Clive
p.s. 'I have a friend' whose niece was born in England ('ethnic English' parents, grand parents, great grand parents etc) moved to France as a child, now a French national, given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Father from ex. African colony. Does that make said baby black/white, African, French, European, English or all of the above? Don't ask me, just one example of how the world has become a ...
@Lynne - sorry, no idea how these things are accurately defined, can probably mean almost anything you want it to. probably best left to the daily mail or the 'more or less' programme to get 'definitive answers'!! I think the wider point with respect to housing demand is that UK population growth is already 'written on the wall' to hit around 80million by 2050 whether by in-shore 'baby ...
Ask anyone in the Czech Republic or Slovakia who suffered 44years of Russian occupation and I can promise you that they will tell you it was worse than under the Nazi occupation. Make no mistake, Putin is out on a self declared mission to wrestle back as much of the ex-USSR as he possibly can. He doesn't need excuses, though of course seeks to find handy ones. As wise 'Mutti Merkel' reportedly ...
Yes, yawn, yawn, but tonight's semi on BBC3 at 20.00 is sure to tell you a whole lot more about the temperature in Europe than just it's taste in music. For starters there is Ukraine, Russia, Estonia and Latvia on the same platform (will sparks fly?) and if that's not enough excitment there is always the 'bearded lady' from that classy country Austria to promote tolerance between them.
Mark Twain summed it up very well many years ago with his advice to, 'Buy land, they aren't making it anymore.'
'It was reported that "the Mafia" is made up of a group of children who had also allegedly drawn up a hit list of six teachers they wanted to target. Following the incident a letter was reportedly sent out to parents at the primary school explaining what had happened and telling them that it had been reported to the police. Neither of the two boys is believed to have been arrested ...
It was on Radio 4 at the weekend - I got the impression that the police were involved but could be wrong. Irrespective - my opinion is that any pupil (or staff!) action with a serious H&S threat must be handled by the police. Dealing with it internally just down plays it's seriousness to other pupils, plus schools have a vested interest to try to 'bury bad news' - which in my day was all too ...
I get that councils get money from central g'ovt for building houses but does central g'ovt or the public purse more generally benefit in any significant way from the windfall increase in land value when permission is granted? Would be interesting for someone to do the maths from Lynne's comprehensive list of applications. Simplistically for me, the very long term council tax rise on my house ...
So on the one hand councils downgrade public services, while at the 'stroke of a pen' in the other hand can turn pennies into pounds granting planning permission. Something must be very badly mis-firing with the system if they struggle so much to balance the books?!
The thing I don't understand is that with house prices being so ridiculously high, how is it not more possible to utilise brown field sites more. In particular to heavily skew the council payments to this effect? Looking again at the above picture, the thing that strikes me, is that there would seem to be little to no chance of any trees ever being allowed to grow between the houses to soften ...
