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Politics, Mature and taboo => Political Pundits => Topic started by: Walkie on November 15, 2016, 09:11:29 AM
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Every now and then I have a go at explaining British demographics , and some of the above inter-related issues to people here. I usually don't get far, cos I'm way too slow at composing such posts, and all-too-often illness intervenenes before I'm ready to hit "send". Then i get lost in my own disjointed thoughts , and lose faith in my typo-ridden, insufficient bit of an explanation. I think you actually have to be living in the old industrial cities in the North and the Midlands of England before you actually see how things are work (or failing to work) here. Most people's perceptions of Britain are filtered through the lens of the "booming" South of England, and skewed by a failure to grasp how small an island this is, and to really appreciate the effects of excessive population density.
The poor in Britain dream of living the lifestyle of "trailer trash" in America , we really do. I just remarked on that on the phone to Teddybear today, and he readily agreed. Absolutely. Yet that doesn't occur to Americans for a moment. They see us living in our cold, damp , rented Victorian houses and think we're better-off than they are, because they can't afford inner-city rents, like we can. Well, neither can we, truth to tell (as the alarming numbers living on the streets very clearly attest) but that's as cheap as it gets in England. The further out you get from the misbegotten tenenments clustered round the centre of some sprawling conurbation , the higher the rents get. London is an exception to that rule , not the norm. (And most of us really don't think of London as part of Britain any more. Really) That's pretty much the reverse of the American pattern , i hear. Besides, the poorest of us can't afford to run cars, and can;'t afford to use public transport very much , either, so we'd better live pretty damned close to the shops, Jobcentres and things.
That empty wish for a more natural lifestyle is not exactl;y an issue (no use making an issue of it) but that kind of mismatch and misconception does help to distort the picture, and thus contributes to bigger, nastier misconceptions. So it looks like we really need to get down to basics, before people start hearing what we're actually trying to say about the bigger issues
I hope Teddybear will have more to say about these issues on this board. I hope that a few people will chip in.
But first , please forgive me for recycluing a couple of recent posts of mine, in my effort to get my best efforts thus far into a single thread , under an appropriate title. Just a mo, I'll go find 'em.
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Bits of recent conversation with Pyraxis:
Also, I hope you don't mind me repeating it here, but a previous conversation we had regarding Brexit and immigration.
"Conservative" is way too much of a generalization, but the type of conflicts you've talked about, like poor British renters vs wealthy immigrant landlords, remind me of the POV of small town USA people who are inherently suspicious of the cities and the wealthy people there. A big subset of Trump's supporters come from that background, which in the USA is called conservative. But there's a lot more to it than that, ie the assumed racism, bigotry, religious values etc. that I know you don't share.
Ah, I begin to see what you mean. And I've been trying way too hard to construct a reply, It's insanely difficult to pin down and extract all spurious assumptions that come in, both potentially and actually, that basically arise from living in different countries, under different circumstances. I don't mean between you and I , specifically, but across the freakiing board; and even within England, which has effectively split into two very different countries . And I don't mean by Brexit. Brexit only went to demonstrate how extreme our traditional North-South divide has become, That division dates back to Industrial Revelotion (and probably beyond?)and is more of a demographic division than a geographical one. The "Satanic Mills" and their labour force being very much concentrated in the North, with the South left free to focus on farming and more genteel pursuits; which is not to say that there was no such thing as a working-class southerner ofc, but in the past that would have been largely comprised of farm labourers and servants, who would be more inclined than the city-dwelling Northerners to share the conservertive view of their masters. Thus the North-South divide represents a corresponding Socialist-conservative division, which has only deepenened, in recent decades, in tandem with with the dismantling of British Industry, and ever- increasing austerity.
I should point out that land here is at such a premium that the concept of "poor farmer " is laughable. Not even the poor farm labourer can be seriously said to exist anymore, because it just isn't possible to lsubsist on the highly erratic , low wage of a farm labourer, especially not in the South, where none of the low-paid workers can pay the high rents, not without help on the form of top-up benefits, and especially not in the villages , ( most which have largely turned into dormerville for middle class commuters long ago, even up here in the Midlands. You also have to remenber that England is a very small country, and therefore much of England is in easy commuting distance of London..for those who can afford to commute. And that a cottage in the countryside is a much-sought after thing. A luxury item, however humble it might look. Thus the original villagers have mostly been priced out of the vilages ). Farm labouring is simply "casual work" which people do,,when they get can it, in addition to bar work, shop work and whatever else they can get, But there are not many places left in England where the laborours live near enough to the farms to make farm work a realistic option.
Back in the eighties, the farmers round here had a scam going of picking up unemployed labour by the truckload from the City Cenre and paying them "piece rates" which worked out way below minimum wage, (I know, I've actually been in those trucks) . Though that was no sort of living wage, it was just about acceptable for the workers insmuch as it enabled them to top up their enemployment benefits to the point where they might realistically buy the kids new shoes and.or begin to pay off some of their debts; That wouldn't work at all if they declared such earnings (the government would let you keep £5 per week, after taking so long to review your entitlement that you'd have big problems surving the interim. That £5 barely paid for the extra food you need when doing hard manual work)). The DWp screwed that one by their vigouous puirsuit of the evil "Benefits Frauds" who were accepting such work (they actually sent investigating officers out into the fields , and mounted a poster campaign to covince people that failing to declare a bit of casual work was just as real and just serious as the more dramatic forms of benefit fraud. Not that any of the locals were convinced. We tended to feel that the farmers were the real criminals. A man who's working hard for a fraction of the money he made before being made redundant ,in a desperate effort to keep the bailliffs from his door, isn't anyone's idea of a benefit fraudster, really. But the posters were scary anyway. of course) The farmers never found any other good solutions to the labour problem , AFAIK, short of building dormitories for migrant wortjker.s on their land, and actually paying them a legal wage, They've been bitterly grumblimg about the "work shy" native Brits ever since .
Also since then, the myth of "work shy" Brits has only gatherered momentum and now amounts to odffficial government propaganda, used to jusify a really punising series of "Welfare reforms", which make welfare ever harder to get, unreliable (it gets withdrawn at the drop of the pin, on various pdretexts) and ever-lower. in real terms. To the Government's embarassment, many such reforms affect the low-paid just as much as the unemployed. They've had that rubbed in their face to such a degree that they've had to make steps to address that, but the rhetoric of being on the side of "hard working families" cuts very little ice in the North. When we do the maths , we still don;'t find anybody getting better off other than the weathy The disparity in income between rich and poor in this countryjust continues to grow and grow. And now, after something like 40 years of being promised "jam tomorrow" if we only take our punishment and allow the Ecomnnomy to recover. we're pretty sure we know what a "healthy Economy " looks like, and who actually benefits from that.
Yeah, it's taken 40-odd years of ever worsening conditions in the Midlands and North for the working class people to really rebel. Untuil Brexit , we were basically becoming increasingly hopeless and depressed.The two major political parties had both become so right-wing that we didn't even feel as if we actually had a vote worth the paper it was written on. And given that the North serves as a receptacle for anyone who can't afford the housing down South, including most of the original Londoners , as well as the migrants and immigrants, we feel we get a much better view of the real purposes behind mass immigration . The self-righteous bleeding-heart messages from southern liberals to the effect we ought to be willing to sharing our "privileged lifestyle " come across as either hopelessly naive at best, or just taking the piss.
Anti-immigration feling isn't remotely based upomn racism, but rather on ever-increasing poverty, overpopulation, homelessness etc. and the sense that the South either don't have a clue what's going on, or else don't give a flying fuck. Those kind of conditions can breed racism of course, but they mostly don't. However, Anti -Islam feeling is something else again , with an entirely different basis. And when ant-immigation is concatenated with Anti-muslim feeling , and condemned on the same (mostly spurious ) grounds, we tend to despair of ever being understood .
