In praise of Russell Brand. Seriously *.

Successive Labour and Tory governments have had increasing institutional investment in the British residential property market as a policy goal. The Montague review, for instance, was targeted at identifying both barriers to institutional investment and ways of overcoming them; and with institutional investors’ allocations to residential property rising from £7.6 billion in 2012 to £12.7 billion in 2014, it’s an area where government can claim to have had some success.

Whoopee, except I’m not sure how much awareness there is of the fact property investors typically - and fundamentally - differ from other institutional investors. A pension fund, for instance, owns lots of little bits of companies, enough to give it the right to contribute a few votes at an AGM and get patronised by the CEO and CFO once in a while, but not enough to really influence whatever it is a company does. By contrast, property investors usually own whatever it is they invest in outright (give or take a bank loan), which is why property investors actively “sweat” their assets, be it churning the - poorer performing - pubs in a pubco portfolio or increasing the number of folks selling things off carts down the aisle of your local shopping centre.

This brings us to Russell Brand who helped draw attention to what increased institutional investment in residential property can, does and will mean. After an Ummurikan investment firm bought the New Era Estate in London, it promptly set about trying to evict people in the name of redevelopment i.e. get in folks who could pay higher rents/buy the properties; nice. So sure, sure, the London housing market is different, but the principle applies across Britain - institutional investors will actively try to “sweat” their assets, that being potentially a euphemism for clearing out entire estates en masse.

Now there is the moral case against evicting people because you can, but that will never fly beyond the pages of the Grauniad, so lets make an economic one; evicting people like this imposes obvious externalities (costs) on everyone else i.e. us  - the employer that finds his key staff have resigned to move elsewhere, the employees who can no longer afford the commute so resign and sign on, the schools contending with an influx of new pupils, the transport companies that suddenly lose out on wodges of fares, etc., etc.,  bause the thing to bear in mind is why successive governments have tried to encourage more institutional investment; s social housing has become increasingly about social need, this has left a widening stratum of working poor too “rich” to qualify for housing association help and too poor to buy a house – these are the precarious people government is hoping institutional investors will cater for.

And my god the interviewer in the clip above was a monumental walloper for trying so hard to turn such a fundamental issue into a  story about the size of Russell Brand’s bank account.

 

* fucking hell. This is how shite politics has got in Britain today.

Poverty p0rn

Stumbling and Mumbling is a brilliant blog I rarely read without coming away thinking about stuff. I was less sure about this bit though:


"(P)icture the 1930s depression. If you're like me, your visual images come from Steinbeck and Orwell, and the aural ones from Woody Guthrie and the Carter Family. Picture the 1980s recession, and we (I?) recall the Specials, Brookside and Boys from the Blackstuff. Now picture the recent Great Recession. What do you see? What do you hear? Nothing. Culturally, the recent recession didn't happen."

The images cited illustrate how history acts as a filter. Give or take "Broocckie", as time passes the mediocre and the average tend to be forgotten as those who write the past unavoidably impose their own current perspective and standards. But, that's by the by because the emergence of poverty porn (Benefits Street, the Scheme etc.,)  has already given us images of the recent recession, just ones characterised more by their gawping vindictiveness than the powerful notions of empathy we - like to think we can - see in the past.

That bastard verdict

Cycling to work yesterday the air actually felt tangible. I knew the result, had done for hours, and clearly everyone else did as well. This shared knowledge of what wasn’t going to happen had somehow generated a quiet and reflective calm, an atmosphere only broken by the rush hour traffic at the very centre of the city.

Before then, therre was time on my commute to reflect upon what it now means to be Scottish now that Scotland has chosen to be fear-mongered into mediocrity. Except, I realised I don’t actually know what being Scottish is anymore, what had been a national identity I’d worn with pride now felt dirty and tainted. 

So if I’m not Scottish, it seems I’m obliged to be resolutely British; no great national adventure for me, rather it’s the Royal family, penalising the poor, the sick and the disabled and endlessly worrying about immigration, the EU and house prices. Rule-fucking-Brittania.

Scottish Independence - and class (and hierarchy)

Like you, lots of the chat at my work these days is about independence. What's noticeable about this is the little divides that have emerged; as you ascend the corporate hierarchy in terms of who is saying what and how senior they are you notice how the younger and/or more junior the folks are the more likely they are to be pro-independence ("Yessers" even).

