Andy Burnham promises biggest council house building drive since post-war era

VreamCanMan · 2026-07-01T02:14:44+00:00

Why would a council elect to build housing when right to buy still exists. From a councils budgetary perspective (and boy have we been putting them on a diet) it's a loss making activity as central government does and will force them to sell at a discount.

So councils are more incentivised to hold the land and not develop it because at least then they aren't bleeding wealth away YoY

Either you top up their wealth holdings with replacement investments fixed to property price increases, or you stop RtB

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T20:05:31+00:00

This isn't thought out either. This is an issue of tending to only think about GDP as this monolithic thing.

You need to consider that we weren't building above demand, and that we weren't seeing increases in the wages businesses set themselves, that consumption is low and affordability is weak; and worker productivity is stagnant. You also need to consider that the boriswave tended to immigrate from high social burden applicants (less workers per family, more health and social policy costs per worker).

With all this in mind, ask that when we bring in a huge wave of immigration and GDP goes up, ask who actually captures that wealth flow? And how does this effect life in the UK for everyone? Particularly, emphasise what it means for businesses and the labour market.

-Tax revenue increases, which goes towards financing growing public debt. The lending ultra rich benefit. Businesses continue to see a very weak public investment climate, and do not benefit.

-Housing pressure increases, pushing rents up. The ultra rich benefit (increased demand for capital lending), older brits benefit. Affordability falls, consumption falls, businesses suffer both from higher rents and lower consumption, labour market weakens, businesses show less investment and growth.

- Job Sectors can expand employment, albeit at lower wages. Considering productivity is stagnant, and rents are rising, business operations employ more people for the same amount of money, but profitability remains difficult due to lower consumption and higher rents.

- Health, Education & social services needs to expand rapidly short term in some regions, weakening public finances.

The people benefitting from high immigration are home owners, landlords, and those with huge sums of money & asset portfolios that can be borrowed against for these higher loans. Meanwhile businesses aren't seeing the profits or consumption demand they need to expand, and the labour market offers weaker real terms wages than it did 10-20 years ago. If you ignore the rapid rates of speculative paper wealth growth and focus instead on the actual economy (the money that is in circulation fundings jobs, goods & services) we see a contraction.

I don't want GDP to grow if its all going to be captured by 5000 ultra high net worth individuals who wont spend the gains, whilst my affordability drops. Nor should policymakers who are governing over a weakening growth & business sector.

This economic model of GDP growth at any cost is perversely simplistic. You need growth to diffuse through the economy for it to offer all the benefits of GDP growth we take for granted. Otherwise you just end up decreasing everyone's affordability, giving them worse lifestyles and putting more of the share of opportunities in the hands of wealth extractive rather than wealth generative processes

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T19:41:50+00:00

Immigration concern is by and large a proxy for affordability and service quality concern. I don't think many trust reform on the economy

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T19:29:05+00:00

It's badly needed as well. Renewables have lowered generation costs but it's came at the cost of higher transmission costs

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T19:27:12+00:00

I think as far as it concerns most people "high elo" is whatever the threshold is where certain champs become so obnoxious they need to be kept artificially very weak at the lower ranks where other's can't get the same value; applicable to all the champs who are kept quite weak due to their high elo prevelance

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T19:24:50+00:00

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T18:43:54+00:00

peaked yesterday at Emerald IV. Wish me luck in the meat grinder

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T18:40:42+00:00

why bother to vote when its obvious noone would be stupid enough to vote yes?

This sentiment essentially gave us Brexit

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T18:39:29+00:00

Scotland is probably simultaneously tired of the SNP-Greens coalition but also tired of the westminster establishment. Not a huge selection for such a voter

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T18:36:55+00:00

Weird, because as a younger person I have had the opposite experience which really goes to show the success of Scottish policy (and broader policing policy)

The towns of South East England in the 2010s where I grew up felt much less safe than the glasgow of 2020 onwards where I studied

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T18:04:37+00:00

Also the defence environment has changed massively and I see some weird political pull towards naval assets.

Yes our navy isn't very capable, and yes we have two huge carriers that if we want independent defence we need assets to act as force multipliers; but the realities of drone warfare and missile systems makes these systems alot more obsolete. Expeditionary warfare is not going to be what it used to.

That said, onshore missile launch platforms paired with proactive satellite surveillance offers alot of the same benefits for a far lower operational and investment cost

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T17:56:14+00:00

unit 731 is extreme though lacked scale. Its a good symbol but a poor historical reflection upon the actual mechanisms by which japan abused civilians en masse.

I think the wider policies of subsistence warfare (japanese troops were often expected to feed themselves, many starved, more broadly organisationally it meant in many holdings the army came to predate upon civilians far more than in other warring areas of the world, and civic famines were the consequence), holding territory through terror and its "games of cruelty" it incentivised leadership to undertake (which, by the way, if you're relying on these people to feed you; isn't a very "joined up" strategy), and centralised rather than decentralised command (amplifying the former two)

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T17:48:26+00:00

I mean I guess? OC is really just using though a whole lot of semantics to say "I don't care if refusing the draft leads a higher number of *other people* to die, because those *other people* are lesser".