One problem is that the Political right in britain managed to speahead both the Remain and the Brexit campaign. You can perhaps appreciate what a brilliant propaganda coup that turned out to be, for the Tories?
Both Brexit and Anti-immigration stem largely from left -wing Northerners, but the lack of left-wing leadership at the time makes that statement highly unconvincing to any kind of outsider. We'd been dismissing the Labour Party as a bunch of "junior Tories" for decasdes, and , somehow, no serious alternative was emerging, Splinter groups like the Socialist Party (formed by people that Labour had thrown out for being too left wing)were campaigning for Brexit, but they weren't very salient nexct to the right -wing-clowns that are now taking credit for Brexit . In the opinion ofyour average Northerner those clowns actually undermined Brexit more than they helped it. And in the opinion of your average Northererner, the genuinely left wing Labour leader, Corbyn, had reluctantly been pressured into supporting remain by the hostile , unruly right-wing Blairites who still predominate in his party. . Be that as it may, it certainly presented a completely false picture., and left the average Northerners a little bit conflicted in his attitude to Corbyn. It was not the best of starts, as regards getting Labour back on track. There were fears that he just isn;'t strong enough to swing it.
I've had to start saying England rather than Britain, in many contexts , by the way, because it's coming home to me how radically different, again, the Scottish experience is. Where England is overcrowded, with a very real housing crisis, Scotland has a falling porukation , and housing to spare. Scotland is traditionally left-wing for the same readon that the Notrth of England is,. It's population is larhely comprised of working class peoplem=, struggling on the verge of destitution. But there the similarity ends, because working class people struggling on the verge of destitution really don't want to live in Scotland, by and l;arge, where unemployment figures are higher still, heating bills are higher, and your chances of survival if you do become destitute considerably lower. There's a longstanidng tradition of down-and-out scots moving South into England(my paternal grandfather was one suich) and movement in the other direction is almost uneard of. A lot of Scots stil buy the logic that mass migration might actually ficx their economic problems, so they swallow that longic along wuth theaccompanying bleeding heart political rhetoric. Atv least, that's the best explanation I've heard for the striking difference in attitudes. And if we have to wait for Scotland to become overcrowded before they rethink...
Well anyways , I think that background probably irons out a few apparent paradoxes? And I haven't even started on the Islamn thing. The English experience of Islam is also unique in it;'s way, and it pisses us off mightily when people try to tell us what we think about Islam, and why we think it , rather than listening . But hey! I've really struggled to explain this much. already. I really have!
Hmm, actually Pyraxis, given the somewhat awkward example you quoted (no , i don't mind, but this one happens to be awkward, taken out-of-context) , i fell I have to try and explain the complex role that Muslims have in the British Economy, a little bit. It's complex because there is no single definitive "muslim " population here, and you can't certainly put them down, wholsale as an economic underclass. My example was intended to illustrate that . And to illustrate how a genuine memberiof the economic underclass might well feel that his position has been completely misconstued and pissed upon, by the "liberal "pro-immigration rhetoric .
The "poor v rich" antagonism can easily extend to some groups of Muslims . In a country where there's a genuine and serious housing crisis, Landlords are not popular figures, ofc. They may not all be "rich " exactly, but they're clearly gaining an econnomic advantage from said economic crisis, and often exploit that advantage pretty ruthlessly. Given that something like 75% of Brits can't afford to buy their own home, and are never likely to, we do , quite naturally, think of Landlors as way above us, in the economic pyramid. The Muslim Landlord is a particularly common figure, largely because of the Way Muslim banking works. Islam is against "usury", so Muslims to ften "make their money work for them " by investing in property, rather than by buying shares. Hence, a sucessful Muslim is all-too-likely to be a Landlord, much more so than members of other religions. Just that fact alone is enough to make any representation of Muslims as an underclass seem pretty laughable in general.
Such landlords wil as likely be milking poor Muslimns as milking poor non-muslims, I should add, if that matters. I might also add that the Muslim Landlords in the North mostly hail from long-established British Muslim communities (mostlty hailing from Pakistan and Bangladesh) , The stinking rich Middle-eastern Musslims who buy up properties in The South are another kettle of fish, but they don't help improve the Northerner's image of Muslims. They are disliked all the more, on account of speculations that they are the reason why the Muslims , as a whole, appear to have undue powrr and infuence in Britain.
We do have a lot of sympathy with poor Muslims fleeing Syra, but that'smixed with A) genuine fears regarding the spread of Islam (which i'll sabe for another post) B) genuine fears about increasing population pressure, and inxcreasing numbers of people actually living on the streets C) recognition of the fact that that migrants, of all race and creed, are being exploited as much as possible , then pushed into the human dustbin in the North once it's clear that they can't hack it in the South any better than the rest of us can. We;re not inclined to regard that as genuine "kindness". We seeing them become as anxious , depressed, disillusioned and and desperate as the rest of us. Britain doesn't meet their expectations any better than Britain meets ours, as it happens. Indeed they're often shockedand apalled in a way we jaded natives have ceased to be shocked and apalled.
I could give more reasons, but that's prolly enough?
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The way I read this is that your Muslim problem is actually more of a class problem, used to the extent possible by people with agendas.
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The way I read this is that your Muslim problem is actually more of a class problem, used to the extent possible by people with agendas.
That would be a logical reading. On the other hand, i haven't yet got around to seriously attempting to define our issues with Islam, as such. Those observations were very peripheral.
We do have a "class" problem, and we do have a Muslim problem. There's not that much overlap. You can't explain the thing in those terms. I was really trying to explain why it doesn't really wash when Muslims are presented as some kind of oppressed underclass. That is, I want to sweep aside some of the more offensive common assumtions , if i can, and explain why we find those assumptions offensive.
I don't mean to be mysterious here, I've actually tried to explain the real Islam issues 3-4 times already, but somehow never succeeded in finishing and posting! So now I'm taking it as it comes ...and getting a litle bit superstitious about throwing myself into that particular subject again :LOL:. (I like that I'm beginning to feel well again, since l;ast abandonened attempt)
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Oh! In the meantime, a report from my original home town , Southall (in West London) , is intersting, being basically about tesions betweeni Muslims and Sikhs.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/fear-and-loathing-in-southall-1585187.html
I must say (to avoid confusing people) that the problems described are a whole lot worse, in the Midlands and North. (It's curious that the people interviewed seem totally unaware of that), Unemployment, in particular, is clearly a very recent development in Southall, according to that article, wheras it's been an an ever-worsening issue here since...well, about 2-3 years after my family moved here in 1971. However, when my family decided to moved to the Midlands, it was actually getting hard for the native whites in Southall, employment-wise, but like the article says, that clearly wasn't a problem for anybody else. I'm pretty convinced that was because of a deliberate thrust on the part of some asians in the town to force the white families out. Im pretty sceptical of stories like that, normally , but I've heard, for example, that Asian women were taunting some of the white women to that effect, including my Mum who has zero motivation to make up such stories. I've no idea which asians were doing that. The white people, back then couldn't tell a Muslim from a Sikh, from a Hindu; it was all too novel, and we had all three coming in.