This stands to reason. A Yes vote is about dramatically changing the status quo, upsetting apple carts left right and centre (and is all the better for that fact). By contrast the more senior people actually quite like the status quo. Where I am the status quo is what pays for the company car (a 5 series BMW being the one to get at the mo, Audi's being so terribly passe), the 2 weeks with the family in Florida and yet another giant telly.

All these terribly, terribly competent folks basically want the referendum to go away because, well just because really, They've invested their skills, their values, their sense of self and a whole lot of free over time in things continuing exactly as they are. And - goddammit - they've done rather well as a result.

To which I say fuck them, fuck them hard into a cocked hat because a lot of the terribly, terribly, sensible and competent people currently saying no to Scottish independence where the same ones, certainly where I've worked, who said yes please to the fuck nuggets who did their best to blow up the UK economy in the credit crunch.

All these folks, (especially the ones that end words with the "bzzzsshzzz" Jack Docherty used to take the piss out of in Absolutely)  have no credibility let alone any great insight, what they do have is a big mortgage, school fees and a lifestyle they believe they deserve regardless of what such mealy mouthed, fiver grasping shite means for everyone else. Fuck 'em.

Scottish Independence - Banks moving to London is more silver lining than cloud

The chat about all the banks moving to London if Scotland says YES is incredible if by incredible you mean an obviously orchestrated political stitch up reliant on folks not knowing the real deal.

The first thing is to be clear what we're actually talking about here which is this - NO it is not a change in where any bank is headquartered, rather it's a change in where a company is registered. That's it, nothing more.

Fer instance, RBS can de-register from Edinburgh, re-register in London and ....... KABLAM, it's still run out of Fred's folly right beside Edinburgh airport (similarly all those investment companies registered in the Cayman Islands are actually run out of London, TopShop from Monaco etc.,).

And this is a good thing; right now banks are getting super aggressive about cost cutting, like well beyond the point of reason in an oh feck, my laptop isn't working and I can't do my actual job, kind of way. So when you take into account the fact that the cost of being based if not registered in Scotland (cheap labour, cheap offices) vs London you know any bank saying it's moving all it's head office staff darn Sarth would get shot down by its shareholders pronto.

And aside from the bank relocation chat basically being about a legal shoogle, there's also the big benefits to consider. Like here's Paul Krugman getting it surprisingly wrong about the status of Scottish banking if the vote is YES:

"We are told, for example, that Scotland need not worry because its fiscal position is relatively strong. But that was true — or appeared to be true — of Spain and Ireland before the euro crisis. What we’ve learned, alas, is that a seemingly strong fiscal position can evaporate very fast in a crisis — especially if banks need to be bailed out. In that context, it’s interesting to note that Scotland’s banks are very big relative to the size of the country, because they serve much of the UK. Nothing wrong with that as long as you have a political union; but without, what’s to prevent an Irish-type situation in which a small country is trying to bail out big banks? "

What's to stop it? They're all registered in London of course meaning a fiscal union would work hunky dory (or at least be less of an issue than it might otherwise be exactly because of the orchestrated banks moving all their brass plaques darn Sarth simultaneously chat) because the threat of a too big to fail bank failing would be England's problem not Scotland's.

But, setting aside the ignorance and the bollocks an awfy interesting person made some lovely points to me today; the referendum has got all of Scotland interested in its politics and the vote will see voting actually matter for a change.

That aside, the UK is run by and for London and the South East of England, an independent Scotland wouldn't be. How to vote on Thursday really isn't rocket science

Vapid Pt II *

So that's 13 or 14 weeks now of vaping instead of smoking. Nice. And during that time the World Health Organisation has come out with some vacuous shit about the "perils" of e-cigarettes subsequently kicked in the chops by an actual study issued by University College London. But, that's by the by because reflecting on my own experience as an actual and current non-smoker its the whole re-normalization of smoking tosh the Welsh BMI is trotting out to justify banning smoking in public places that gets me.

By this they appear to mean e-cigarettes act as a gateway to the real thing, an argument we already know, love and laugh at in relation to hash and heroin. I say laugh because only a non-smoker could take such bollocks seriously. Here's why:

Its a joke because smoking is disgusting, like really disgusting. When you start smoking you have to persevere and I do mean persevere; to begin with you turn green, you go light headed, it burns your throat, you cough, you gag, it stinks, jezuz christ it's expensive, it stinks, you feel sick, it really stinks, you cough some more.

