenal, he swore,
The likes of which this world
Has never seen before
”And as I said they will be met with fire, fury and frankly, power… the likes of which this world has never been seen before.” ~ Donald J Trump, 8/8/2017
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