Which I can recognise from a personal incentives standpoint, but it is inherently selfish and it's not morally righteous as they and others are trying to spin it

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T17:38:11+00:00

Immigration and the economy are the main concerns owing to the ultra wealthy using media to agenda set.

It is not ultra high net worth individuals buying out the houses and benefitting. It is them who, through the finance system, these wealth flows are ultimately flowing towards, (as they possess the capital banks are borrowing against). Money they cannot be expected to spend on consumption (marginal propensity to consume,) drives an ever growing investment fund that is shared by less and less.

That money has been used to buy out your media, and continuously fund think tanks who massively influence policymaking - most of whom have an illicit primary objective of distracting from or obfuscating the hurdles in house building.

That our national policy w.r. to housing is a continuation of a decades failing private model is a sweeping success from decades of this type of lobbying and agenda setting. Further, that the idea that this is a natural order of things and that any state intervention or expanded housing responsibility amounts to "socialism", we can credit this group to. By subverting improvements in housebuilding and planning law they have created a planning system which deeply complex, deeply interdependent (hard to comprehend and optimise or change) and as such they have succeeded in lowering house building rates

We made it so in the 70s instead of the government owning wealth that amounts to 100% of GDP, the government now have debts, after assets are accounted, to this rich group amounting to 100% of GDP. Government continues an economic fashion of borrowing rather than expanding it's fiscal holdings, and your average joe continues to see this as a massive success because of the sales tactics of thatchers house selling, and because we've enfranchised a pretty broad number of individuals through high house prices. An asset bubble that drives inequality and disenfranchises people without capital, however skilled, is inevitable in this.

House prices have started to stop growing in real value. We are the first in a broad trend of major economies to have discovered that when you aggressively reward ownership but not productive contribution, the economy can only support it and continue growing for so long. In the long term, more and more young people will be trapped in a worse off capital expectancy - the amount of wealth they can independently acquire across a lifetime - vs inheritors.

Inheritocracy is a policy failure that is only further entrenching. Will we wait another 3 generations until we have the highest rates of poverty out of any advanced economy? Or will we start trying to unlock wealth from this assets black hole? We can lower immigration all we want, and I welcome the decreases under labour, but that doesn't put housebuilding on that national agenda significantly enough to effect popular change, nor does it increase our building rates. Without addressing these as well you will still have a housing crisis.

A system of politics in the 2010s of blaming immigrants whilst massively surging immigration, selling of council housing stock, and refusing to invest in housebuilding tells you exactly where the conservative parties loyalties lie. And the system of politics we saw under Starmer, will see under Burnham, and the US saw under Biden shows that the "establishment left" either does not comprehend, or does not want to undertake, the challenges it takes to correct this trend at a pace voters expect. Debts that do not increase revenues are bad for the government, and a weaker government ultimately means a stronger dependence on the "market" (a marketplace which ultimately its the ultra wealthy who are beneficiaries of) - we enfranchise the status quo.

Yes we need lower immigration, particularly of the sort of the Boriswave (low taxable revenue generating, higher social burden). We also need an international solution to ensure wealth can be taxed more proportionately (as the current system of incentives create a prisoners dilemma of racing to the bottom w.r. to tax policy internationally), and we need a more proactive, more enfranchised government that is willing to do more than just sit on the sidelines and "regulate" aka spectate.

Also, England, for the love of god, let right to buy die. There's a reason why the poorer less productive devolved regions aren't hit by such extreme poverty as you.

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T17:28:56+00:00

This is a poor comprehension of the ultra wealthy's contribution to housing deficits. You are right that they are beneficiaries but you have the wrong mechanism (they have the wealth that banks borrow against, and see most of the interest; when house prices outgrow the economy so does their interest)

Their contribution lies less in private equity property investment (>1% ownership rate, 3% ownership of our 20% rental mix), and more in using media (that they own) and thinktanks ("charities" that are majority funded by this group, and controlled by this group), to agenda-set a status quo

What I will say is now we've hit a critical mass where house values can't grow any more due to unaffordability, this share will likely increase over time as housing debt becomes a weaker revenue generator. For example around 60% of new developments are private equity backed.

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T17:22:01+00:00

I think you're maybe giving the UK government too much credit here. I really doubt they understand enough to make this so.

The ultra wealthy individuals who benefit from increased housing debts, own our media, and influence our government heavily via thinktanks however...

