So do you want the houses built or not?

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The National Housing Federation (Nat Fed) is in a funk about the government's housing strategy - no surprise there. But one of their worries is about the renegotiation of s106 agreements to reduce the proportion of "affordable" houses built as part of individual schemes:

The housing strategy, which Mr Cameron described as a ‘radical’ way to ‘get Britain building again’, estimates that there are 82,000 homes in stalled schemes across England which would benefit from renegotiation with developers.

Of these 82,000 homes, 16,000 would have been affordable, according to the National Housing Federation - the same number of homes the government hopes to see built through a separate £400 million ‘Get Britain building’ investment fund to kick-start frozen developments.

The NHF said the policy, which will undergo consultation, was likely to force councils to scrap affordable housing obligations to get stalled schemes moving.

The question - one that ministers have answered and the Nat fed hasn't - is do we want the stalled schemes unstalling or are we happy to wait until the market recovers enough for developers to recover the margin lost from having to build those "affordable" homes?

The ministers want the houses built. Does the Nat fed?

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...more misleading obesity claims and some outright nonsense from British Heart Foundation

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Now I don't want to be boring but you can't make the assumption that the typical diet of a teenager will either remain typical throughout their subsequent life or lead to obesity. Yet that is precisely the scare story that the British Heart Foundation are peddling:

Obesity treatment in the UK could become more widespread in the future due to the unhealthy diet of this generation of children.

This is the main conclusion from new research by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), which conducted a survey on the eating habits of 2,000 secondary school pupils.

According to the results, the average youngster is consuming one fizzy drink, one chocolate bar, one packet of crisps and one bag of chewy sweets every day.

And of course more and more of these children are now "obese":

Data collected as part of the Health Survey for England shows that in 2008 the rate of child obesity in children aged two to ten was 13.9 per cent -the lowest reported figure since 2001 - compared with 15.5 per cent in 2006 and 2007 and 17.3 per cent in 2005.

Presumably, the kids are stocking up on the fatty stuff only once they pass 10?

Despite the government ignoring the anti-obesity lobby's urgent suggestions for traffic light labelling on food and suchlike, the latest figures show that obesity amongst men has fallen to 22% and the female obesity rate has fallen to 24%.

So we have slightly thinner children and slightly thinner parents - it's just the teenagers who are fat!

Yet the senior dietitian from BHF thinks all these children will die younger than their parents - perhaps the most misleading, disingenuous piece of scaremongering going:

"This generation of children may not live longer than their parents due to the implications of their lifestyle on levels of obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease,"

People like this should be held to account for this sort of statement - they have no evidence at all to support the contention as average lifespans continue to rise year on year.

 

So there has to be a complete reverse in this trend - as well as a reverse in similar declines in childhood deaths, deaths in young adulthood and deaths in middle age. Or else this "dietitian" is simply trying to scare us (and the government) into handing over lots of cash so she and her fellow new Puritans can have a whole career nannying us about what we eat. 

I think that's about the sum of it really!

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Nick Clegg is wrong about black students....

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...but sadly he completely misrepresents the educational achievements of Britain's ethnic minorities:

What Mr Clegg is claiming:

Nick Clegg will today warn that hundreds more young black men are in jail than at top universities, in an explosive attack on race relations in Britain.

And what the proper facts say:

Based on detailed analysis of both the Office of National Statistics’ Labour Force Survey and the Higher Education Statistics Agency’s ‘HESA Student Record’, the report, ‘Race into Higher Education’, sets out how almost one in six (16.0%) of UK university students are from a Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) background. This is up from 8.3% in 1995-96, the year in which Business in the Community founded Race for Opportunity. This increase is virtually in line with the growth in the BAME population from 7.7% of 18 to 24 year olds in 1995-96 up to 14% in 2007-08.

