Tag Archives: brexit

It seems the new Tory administration has finally left the circus and wants to join the housing revolution – about time, you may say

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Secretary of State for Housing, Robert Jenrick, (yet another one through the revolving door of the department) wants to try and cure the ailing housing market, which only built 220,000 homes last year, which is still woefully short of the optimal number of about 300,000 per annum. The intention is to return to the halcyon days of the 1960s, hopefully without the urban blight of those miserable tower blocks.

A new guide for councils has been established which includes design control. The emphasis is on ‘leafy and green’, elevating quality over quantity. Presumably, this will avert the aesthetic pollution which happens when thousands of cheap’n’nasty, little boxes are spewed onto a green space with no infrastructure or forethought.

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The only certainties in life are death and that higher taxes raise less money

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According to Winston Churchill, “There is no such thing as a good tax”. He could very well have been referring to the draconian changes to Non-Doms and Stamp Duty, which are now costing the Treasury £3billion per year. One could play a game of ‘Fantasy Infrastructure’ and ponder how many hospitals and schools could be bought for this humungous amount of money.

The omnipresent, politics of envy, represents the pinnacle of socialist utopian thinking, managing to be both expensive and inefficient at the same time. Like all caring, sharing lefties, Labour governments can’t wait to get their greedy hands on other peoples’ stuff so that they can whittle it away. The hapless, former Chancellor Osborne succumbed to this practice in 2014, when he caved into the usual Labour clamour about ‘soshul justis ishoos’. Continue reading →

As Brexit bubbles away, where does that leave the Residential Property Market in the next quarter?

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One doesn’t have to be a carnival fortune-teller or political expert (the former being more accurate) to realise that Boris will be a shoo-in candidate for Prime Minister. Top of the job list will be to trudge through a legislative obstacle course to propel a deal through Europe in three months. This is akin to squaring the proverbial circle and this herculean task will be compounded by the fact that the new – unelected – EU commissioners would hardly have had time to raid the Brussels wine cellar, nor file their bogus expenses claims.

Wisely or not, Boris has committed himself to the deadline of 31st October and there is no going back for the ‘blond bruiser’. After three years of May’s failure, he will confront a restive nation that will delight in nailing him to the masthead. While it’s possible that he’ll just do a cut and paste job of May’s withdrawal deal, kicking some of the more contentious elements down the road (i.e. the backstop), given the past obdurate record of the EU negotiators, this seems like an improbable scenario. We don’t need any more choruses of ‘Mais Non’ from them do we? Continue reading →