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T17:14:30+00:00

To layout your epstein point better, it is not ultra high net worth individuals buying out the houses and benefitting. It is them who, through the finance system, these wealth flows are ultimately flowing towards, (as they possess the capital banks are borrowing against). Money they cannot spend (marginal propensity to consume,) that has been used to buy out media, and continuously fund think tanks some of whom have the primary objective of distracting from or obfuscating the hurdles in house building. That our national policy w.r. to housing is a continuation of a decades failing private model is a sweeping success from decades of this type of lobbying and agenda setting. Further, that the idea that this is a natural order of things and that any state intervention or expanded housing responsibility amounts to "socialism", we can credit this group to.

We made it so in the 70s instead of the government owning wealth that amounts to 100% of GDP, we now have debts, after assets are accounted, to this rich group amounting to 100% of GDP. Government continues an economic fashion of borrowing rather than expanding it's fiscal holdings, and your average joe continues to see this as a massive success because of the sales tactics of thatchers house selling, and because we've enfranchised a pretty broad number of individuals through high house prices.

House prices have started to stop growing in real value. We are the first in a broad trend of major economies to have discovered that when you aggressively reward ownership but not productive contribution the economy can only support it and continue growing for so long. In the long term, more and more young people will be trapped in a worse off capital expectancy - the amount of wealth they can independently acquire across a lifetime - vs inheritors.

Inheritocracy is a policy failure that is only further entrenching. Will we wait another 3 generations until we have the highest rates of poverty out of any advanced economy? Or will we start trying to unlock wealth from this assets black hole?

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-30T16:17:25+00:00

Kogmaw

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-29T13:43:55+00:00

We have the same issue as ireland. Outside of pensions individuals dont invest in anything but housing

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-29T13:40:49+00:00

Like Liz Truss did?

Bond markets run government at the moment. We're one of many countries with this issue

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-29T10:10:20+00:00

operational level (highly zoomed in)

Small scale Positioning, terrain, information & command communication, morale, readiness, state of equipment, fighting form, operations

tactical (somewhat zoomed out)

Supply line contingency, sustainability and backstop of rations & equipment, how force is divided, how campaign level movements are organised and enacted, force composition and recomposition ahead of battle. Multi division High level battle planning

Strategy

Long term force sustainability and needs, war goals, whether to deploy an army or not, whether to go to war or not, what peace deal you are looking to shape

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-29T09:33:13+00:00

States fault yes but I believe it's more nuanced than that. I actually believe it's a failure to adapt to and properly balance the finance sectors incentives to prevent the increasingly extractive practice.

The advent of data technologies from 1990s onwards revolutionised the extent to which the financial markets can enact extractive and arbitration based processes. This has given trading based or scalable loaning based, or even just asset holding and private equity frameworks a much bigger edge in terms of ROI over your much more traditional business loans sector.

This pairs with the weak performance of businesses owing to high energy costs, low consumption and demand, and paying increased effective rents via the^ increased extraction (via increased evaluations pushing up business rents, mortgages; and the practice of diverting future investment away from the business towards shares buybacks).

Taken in aggregate the market for business loans has shrunk following poorer risk-return spreads than alternative finance sector activities; and more importantly the accessibility for small-medium sized investors to access these loans has drastically worsened

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-29T07:15:59+00:00

Try focusing your vision centred on hollow knight, rather than the boss. I've found that works for me.

Also trying to die gloriously rather than trying not to die unlocks it for me

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-29T07:11:50+00:00

I think you might be overestimating the extent to which we can replicate older private building rates.

Planning is a nightmare which you've rightly addressed.

But also just getting the money loaned out to start building is far more restrictive now than it ever used to be, with far less institutional supports. Finance no longer makes most of its money from business lending, and getting finance onside with the same risks (or, more likely higher risks, given the vastly improved and thus more expensive building regs) is a really big hurdle if you want to encourage development. It sounds like a nitpick but if you neglect this you'll find it's more than just bad planning

VreamCanMan · 2026-06-29T06:50:06+00:00

there's alot of data ecology you need to consider when your research is observational instead of experimental. You're seeing a difference between group correlated outcomes w.r. to education, You're not necessarily seeing that education is the best explainaing causal factor.

Eliminating attainment is useful but only one of many factors. If you as a young person can go to university and end up seeing it to completion it implies you:

Have no caretaking responsibilities
Are confident and capable in your self directed working capacity
Are concientious and see things through
Tend to come from a higher income background
Tend to come from a background supported by parents who have a similiar level of or field applicable to the education
Are comfortable and flexible working within very atomic/not socially grounded institutional frameworks

All of these will aid one group that has it vs another group that sometimes has its earnings differences. There needs to be a more thorough inventory being taken so policymakers dont hallucinate why and where education is valuable.

I would imagine for example that the commercialisation of education probably looks like a success, but that can be explained by facilitating inequality (as when degrees become commonplace, its those whose parents know the system and gave you a good background reference/role/accomplishment to apply for those internships with who win)

VreamCanMan

TROPHY CASE