Thread by @EuropeanPowell

Johnson approved this greenwashing redevelopment site for luxury apartments in a pocket of 1 of the worst deprived areas in Ealing, despite Council and residents campaign to block it, now they are falling ill due to petrol like fumes in the area. Obscene.
theguardian.com/business/2023/…

Case in point
Royal Ins. of Chartered Surveyors do not serve the public interest, they're a powerful lobbying group for venture capitalists with a direct channel into Govt. Housing crisis is no accident, a calculated product of an elite group.
theguardian.com/artanddesign/2…

Meanwhile, local authorities have been forced into public-private partnerships for major developments on their own land, including the “regeneration” of estates that leads to the loss of thousands of council houses and the break-up of communities.

Instead, funding for social housing has been slashed while subsidies are lavished on the private sector housebuilders, in the hope that affordable housing will be delivered through “planning gain”.

Colenutt puts it, the situation has led to “the ultimate absurdity of public authorities actively pursuing higher values from market-led development in order to find crumbs for social housing development.”

Berkeley Group, one of the Top 10 UK builders, built 3,536 homes in 2017, which sounds like a decent contribution to meeting the housing shortage. That is, until you realise that the average price of these homes proudly described as “popular with overseas investors” was £715,000.

Tony Pidgley, company’s founder, received a payout of £48m in 2018, another of £23m in 2015, profits rose 42%. Berkeley has consistently reduced the amount of affordable housing on its developments across London, on the grounds that the local authority targets were “unviable”.

Over the past eight years, Berkeley made a profit of more than £3bn. Do people know that the City of London is in fact a charter city dating back to 1075?
verfassungsblog.de/the-danger-zon…

Cities like London and trading companies like the East India Company should not become “commonwealths by themselves”.
Primacy of natural rights needs balance to prevent centralised authority from becoming tyrannical, step in a privately elected Govt with an oligarch at the helm.

It's not only distribution of profits to a tiny number of executives that is so obscene, it is the political influence that goes with it. Berkely's Pidgely was awarded a CBE in 2012 and the Queens award for sustainable development in 2014. His company are now making people sick.

Pidgley gave a donation to the Conservative party and wrote to the Daily Telegraph before the 2015 general election expressing his support for the Conservatives, citing their housing and development policies.

Govt subsidy through Help to Buy, along with grants from Homes England and deregulation of the planning system that enables housebuilders to dodge their affordable housing obligations.

Chartered Institute for Housing estimated that of £53bn in Govt housing investment in 2017, 80% went in direct subsidies to the private sector. Help to Buy is basically a shell company for fat cats to milk as homelessness and shoddy house building increase
theguardian.com/business/2019/…

Persimmon, which infamously awarded its CEO Jeff Fairburn a £75m bonus, revealed that nearly half of its house sales in 2018 were partly funded by Help to Buy. The disastrous policy has simply maintained house prices at their high level maximising housebuilder profits.

A central contradiction in the Home Builders Federation platform is that at the same time as wanting the state to reduce its control over development, they lobby for more state subsidies and govt intervention to support their business model and bolster their profits. #Capitalism

Country Landowners’ Association has 33,000 members, the largest private landowning group in England and Wales. When planning consent for housing is granted on farmland, its value can rocket a hundredfold. PPE heist, austerity as policy, property devs' all leeching public wealth.

The fix.
“Reinvigorate the welfare state, where housing, like health, is available to those in need as a human right”. It would be just as repugnant to the property lobby as the idea of a UK-style NHS is to the US health insurance industry.
Reverse Brexit.
#GeneralElectionNow

@policypress The Property Lobby: The Hidden Reality Behind the Housing Crisis by Bob Colenutt

I have no doubt that the engineered Housing Crisis will after Brexit deregulation, kickstart the +75km zones surrounding Sunak's Freeports as a venture capitalists dream come true. Mogg's fundamental restructuring of the welfare state post Brexit next.

https://twitter.com/EuropeanPowell/status/1648250923746050050?s=20

Do the British public have the faintest idea about charter cities, investment zones and the libertarian ideology of low tax, small Govt and absolute corporate power being installed in 3rd country post Brexit UK?
It would appear not.

https://twitter.com/EuropeanPowell/status/1647712740885028869?s=20

You do not raze a countries economy to the ground, divide a public, pump shit into waterways, collapse the welfare state and shamelessly profit from crises for nothing. Emptying public coffers to subsidise corporate hegemony is a segue to kill democracy.

https://twitter.com/EuropeanPowell/status/1634091475309928448?s=20

Johnson heralded 'Social Darwinism', Truss speaking to Heritage Foundation attacked 'redistributionism', that's GDP where profit share and wage share used to be in balance for 30-40 years under the social contract.

https://twitter.com/EuropeanPowell/status/1627990004172480512?s=20

Ask your mates, your family if they know what a think tank is, a charter city, a Freeport or an investment zone or what libertarianism ideology is about, who funds it, who lobbies for it?
This lack of awareness is a gift to the Tories.

https://twitter.com/EuropeanPowell/status/1623574668333486082?s=20

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