I didn't notice any inter-racial tensions myself, so they couldn't have been very bad (I was autistic, mind :LOL:), but another factor was that a gang of Pakistani lads ( it was said) were making death threats against my teenage brother; a lot of white people were pretty fed up (understandably) by the local shops selling indian food, instead of the stuff they were used to, by circles of Sikhs holding council on the parkland where the kids were used to playeing football, etc. The place really wasn't the same. And then, to add the finally push (or rather pull) , there was an " industrial boom" in the Midlands, there was plenty of work in car industry, and housing was dirt cheap , compared with what we were used to. Oh! and my Mum had her roots and relatives up here. So up we came, like quite a lot of other Londoners. The exodus of working-class families from London was beginning, in a gent;e way (We didn't feel like we really had no choice, at that point in time, just that we were a whole lot better-off moving north)
[actually, just noticed the report is about 20 years old! that doesn't really affect my points though. Rather it highlights another point I wanted to make, which is that anti-Islam feeling in Britain is nothing new; it's just been fast coming to a head, in recent years )
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Actually. there certainly have been genuine, widespread, pretty nasty inter-racial tensions, at times . I wouldn't want to swep that under the carpet. There were actual "race riots" in Southall , in 1979 , apparently incited by the National Front:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Kc7d5T175Q
There was a whole spate of similar riots in other towns, at around the same time. Things were pretty damned turbulent back then, in all sorts of ways, with the Economy crashing, Industry failing, and and Thatcherism getting its nasty iron grip on the country.
But the British issues with Islam have bugger-all to do with race, as my other Southall link shows. Sikhs and Hindus (who belong to the exact same ethnic group as our older, established Muslim communities) feel the same way about Islam as the whites do. And not just in Southall. We have a lot of Siks and Hindus in the Midlands too, and I talk with them quite regularly. And I read about other places.
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The poor in Britain dream of living the lifestyle of "trailer trash" in America , we really do.
I haven't been able to read through all of this yet, so I'm going to come back to it, but what is it about trailer park life that is really appealing from the Brit perspective?
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The poor in Britain dream of living the lifestyle of "trailer trash" in America , we really do.
I haven't been able to read through all of this yet, so I'm going to come back to it, but what is it about trailer park life that is really appealing from the Brit perspective?
I'm going to guess it's the cool vinyl wallpaper. :zoinks:
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The poor in Britain dream of living the lifestyle of "trailer trash" in America , we really do.
I haven't been able to read through all of this yet, so I'm going to come back to it, but what is it about trailer park life that is really appealing from the Brit perspective?
ummmm. I decided to read some articles about Americam trailer park life, just to check that my image of it is close enough to the reality not to make my answer laughable in yoUr eyeS. Actuially my image does sem to match the reality, but, what's totally gobsmacked me was some stuff about WHY americans live in trailer parks but Brits don't . I mean, you guys do seemto think we have a choice, and prefer for various reasons to live in inner city tenements instead . Whereas it mostly comes down to: there's no space in England to spread out the housing like it is a trailer park, so that's never gonna be a cheap option unless you park them in a place where local employment is virtually zero. Which is mostly the case, in deed The trailerr parks we have mostly serve as retirement villages, or holiday camps; and they're not near as cheap as the American counterparts.
I just read " limited housing options in the US for low income people. The threshold at which they're eligible for subsidised housing is much higher than in European countries so people that might live in a council house in the UK don't have that opportunity here" Actually, unless we're very lucky, we don't have that opportunity in the UK either, not any more. The local councils have long-since been constrained (by Tory Government rulings) to sell off their houusing stock, at a discount, to tenants on demand. That's led to nearly all the really habitable stock findinfg it's way into private hands (often unscupulous mortgage brokers; also used by some as a cheap enrty into the buy-to-rent market; on occasion it even leads to the tenant actually owning the place they live in) . Of course "right to buy" is a huge disincentive to building more social housing, hence the really huge shortfall in Social housing nowadays; and what's left is mostly rrally grim; the kind places nobody would want to buy, nor even live in, not for one second longer than they had to: : damp concrete tenements with excrement and piss in the stairwells, and such. Most of us are living in private rentals (scatterered through what ince used to be a council estate) nowadays and have no security of tenure. Including myself, I've ben on the council lwaiting listss since my 27-year-old son was six, re-activated my application every time we had to move on, and never, ever got odfferered anything half-way acceptable. My description, above is of one the places they offerered me. Noways, you might get offerered somnething like that on a take-it-or leave it basis if your situation is extremely desperate (meaning getting evicted tomorrow, along with young children, but only if you provably haven't " deliberately made yourself homeless" eg by failing to pay all due rent ) ; otherwise , they'l;ll most likely have nothing at all for you.
Meantime , tyhe "welfare reforms" are all-too-likely to leave benefits claimants (most of whom are actually working) with a shorfall intheir rent money. As a consequence most of the private landlord won;t even consider a tenant on welfare, nowadays, so your chances of finding half-way acceptable private housing is even slimmer. and it won;t be genuinely affordable, not even if it;'s appalling . Those "specialist" landlords know you don't have any other choic except the street , so they ask for maximuium they possibly can.
Soyou can probably see one big attraction of the trailer park, if that were an option? (And yiou can see why i put up with my mad landlady?This house is really good comparec with the alternatives. I have looked at the alternatives)
Paradoxically you have a lot more security and stabilty in those "mobile" homes, and the chance to buikld a sense of community. Working-class nglish communities barely exist, anymore; too many people get moved about too much , and your neighbours are constantly changing. I don't just because of tenants falling behind with the rent. In my area, Landlords often get rid of families to convert a place to the more-profitable student accomadation. There are all sorts of reasons why you might have to go.
Anither attraction is the rural or semi-rural lovcation of the parks, away all from the crime, the noise and the antisocial behaviour you get in inner-city areas; amnd closer to the countryside.
That website also stated being close to workplace as the reason why we "choose" to live in houses instead. Hmmm, Well I meantioned being close to the jobcentre as an attraction didn't i? But inasdmuch as industry still exists round here, it's mostly located at , or beyond the outskirts of cities and nigh-on-inaccessible by public transport,,If youdon't hace private transport, , there's not much you can do excvept hope for the best, That's one area where the big shift towards agency work has really screwed people like myself (non-drivers). You've no chance of making a regular car-sharing arrangements when neither you nor your co-workers here on a releglar , predictable basis, You might catch a lift, or manage to share a taxi, you might not. You might have to walk all the way home at 3am, as I did on a few occasiobns). But there's definitely no living near your workp[lace, not when that workplace is apt to chop and change .
I'd find America even tougher, personally, given that I just can't drive, but one other enviable thing about America from our perspective is that motoring is obviously cheaper, and even the poorest people drive, usually.
Public transport here is kaput, since it was privatised. It makes no actual attempt to meet people's actual needs, and just runs the profitable services, at the profuitable tines, at increasingly mindblowing prices.
It#s not so much a case of having limited options here, but of scratching around for possibilities, and constantly wondering if youy've finally come down to having no options left at all, yet? A trailer park in America is close enough to absolute rock bottom to feel relatively secure, methinks, without coming right down to street level
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The poor in Britain dream of living the lifestyle of "trailer trash" in America , we really do.
I haven't been able to read through all of this yet, so I'm going to come back to it, but what is it about trailer park life that is really appealing from the Brit perspective?
I'm going to guess it's the cool vinyl wallpaper. :zoinks:
Oh nooo. So, vinyl wallpaper, of all things , manages to cross the cutural divide? (emo) We're trapped! trapped! traaaapped! No escape, not even in the Land of the Free.
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Just want to say, Walkie, thank you for writing posts I want to read, about a subject that usually goes over my head.
:plus:
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Good thread. I'll add a few observations of my own if I may, as someone acutely familiar with the racial dynamics in post-industrial Northern England.
As some of you know I hail from Bradford, which could fairly be described as the Daddy of economically fucked former mill towns. Other towns with similar social and economic issues are clustered through Yorkshire and Lancashire, and have a number of common characteristics; they all suffered the severe decline of traditional heavy industry, primarily textile spinning and manufacture - the area received a high number of immigrant workers in the 1960s to work in the mills, these mostly came from rural Pakistan and Bangladesh and were predominantly Sunni muslims. Due to racist attitudes from some locals and a preference for living in close extended families - even now it is common for a street to have many families from the same village in Mirpur - a degree of self-segregation became apparent in some areas, accompanied by 'white flight' from neighbourhoods as the demographic balance shifted in areas where the newcomers settled.