Time passes, days become weeks become months until eventually you can take a proper draw of a fag, a French inhale even, without retching. Finally, you think you look THAT cool and can smoke without retching (my "thang" was to play guitar with a fag hanging out the side of my mouth).

E-cigarettes avoid all that bollocks; for over 3 months now I've been getting my nicotine fix without smelling, retching, gagging, coughing, turning green or setting tenners on fire every day. In fact I only actually associate with smokers because the dumb fuck anti-smoking lobby has forced me to hang out with them down at smokers' corner!

And in our no pain all gain consumer society it's difficult to see why anyone other than the dumbest of fucks would swap a relatively painless and cheap electronic simulation for the real deal. And anyway, anyone that dumb is going to do dumb shit regardless.

As for the WHO shite about how the efficacy of e-cigs hasn't been proven, well I don't actually know anyone whose tried a proper e-cig alternative and then reverted to the real thing meaning they really do work, and that's despite the anti-smoking lobby's best efforts.


* Yes electronic hookahs do look like a sonic screwdriver, which is kinda cool / appealing to kids. But no one in the anti-smoking lobby has made that argument yet, so feck 'em.


Jan 15  - a 6 month's not a single fag PS; so that's my dentist now explained to me all teh mouth medical benefits of using an e-cigarette instead of the real deal. And I still have to go outside for a puff (actually I don;t, they are pretty much odourless so I can sneak a sly puff in an empty office at work

Vapid

Smoking is fabulous. The first fag of the day takes you gently by the hand , then leads you through to the kitchen for coffee while the delicious digestif of a post-meal puff blesses you with even more tastes to savour. So yeah, I like smoking, preferably 15g of rolling tobacco a day. But, its as mad unhealthy as it is expensive so I’m now into my 5th week of complete no-smoking thanks to an e-cigarette, vapouriser, electronic shisha thing (and 24 mg bottles of  nicotine oil) making me – for the time being – one of those are “60 percent more likely to report success if they switch to e-cigarettes than if they use nicotine products like patches or gum, or just willpower”  just identified by University College London. The fact e-fags appear to work is why the anti-e-fag stance confuses the hell out of me.  

What makes them work so well is that besides nicotine, they give you the hot sensation at the back of your throat and something to inhale/exhale. But, because its steam not smoke, they’re a lot less unhealthy (one doctor recently said on a Radio 4 Analysis programme that if cigarettes are 100 on a scale of 1 to 100, e-cigarettes are 10) both to the “smoker” and all those around them.

So if there’s no passive smoking, health and safety being the rationale for the smoking ban, why can’t e-fags be used inside? The main arguments appear to be that their health effects aren’t fully understood (so better safe than sorry) and that they “re-normalise” smoking. 

Re: Better safe than sorry, well this can go fly because e-cigarettes are a damn site less bad than the real thing and in our “nudge” society that counts for a lot. As for the second, well this just confuses me. The picture above makes clear how in the US they’re desperately trying to make e-cigarettes cool (it also makes clear any US attitudinal based research isn’t especially applicable to Britain!) so here’s what you do instead – ban all advertising and product placement. There, sorted. As for the issue of kids taking up e-fags cos they're cool, possibly, except, as with alcohol and real fags, this is a retail issue and needs some perspective, which is e-fags are nowhere near as bad as the real thing

In the meantime, the British bans on “smoking” e-cigarettes inside are actively “de-normalising” e-fags. By this I mean, smoking is a habit and a cluster of physical addictions, which for me meant stepping outside to smoke. I (currently) don’t smoke, but still have to head to smokers' corner for a puff because the bans taken away the habitual and cultural differences between puffing on a real and on an e-fag. And by keeping the same habits in place the bans make it easier to fall back onto the real thing again; right now much of the anti-smoking lobby appears opposed to the best aid to giving up smoking ever invented!

In the meantime I think there's another reason for the bans; e-fags have completely bypassed the existing anti-smoking industry, rendering much of it a government grant funded irrelevance, which they don’t appear to like one little bit i.e. reading an Ash Scotland note on e-cigarettes, every benefit is acknowledged only to be immediately caveated and the threat of Big Tobacco flagged up as a not necessarily relevant bogeyman given the Chinese made e-fags and small scale British oil manufacturers and retailers that have sprung up, (there again Ash does appear to be trying to wangle a new e-fag funding stream as I type this).


(revised/tweaked  July 30th)