Apparently spending money isn't a good way to do stimulus

This is a good lesson for us all to learn in two different ways:

Dame Meg Hillier, Labour MP and chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: "It cost the taxpayer £50 million just to administer the pointlessly rushed-through Green Homes Grant scheme, which delivered a small fraction of its objectives, either in environmental benefits or the promised new jobs.

"We heard it can take 48 months - four years - to train the specialists required to implement key parts of a scheme that was dreamed up to be rolled out in 12 weeks.

"It was never going to work at this time, in this way, and that should have been blindingly obvious to the department. That it was not is a serious worry. I am afraid there is no escaping the conclusion that this scheme was a slam-dunk fail."

Well, yes, and let that be a lesson to all those Green New Deal enthusiasts. Actually getting competent workfolk on site and doing something useful is not something governments are good at. No matter how the effort is financed - say, green or peoples’ quantitative easing - it’s the people making hammer hit nail that are the actual scarce resource.

There is also this:

A government spokesperson said: "The Green Homes Grant voucher scheme was designed as a short-term economic stimulus and was delivered during a global pandemic.

Government actually trying to spend money isn’t a good way of doing stimulus. Don’t forget that, assuming we want to do any stimulus at all, the aim is just to get the money out there. To increase that gap between government revenues from taxation and government spending. That increase in the deficit is the stimulus.

Rather than fiddling with bad - OK, lousy - plans to create some lovely little project government actually has two effective and efficient ways of gaining that stimulus. One is simply to give money to people - as the US showed with their possibly overenthusiastic lockdown stimulus checks. The other is to stop taking money off people. Simply cut taxes to produce that stimulus. As Keynes himself once pointed out, cutting national insurance will appear in the next paycheque, will be of a size that would be stimulatory. There’s almost certainly nothing faster as stimulus than doing that.

So why don’t we try to learn that lesson. We want stimulus? Don’t get government to try to do anything, just get it to take less money off folks. Tax cuts, not spending increases, don’t try to get government to fertilise the economy from one end of the alimentary canal just stuff less into the maw in the first place.

If you're calorie counting lettuce then you've a severe problem there

We’ve muttered the odd bit and piece about how we tend not to trust many new measurements. Not just £ s d or the way in which a silver dollar actually had some value, nor this newfound again freedom to use lbs as the French continued to use livres. Those old ways were probably just more culturally comforting than anything else. We take issue rather more with some of the newly constructed measures of things.

For example, once it became obvious that actual poverty was conquered in Britain the concept of relative poverty was brought to the fore. We’ve whine about how people adamantly refuse to note that the age profiles of the varied ethnicities are different - it’s therefore no surprise at all that ethnic representations in populations where age is a factor differ from the portions in the general population.

We think we’ve found a new one to shout about:

Given that poorer UK households would have to spend nearly 40% of their income to buy food for a healthy diet, according to recent data from the Food Foundation,

That strikes us as being an absurdity. Just on the mere face of it. Median household income is £30,800, poverty is less than 60% of that, so say the edge of poverty is £355 a week. 40% of that is £142 a week. And given that the average weekly food bill for a household is £60 we do not believe for a moment that original calculation. It’s nonsense, but why is it nonsense?

The answer being that the Food Foundation is using a method stupid even by the gormless standards of the usual wokeist campaign groups.

They measure the price of foods by their calorie contents. So, lettuce is a bad way to get calories - however good it is in other ways - therefore it’s expensive by the calorie. Potatoes are cheap by the calorie. OK, that’s fine in real life as we go gain our calories from those cheap and calorie dense foods and eat the other stuff for the other things in them, minerals, vitamins, flavour and so on.

The Food Foundation only measure food costs by the calorie. And then says that because calorie light foods are more expensive by the calorie then so is a balanced and healthy diet. Entirely missing that balanced part of course, where we get calories from where calories are good to get from and vitamins equally and so on. They really do price their diet as if we eat the lettuce (or broccoli, cabbage, whatever) as a calorie source.

Actually, that’s not just stupid or gormless that’s mad. But that’s where that expense of the healthy diet number comes from. An entirely insane calculation of the cost of that healthy diet. One in which they are calorie counting lettuce - and if you’re doing that you should realise there’s something severely wrong.