During the deindustrialisation that followed in the 1980s the tensions between this group of culturally separate incomers who were now second generation, and the host communities became starker and more apparent as both white and asian workers were thrown on the scrapheap. The resulting divide can be viewed as having both a class and Islam-specific dimension - it really is an issue about culture and not race. Bradford differs from many typical mill towns in that as a large city with a long history of absorbing waves of migrants it tends to be more open to newcomers and does have a wider diversity than smaller towns such as Oldham, Burnley or Dewsbury. Bradford has an established West Indian community and eastern european (mainly Polish, Hungarian and Ukrainian, though in latter years heavily augmented by more Poles and Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians and Latvians) communities dating back to the end of WWII as well as Sikhs and Hindus in large numbers, all of which groups are reasonably well integrated. Arguably the 130,000 strong Muslim community in the district is not, as is also the case in most other Northern mill towns.
In Bradford and a number of other places in the area there have been repeated outbreaks of unrest or rioting, the last wave leading to a report by Lord Ouseley which concluded that part of the problem is the degree of separation between the British Asian muslim community and the rest of society - this 'othering' has become more apparent since 9/11 and the War on Terror - the degree of mutual suspicion and distrust between folk who increasingly don't go to school together, socialise together, or live in the same areas has a parallel with the situation in Northern Ireland. There is a strong them and us undercurrent. On a class level negative attitudes are more strongly held by those on lower incomes and with less education, who may be less likely to work alongside folk from the other side of the divide as is the case in many office environments - those of us who do work with people from all the city's communities form work friendships and often gain an insight into other cultures, so are less inclined to consider all whites or muslims as all the same and not like us. Despite this the majority of folk here both Muslim and everyone else just want to get along but the barriers to integration are large and will need some efforts to get past. If people don't get to know each other and discuss the things in each other's way of life they either misunderstand or disapprove of we'll not improve.
Back to you Walkie. :soapbox:
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Good thread. I'll add a few observations of my own if I may, as someone acutely familiar with the racial dynamics in post-industrial Northern England...
Absolutely! I was very much hoping that you would. Must add that your observations all very much apply to the post-industrial Midlands too. :plus: for that, and do feel absolutely free to add more. I see no benefit in hugging these issues to myself :LOL:
This "othering" of Muslims , as you put it, is a core factor , as pointed out out by Trevor Phillips in that documentary. (http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/04/why-do-we-pretend-that-all-muslims-are-sweet-smiley-and-integrated/) Much kudos to the guy. I think only Trevor Phillips could have gotten away with saying all that. No way could you paint him as a racist :LOL:
One thing that never seems to get a mention, in this context, is that we Brits have a healthy distrust for Religious Extremism. And whilst not all Muslims are religious extremists, it's fair to say that most religious extremists in Britain are Muslim, and they are scarcely any different from other religious extremists , except in seeming to have an highly disconcerting degree of power and influence, both within and without their comminities, and in being even more backward than most of the rest. They bang on about their horribly conservative values, not only promising hellfire, but even issuing death threats to apostates, homosexuals, loose women etc; and demanding a return to kind of laws that Britain has slowly , painfully and resolutely left behind in favour of liberal, huminitarian, egalitarian values .
Whether the views espoused by these people qualify as genuinely Islamic is actually pretty damned academic, in most people's eyes. Most people don't want a theological debate about it any more than we want a theological debate with the Jehovah's witness on our doorstep; we don't see it being fixed by theological debate. That "not a true Muslim" is used to justify (so-called) Muslim outrages againsdst other (so-called) Muslims as often as it's used by others to dissociaciate themseves from those outrages . And we non-Muslim people are really in no position to judge. If the (so-called) Muslims clerics are deeply divided on such questions, what the hell makes us think our opinion can ever be worth squat?
I happen to believe that the Cusaders were not real Christaians, but i surely wouldn't have expected a Muslim of the time to take my word for it , nor to take any comfort from the fact, in any case. We Europeans were the rampaging barbarians back then , and we all identified as Christians, thus imprinting "Christianity" as a dirty word in the mind of your average Middle Eastern person. Nowadays the boot is on the other hoof, and people are still people. We see outrages committed in the namne of Islam, and so Islam itself becomes a dirty word. That's not to actually tar all Muslims with the same broad brush, but to accept that faith plays some part in driving these people, just exactly as they claim.( I very much question such claims, personally speaking , but again my opinion on that is irrelevant. )
This big issue of screening out the terrorists which currently rivets Amnerica just pales into insignificance in British minds, as we find ourselves faced with the clearly impossible task of screening out the raving bigots from the refugees. We don't actually have a great deal of fear of terrorism here in Britain. We got bombed to hell by Nazi Germany, after all, then bombed some more by the IRA in the seventies. What we're looking at here is a much more menacing and intimate than mere bombing ; something that employs the language of "human rights" to systematically subvert human rights.
This British dislikefor traditional "Muslim" customs and values is nothing new. We've always ben concerned about the alarming frequency of forced marriage in Britain ever since the Muslims started arriving. But then, at the same time, we tended to fel that the the worst attrocities were happening "over there" and that Britain really was providing some sort of refuge, as well as a -hopefully- moderating influence.
However it all seems to be getting worse, instead. That Britain should have actually turned into a place where genital mutilation of children (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/30/female-genital-mutilation-england-fgm-girls) occurs on an industrial scale is sickening , and scary as fuck. We are clearly not in control of this thing, and neither is the liberal sector of Muslim community in control of this thing; but rather, it's gaining increasing control over us , and turning our own liberal rhetoric against us. "Freedom of religion" is turning into a value that overrides every other freedom ... just so long as the religion is Islam. (I've seen video footage of Muslim clerics , in Britain, denouncing Muslim apostates as "worse than Christians and Jews" . Those people have a significant following. Apostates live in fear of being physically attacked; and that actually does happen to some)
There's still one heckova lot of sympathy for Muslims who find themselves oppressed by their own community, but importing more and more Muslims is clearly not the solution.
When Political Correctnesss coins a new word "Islamophobia" to describe our reaction to such horrors, and sets out to silence us with slurs of "racisms", we quite natutrally feel increasinfgly alienated from the PC brigade. We tend feel that they, and we, are being taken for a ride. And not just any old ride, but a very scary ride in a clapped-out-old rollercoaster headiing for oblivion. All the world seem to have learned from European history is that bigotry has a white face;
Of course, there are and will always be racistand bigots amongst us. However, the The English working class are every bit as alert to racism and bigotry as we ever were, and we don;'t believe that it always wears a white face. Hence that weird paradox of the liberal English suddenly turning into bigots, in the eyes of the rest of the world. We haven't changed at all,in that respect we've just identified a much bigger threat to our cherished values than the various strutting little English national parties have ever been; and I'm sure that most of us sincerely hope that we're wrong.
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The poor in Britain dream of living the lifestyle of "trailer trash" in America , we really do.
I haven't been able to read through all of this yet, so I'm going to come back to it, but what is it about trailer park life that is really appealing from the Brit perspective?
ummmm. I decided to read some articles about Americam trailer park life, just to check that my image of it is close enough to the reality not to make my answer laughable in yoUr eyeS.
Unfortunately it's having the side effect of me falling even further behind on coming up with cogent responses to all this. :LOL:
Actuially my image does sem to match the reality, but, what's totally gobsmacked me was some stuff about WHY americans live in trailer parks but Brits don't . I mean, you guys do seemto think we have a choice, and prefer for various reasons to live in inner city tenements instead . Whereas it mostly comes down to: there's no space in England to spread out the housing like it is a trailer park, so that's never gonna be a cheap option unless you park them in a place where local employment is virtually zero. Which is mostly the case, in deed The trailerr parks we have mostly serve as retirement villages, or holiday camps; and they're not near as cheap as the American counterparts.