Even if we assume that the Russell Group universities do less well - say 10% from BAME communities - that's still 16,000 black students. If they achieve at 16%, that's over 25,000 black students - more that the 22,000 black people in our prisons.  The UK's student population as a whole is well over 2 million - meaning that there are at least 400,000 black students. This is four times the size of the entire prison population.

So Nick's just using carefully crafted statistics to mislead us. Typical Liberal Democrat!

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The international market for labour is a fact...

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Often - especially when matters of pay and tax are discussed by left-wing political types - the competitive international market for highly skilled labour is dismissed as some sort of figment dreamt up by those with the fat salaries. Well think again folks:

The survey of HR leaders and senior business executives from 140 organisations worldwide found that 88% of respondents believed that global mobility needed to be more integrated into core HR processes - such as the talent agenda - and act as a strategic partner to the business.

Alignment between global mobility functions and talent programmes could become an even more important issue in the near future, with three-quarters (75%) of organisations anticipating that the number of internationally mobile employees in their workforce will increase over the next three to five years.

An international market for labour - and one that's growing.

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No, sir, councillors are not part of the voluntary sector

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Mind you it rather explains a lot about the attitude of the civil service to local government. One mostly of ignorance:

Speaking at the local infrastructure body Navca’s annual conference in London yesterday (22 November), David Prout, director-general for localism at the Communities and Local Government department, said there should be greater recognition of the volunteering efforts undertaken by many of the country’s 20,000 councillors. Prout said they deserved to be regarded as part of the voluntary sector.

This is nonsense on stilts - councillors are elected representatives. You know, like MPs and MEPs. We are part of the formal structures of governance in England - there is no objective difference between a humble parish councillors and David Cameron in this respect.

For sure the great majority of councillors in England - all those parish and town councillors - do it for nothing but that does not change their formal position as decision-makers. Undertaking something voluntarily does not, however, make you part of the "voluntary sector". After all most of the work in that sector is actually done by paid workers not by volunteers.

And frankly councillors don't need patronising by self-important, overpaid civil servants.

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It's not Unity if you achieve it through bullying....

Raise your banners high
Strength to strength and line by line
Unity must never die
Raise your banners high

Firstly – before I dive into the politics – a plug – folk legend Martin Carthy will be launching Bradford’s celebration of (mostly leftie) political song at the Topic Folk Club on Thursday. Sadly, I won’t be there as I’m already double-booked that evening. All the details of Raise Your Banners can be found here.

Next I shall speak of scabs, blacklegs and the evils of the political bully.

Regardless of the emotion, the history and the passion – the things that are celebrated in these songs. Despite the cry for unity and the desperation of the cause....

...you have a right to withdraw your labour, to strike. It is a right hard won by men and women in times past. It is a right cherished by everyone – a notion of liberty, if only group liberty.

But you have no right to bully, assault, ostracise, condemn or otherwise mistreat another person because they choose not to go on strike. 

That is their choice – their right - and if you use violence to prevent that choice, to remove that right, you are no better than those you condemn for removing or reducing workers’ rights.  You are no better that the fascist thugs you condemn.

There are no scabs, no blacklegs – just men or women who made a different choice from you. Men or women exercising their rights in a free land.

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Guinness really is good for you!

Not Guinness

The moderate consumption of beer provides a health benefit:

Researchers at Italy's Fondazione di Ricerca e Cura combined several different studies conducted in the last few years that allowed them to explore the possible link between beer drinking and cardiovascular disease, with a data set of over 200,000 people. They found that regular, moderate beer drinking carries almost exactly the same health benefit that has previously been demonstrated for wine consumption, as moderate beer drinkers enjoy a 31% reduced risk of cardiovascular disease compared to non-drinkers. The best combination, they discovered, was drinking slightly more than an English pint's worth of beer containing 5% alcohol each day.

Now when will that be a headline on the BBC? And do note that the level of consumption required is pretty close to those “dangerous” levels warned about by the New Puritans!

h/t Dick P

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