But here’s what really worries us. As we can see here this is being referred to as reasonable by others. It’s now that we should be objecting, before this becomes a commonplace. So, we’re complaining.

The Food Foundation’s calculation of the cost of a healthy diet is flat out insane. Stop using it.

As ever, it's the customer who really benefits from a transaction

We don’t have to go far to find folks who insist that every transaction means the customer is being ripped off - look the supplier is making a profit, that must be evil! These people rather missing the point, in a voluntary transaction that consumer must also be gaining something they value.

As it happens we can even assign rough values to who gets the most out of this. Profits are, at most, some 10% of GDP (after we subtract depreciation etc). The usual calculation of the consumer surplus - the amount of value that consumers get that they don’t have to pay for - is some 100% of GDP. A very crude comparison indeed but the weighting seems to be 10:1 in favour of those consumers.

We also find ourselves with an example out in the wild:

The eurozone’s most powerful banking groups have demanded long-term access to London’s multi-trillion dollar derivatives trading market in a fresh blow for Brussels’ plans to seize business from the City.

In a joint letter, finance trade bodies said that the bloc faces a “cliff edge” unless it extends exemptions that allow trades by European Union institutions to take place in the UK and other major markets.

The City does indeed provide varied services to companies across Europe and the world. The City makes a fat income from doing so, huzzah for the City. The EU has been muttering for decades that perhaps all that value generation should instead be within other countries - the City as pirates sailing off with all those profits. But when push comes to shove look what happens.

The customers insist that access to the value they gain is far more important than who gets the relatively trivial - trivial to the value those consumers of the services gain - profits from the process.

It’s the customer who benefits from voluntary transactions which is why said customers, consumers, partake of them.

What Migrant Crisis?

Marsham Street 

“I’m so glad you were able to accompany me to my new ministry, Humphrey.” 

“My pleasure, Minister.” 

“You know, Humphrey, I’ve come to regard your advice as positively Socratic; Platonic dialogues and all that.” 

“You are too kind, Minister, but that is beyond me.  The civil service has long since ceased recruiting people who know about such things.” 

“Yes indeed, back to business.  Quite a conundrum: these migrant chappies crossing the channel.” 

“More than 23,000 such migrants have arrived already this year compared with 8,500 in the whole of last year and your predecessor was panicking, sorry, expressing mild concern, then.” 

“Why do these people want to leave La Belle France anyway?  My wife and I often motored around there in the summer.  Picnic lunches bought in their charming covered markets and the Michelin star dinners are absolutely cracking.  The weather is better too.” 

“If I may say so, Minister, the camps in the Pas de Calais do not receive many Michelin stars.” 

“Then they should nick a few bicycles.  I believe there are over 270,000 job vacancies in France.” 

“That may be so, but they don’t speak French and they would need identity cards, proofs of right to work and bank accounts, just for a start.  And, as the French point out, they really, really want to come to Britain.  They say the UK’s ‘pull factor’ is caused by us and it’s up to us to eliminate it.” 

“The fact remains, Humphrey.  That we coughed up another £55M in July to stop the crossings and they have just gone up.  The French police simply watch.”

“True but the French say they have spent €217M and prevented 60% of attempted crossings.” 

“Passez-moi un morceau de sel.  After they watch them on the beach, they have to fish them out of the water when they launch because, according to your newspaper,  ‘any attempt to stop the dinghies [is] too dangerous because of the risk of panic or sudden movements that could capsize the vessels.’  So if we push them back to French waters, they would have to rescue them?” 

“Unfortunately, Minister, Channel Rescue, an organisation founded last year to ensure the safety of migrants, has brought a legal action against our home secretary claiming that pushing back is ‘life-threatening, inhumane and unlawful’.” 

“As I see it, Humphrey, Monsieur Micron is easily offended.  He regards any offer of help as patronising.” 

“Unfortunately, M. Macron shares with our own beloved leader a remarkable capacity for over-looking inconvenient facts.  Mr Johnson says the Northern Irish Protocol should be disregarded because he never really meant it and M. Macron says exactly the same about Frenchmen fishing in UK home waters.” 

“Two tits for two tats, you might say.” 

“I certainly would not, Minister.” 

“What are we going to do with all these rubber boats we must have collected?” 

