This is the post Tim Montgomerie wouldn’t have In London alone, the annual flow of Local Housing Allowance into landlords’ pockets is over two billion pounds. The taxpayer is forking out with no expectation of getting anything for it. But the policy of radically reducing the LHA valuations, from the 80th to the 30th percentile…
Read More A Tory Case for the Simple PlanOK, so this is the extended 12″ jacking tech-house hot wax remix of the piece at Liberal Conspiracy. It’s October, 2013. As unseasonable snowfall turns the streets into a fairy wonderland and the transport system into a Pratchettesque mess, police are herding the last holdouts out of the Elthorne Estate in London, N19. Homeless shelters…
Read More The Simple Plan: The Definitive StatementSo I searched for the following address on several popular mapping sites: Dos Trece, Calle Carme 40, Barcelona, Spain OpenStreetMap‘s gazetteer search is reliably hopeless and this occasion was no exception. It returned nothing. Microsoft’s Bing Maps did worse than that, much worse, as you’ll see if you click the link – it directed me…
Read More Whoops, there goes the Chinese embassyFraser Nelson apparently believes he has some standing to complain about other people’s accounting. He is very angry about a Tory party political broadcast in which he says David Cameron “tells porkies”. In fact I count 12 occasions in which he accuses the prime minister of lying. Further, he says: Financiers are, quite literally, prosecuted…
Read More Fraser Nelson: HackSpeaking of political reptiles, here are some more, dinosaurs this time: One female Conservative MP tells a story about how, in the weeks after the influx of new female Tories into the House of Commons at the last election, some of her male colleagues struggled to tell them apart. Instead they resorted to calling any…
Read More The Guardian is not a good newspaper, it is merely the least bad newspaperSunny Hundal has a go at this rather floppy interview with Paul Staines. The interesting bit is right at the finish: “I think the internet means you can raise funds online in a different way. Labour goes to the union barons to get big cash-flows; the Tories go to the City. But I think the…
Read More Paul Staines Has a WebsiteIf this government had an aesthetic, it would be the YBAs’; sheep chopped in half in formaldehyde, everyone I’ve ever slept with, yadda yadda. Being “shocking”, in a highly conservative and derivative way. I submit that it is no coincidence that their biggest patron was Maurice Saatchi. Of course the great threat to the professionally…
Read More If Damien Hirst was in government nothing would be at all differentSo, reading the LSE Growth Commission report. There’s the usual stuff about infrastructure, and they want both an infrastructure bank and an infrastructure planning commission (I remember that!) and crappy provision for small and medium-sized firms’ financing needs, hence a KFW-analogue. So far, so radical consensus. There’s also a weird fetish for academies; apparently we…
Read More Our economic future: Other.The woman who I am obliged to call “Crazy” Janet Daley is making sense: So what must we conclude? That, if anything, he [the prime minister] may be too facile with language and arguments? That, like a very bright but vaguely lazy student, he can pull out a gifted verbal performance when it is absolutely…
Read More this is grass. we’ve been eating grass!Speaking of the Simple Plan, I am assured that the Liberal Conspiracy piece is coming Real Soon Now. Meanwhile, I’m seriously considering offering it to Conservative Home.
Read More Update