Uh, I hope you don't include me in "you guys", because then you'd be putting words in my mouth. But the space answer makes sense.
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Walkie, after reading your last post about Islam, it sounds like the density of Muslim population in Britain is significantly higher than in the USA. It's a whole different set of issues - though I think you're being disingenuous to call it "only bombing" vs "more menacing" cultural mixing. According to a brief Google search, Muslims are 0.9% of the US population vs 4.5% of the British population.
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Muslims are 0.9% of the US population .
It should be considered, muslims are racially diverse in the US, with no one race accounting for more than one third of the muslim total. While there are 3.3 million muslims in the US, also two thirds of American arabs are Christians. Not sure how that works out over there.
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Walkie, after reading your last post about Islam, it sounds like the density of Muslim population in Britain is significantly higher than in the USA. It's a whole different set of issues - though I think you're being disingenuous to call it "only bombing" vs "more menacing" cultural mixing. According to a brief Google search, Muslims are 0.9% of the US population vs 4.5% of the British population.
Yeah, one thing I want to bring out is that we do have a much hifgher density of Muslims here already, and that does make all sorts of difference.
@ Jack : much diversity amongst Muslims here too. As Dunc pointed out, the old , familiar Muslim population is predominantly Pakistani , and mostly from the Indian sub-continet ; but we've had increasing numbers coming in fom the Middle East, and Africa and Europe, That's one why it's more accurate to say "muslim communties" than the singular. (Heck, some of those people would sooner be mistaken be mistaken for Christians than mixed up with each other. :LOL:)
As for my being disingenuous: I think the Australian comedian, Adam Hills summed up the British attitude to terrorism pretty fairly in this wickedly funny monologue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XZ7M4pWSzw
He is not misrepresenting us!
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What's more, it's not just different poulations of Muslims etnically speakiing, but also different sects of Islam within the same ethnic population, Eg , in England, we recently had the case of the Pakistani Muslim shopkeeper who was murdered by another Pakistani Muslim for "disrespecting the Prophet" ; The isseue seems to be that their two different branches of Islam had two different ideas as to what "respecting the Prophet" should mean in practice. The victim's sect was particularly moderate, and he had given offence by putting up a notice wishing his Christian customers a Happy Christmas.
The crime was not that surprising to we English. What got us most was that the thing should be touted in the media as a "race crime" which is fucking laughable, and makes you wonder how many opther such crimes get mis- labelled like that? It's often impossible to figure out etnicity and religion of the assailant from crime reports in the media . If the report gives an Arabic-sounding name, we usually guess that it's a Muslim, but that's not an altogether sound assumption, is it?
Of course people want to know, but there's this misguided effort to suppress information that might lead to further prejudice against "the Muslim community", which only leads to increasing paranoia, of course, and increasing prejudice against people with Arabic names.
Also, there's the disturbing possibility that we "white trash" Brits might be getting the blame for Muslim attacks against Muslims. And no, we can't afford to have prejudice against ourselves turned up a notch, either. Arguably, we're the the biggest victims of prejudice in this country, because we're universally regarded as fair game, even by our own kind.
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Oh! A little extra note re, English people being more sanguine re. bomb threats. Well, we still find unexploded bombs left over from WWII, now and then, Just last year, they found one buried near the bottom of my street, during building works, They had evacuate a faily big (partly residential) area of the City Centre, for a day or two, whilst the bomb disposal experts worked on it. I think that kind of thing also helps to acclimatise us :LOL:
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@ Jack : much diversity amongst Muslims here too. As Dunc pointed out, the old , familiar Muslim population is predominantly Pakistani , and mostly from the Indian sub-continet ; but we've had increasing numbers coming in fom the Middle East, and Africa and Europe, That's one why it's more accurate to say "muslim communties" than the singular. (Heck, some of those people would sooner be mistaken be mistaken for Christians than mixed up with each other. :LOL:)
Diverse or not, it's still probably a vast majority, so muslim and arab can be used synonymously. It can't in the US. Used to be, talk of American muslims brought to mind a black person. Tend to think Americans are often disingenuous when speaking of muslims, and unless the topic is about religion, just assume what they really mean is Arabs when saying muslims, because that's probably what they really mean.
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@ Jack : much diversity amongst Muslims here too. As Dunc pointed out, the old , familiar Muslim population is predominantly Pakistani , and mostly from the Indian sub-continet ; but we've had increasing numbers coming in fom the Middle East, and Africa and Europe, That's one why it's more accurate to say "muslim communties" than the singular. (Heck, some of those people would sooner be mistaken be mistaken for Christians than mixed up with each other. :LOL:)
Diverse or not, it's still probably a vast majority, so muslim and arab can be used synonymously. It can't in the US. Used to be, talk of American muslims brought to mind a black person. Tend to think Americans are often disingenuous when speaking of muslims, and unless the topic is about religion, just assume what they really mean is Arabs when saying muslims, because that's probably what they really mean.
No, Pakistan used to part of india. Ethnically, Pakistanis are indian , not Arabic. We're more familiar with the Pakistanis here, but the Muslim population has, of course, become a lot more diverse in recent years. However, Muslims all over the globe tend to adopt Arabic names, so mabe I confused you with my talk of prejudice against Arabic names?
Wow! we certainly wouldn't just associate Muslims with the Middle-east here, nor black people. (Actually , our blacks were predominately Afro-Carribrean in origin until recebnt years. Hardly a Muslim amongst them, until the Africans started arriving )
You mean most Americans have absolutely no idea how very widespread Islam is?
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You mean most Americans have absolutely no idea how very widespread Islam is?
No, meant when Americans speak of Muslims, they sometimes don't seem to really be referencing a religious group.
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Oh! re, the the point about houses v trailers. I've been meaning to post a link to one of those articles about American trailer I was looking at . This is really sad and scary,
IQ, it looks like the "specialist" landlords are turning their attention to your neck of the woods now . They've figured out the same thing that our English landlords figured out long ago; you can squeeze a poor tenant til he bleeds if the next step down is the street.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/03/owning-trailer-parks-mobile-home-university-investment.
You know something I find entrepreneurs to be loathsome creatures in the main. I try not to be prejudiced against them , but they mostly act like a pack of vultures, and maybe some are just innocently buying this strange modern ethos that raises entrepenial spirit to angelic status; just trying to be "good people" ; but that innocent sort is the sort most likely to fail at being a hammer, and turn into just another a bent up nail. It takes more than "hard work" to be sucessfiul, in those terms. It takes qualities I'd rather not possess.
Most people just want autonomy really, but the roles on offer are hammer , nail, or scrapyard. so we get taught to dream of being hammers. Autonomy (or some kind of illusion of autonomy) comes with sucessful, diligent hammering , if you're lucky. I think most of we people in the northnern scrapyards never even tried to be hammers (I surely didn't, but then, Im a werido, ya klnow?) just tried to make a living and save our dreams for our spare time; not becauise we're lazy, but just because there are much better, more meaningful things to dream of and invest in than being any sort of cog in this machinery. I know, i know, that sort of thinking went out out with the dinosaurs and so did we . But there it is. I'd rather not be any sort of entrepreneur; and I'd rather they stayed away from my door and yours .
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You know something I find entrepreneurs to be loathsome creatures in the main. I try not to be prejudiced against them , but they mostly act like a pack of vultures, and maybe some are just innocently buying this strange modern ethos that raises entrepenial spirit to angelic status; just trying to be "good people" ; but that innocent sort is the sort most likely to fail at being a hammer, and turn into just another a bent up nail. It takes more than "hard work" to be sucessfiul, in those terms. It takes qualities I'd rather not possess.
