Missed

Personally, I’ve always thought John Prescott epitomised everything shit about old Labour. Aside from the rank fucking hypocrisy of him using his prolier than thou shite to lend everything he said/says said some kind of moral authority in a lets pretend the man hasn’t spent most of his life in middle class jobs care of the labour movement type style, it was his utter fucking incompetence as Deputy Prime Minister that really stands out; all these grand 10 year plans for everything that delivered fuck all or less than fuck all (like the “Pathfinder” initiative) to the point where he had most of responsibilities taken away while still in office because he was such a joke. There again his clash with Zac Goldsmith about changes to laws governing where houses can get built was quite useful both for highlighting how fucking thick politicians are and some fucking obvious realities about the housing market.

You could focus on how the discussion and associated life histories read like something out the Sword of Honour trilogy, except that would be to credit both parties with being less fucking ignorant than they actually are. Instead, I’ll just stick to the main fact of the matter which is this - housebuilders lurve planning constraints.

They do, they fucking love them in a kinda totally fucking, blindingly obvious way. This is because British house prices are propped up by constraints on where, when and how you can build houses. The easier it is to build houses the more houses get built; supply increases and prices fall. End of. Plus all the landbank that make up the bulk of a housebuilder’s balance sheets would plummet in value.

Hence housebuilders moan all the time about planning regs and constraints, just not too much because planning laws essentially determine their profits. For Zac and John on the other hand it was all about, well fuck knows what really, point scoring essentially.

On a different note so there is the Stephanomics BBC blog going on about how the economist blerk chairing the Office for Budget Responsibility is a “distinguished public servant”. Except going by Wikipedia he’s only ever and I mean EVER, been a distinguished public servant under Tory governments. Am no saying the man has prejudices that will cloud his judgement or is anything other than scrupulously independent, but I will say choosing someone you know will give you the answers you want to chair a committee set up to give you “impartial” answers is a fucking obvious political tactic.