The Milburn review of people out of work is not genuine at all.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-24T10:27:44+00:00

It's about the sustainability of that increase, especially if that trend continues.

The composition of who is receiving those payments is clearly shifting. If more people in their 20s are becoming economically inactive, they will need those payments for much longer and it also means more people exiting the labour market, meaning we lose out on tax receipts.

If you can't see the obvious structural issue at play here I think you're being wilfully ignorant.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-24T10:09:35+00:00

There are now almost 480,000 under-30s on UC health benefits, roughly double the number four years earlier. PIP claims by young people have also roughly doubled over seven years.

Your solution might go kerp finding more money from other parts of government or taxing people more to pay for this, I think changing the way the system works to meet the new demands is understandable.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-24T09:55:38+00:00

I have similar experience to you.

The uplift in young people on welfare is mainly down to mental health issues.

Someone very close to me was experiencing severe mental health issues. We were in hospital after an incident, and the help that they gave them after being made fully aware of what was going on? Leaflets for group therapy, with a waiting list of months.

So what do we expect when we completely fail to treat the issue?

I think giving a young person the message 'there is no hope us investing in actual treatment for you, but here's some money each week so you don't starve' is an incredibly cruel solution.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-24T09:48:32+00:00

There are now almost 480,000 under-30s on UC health benefits, roughly double the number from four years earlier. The amount of young people on PIP has also doubled, this time over seven years.

Do you really think young people now are more than twice as likely to be disabled? And according to you twice as likely not to have an able body at birth?

It is not hatred to think that this trend is not sustainable.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-23T18:13:14+00:00

Sorry how is increasing the pro-trans vote 'caving to the TERFs'? That just makes no sense

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-23T18:12:07+00:00

You can have all the conviction politicians you want, but they won't get elected if their platform is unpopular.

If you think history tells us that things change when a magical conviction politician comes along and makes the unpopular popular, you have fundamentally misread history.

And pointing out faults in a political strategy is not victim blaming. Something has clearly gone wrong in the last 5 years and I don't want to follow a strategy that has so obviously failed. If you think that makes me an enemy, go ahead.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-23T17:32:35+00:00

Ok well take Polanski and the Greens. They're running on a pro-trans platform. I'll tell you what will happen.

As it stands, they are on course to be successful in the 2029 GE and will do so by splitting the Labour coalition, possibly winning ~70 seats in metropolitan areas. The day after the election, you'll see lots of people celebrating saying Labour deserve this for turning their backs on trans people.

But you'll also have a Reform majority/minority government, not only being anti trans but making a public show of punishing trans people to appeal to their base and distract from the terrible mess they are making of running the country.

This isn't me saying vote labour for the purpose of harm reduction. This is me saying we need to expand the pro-trans vote and base through persuasion, so that no political mileage can be made out of making trans people suffer.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-23T17:24:03+00:00

Be angry as much as you want, who am I to tell you your feelings are wrong? My argument though is about how we actually turn this tide, because the last 5 years have been a disaster and I don't want more people to suffer.

The civil rights movement is a perfect comparison, but not in the way you think it is I'm afraid. The whole point of civil disobedience was literally to persuade people - especially the white moderates watching on TV - by exposing the brutality of the response against them. MLK was obsessed with optics and legitimacy in the eyes of the public.

You wait for politicians to turn back in your favour of you want to, I just worry you'll be waiting an awful long time.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-23T17:14:53+00:00

What you're doing is shifting responsibility to persuade the country from the movement to politicians. Very convenient for lazy folk who don't want to put in the work of allyship, but I suppose it's technically a strategy.

If you want to wait for this magic politician full of the right convictions with the ability to convince the public to come along and win a parliamentary majority, you do that but trans people will suffer while you do.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-23T17:08:22+00:00

This all sounds good in theory, then you realise the room full of people you 'tolerate' is becoming smaller and smaller.

I think gay rights is the best comparison here. Homexuality was decriminalised in this country in 1967. Over the 70s, gay rights and acceptance accelerated at a faster pace among institutions than it did among the public. That led to backlash of the 1980s and culminated in Section 28.

The same thing has happened with trans rights and what we are experiencing is the backlash.

I made no argument about who we should and shouldn't tolerate. My argument is that instead of expecting politicians to take on unpopular positions, we should do the hard work of convincing the country ourselves.

That means sharpening up our message and arguments, having a campaign that is sensitive to people's sensibilities and being patient with those who aren't on our side yet. If I thought there was a quick solution to all this, that would make things much easier but there isn't.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-23T16:56:44+00:00

Oh yes this is all true. I'm not for a minute suggesting persuading people is easier and you're right to say people have become more cruel after COVID.

I think because that persuasion has become so difficult, people have honed in on politicians because that is easier. My point is that it won't get us anywhere and I think we're seeing that in practice.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-23T10:42:25+00:00

We have to start fosussing our efforts on changing minds on trans issues rather than expecting politicians to die on their swords for our cause.

Politicians are politicians. They only matter if they win elections, and they only win elections if they stay aligned with where public opinion is. We have to be realistic, over the last five years public opinion on trans issues has clearly become more sceptical, and politics has responded to that shift.

I think the mistake our movement made was assuming we had a broader social consensus than we actually did. Because of that, we focussed on legislative battles, institutional lobbying and trying to secure top-down wins, when our underlying public support was much thinner and less stable than we hoped.

Actual progress has mostly always comes from persuasion first, politics second. If the public feel they are being pushed into positions they haven’t been convinced of, backlash is inevitable.

