badgerx16

We visited the national war museum in Fort St Elmo, which contains a lot of stuff from the Axis blitz in WW2. We walked round behind a coachload of German tourists, and at one point I wispered to my wife "And which part fell off your father's plane Otto ?".

There's an idea, re the Navy; we need to ncrease the surface fleet, and therefore the number of ratings required to crew the ships, so bring back the press gang, or at least a variation on it. All able bodied immigrant men of working age, who so desperately want to be here, serve 4 years at sea. After all, they are already experienced sea farers after crossing the Channel in small boats. If they finish their term with a good record, then their asylum applications will be looked upon favourably.

Why bother to put them in temporary camps ? Why not snatch them off the streets and deport them immediately ? Saves even more money.

Well he did at least get something right.

Particularly as almost every local or national poll winner doesn't get close to gaining a true majority of the constituency electorate. You would be "punishing" the majority for something they didn't do.

There are too many unscrupulous builders who fold once the basic construction has been done, to avoid responsibilties and additional costs, such as this development a few miles from us...... https://www.lancasterguardian.co.uk/news/people/fresh-calls-to-fix-botched-south-lancaster-housing-estate-after-four-years-of-misery-5504987

Maybe we should wait to see if the Planning and Infrastructure Bill can deliver.

Affordable housing is not the same as council housing, the situation we used to have more widely where councils built and maintained rental housing stock and retained it in the public domain.

I don't know. Why not write to them and ask why ?

Financial restrictions imposed on Councils limited their options on capital spending, particularly on housing, and Right to Buy scuppered any long term retention of anything that did get built in the public domain.

Yankee

You sound like somebody I used to work with who complained about his taxes going towards educating "other people's children". Yes, there cannot be a set figure, it is a ridiculous assumption. One Local Authority I know of had to stop taking children into care because by January of one particular year they had spent the budget allocated to that purpose. I don't think there s an "endless pot", but neither do I think a set figure can be applied. Once you have determined what exactly you will be providing, and what the qualification criteria will be, then the cost is whatever it turns out to be. You can change what is delivered, you can tighten or withdraw qualification, but you cannot arbitrarily stick to a fixed fiscal allocation.

The welfare budget should be whatever it needs to be, rather than measured as an exact figure. Undoubtedly there is a small degree of misuse, and some areas where the vagaries of setting qualification criteria create anomalies, but simply making judgements based on a crude total expenditure is misleading and unhelpful.

We have several Clematis plants around our gardens, this one, growing up an old pear tree, is the biggest and first to flower each spring....

Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir were looking for an excuse to blitz Gaza and push for the annexation of the West Bank, and HAMAS handed it to them- although the exact date might not have been known they knew full well something was imminent. What happened on October 7th was appalling, but the Israeli response has been hugely disproportionate.