“I hoped you would ask me that, Minister.  It may be time soon to share our plan.  We should agree with the French to make the manufacture, sale or distribution of these boats illegal from any source other than the sole French nominated supplier and labelled ‘Pas pour Hauts-de-France’.  We give boats to the French government for free and they get the profits.” 

“Jolly good that, Humphrey.  And we can send loads of loyal Tory voters over to stick knives into any rubber boats they find on the beaches of the Pas-de-Calais.” 

“Except fishing boats, of course, Minister.” 

“We don’t have to worry about them, Humphrey.  They’ll all be fishing in the Channel Islands.  Talking of islands, why don’t we do as the Australians do.” 

“That does have merits, Minister.  Anyone who the UN certifies as a genuine refugee is ‘authorised’, i.e. gets a visa to enter the country and has his or her right to remain accessed there.  According to the Australian government ‘Anyone who attempts an unauthorised boat voyage to Australia will be turned back to their point of departure, returned to their home country or transferred to another country’.  In practice, they don’t want to go back and other countries won’t have them, so they are dumped in a so-called processing centre on the island of Nauru.  Once the word got around the migrant community, they stopped going to Australia.”  

“It’s got to be legal, Humphrey, if the Australians have been doing it for eight years without trouble.  All we need is a processing centre on a remote island like St Helena, Macron would like that, or Ootsta.” 

“Ootsta?” 

“Humphrey, really!  Every school-boy knows Ootsta, or Out Stack.  It’s the northernmost place in the UK, an island 260 miles north of Aberdeen.  There’s no land between Ootsta and the North Pole.  Ideal migrant processing centre.  It would give those from hot countries the opportunity to cool their ardour and the locals wouldn’t complain, ‘cos there aren’t any.” 

“Minister, I fear I need to advise you of another point of view.  The number of boat people really is not that great in the scheme of things.  Many of them are useful trained people, doctors, nurses, fruit and vegetable pickers and lorry drivers.  Just the people we need.  We are, these days, critically short staffed in many areas.” 

“That’s only because, according to the Governor of the Bank of England, the PM is, according to some, Dagenham and has added up to another 300,000 to the public payroll.” 

“Dagenham?” 

“It’s five minutes beyond Barking.  Yes, there would be useful people along with terrorists, scroungers and lay-abouts.  Only the other day, I heard a boat migrant who has become a dentist on the Today programme.  Clearly he’s filling a gap.  Our department does not, Humphrey, have a great record in sifting the wheat from the riff-raff.  We had boatloads of people from Jamaica 60 years ago and we still don’t know who should be here and who shouldn’t.” 

“Minister, you are missing, if I may say so, the subtlety of my point.  At the moment, everyone is blaming the Home Office for not dealing with this so-called migrant crisis.  What I’m suggesting is that we give all the arrivals, except the obvious undesirables, identity cards and work permits.  Between them, they would have to look after the children that came with them.  Then we would transfer them to the Department of Work and Pensions as it would then become their problem, not ours.  With the DWP in charge, what could possibly go wrong?” 

“Congratulations, Humphrey.  You’ve cracked it.”

So, governments are good at that long term planning thing, are they?

Governments, in the sense of a something that rules over a territory, are not immortal - radical changes have regularly happened over history. But they’re as close to being so as anything we have in a human society. This leads some to conclude that government should be planning the long term things because that institution is the only one that faces the correct long term incentives.

The more rational among us note that while this could be conceptually true that might not be quite the way it works out:

Andy Cowper of Health Policy Insight points to the decision in 2006 to fix a short-term funding crisis by slashing training budgets, which contributed to staff shortages that still plague the NHS.

Government is run by politics, which means politicians. Whose time horizons never do extend to further than the next election - at that time some 4 years away. At which point they take a decision about a 7 year (minimum, for doctors) process with 50 year implications on the basis of rather shorter term considerations than either of those.

We’re not going to drop the democracy bit so the short term pressures aren’t going to go away. We’re left, instead, with the obvious truth that we can’t trust the government process to do the long term planning so we shouldn’t ask it to.

Which does, helpfully, get rid of a lot of the things that governments cock up and always will, for as we know, incentives matter. Taking long term decisions for short term reasons is just never going to work out well, is it?

Possibly trivial but also rather the point

Given that we English have been consuming mince pies since the return of the first Crusaders you’d think we might have got them right by now. But no:

Britons are starting Christmas early, with sales of mince pies on track to top £100m amid a fierce supermarket bake-off.