Personally find people willing to take the risk of running their own business and be their own boss to be commendable. There are entrepreneurs on this forum, and view their success to be as neither hammer nor vulture. In western society where the majority of income opportunities come from corporate or government entities, succeeding as an entrepreneur is not only difficult to do but also brave.
Most people just want autonomy really, but the roles on offer are hammer , nail, or scrapyard. so we get taught to dream of being hammers. Autonomy (or some kind of illusion of autonomy) comes with sucessful, diligent hammering , if you're lucky. I think most of we people in the northnern scrapyards never even tried to be hammers (I surely didn't, but then, Im a werido, ya klnow?) just tried to make a living and save our dreams for our spare time; not becauise we're lazy, but just because there are much better, more meaningful things to dream of and invest in than being any sort of cog in this machinery. I know, i know, that sort of thinking went out out with the dinosaurs and so did we . But there it is. I'd rather not be any sort of entrepreneur; and I'd rather they stayed away from my door and yours .
Jack is simply a cog in the corporate machine, and would never risk the instability of entrepreneurship. As the sole provider for my household, suggesting there's more meaningful things to invest my daily hours as a cog, is insulting.
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suggesting there's more meaningful things to invest my daily hours as a cog, is insulting.
:hahaha:
(https://memecrunch.com/meme/6MIVS/master-data/image.png?w=500&c=1)
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:LOL:
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Most people just want autonomy really, but the roles on offer are hammer , nail, or scrapyard. so we get taught to dream of being hammers. Autonomy (or some kind of illusion of autonomy) comes with sucessful, diligent hammering , if you're lucky. I think most of we people in the northnern scrapyards never even tried to be hammers (I surely didn't, but then, Im a werido, ya klnow?) just tried to make a living and save our dreams for our spare time; not becauise we're lazy, but just because there are much better, more meaningful things to dream of and invest in than being any sort of cog in this machinery. I know, i know, that sort of thinking went out out with the dinosaurs and so did we . But there it is. I'd rather not be any sort of entrepreneur; and I'd rather they stayed away from my door and yours .
Jack is simply a cog in the corporate machine, and would never risk the instability of entrepreneurship. As the sole provider for my household, suggesting there's more meaningful things to invest my daily hours as a cog, is insulting.
You misunderstand me. I was actually saying that most of us, historically, have settled for humble, supposedly "safe" positions in the vast overarchering machinery of society (to be nails, rather than hammers)just exactly like yourself.and out of a similar sense of priorities. We'd work our shift in the factory, or our 9-5 at the office , then come home to devote our attention to the tghings that really matter. Most often that would family, but might be art, music , spirituality. Whatever. The point of working was to support and sustain the important things, not to displace them with the dream of “bettering” ourselves . We prefer to keep the "living" part in "making a living" The meaningful things in life areusually found outside the factory l or the office, not wiwithin it. So long as people’s standard of living is acceptable(and so long as their paid work isn’t vital to society and under-resourced), most people will work as hard as they need, to keep it that way, and no harder.
I was defending that value –system , which is very much under threat, I certainly didn;’t mean tio say that we’re not cogs in the machinery (except inasmuch as redundancies deny us that role), just that we ‘re only willing to invest some of our time in being cogs, not all of it, given any choice in the natter And that’s not the same thing as being “lazy” . And that there’s actually no intrinsic virtue in working extra hard to” better yourself”
I was gonna make a list of things we might see as more important (family , art, spirutuality..) but I figured that aspies who don't have kids would have a hard time relating to the usual thing of "family" being more important than work , especially given our dysfunctional family relationships :LOL:. and the other exampless looked even more controversial, one way or another; too easily dismissed as mere entertainment, or fanciful bollocks. i reckoned it was safer to let people insert whatever was meaninful to them . And you did. You implicitly cited your family as more important, if I understood you correctly? I mean somebody who works to support their family surely doesn’t think that work comes first , family second? (though we might sometimes be constrained to act as if that were so)
Except you thought I was putting that ethic down. So apologies for putting it too opaquely, as I now realise.
Maybe you don’t think that kind of value e system neds defending (Family is important, therefore work is important a means of supporting your family) But it does, around here. The work is vanishing , but the Work Ethic has simultaneously turned into one great big , over-riding virtue that bulldozes its way through everything else, family included
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Paradoxically, unemployment doesn’t mean that British people work less hard than they used to; it means that most of us work a lot harder than we used to, for ever-dimininshing returns; and the losers in that scramble to hold on to your own diminishingly thin slice of cake are faced with increasing contempt, rather than sympathy. It’s a whole lot of stick, and no carrot, with the winners hardly bettering the losers by much. I'm taking issue with the ethos that supports that…or rather practically forces it on people
The economic pressures are quite bad enough to push people to breaking point, without the corresponding social pressures
But I’m gonna break off here for a bit, because I’m doing my head in by trying to make too many points in one post :LOL:
Hope I've said enough to mitigate the sense of offence?
[PS I can see the weird typos. Some of them of arose from my flailing efforts to fix more conventional typos :LOL:. I'm clearly not up to much today. It's gone and spent ...I dunno how many hours to trying to make this post legible *wince* ]
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You misunderstand me.
Fair enough. Similar to how some people have generalizing bigoted views about people who don't work, that post seemed to assign meaningless to those who do work, and also assign poor character traits to those who work for themselves. Thanks for explaining I clearly misunderstood half of that. Personally would rather work for myself, but the risk is too high and taxes in the US for the self-employed are much higher, because someone on a payroll has an employer contributing to their social security and medicare tax. Someone on a payroll also has an employer contributing half of their medical coverage, as well as completely providing some benefits like short term disability and life insurance, with the option to buy more coverage at nominal fees.
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Tell me again: why can't we talk about Islam in the Trump thread when the guy wants to ban every Muslim on the planet from entering the US and register every single one already in the country when it seems to be fine to do it here?
Is it because you aren't a Muslim and don't live in the US, so you don't see the connection?
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Tell me again: why can't we talk about Islam in the Trump thread when the guy wants to ban every Muslim on the planet from entering the US and register every single one already in the country when it seems to be fine to do it here?
Is it because you aren't a Muslim and don't live in the US, so you don't see the connection?
We can ovbcviously talk about Islam where we like, but I figured that it's such a big issue, it might easily take over the Trump thread and this thread as well if it didn't have it's own thread. Obviously, iyou can't make clear distinctions s between British issues and Islamic issues either, and now I've gne and posted a bunch of stuff that was surely most apposite here in the Islam thread :LOL: just because that's where it came up. Sorry, i didn't mean you to feel you'd been forced out of the Trump thread, just bymy giving what appeared to bejust a little aside, adressed to myself it's own thread , before replying . I honestly believesd i was being respectful of the thread it appeared in. If If you want to post your thoughts on Islam in the Trump thread instead , or in addition , I honestly can't see what's stopping you. A thread is just a thread not a triple-locked prison cell.
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You misunderstand me.
Fair enough. Similar to how some people have generalizing bigoted views about people who don't work, that post seemed to assign meaningless to those who do work, and also assign poor character traits to those who work for themselves. Thanks for explaining I clearly misunderstood half of that. Personally would rather work for myself, but the risk is too high and taxes in the US for the self-employed are much higher, because someone on a payroll has an employer contributing to their social security and medicare tax. Someone on a payroll also has an employer contributing half of their medical coverage, as well as completely providing some benefits like short term disability and life insurance, with the option to buy more coverage at nominal fees.
I'm sure most of us would much rather work for ourselves, and I certainly didn't intend to knock the people who try that. Though, sadly, that often results in people working working insanely long hours for next--to-no -pay, doesn' it? in a flailing effort to make a sucess of it at all. So I don't much like the kind of rhertoric that encourages people to start their own business if they can't get regular work That might almost be designed to mjke the long journey down that bit more painful for people , and the "loser" taunt that little bit more stinging. People jump through all kinds of hoops, only to wind up no different, on the face of it, from all the the other jobless bums. The blood, sweat and tears leave no visible trace.
