the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

that Fukuyama bit is feeding into the same kind of thought I'm struggling to elucidate - the way that socialism or other forms of let's call it "justice politics" are focused on the present, which of course doesn't exist except conceptually, but the focus is always on distribution of resources at a given moment in time and doesn't seem to account for the effects in time of laws of ownership and control. they are structuralist politics as opposed to whatever.

sorry this is waffle I'm just feeling it out

Nah relevant imo NV

Also any change in practice will be attacked over time by expertise, power and resources in order to return imbalance over time so a focus on correction as situational is flawed vs a broad standing ethos with an enormous stick

overtime

some of what i was feeling out in last night's unfocused flu-bound rambling was much the same, except it got lost in the details of leasehold vs free hold: that who owns what and why this matters is of salience to a much larger tranche of current society, and that this particular series of events is actually help people dramatise it for themselves

mailreaders were happy to try and pin blame for grenfell itself on some poor bloke with a crappy fridge, but they were also blazingly angry about it: and as the threat persists, and more obviously points at them -- burn to death or never be out of debt! the home-owning democracy! -- then the tensions mount, and the anger. good polltics is seizing on this and saying, look, there is a better way out of it

i am weak as a kitten this morning

The better way out of it is public ownership of all housing resources tbh but the Mail fantasy of a property owning democracy is always built around the house rather than the apartment.

of course, and I think the clearest cases you can make for public ownership or at least heavy public management are with resources like land/homes: always going to be needed, never going to grow any greater unless future space communists can terraform Mars. mark's right, anxiety over housing and its bubbles could be an excellent wedge for this kind of argument.

of course this intertwines thoroughly with social care costs/aging population etc

tomorrow's Daily Mail readers will be kneejerk socialists as the only viable system for defending their way of life

It’s not necessarily a panacea though, the famous Art Deco block Marine Court in St Leonard’s was taken over by an LLC made up of residents - and they’re still paying thousands of Pounds a year in running repairs.

Forcing developers to take permanent responsibility for shonky work they have done would be good

Yeah I mean fundamentally if you buy a freehold house or share in a block and the roof collapses you're on the hook for that repair, that's fair enough. Getting a bill for the upkeep of a building in which you own a leasehold flat is OK as well (as you say it's part of the risk you accept when you buy it).

The issue here is that the building is a potential deathtrap and they are refusing to do the necessary work *at all* until the residents stump up a large cash sum. If the owner is also the developer then this is a deathtrap of their own creation (and annoyingly I can't find any information on that). This is, I guess, where any legal recourse might come in?

Another reason why the Tories should be more worried about this is that it's yet another example of the collapse/hollowness of the Thatcherite dream as it was originally sold.

(Sorry, missed the last couple of posts there)

Is this not the sort of thing that's covered by buildings insurance though - is it that the owners thought that the freeholders' insurance covered this and it didn't?

not sure how building insurance works for cladding 1 flat at a time

buildings insurance seems pretty useless in my reading of it - another frustration is that a leaseholder (at least ex-LA) you don't get to choose this, you just have to go with what the leaseholder chooses.

Okay so suppose the unthinkable happens and the Croydon block burns down tonight killing lots of people. It's already been established that the owners were fully aware of the risks and declined to do anything about it until the residents paid up, rather than taking the cladding down immediately and worrying about the money later. They had deep enough pockets to do that easily. Who is legally liable?

There's an extra £44m for reinforcing Fortress Calais meanwhile.

xp

I wonder if the Freehold owner's employment of Fire Officers - even if they intend to charge the residents for the privilege - would count as admission of some level of responsibility

Do you mean in this case or generally, Toby? I am personally very fond of it, as an electrical fire in my flat last month means that I get put up for a few months until insurance-provided builders rebuild my bedroom, rather than sleeping on a soot-covered futon.

This is the extent of my experience with it, though, but it's been pretty smooth.