The popularity of the mince pie is rivalled only by pigs in blankets at Christmas and this year a welter of new flavours, including cookie-style and plant-based pastries, are on the menu as stores seek to appeal to younger taste buds.

Even with the thick end of a millennium of experience the experimentation continues.

This of course being entirely trivial, there’s no need to keep playing with such a minor issue.

Except, equally of course, that this is the entire point of our basic socioeconomic system. What we can do changes over time. What it is that people desire to have done changes over time. We might imagine, for example, that the Holy War on sugary drinks has left those young desirous of something less cloyingly sweet. Or that the exigencies of the modern world have left them requiring a slug of gin (one flavour being tested out there) with their tea and sweetie.

The free part of markets means that anyone can try anything they wish. The markets part means that those who desire that experiment may have it. Capitalism means that those who purvey something desired make money thus providing the incentive for that free part of the market back at the start. We end up in successive iterations of experiment and knowledge gathering over what, among the things that can be done, people desire to have done. The world gets that infinitesimally bit better each and every day as the process plays out.

Free market capitalism also allows the most ghastly mistakes (note to Americans, no, really, just no) but that’s also part of the experimentation process.

Yes, OK, mince pies are indeed trivial. But the point about free market capitalism is that it does this to everything, all the time. Which is why it all works.

So, why are they changing the measurement system?

We have a little foible, which is that we think measurement is important. This has a corollary, which is that we always wonder what people are trying to do when they change the measurement system. It’s even possible that they’re making the measurement better although that’s not always so.

Consider that move from measuring poverty, actual deprivation, to worrying about relative poverty, or inequality. Clearly this was simply because actual deprivation had been beaten - as Barbara Castle pointed out in 1959 - and what’s a redistributive leftism if the moral imperative of the actually poor has already been dealt with? Invent some other reason for that same old policy of taking everything off those who have more.

At which point:

The term “BAME” should be scrapped as it “erases identities”, NHS-backed research has concluded.

The NHS Race and Health Observatory launched a four-week consultation with the public in July on how best to collectively refer to people from black, Asian and minority ethnic groups.

The independent body, set up and supported by the NHS to tackle health inequalities, has formally committed to never use the blanket acronym after feedback to its consultation said it was not representative.

The Observatory said it has become the norm in public policy to use initialisms to refer to a "hugely diverse" group of people, but that renewed scrutiny has been spurred on by the Black Lives Matter movement.

It said terminology that "crudely conflates" different groups "does not just erase identities, it can also lead to broad brush policy decisions that fail to appreciate the nuance of ethnic inequality in the UK".

You might call us cynics here although we prefer the name realists. Some ethnic groups are failing to perform their allocated roles of suffering under the pervasive and institutionalised racism of this country. Calling into doubt that diagnosis of a pervasive and institutionalised racism. This is becoming so obvious that the wheels are about to come off the handcart. So, let’s change the name, the system of measurement, so the bandwagon can roll on.

Hmm, perhaps you should be calling us cynics at that.

Indeed so, whither society?

The Guardian asks us to ponder the nature of society:

According to the Reagan-Thatcher worldview, there is no such thing as society. There are only families, who look after one another, and individuals, who participate in markets. The idea that government is the solution to people’s problems rests on a mistaken belief in the existence of society. This mistaken belief….

On the same day The Guardian praises a certain part of society:

The group was originally focused on providing necessities during the early months of the pandemic, such as help with shopping, collecting prescriptions or providing reliable Covid information. Its remit has since expanded – members now share food and festivals, pool DIY tools, brainstorm measures to tackle unscrupulous landlords and speeding cars, and tend to a community garden. When I met some of the group recently, one member, Helene, 50, told me: “It’s a gazillion unplanned micro-miracles that happen when neighbours talk to each other.”

There’s a certain echo of Burke’s little platoons there. The Guardian also gives us earlier that famed Margaret Thatcher quote but in full, not as it is normally truncated:

"They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."

Or, to quote another Tory PM, of course there’s such a thing as society it’s just not the government.

As we’ve been known to point out the British state has difficulty in handing out free money - lucky we’ve got each other to rely upon then, no? You know, society?

