"Labour will allow councils to seize abandoned shops to give them a new lease of life as cooperatives or community centres" Typical! Another policy based on theft. Those shops are owned by someone, who may already be desperate because they can't fill them. theguardian.com/politics/2019/…
So what would Corbyn do? Steal the properties off their owners and just hand them to the state.

This is the perfect example of why Labour finds it so hard to win the backing of businesses.
It's hyper populist because many people won't care about the reality of the underlying situation. They'll just think: "Awesome. All those grotty boarded up shops will be a thing of the past."
It's like his policy to pay less than market value for the things he wants to privatise (seriously - Google it!)

At the end of the day he's taking something that belongs to someone (in the case of privatisation, that includes millions of ordinary people via their pension funds.)
It's really not rocket science...

If you take something that does not belong to you, that's theft.

That's true if you're a burglar smashing your way into a home through a back window.

That's true if you're the state seizing assets that aren't yours to take in broad daylight.
So "for the many, not the few" should really read "for the many, not the few, by any means necessary" the way Jeremy Corbyn is going about it.

Chilling effect on business, on investment, and on the security of anyone who dares to aspire to actually own something for themselves.
What people cheering the opportunity to stick one in the eye of Megacorp don't get is that the State's pockets may be deep, but the private sector's are much much deeper.

Scare away the private sector, dissuade them from investing, and at some point everything *will* fall apart.
There is a reason why every single communist experiment everywhere in the world has failed. And that's because the State can never fully replicate the drive, motivation and resources of the private sector, no matter how hard it tries. Eventually the head of steam runs out.
If there are obvious problems (eg lack of transparency over property ownership) then by all means fix them. There are hundreds of loopholes that could be productively closed.
And if you want to pass a law that the State will compulsorily purchase *at very very close to actual market value* certain derelict assets, there's a case for that too.

But don't just steal stuff.
The very end of this slippery but continuous slope is "Why aspire to own anything if the State can just come in and take it from you?"

2 groups take things that don't belong to them: thieves and pillaging armies.

Aspiring to add the State to those 2 groups is not a good look.

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More from @uk_domain_names

Feb 6
Before Brexit...
- EU Trade: super easy.
- Rest of the World Trade: hard.

Since Brexit...
- EU Trade: hard.
- Rest of the World Trade: hard.

The difficulty gap may have "narrowed", but not in a way that benefits businesses at all. Trade is on average harder than before Brexit.
Does it encourage firms to consider trading more outside the EU?

Maybe - but only because they'll have a lousy experience everywhere.

It's like raising the price of apples from £10 to £20, keeping pears at £20. Sells more pears? Maybe. But overall, consumers end up paying more.
A smart country would have tried to figure out how to make hard trade with the rest of the world easier.

A dumb country decided instead to make super easy trade with the EU as hard as trade with the rest of the world.

Welcome to Brexit Britain, where brain cells come to die.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 6
Kirstie Allsopp (bought 1st property age 21) claims young people should fritter less to get on the housing ladder.

HOWEVER...

Average House Price (Nationwide)
- 1992: £50,168
- 2021: £253,113

BOE Inflation Calculator
£50,168 in 1992 = £110,472.43 in 2021

Aha! Penny drops.
Another way of looking at it...

Kirstie Allsopp said her job paid £11,500 a year at the time she bought her first property.

That would be £25,323.57 in 2021 money.

£50,168 is the equivalent of 4.36x her 1992 salary.

But £253,113 is 9.99x her nominal 2021 equivalent salary.
Simply put, a given house is more than twice as unaffordable today (everything else being equal) than in 1992.

Quite amazing that someone who has lived and breathed the property sector for decades seems oblivious to the above differential.

It's hardly rocket science.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 4
The Brexit effect, hurting a business badly.

(Problem is EU students can no longer travel on ID cards because the UK now requires passports, but kids don't need passports because they can go all over the EU on IDs. Catch-22.)
Read 4 tweets
Feb 3
Look at the scam in this Treasury press release.

They've called the £200 loan towards energy bills a rebate. It *isn't* a rebate because consumers must repay it in 5 instalments.

Then in the next paragraph there's a council tax rebate that *is* a rebate.
gov.uk/government/new…
It's also referred to as a discount.

Can you imagine if Tesco or Amazon applied the same logic?

We'll give you £20 off your shopping now, but you'll owe us 5 legally binding payments of £4.

You'd be livid if they tried to claim that represented a discount.

It's a 0% APR loan.
And here's the really devious part: the Tories are buying voter goodwill now using money that will largely need repaying after the next GE.

So if Labour win, they'll be left with the ticking time-bomb of Tory debts, and a legally binding obligation for *consumers* to repay them.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 2
According to the Daily Mail, the Tories have indicated they plan to plunge us all into the dark on the pandemic in April by giving up publishing daily stats.

This on a day that saw more than 500 deaths announced.

Could they gaslight us any harder? Genuinely hard to think how. Image
The whole article is grim. Apparently Boris Johnson plans to bin every single protective measure on March 24, including the requirement to self-isolate if you test positive.

How can the several million extremely vulnerable people ever be safe after that?
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…
The excuse given is that it's becoming "like the flu" and we don't shut down the whole country over that.

A) Covid killed more people in 2 years than flu did in the last decade.

B) Flu is very seasonal. We've had a high covid death rate since August, with no sign of slackening.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 2
There's a paradox at the heart of Brexit.

Leaving the EU saves the UK government our membership fee.

It costs individuals and companies much much more than that saved fee. But they're bearing the cost in a distributed way. (Less trade, higher prices, less choice of work etc.)
So the UK government's balance sheet improves by the value of the EU membership fee that's no longer being paid.

But every single one of us and the organisations we work for are effectively being stealth-taxed by Brexit much more than the saving recorded by the UK government.
The UK government can semi-truthfully say "there's more money for us to spend after Brexit" (though the amounts it quotes are wholly fanciful, and don't account for its own extra costs because of Brexit).

And yet as a nation we're still MUCH poorer as a result.
Read 7 tweets

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