I meant generally - although that sounds good! "Pretty useless" is way too strong a term, sorry - but I don't like not having any say in the provisions of the insurance (and e.g. as providers have changed over the last few years, the exclusions have varied, so sometimes we'd be covered if our neighbours accidentally blew up our flat making bombs, sometimes not...Hopefully that's not really a practical concern, but it has made me sceptical of exactly what would be covered in the event of something serious.)

We definitely had to choose our own buildings insurance provider when we bought last year, so either the terms of our contract are way off in a number of ways or the insurance rules just vary from building to building.

I'm not sure insurance would cover this particular eventuality given there isn't any damage to the building and the cladding was presumably there when the policy was taken out (even if there was no survey going 'dudes this is highly flammable'). Most policies won't pay out for things like asbestos removal afaik.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/18/council-set-to-take-on-tower-block-that-landlord-refuses-to-make-safe

ctrl+ "guillotine"

if the taxpayer is going to have to pay for this shit, might as well just confiscate the whole building from the leaseholder and save him the trouble of paying for the upkeep

TBF the article says the council will purchase the building for a nominal fee, of course lumbering the council with legal costs and ongoing management costs and the freeholder getting away scot free having supplied a substandard product, not discharged its obligations and presumable having made a bundle in the process.

Confiscate is too close to seizing and you know who else seized it don't you? And you DO KNOW what happens next don't you?

If not, learn some history.

hey what are kickstarter’s rules on crowdfunding an assassination

uh asking for a friend

what are the stretch goals?

the target spends some time on the rack before the finale

IN

Digging myself deeper into the unpopular opinions hole but if the freeholder doesn’t have a legal obligation to pay, Javid has left councils with next to nowhere to go by saying that residents have no obligation to pay either. The council should turn the freehold over to the flat owners, provide a loan to cover repairs and structure that loan over a long enough period to enable people to pay it back. The going rate for those flats is £300k+.

Actually it should be central government, not the council.

no i think yr opinions are basically sound re: the leaseholders being property owners

Boris Johnson's proposal for a bridge linking Britain to France has been greeted with scepticism by representatives of the UK's shipping industry.

The Foreign Secretary floated the idea of a cross-Channel bridge between during talks between the UK and France on Thursday.

He said "good connections" were important between the two countries, and suggested the Channel Tunnel might simply be "a first step."

The countries had agreed to establish a panel of experts to look at major projects, Johnson said.

he's right guys, currently we can only reach france by air, sea and train, we def need to be able to drive to calais too

It's so he can set charges on it.

we should really also consider building a zipline between the countries and/or an array of cannons by which goods and travellers can be fired back and forth across the channel

can't believe Boris hasn't suggested dirigibles crewed by picaninnies

i'm all for boris being encouraged to play with explosives tho tbf

he really has just wandered into work after having a vivid dream last night hasn't he?

it's entirely possible he was sleepwalking at the time of his comments

never let it be said he's not an ideas man

boldly looking beyond the economic dissolution of Brexit to a bridge-based powerhouse

if anything it's kinda impressive that in his years of blue-sky thinking he's not once come up with one good idea

honestly, what are the odds

we could spend all the money saved by brexit by driving this bus back to europe

this kind of thoughtless fuckwittery confirms the Nincompoopolis portrayal of Boris, not that there was ever any doubt.

"With his achievements he showed us all that massive privilege, leaping ambition, no concern for detail and a wasp’s attention span needn’t hold you back when it comes to creating terrible architecture."

if he really wants to get to galaxy brain why not just fill in the channel

fuck blue passports, I say bring back doggerland

Jet packs for everyone.

I tentatively support electric hydrofoil shuttles between Folkestone and Boulogne.

not gonna lie, i'd fucking love a jetpack and only partially because of the suicide-bombing potential it offers

'Migrant crosses Channel by drone' is a headline I expect to see before 2020.

not a tech-type in general but I wonder if over the next 100 years it might totally undermine border control

one would think that BoJo would steer clear of all things bridge-related given the outcome of his last foray in that area