The DHSC is a Lovesome Thing, God Wot

If the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) had been around at the time, the Victorian poet Tom Browne would surely have described its structure as “a lovesome thing”.  He would have recognised the tangles, the plots and the “fern’d grot”.  He might have struggled, however, to connect its re-structuring gyrations, which we are witnessing this week, with seeing “more patients benefit from the best possible care, with the right staff in place to meet patients’ needs.”  You and I might have been thinking that was a question of getting more doctors and nurses, if not now, then sometime. It seems Hancock’s MBPR (management by press release) is still with us. We are not hiring the doctors and nurses we need, but merging quangos which is, in fairness, also something we need.  My grumble is that the two are being confused. 

When Hancock was trying to ease Dido Harding into the NHS CEO job, he put her at the helm of the quango “NHS Improvement” and, in 2019, semi-merged the two.  They are now, supposedly, a single organisation, NSE/I, but they still have separate boards, each with executive and non-executive directors and objectives.  One may wonder why the business of improving NHS (England) was ever seen as distinct from the management of NHS (England) but we are getting there.  NHS England is simultaneously part of government and independent from government (it is a “non-departmental public body”).  It does not have charge of primary health care (GPs own and run their own practices as contractors to the NHS) nor of secondary care (hospitals are answerable and not answerable, see below, to NHS Improvement) and since it does not yet have charge of its staff development, IT, business or legal services (NHS Litigation Authority), not to mention half a dozen other quangos which are regulatory in nature. Nor most of health which almost every other government department, local and national, deals with. Not to mention the Health Foundation, which is independent of government, but, in 2020, spent £50M on promoting health and has plenty to say on the subject.  Parliament may approve this integration in 2022 so, technically, the status quo remains until then. 

Then again, the major hospitals are supposedly independent trusts and only voluntary members of “NHS Providers”, the “organisation for the NHS hospital, mental health, community and ambulance services that treat patients and service users in the NHS. We help those NHS trusts and foundation trusts to deliver high-quality, patient-focused care by enabling them to learn from each other, acting as their public voice and helping shape the system in which they operate.”  With all of her main responsibilities farmed out, it is amazing that Amanda Pritchard, the new CEO of NHS England, finds anything to do. 

The good news this week is the announcement that three of these quangos, that should never have been outside the control of NHS England, are now being integrated with it. One is Health Education England (HEE) which “exists for one reason only: to support the delivery of excellent healthcare and health improvement to the patients and public of England by ensuring that the workforce of today and tomorrow has the right numbers, skills, values and behaviours, at the right time and in the right place.” It refers to itself as “part of the NHS” but is actually an independent executive non-departmental public body which is why it now needs an Act of Parliament to merge it with NHS England. According to its 2020/21 Annual Report, 2,432 staff were employed at a cost of £187M and the whole caboodle cost £4.4bn. Never mind merging it with NHS England, with no savings, since HEE’s function manifestly duplicates that of NHS England itself, would it not have been better simply to abolish it? It appears to add no value.  

NHS England’s IT operations are provided by NHS Digital and NHSX.  The former “is an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department of Health and Social Care.”  In other words, it is not answerable to anyone, and certainly not to the CEO of NHS England, but it is jolly good that it has a sponsor. Ironically perhaps, it has not had time to publish a 2020/21 annual report but the 2019/20 one (published July 2020) showed a cost of £180M.

NHSX is also now being merged with NHS England although it was only created two years ago. In theory, it sets “the strategic, policy, and delivery objectives for digital transformation throughout the NHS and adult social care sectors” but as adult social care does not have any overall digital transformation, the Cinderella of the DHSC will not be affected. It did, however, deliver 11,000 iPads to care homes.  NHSX cost a mere £1bn in the last financial year. 

Amanda Pritchard is probably right to absorb just the quangos discussed above and leave business services, litigation and health matters to another day. The NHS Business Services Authority is “independent of the DHSC but can [sic] be subject to Ministerial direction.” It does not appear to have lodged an annual report since 2018/19 and, since that reported the disbursement of £36.4bn of taxpayer money, it might be good to know what they have been up to since. Most of the expenditure (£22.3bn.) went to NHS pensions which one would have expected to have been included in the NHS accounts. £11.6bn. went on prescriptions for GP surgeries (presumably the elderly and those on income support) and only £2.4bn. on the Authority’s projects including £200M operating costs. 

