This has been a good year for this blog. Although the audience remains relatively modest, traffic has nearly doubled compared with 2012. Thanks for reading. The blog spent all year in the ebuzzing monthly politics top 100. Such rankings are not to be taken too seriously, but being […]
Welcome to my third annual list of my top ten blogs. I have continued to read all the blogs in my previous lists, although a couple of bloggers took a bit of a break this year. So I am discovering that the process of compiling a top ten […]
Much of the media reporting of today’s IPPR briefing note on the economic recovery focused on the alarm it sounds about the rapid increase in household debt – in particular the risk that Help to Buy II will further increase house prices. The economy may give the appearance […]
We are used to thinking of NIMBYism as a parameter of the housing policy debate. The survey evidence suggests that anti-development sentiment is deep rooted and hard to shift. It is a constraint that we must work within – something to work around – rather than something to […]
Given a relatively trouble-free IPO only a month ago and Twitter’s plans to broaden its services in future, it might perhaps seem a bit perverse to reflect on whether its time as the social media channel we know and love is passing. But I wonder. No technology is […]
A substantial essay by James Meek on the housing crisis, entitled Where will we live?, has appeared online today at the London Review of Books. It will appear in the print edition in the New Year. The essay roams widely across the terrain of housing policy. It focuses […]
Yesterday I had a meeting with someone about a thing. Before we got started my interlocutor looked at me rather accusingly and, apropos of nothing at all, said “Someone tells me you’re a member of the Liberal Democrats”. This was a decidedly unexpected turn of events. I felt […]
It seems that with each passing week the news on the housing front gets gloomier. A week ago the NHF published its latest Home Truths report which extrapolated current trends and concluded that if things carry on as they are then affordability – or rather unaffordability – will […]
In 2012 Elected mayors were very much on the political agenda in England. But after the largely negative outcome of last year’s referendums there was a debate over whether mayors are now off the agenda again. However, in 2013 the debate about mayoral governance seems to be as […]
The brouhaha over the impending proposal by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority to increase MPs pay to £74,000 is understandable. It seems perverse to be considering an 11% pay rise on a £66,000 base salary at a time when most other public sector workers are in the middle […]
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