Brexit -am I stupid or what

Of course she is - her farm(s) were in receipt of nearly £50k in subsidies from the EU in the past two years.

Sandbach's Company in Receipt of Huge EU Payments -

 

I'm shocked. No, really...

 

Corbyn is getting in early punches in a smear campaign the treacherous little snipe. No truth to anything he says (or maybe a very narrow specific part which is then inflamed to preposterous degree) and he's taking anything that anyone has whined about over the last years and saying the Labour leadership shall provide! He's promising the earth. No ability to pay for anything of course. Or a plan to deliver. He's a twit and he fairly smacks of desperation. I think it's just showing how little ability he has, with no single vision he's promising everything; he'll rattle off all these sound bites ad infinitum (lib dems will chime in when they stop whinging about not being included in debates) and I expect Boris will take them down one by one. Jez will have nothing to come back with so carry on saying the same thing like an amateur schoolyard bully.

 

And these are the people voting... what hope is there? They don;t do their own research and are just sheep.
Loved seeing the professional protesters... not saying there's a type or anything...

 

We had some for Diwali, and the odd bit on Saturday night, but other than that it has (thankfully) been fairly quiet - long may that continue.

 

Totally ignore any Brexit issues, I've been reading Labour's proposal to create 450,000 new jobs and using them to improve the house insulation and energy efficiency of dwellings.

Rather reminiscent of the HIPS disaster that they brought in during the early naughties! That was the Home Improvement Packs that they made compulsory when someone sold a house. They got people to train for these new lifetime jobs of being HIPS inspectors and not too long after the scheme came in it was found that it was a failure and contributed to the crash in the housing market. Ending in newly trained people with no work!

This new scheme is on a much grander scale but with no real working out how it will turn out in the longer term. It's brilliant to want more energy efficient houses but they seem to have glossed over the implication of their scheme.

Training that many people to do these jobs is a massive project (not sure where they will all come from and who will train them ) and then getting them a sustainable careers is impossible. Just a few calculations on a bit of scrap paper can show it can't work - no matter how desirable it may be. Bearing in mind that mine are only brief calculations I can't understand their policy.

I'm not sure where they get their figures when they say there are 27 million houses to install all these things but the government's own Office Of National Statistics figures (2017) said that there are 27.2 million homes in the UK. So they are saying that virtually all the homes are not insulated!

Lets be generous and say it's 20m homes that need doing (easy figure for rough calculations ). If we guess at it taking about one week to insulate and double glaze an average house (mine to less), then we have 20 million weeks of work. Divide this by the promised 450,000 workers gives you ten months. Assume you have two workers per project, as we did, then it will provide one year and eight months of work and then all the houses in the country are done. Then 450,000 people are out of a job!

Of course, these are rough figures and a bit arbitrary but show a line of thinking that the people who devised the scheme obviously didn't bother to look into.

Then we come to the kicker!

Quote (direct from Labour):- "Upgrades to low income households will be grant funded. These households will pay no upfront costs and will see their bills fall immediately after the work is done. They will keep most of the savings on their bills, with the rest used to pay off part of the cost of the work."

That means the people will be having to pay towards it from the savings they have made on their bills. who calculates and hoe do they collect it?

Quote:- "Wealthier households will be offered interest free loans to improve their homes and lower their energy bills. Landlords will be regulated to ensure their properties are warm and energy efficient."

Who decides who is wealthier? How is it done? Do you earn £10 more than your neighbour? Will you have to take out a loan and not him?

Labour calculates that delivering essential upgrades to the UK’s entire housing stock will cost about £250bn, or an average of £9,300 per house. The party pledged to provide £60bn of direct public subsidy for the programme, with the rest paid for “through energy savings”.

I won't bother to bore you with further jotting I have on my scrap of paper. Suffice it to say, I shall be looking just as critically at Conservative claims if that stand out as obviously as that one does. My local MP (Conservative) has also been on the end of my calculations in the past, in public meeting . At least he still talks to me, despite all that, and even turns up at my charity Open Garden Day!