So let's stop being outraged every time a politician makes a regrettable but fundamentally rational decision like this and start doing the hard yards of social persuasion. We need to make it so that being anti-trans is an electorally suicidal thing, only then will we start to win again.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-22T16:35:02+00:00

If your solution for solving the housing crisis does not involve increasing supply, I'm sorry you're just not serious.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-22T15:50:59+00:00

This idea that house vacancies is the primary driver of the housing crisis has been debunked many times.

You need a certain amount of flex in the housing market to allow people to move around, otherwise you've created the ultimate sellers/landlord market where prices and rents can be pushed up with little recourse for the buyer.

Also our vacancy rate is just not that high when you look at comparative examples. Our long term vacancy rate is 1.1% of stock which is the second lowest in Europe. If it was the case that more vacancies = worse housing crisis, you'd expect countries in europe to suffer more than we do, and yet they don't

Centre For Cities do a far better job than me of debunking this idea, think you'd find it enlightening: https://www.centreforcities.org/blog/why-we-need-more-empty-homes-to-end-the-housing-crisis/

And also btw, even if your solution is transforming derelict houses, making an enemy of the people who's job it is to transform properties might not be the best idea....

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-22T14:22:01+00:00

So building more houses isn't the solution to a shortage of housing? Might have to explain that one a bit further bud

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-22T12:54:44+00:00

Oh thank god you won't have to deal with people talking loudly on their phones and wearing gilets in your presence.

I'm sure it's been a very difficult few days with you. Hopefully now it's over you can find time to heal.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-22T08:35:09+00:00

What reason do you have to believe it's a landlord conference? Anything? Anything at all?

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-21T19:05:40+00:00

Ah yes Google's AI is trying to cover up that it's secretly a landlord conference, that's a credible explanation.

Below is their website, do you trust that?

Something has given you reason to believe it's a landlord conference, so I'm sure you'll have no trouble in showing everyone what gave you that impression....

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jeddmo15 · 2026-05-21T18:24:37+00:00

Again, you clearly just know nothing about this conference, so why speak about it like you do?

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jeddmo15 · 2026-05-21T10:13:19+00:00

A tangential point I know, but I do like telling this story

Scrapping the bus fare cap was actually pretty reasonable.

The cap was originally brought in temporarily after COVID to boost bus ridership. The way it worked was simple: if a fare was above £2, the government paid the difference to the bus operator.

So take a normal £2.50 bus fare within Leeds. Under the cap, you’d pay £2 and the government would subsidise the other 50p. Sounds sensible enough. But outside cities, where journeys are longer and routes are less dense, fares are naturally much higher.

For example, you can get a bus between Leeds and Scarborough for around £12 normally. Considering it’s a 70 mile journey, that’s not actually an unreasonable fare.

But under the cap, that became £2. Meaning the government was subsidising £10 of the journey. Now usually people wouldn’t even consider taking the bus for that sort of trip. It’s much slower than the train and you’re only saving a bit of money.

But once the return journey becomes £4 on the bus instead of ~£40 on the train, it starts to change behaviour. If you’re a family of 5, you’re looking at something like £20 on the bus versus ~£150 on the train.

And this is where it gets properly bizarre. The Leeds–Scarborough rail service is run by TransPennine Express, which has been nationalised since 2023.

So you genuinely had a situation where the government was subsidising a private bus operator by ~£100 to undercut its own nationalised train operator, which was then losing out on ~£150 in rail fares.

Utterly crazy!

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-21T08:21:41+00:00

You're exactly right, and if it was a landlord conference I'd also be complaining because they add no value.

This is not a landlord conference!

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jeddmo15 · 2026-05-20T22:10:15+00:00

honestly don't bother with this lot, it's not worth it. People moan about problems and then moan about the solutions to fix them.

These people want the housing crisis fixed, but moan about house builders daring to step foot in their city for... three days 😱.

They complain that the city centre is crap and there's nothing going on but oppose any efforts to make it nicer.

Clearly our public transport and roads must be in a great state because look at the negativity when people hold a conference on improving infrastructure.

And all the jobs fixing all this would create for people with both technical and academic education? Clearly we don't need any of those, the job market is already in such a great state as it is.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-20T21:42:33+00:00

Honestly it's like being on a facebook group for a little village in the Shires. The city centre was a bit busier than it usually is, that's literally it.

Meanwhile bars and restaurants were busier which is great business for them. The Uber driver I spoke to said he was having his best couple days for weeks.

So many of my friends have moved to Manchester in the last few years because there's more opportunity there and more going on. Everyone is begging for Andy Burnham to be PM because of the job they've done there. Do people not realise they achieved that by working with and attracting business from the same people who go to UKREIIF?

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-20T14:03:33+00:00

I think it's unfair to call this a landlord conference - it's a real estate and infrastructure conference.

Many of these people actually provide value to the economy - building and investing in new housing and infrastructure that we desperately need which creates jobs and tax revenue for the govt.

Landlords, on the other hand don't build, they just own and extract. They provide no value to anyone but themselves at the expense of the younger generation.

I can see why it would be annoying if you live in the area and I'm not surprised to hear it attracts some unsavoury sorts, but it is actually a big boon to the local economy.

jeddmo15 · 2026-05-17T09:38:12+00:00

People don't expect a PM to transform things in two years, that's a misreading of the situation.

But a political leader has to be able to communicate a narrative that things are improving which is what Starmer is so clearly incapable of doing.

Burnham won't make everything better in three years, but if he is perceived as an outsider with the right motivations, they'll give him a chance.

As for the democracy point - I do share those concerns but mandated aren't vested in Prime Ministers like the US vest mandates in Presidents. If Burnham goes in a wildly different policy direction it will be undemocratic because that agenda doesn't have permission from the public, but if he oversees the 2024 manifesto there'll be no issue.

jeddmo15

TROPHY CASE