A selection of things that have annoyed me today

[philmophlegm]

Part six
Warning: some bad language


The Cornish National Liberation Army (yes, really - I imagine a cross between Brian's friends in The Life of Brian and the Tooting Popular Front in 'Citizen Smith'.

What about this bunch of (possibly dangerous) crackpots?

They have described Rick Stein's and Jamie Oliver's restaurants as 'legitimate targets'. It has threatened vandalism and arson against commercial targets that it considers to be 'English'.

What do I (an English immigrant in that I moved to Cornwall from England even though I'm actually Welsh, although even then, my parents were English immigrants to Wales) say to the CNLA?

Re'th kijyewgh hwi!

Of course it's people like me that force up the house prices so that the locals can't afford to buy a house any more. Well wise up - nobody can afford to buy a house any more in England! In fact, house prices in most of Cornwall are well below the national average.

And in any case, if immigrants are buying houses in Cornwall, then surely it must be because locals are selling them. Should the locals sell them cheaply? I don't hear many calls for this from those locals.

Comments

[rustica.livejournal.com]

"And in any case, if immigrants are buying houses in Cornwall, then surely it must be because locals are selling them. Should the locals sell them cheaply? I don't hear many calls for this from those locals."

It's exactly the same in my village (which is not in Cornwall!). The locals are perfectly happy to flog their houses to non-locals - every time the houseprices go up, another lot of them do so - and then they sit and bitch because their deadbeat kids can't afford to live here. Well, guess what? I studied, and I went away to uni, and then I moved to where I could get a job. I don't belong anywhere anymore, but at least I don't sit around being unemployable, scavenging off my parents. I have professional friends - lawyers, accountants - *couples!* - who can't afford to buy a house round here anymore, let alone people who left school at 16, work part-time in the local Co-op and think the world owes them a living. Bah! And yet these locals think they're too good to talk to the likes of me. I guess that's just fine, because I don't have anything to say to people like that either...

(Your post hit a nerve, there! I have been known to rant about this until I become incoherent, but I shall stop now :) )

[bunn.livejournal.com]

That's my rant! I found someone else who does my rant!

Good grief.

[(Anonymous)]

Totally agree with you both. I don't have any personal experience, but whenever I hear people on the radio lobbying for "low-cost housing for local people" I think "Huh? You live in a desirable area where lots of people want to come. The traditional way of deciding who gets desirable resources is money, which is meant to be at least roughly correlated with merit, hard work, years spent grafting etc. While there are undoubted problems with this system, is it really a better idea to replace it with where precisely within the country you happened to be born??" If we did base it on birth postcode, personally I'd give top priority to people who were born in really scuzzy inner-city areas -- I'd figure they deserved a bit of a break, whereas the local kids at least got the chance to grow up in a nice desirable area, even if they have to leave when they're adults.

Neuromancer

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Well, there is the argument that when the children from the people from desirable areas leave to get jobs, they go to places like Liverpool or Warrington, which are much more deprived and, using their education, often privately funded and improved by having grown up in places where there was nothing else to do but read, they take away jobs from the inner-city locals.

Then when they've lived there a few years, they take all their useful skills and leave again for somewhere nicerer. That's what I did.

[chainmailmaiden]

My rant too :-) I was glad I & my parents at least managed to sell our houses in the Lakes to people who intended to live and work there.
The road I used to live on had about 3 holiday lets/holiday homes out of the 20 or so houses on it, when I was there. Now there are only about 3 houses where people live there all the time, all the rest have been bought as private holiday homes or to let out as holiday cottages. The village & many others like it have become virtual ghost towns for a lot of the year and lots of the businesses are closing because they can't get staff, because no-one lives near enough to work there for the wages.

I don't think the locals that are left would have objected to Jamie setting up a branch of Fifteen there though, I think they would have been glad of the extra jobs & the publicity for the area.

[helflaed.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see a world where pretty much anyone who works full time earns enough to be able to get a mortgage and buy somewhere to live. Even up here houses are getting beyond the reach of first time buyers.

The problem is that the political will to do what is necessary will create such a storm of protest that nothing will be done. Every time new houses are to be built there is a storm of protest to the planning authority. Virtually all the brownfield sites available are covered with new housing already. Releasing greenfield will not be popular. That's before we get onto the issue of how unpopular it will be with some existing homeowners if prices fall.

All the current tinkering with interest rates isn't really addressing the current issue of supply vs demand. Even increasing taxes on second home owners won't help, as they are the people most likely to be able to absorb those costs.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I agree that there is something wrong if you have to be professionally qualified and a couple to even have a hope of getting on the housing ladder.

I don't believe that increasing the housing supply yet more will fix the problem though. We have been doing that for years, the demand is still outpacing the supply, and the more building there is, the more strain on other things like hospitals and roads and green spaces.

I don't know what the answer is though.

[rustica.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the answer is, either. I'd *like* to see people being forbidden to have second houses that they leave empty most of the year; but I don't see how they'd actually go about doing that, and I don't think the political will is there. I really, *really* don't want them building on the green belt, though...

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

They've obviously not met up with costa del geriatrica, aka Bournemouth. Old people go there to die. I used to live less than 20 miles down the road. As Bournmouth fills up the geriatrica spreads: Christchurch, Highcliffe, Barton, Lymington... The house prices have been high for decades and the jobs scarce, unless you want to look after elderly, infirm rich people. I moved.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

"Coast" focussed on Sandbanks the other day. Okay, that's a specialised case, but even the cheapest houses there are over half a million. As soon as a plot of land becomes available, it's bought up and turned into megamillionaireland (which sounds rather like a theme park, which is what Sandbanks seems to be becoming).