My vitriol was directed at the real entrepreneurial vultures , the ones who measure up other people like cattle in a meat market, to work out how many pounds of meat they can get before the corpse is stripped down to the bone. I mean the kind of entrepreneurs that the article I linked to was about. Also I really don't like how the "sucessful entrepreneur" is held up up as a model citizen , to be emulated. We can't all be sucessful in those terms, not even if we want to be; and the business world really is cut-throat, even at relatively humble levels. Sucess without dishonesty , expluitation etc would be insanely hard to achieve; so of course , the scum rises, just like they say. I'd rather have no part at all in that world and that value-system.
Nothing at all against working peopkle :) just those who live off their backs; and who like to call that "work ". And who really believe that the money in their bank account reflects their value as a citizen. And against the political rhetoric that makes another over-arching virtue of all that kind of thing.
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oH! just to summarise the article I linked to: it was about a group of bright-eyed bushy tailed entrepreneurial types drooling over the fact that the number of trailer parks that could bulit in some parts of America have been capped; and working out that if they bought up the exiisting parks they could easily double the rents, or better, because the people living there have nowhere else to go.
Hopefully it's obvious why I find that contemptible? And scary.
We have far too much of that sort of thing in England, already. Wouldn't wish it on you Americans
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Oh, I didn't feel forced to do anything. No worries. I just wondered what the difference was.
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oH! just to summarise the article I linked to: it was about a group of bright-eyed bushy tailed entrepreneurial types drooling over the fact that the number of trailer parks that could bulit in some parts of America have been capped; and working out that if they bought up the exiisting parks they could easily double the rents, or better, because the people living there have nowhere else to go.
Hopefully it's obvious why I find that contemptible? And scary.
We have far too much of that sort of thing in England, already. Wouldn't wish it on you Americans
Took the time to read the article and took away a slightly different impression. The mention of raising rent and renters having nowhere else to go came up twice. The first was related to a park tailored for sex offenders. It's true sex offenders have difficulty finding residence which meets the distance criteria for living away from schools and parks, however the point of rent was related to the current owner charging rates slightly below market value, so a prospective buyer would indeed consider market value when crunching numbers, and a new owner would have no obligation to maintain the property as a sex offender haven. The second mention was related to a buyer who did raise rent considerably after purchase, because the previous owner's rent was well below market value. It was also noted the new rent rate was still slightly below market value so they didn't lose any tennants, so it's not that the tenants had nowhere else to go, but rather nowhere cheaper. Property owners can be an easy target, whenever people believe they should be morally obligated to accept something less than the value of their property, or to care about the personal or financial problems of their renters.
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Agreed. Why should the property owner subsidise the renters?
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Rental properties can be a risky investment, because it takes many years to get a full return on the investment and start turning a profit.
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@Jack and Odeon. The main point of the article ( as I read it) was that the market price of these trailers was predicted to to go up, due to new limitations on building new trailer parks , hence the onrush of interest. Very realistic prediction . Here in Britain, pioperty prices certainly get ever-higher due to exess of demand over supply, though the reasons are not the same (and not altogether different either. Property developers do delay new builds , to keep prices high). Result is fewer and fewr people can afford to buy a home...nor really afford to rent one , since rents are proportionally high. Those prospective investors are looking to make a killing.
It seems we have very different ideas of what "subsidised " means?
eg, in Britain , Social housing (inasmuch as it still exists) is not what we would call "subsidised" but managed on a "not for profit" basis. The Council or H.A. take enough in rent to cover all costs (cost of building/buying , administration , repairs, the lot ) . There are no private owners nor shareholders, is all. Social housing is cheaper than private rental , but not by as much as people expect , if they imagine that it's actually subsidised.
Some confusion might arise , siince the Govt introduced "right to buy"; you might say that it really is subsidised at point of sale , as the Council is constrained to sell at considerably less than calculated market value. But that was never partt of the original idea. It's something that was bolted on to a system that previously worked perfectly well.
Conversely , one might say (and we often do) that private rentals are "subsidised" through housing benefit. Housing benefit is available to people on low incomes who couldn'tt otherwise afford to pay the full rent on available housing. Effectively, that money goes from taxpayer to landlord, so it's a subsidy to private industry , really , as are other top-up benefits. "In-work" benefits are crituicised on those grounds; but as those benefits have been available for decades now, theyve enabled wages to fall well below subsistence level (which would have been the point of introducing those benefits) . And there you get another indirect subsidy to industry ofc (in this case, to the worker's employer), Also, as the Social Housing sector gets smaller (due to "right to buy") the privarte rental sector becomes bigger and more lucrative. So conditions increasingly favour the landlords, who can, and will charge the most the can get away with(usually the maximum rent that housing benefit will normally cover...plus some extra on top of that for "risky" tenants. You therefore get a plateau at the bottom, beyond which rent drops no further, no matter how bad the housing gets ) And it really does amount to wealthy landlords getting getting richer, at the expense of people who are very much struggling, and also at the expense of the taxpayer.
I don't think that charging "less than market" is equivalent to subsidising, certainly not if the landlord can make a reasonable profit by doing so (which one would assume to be the case) and especially not if the market value has been artificially inflated. "Subsidising " in that context really means "I could make more profit if I wanted to" . That might certainly be kind, but it's stretching the term "subsidy" past breaking point. . Of course, you could call council housing "subsidised" by that defininiion , but iso long as you leave "right to Buy" out of it) it's a subsidy that nobody actually pays - not the government, not the council , not anybody. Nobody loses out, except for some hypothetical private individual whio might otherwise make a profit from it.
So maybe Americans use that term "subsidfdised " in a totally different sense than we British do? :S.
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The main point of the article ( as I read it) was that the market price of these trailers was predicted to to go up, due to new limitations on building new trailer parks
The article didn't mention new limitations on developing new trailer parks, but rather local authorities can be very reluctant to grant the development of new ones, which may or may not be new, or even true. The main point of an article can generally be found in the first few sentences. There's simply a higher demand for existing low priced housing in the current economy, and some motivational speaker is making big bucks off of seminars to teach other people how to invest in that. Now there's a slick entrepreneur. :laugh:
So maybe Americans use that term "subsidfdised " in a totally different sense than we British do? :S.
The American didn't mention subsidies, but from what's been written it seems very similar here. There are programs which property owners can apply to receive government funds and then rent at lower rates to low income, elderly and disabled. There's government owned public housing which individuals can apply, and also a housing voucher program for welfare recipients to use as rent payments outside of government housing.
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^ Ah. Ok :)
some motivational speaker is making big bucks off of seminars to teach other people how to invest in that. Now there's a slick entrepreneur. :laugh:
indeed! :lol1:
The American didn't mention subsidies,
I saw a mention of "subsidised" British council housing snmewhere near the bottom . Apart from which , Odeon used the word:
Agreed. Why should the property owner subsidise the renters?
he isn't American, mind, is he? but I kinda lumped him in, since he was supporting your argument (possibly not very fair of me :LOL: ) And it saved the extra faff of writing "Americans and Swedes" (my little labour-saving ideas always seem to go pear -shaped like this *sigh*)
but from what's been written it seems very similar here. There are programs which property owners can apply to receive government funds and then rent at lower rates to low income, elderly and disabled. There's government owned public housing which individuals can apply, and also a housing voucher program for welfare recipients to use as rent payments outside of government housing.
sounds more complicated. but yeah: various schemes for getting public money into landlord's pockets. What bugs me about all that is that some people scream blue murder about poor people living off welfare, but they don't mind so much when the rich people do. It would surely be a more cost-effective use of taxpayer's money if the authorities consistently acted as landlord, but the right wing just don't like that idea for some reason.