NHS Resolution is, like its sibling Business Services Authority, a “special health authority” and thus both independent and, in the manner of this sector of government, not independent of the DHSC. The transfer of liabilities from two medical defence firms caused staff numbers to rise from 328 to 400 (£26M) over the 2020/21 year. NHS Resolution is, in effect, an insurance company for the NHS and should therefore not be part of it.  The pandemic brought new challenges, e.g. “state cover for employer’s liability and public liability to fill gaps where Covid-19 positive patients have been discharged from the NHS into designated care home settings which have been unable to secure sufficient private insurance cover.” Like any private insurance, the annual charges to hospital trusts take claims history “into account meaning that members with fewer, less costly claims pay less in contributions.” The value for money of NHS Resolution should be tested every 10 years or so by inviting private sector insurance companies to tender.  Beyond that, no structural change is recommended here. 

Finally, we come to the issue of whether the NHS should focus just on treatment and cure or whether it should also address general health, i.e. prevention. Ministers like to proclaim that marketing health saves the NHS money, e.g. reducing obesity, but there is no evidence for that.  Furthermore, other public bodies, both national and local, have those responsibilities.  It makes little sense to the writer of this blog to have waiting lists at record lengths and yet divert doctors to lecturing their patients about their (the patients’, that is) poor health habits. The NHS should focus exclusively on treatment and cure until its waiting lists cease to exist and ambulances are no longer queued outside A&E. 

To summarise, the Secretary of State and Amanda Pritchard are right to complete the NHE/I merger and integrate Digital, NHSX and HEE but they should be more radical and look for greater savings.  NHS Providers should be integrated too. The extensive anomalies of arm’s length bodies being both independent and not independent, should be sorted out one way or the other.  The NHS should be focused on patient treatment and cure but let us not pretend, please, that rearranging the furniture on the upper decks will bring that about.

Exploiting a tragedy is not on and yet...

Even without exploitation it’s still possible to draw lessons:

Married couple Stephen Chapple, 34, and wife Jennifer, 33, were found dead at their home in Dragon Rise, Norton Fitzwarren, Somerset, on Sunday night while their two sons, aged five and six, slept upstairs.

Mrs Chapple was stabbed to death, police confirmed on Tuesday. Post mortem examinations are still being carried out on her husband.

Mr Chapple taught computing at West Somerset College and his wife worked at Otter Garden Centre at Pen Elm, near Taunton. The couple's youngest son had just started primary school.

The killings are rumoured to be linked to a parking dispute between neighbours in the Taylor Wimpey development, where it is believed that residents are allocated at least one parking space each.

Sharon Sedgbeer, 50, a resident of Dragon Rise, said parking has been a problem because there simply “isn’t enough of it”.

She said: “It’s horrendous. People park at bad angles, on corners, blocking driveways because the spaces are so limited.”

Another resident, Melissa, said “everyone has an issue with parking around here,” adding: "Some people have multiple cars there isn't space for and it has caused a lot of upset."

The planning system currently insists upon 30 or more dwellings per hectare of land. We already produce the smallest new builds in Europe at something like 75, 76 square metres each. Even at that shoebox level there’s not enough room for how people actually live their lives - this parking being only part of that.

The country has no shortage of land that could be built upon, only a shortage of what may be built upon. The aim of our having an economy, a civilisation even, is that we all get to maximise our own utility, not conform to whatever it is that others think we should be forced into.

Yes, of course, killings are the responsibility of the killer. And yet this fractious nature of the lived environment is due to that planning system. The insistence that everyone must only be allowed a rabbit hutch and without the room to live life as it is desired.

We are aware that the legal system doesn’t in fact work this way but there would be a certain satisfaction in seeing that planning system indicted here for, say, conspiracy to cause violent affray. Then when found guilty, as it obviously would be, we could do away with it.

Do note that this is also about to get very much worse. At the moment this is just about parking - what’s it going to be like when every vehicle needs to be charged overnight as well?

The only reason we have this absurdity of a planning system is that the upper middle classes fear allowing the proles room for a house, garden, and couple of parking spaces might spoil the view. Our opinion on this is that there should be a little more pitchfork and burning brand action outside the Manor Houses. Or possibly the Guido Fawkes solution, blow up The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors.

There really is no good reason why a country as rich as this forces the people into development density that would shame medieval peasantry. So, we should stop doing so.