The effect of this would be extremely minimal. Almost all empty homes in the UK are homes that are temporarily empty pending sale or between renters. Having empty homes is actually extremely normal, you can’t really not have empty homes, as people are always moving.

With rare exceptions, empty homes aren’t just sitting there empty for years, like this article implies. The landlords would much rather rent them out and make money.

The UK has far fewer empty empty homes than anywhere else in the developed world. Our housing stock isn’t enough.

There’s no other option but to build more. I hope Labour’s plans can help with that, but who knows. And it’d need to be sustained.

NIMBYism is killing this country. We have the smallest available housing stock in Europe by some margin. Labour are right to be trying to make a dent in the issue.

Authoritarian arrest?! They broke into an RAF base and crippled multiple planes, FFS.

Why do you want Farage to win so badly? He’d be awful for the country. Do you not see the damage he’s already done?

No, the majority are not questionable. Every single one of those are unambiguously left wing moves.

People are falling victim to the anything to the right of me [socialist] is right wing.

Labour are objectively a centre-left party, and I just gave evidence of that. Saying “well all of that is left wing… but it doesn’t count!” isn’t a legitimate argument.

Of course defence is important. How separated from reality are you for you to think it isn’t?

Sabotaging UK defence is obviously a bad thing, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Come on, “throwing around red paint” is quite misleading, no?

They poured it into the engines of multiple RAF jets, destroying those engines. That’s several million in damages, and a lot of downtime.

And legally speaking, it absolutely was a terrorist act.

You keep saying Labor, are you from the UK?

And tbh, while Labour is far from socialist, they’re doing some left wing things:

• Nationalising rail. Seems left wing to me.

• Nationalising steel. Seems left wing to me.

• Nationalising parts of our energy sector. Seems left wing to me.

• They’re increasing workers rights in a bunch of different ways. Seems left wing to me.

• They’ve significantly hiked minimum wage. Seems left wing to me.

• They’ve implemented a windfall tax targeting profiteering energy firms. Left wing.

• Placing VAT on private schooling. Left wing.

• Means testing WFA. Left wing.

• Placing taxes on non-doms. Left wing.

• Invested a great deal more in infrastructure. Left wing.

• Capped public transport costs. Left wing.

• Implementing stricter rules for landlords. Left wing.

• Essentially restarting SureStart in all but name. Left wing.

• Changing inheritance tax to squash loopholes surrounding buying up farmland. Left wing.

• Ending the use of offshore trusts as a way to avoid inheritance tax. Left wing.

• Bringing the NHS back under direct public control. Left wing.

• Expanding green energy. Left wing.

There’s probably more I’ve not thought of, too.

Putting everyone in the “neoliberal” group as if they’re the same isn’t productive IMO. Labour, Lib Dems, SNP, Tories, and Reform aren’t all the same.

People also need to be realistic about what the electorate overall wants.

Farage could not have asked for better news than this. Ugh.

E: do the downvoters think that vote splitting is not a thing? This is the best news for Farage in a long time.

Reading into this, it seems like there’s actually a lot going on right now when it comes to sorting out our decaying (ha) dentistry services.

Good.

If this gets well and truly sorted, this will be a visible, tangible thing people can point to and say they’ve done well there.

People can’t really conceptualise the less visible things like “wages have gone up by 2% more than inflation this year”, “inflation has dropped by 0.3%”, “infrastructure investment has been raised by X%!”

We’re bad at understanding numbers like that and visualising what impact they will make on our lives over a longer period of time.

The difference between “I’ve not been able to get a dentist appointment for 4 years” and “I can trivially have one booked every 6 months” is something that everyone will notice and appreciate.

Excellent move.

One of the multiple improvements I’ve seen Labour make where I’ve thought “wait, that wasn’t the case before?! Why the hell not?!”

Really frustrating that children are 3x likely to be in poverty as pensioners, yet a disproportionate amount of money is redirected towards pensioners, the richest demographic by a long shot.

And as has been made clear, any attempts to address that will not be tolerated by media or by the electorate. Labour couldn’t even get the original WFA cuts through, despite the poorest still being entitled to them!

Labour restarting SureStart in all but name will surely be a big help for young children and new parents, as will things like the sizable minimum wage increases, and the expansion of free school meals. But it won’t be enough to fix this problem entirely.

Women are underrepresented in CEO positions, although perhaps not for the reasons people think.

The average age of a CEO is 55. Many are far older. You get to that point by being in management positions within an industry for decades. Outside of fringe cases, it takes a long time to become a CEO.

Obviously, that filters out some women due to them choosing family life over chasing job position above all else, as well as things such as in the past there being an even greater disparity in the difference between maternity and paternity leave than there is today (and it’s still not great today either!), as well as past sexist attitudes in having women in managerial roles.

IMO, there being fewer women in CEO positions is an indicator of sexism in the past, not sexism in the present.

Nowadays there are far more women in managerial positions, it’s not seen as weird anymore in the slightest, and that will naturally translate to more CEOs. It will just take time for that influx of managerial-position women to reach the CEO-level.

Will it be 50/50? Eh, probably not. The fact that women give birth means there will always be a not insignificant amount of women that take a significant amount of time out of work and prioritise family life to a greater extent than men.

Absolutely grotesque and evil. It boggles my mind how some people can be this hateful.

I don’t know why there is such a focus on levies/taxes in this article. For energy, the VAT rate is only 5% - even if we scrapped it entirely, it’d barely make a dent. I truly do not understand where the “getting rid of levies will cut energy bills by over £500” thing comes from.

The only way to bring bills down is to bring the cost of energy down by increasing supply and bringing down our average cost per MWh for production of energy.

The good news is that the government, to their credit, have been doing that.

The bad news is that this isn’t a “press the ‘fix everything’ button in No. 10, then everything will be hunky dory” situation, it’s a “take action now so that we can benefit from it in 5-10 years” situation.

E: Reading E3G’s own Energy Bills Charter, the only levy they want to remove is ‘legacy costs’, which they claim would save roughly £80 per household per year. They want it instead to be paid from income tax on workers. Legacy costs, btw, is things like insulation schemes and solar feed in tariffs. Of course, if it is paid via income tax, that’d be an additional £3bn the government will have to find from somewhere, likely meaning more cuts.

I don’t know where this alleged £500+ has come from. It seems other-worldly optimistic to me.

There is no backdoor. We do not have the export variant of the F35 with US-controlled software. The software on our F35s (and Trident missiles) is British. This came as the result of concerns New Labour had about the very thing you mention - US backdoors.

And I agree that the US cannot be trusted. Thankfully our sixth gen fighters have no US ties, and most of our other recent military developments aren’t either. For the time being, though, we can’t really abruptly scrap trident or F35s, despite maintenance not being 100% done here (particularly for Trident). Our missiles only need maintenance every 10 years - I’d hope we have facilities to do that domestically by then.

There’s a disproportionately high amount of old people in that area - a demographic probably less likely to care about a gaming preservation petition.

First I’ve even heard of it, damn, I’d have totally signed.

MP pay is such a red herring.

Yes, their pay is a lot compared to, say, minimum wage, but a low MP pay even further encourages only wealthy people to become MPs.

I’d much rather see MP salary significantly increased, but expenses capped and put under a much greater level of scrutiny.

They’re also comparing total appointment numbers from a time period where there was a lot of Nurse/doctor strike action against a time period where strikes had stopped and NHS staff were working through a backlog.

It seems insane to measure air pollution by this metric rather than, you know, actually looking at air pollution levels.