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It would surely be a more cost-effective use of taxpayer's money if the authorities consistently acted as landlord,
The voucher program is a good idea, because it not only gives the recipient the option to live outside of government housing, but also takes care of people in areas where government or subsidized housing might not be readily available.
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It would surely be a more cost-effective use of taxpayer's money if the authorities consistently acted as landlord, but the right wing just don't like that idea for some reason.
Why would it be more cost-effective?
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It would surely be a more cost-effective use of taxpayer's money if the authorities consistently acted as landlord, but the right wing just don't like that idea for some reason.
Why would it be more cost-effective?
Even if it were, it probably wouldn't matter, at least not here. Don't know about other places, but the US learned it's lesson in thinking government controlled housing projects were the end all solution to low income housing. Public housing projects segregated the poor within their community and created hot spots for crime, drugs, and gang activity. The federal government can also sometimes suck at managing things, and apparently real-estate is no exception. Many of the original large housing projects were torn down years ago, and some are still being torn down now because they fell so deeply into disrepair, so cost-effective probably not. Modern day public housing efforts are now peppered into the community, and rather than being government owned/operated, they're projects where the government is working in conjunction with local property developers by means of subsidy programs.
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It would surely be a more cost-effective use of taxpayer's money if the authorities consistently acted as landlord,
The voucher program is a good idea, because it not only gives the recipient the option to live outside of government housing, but also takes care of people in areas where government or subsidized housing might not be readily available.
Actually, that does sound good . You have to remember though that i'm speakling for a population that's hugely resentful about our loss of social housing, and have found the alternative (in Britain, that is) to be utterly awful in numerous respects. Not that we ever really liked the council estates :LOL: there was a lot of room for improvemnent in what we used to have, but replacing it with (effectively) sunsidised private housing was by no means the solution , nor does it even imnprove those erstwhile council estates. eg in cases the housing was badly constructed and riddled with damp, to the point that it should have ben condemned in the eightess, same housing is still standing, amostly still owned by the council ofc, and still occupied by underprivileged families, living in a srtate of hopelssness, engenderered by low wages, unemployment and bleak surroundings. Slum clearance has pretty mucvh ground to a halt . And where it still occurs, the old housing is replaced with non-affordable private housing, There's a princuiple that new builds must must include "affordable" housing, but that concept is relative, and irrelevant to slum-dwellers. We can now count ourselves "lucky" if we can get the worst housing on those estates; most of most of us make do with bottom end of the private market, which is odten much worse, always mnore expensive,; and maybe worst of all we're on insecure short-tem tenancies , not the long rterm, secure tenancies that social housing offers... or rather, it used to offer. I 've heard that's also changing, now, in the wake of Housing Bennefit reforms, which leave too many tenants unable to keep up with their rent. . Not even the housing associations are coming up with a better solution to that problem than eviction.
I say "we" because I actually lived on one of those estates in the eighties, in a misbegotten concrete tenmant that was so fucking ghastly that the residents were running round excitely, whooping for joy , when the rumour went round that it was going to be knocked down. Same building still stands. The surrounding housing (which is mostly considerably better) has been patchily sold off, so the estate is now more mixed economically, but that doesn't amount to any sort of improvement for anyone.
You can perhaps, therefore understand my cynism , when presented with a pretty-sounding alternative, involving the private sector? I think such schemes could amount to imnprovements , if sincerely motivated, sensibly managed, and designed to supplement, rather than displace Social Housing. But what we;ve actually had , here in in Britain, is a sucession of trojan horses from a right-wing government who are clearly out to put as much public money and as much public property into private hands as possible, regardless of how much misery that causes.
That said, I can believe that things might actually be better in America, in many ways. So far as I can see, America has always been structured round right-wing econonomic principles . Not good, IMO, but it seems to result in various institutionalised counterbalances (eg by charities and local governments) which Britain lacks. I've often been surprised at how comparatively well -off the American poor are (in some ways, in siome places) Over here, we'ce been trained to to be grateful for "not being born in America" :LOL: as much as for "not being born in the third World"
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It would surely be a more cost-effective use of taxpayer's money if the authorities consistently acted as landlord, but the right wing just don't like that idea for some reason.
Why would it be more cost-effective?
Even if it were, it probably wouldn't matter, at least not here. Don't know about other places, but the US learned it's lesson in thinking government controlled housing projects were the end all solution to low income housing. Public housing projects segregated the poor within their community and created hot spots for crime, drugs, and gang activity. The federal government can also sometimes suck at managing things, and apparently real-estate is no exception.
We had exactly the same problems here, compounded (or you might say largely created) by a flyrry of building in the fifties and sixties, using untried and misguided architectural principles. It wouldn't be fair to blame the Gocvernment for that though, as Social Housing was entirely under the control of the Local Authorities.
Those mistakes were being put right, by slow degrees. Our best idea was the Housing Association, which is an inependent charity essentially, performing same role as the Councils , but mostly buying up private housing to transform into Social Housing (though, increasingly, they were building housing too) That's only going pear-shaped due to the Government imposing same destructive rulings on the Housing Association as on the Local Councils. They are now being forced to sell their houses back to the private sector, rather than expand that operation.
In the meantime, the local Authirities became so low on housing stock that they have aquired the right to allocate Housing Associan properties, just as if they were Council properties. Therefore, all in all, it's a very much eroded distinction.
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It would surely be a more cost-effective use of taxpayer's money if the authorities consistently acted as landlord, but the right wing just don't like that idea for some reason.
Why would it be more cost-effective?
Given that most Social Housing tenants would be dependant on Welfare to some degree...
(or rather should be, given that it's meant to house the poorest peope. And the pooresrt people, these days are dependant on Welfare, in some large measure, even if working full-time. In actuality, it's far from unknown for some professional couple, for instance, to be living in social housing, given that young professionals often can't afford to buy theirown homes,either, not at present-day prices; and the option to buy the social housing after living there for a few years is highly attractive. So they put themselves on the waiting lists, like everybody else, and sometimes get lucky. Plus, anomalies can happen in all sorts of ways, what with people's circumstances changing. But I think most of us are on the waiting lists, these days, often for 10-20 years. It;'s a bit of lottery whether you ever become eligible in any meaninfful sense of the term ; your position in the queue is just one deciding factor amonst several )
...OK, umm, given that, and given that those same people are still dependant on Welfare when they can;t get social housing and have to rent privately instead, then obviously, those Welfare payments then go to private landklords, who are not doing thos out of the goodness of their hearts, they want a profit! Therefore an excess of welfare is paid out, compared with the situation of all those tenants living in not-for-profit in Social Housing It's hard to calculate how much of an excess that actually is, since it all has a knock-on -effect on the private sector, But, in any case, it's got to be pretty damned significant, right? It's got to result in bigger-than-necessary Welfare payments.
In any case, the amount of Housing Benefit being shelled out these days has ben used (very disingenuosly) to back up the "lazy scrounger" rhetoric. If Joe Public is managing (by the skin of his teeth) to get by without claiming Housing Benefit, he wil all-to-easily assume that the people who claim it are all, or at least mostly, unemployed. And that, in turn, hasd been used to justify Housing Benefit reforms , which leave his neighbours unable to keep up with their rent. It's all very nasty, very cynical stuff, this social manipulation.
You get some interesting views from the bottom-of-the-heap. I sometimes feel privileged , in a way, because I really don't think I'd ever have understood what was going on otherwise, or even taken near so much of an interest. I used to think "I'm an acedemic sort of person. i'll leave thinking about the social issues to people who are qualified to have an opinion on things like that. I just don't want to study Economics, Sociology and stuff". But when you're hard-up-againsts those issues all the time, you can't actually help but think about them.