Preparedness for when

nuatha

Frugalsod wrote: »

I agree with you fully. If we managed our land use better we could grow more food and end homelessness. I suspect that there are also hundreds of thousands of homes that while not habitable could be made habitable.

Though I am more optimistic in that I do think that governments could actually solve problems. They did in the past, but then they were not run by professional politicians with no experience of the real world. You are right we get the government that we deserve.

The estimate is that there are 300,000 flats above shops which are included in business rates, the 845000 are homes which are declared empty for council tax purposes. Together that's 1.1 million. I'm unaware of anywhere that collates stats on uninhabitable homes or those scheduled for demolition (though some of the later are used to house refugees, presumably that statistic could be found)
Historically governments cause at least as many problems as they solve. Unfortunately they are the best solution we have come up with so far. As Churchill said; "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." I just think that its about time we had another attempt at democracy.

nuatha

thriftwizard wrote: »

Sheep aren't necessarily the best thing to grow. These islands used to be covered in forest, even most of the high bits, until the wool trade really took off at much the same time that vast swathes of forest were chopped down to build ships for the world's biggest Navy, and houses for the burgeoning population. Sheep were hugely profitable then, but not so now, as many of my farming friends keep bemoaning. Fond though I am of sheep & their many by-products, there might well be better, more productive & less damaging ways of managing our land than continuing to do things because that's how they've "always" been done.

In this part of the world, much of the deforestation was during the reign of Henry VIII for his navy as you said. The reivers prevented any substantial regrowth due to burning people out to prevent pursuit of cattle raiders. As the quality of land declined, it became more difficult to support cattle and horses and sheep became the crop of choice.
These days sheep are a profitable crop in these parts, purely because they keep the moors in reasonable condition for shooting.
However the point stands, even sheep struggle to thrive on much of Britain,

Frugalsod

This looks very handy for any drivers out there.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/ResQMe-Escape-Tool-Clip-Black/dp/B000IE0EZO/

daz378

someone said "whoever you vote for you will always get the government"
Stats do say immigrants are less likely to claim benefits and the taxes they pay help support our pension system, though this is offset to a certain extent by the consequence of increased supply of labour will lower unskilled wage settlements.......is this statistic(lies dam lie and statistics) trotted out to try and mollify the populace ...... my sister who has a disabled daughter......had a personal gp appointment ... she said foreigners ... who outnumbered the locals in waiting room came in after her and got seen before her......my sister who had left a friend to look after her daughter was getting anxious . there may have been an explanation for this..... but this kind of thing sends people in droves to ukip. in times of reducing budgets perceptions of the affects of immigration are magnified and the real\objective effect difficult to ascertain

GreyQueen

Morning all.

Sometimes, in hospitals, several clinicians are sharing the use of a waiting room, so that there are effectively several entirely unrelated 'queues' parked in the same waiting area. Sensible clinics are aware that this can cause anger at percieved queue-jumping and publicise this with signage; I have seen this in hospital clinics myself. In our own building, where we serve the public in person, we have customers queueing for various things and the speed that the council tax queue moves has no bearing on that of another enquiry area, albeit the public are in one seating area.

Working as I do in a local authority, I see one side of the equation. There are plenty of migrants who make the LA one of their first ports of calls in the UK to ask for council houses. Sometimes they come straight off the bus from the airports near London. It's clearly something widely-known overseas.

They seem rather taken aback that there are such things as waiting lists which they have to join. I've also seen shortlists when a property is re-let where every single candidate is eastern european and this plays badly with the indigenous waiting-list candidates who sometimes have been striving for a council home for more than a decade. The migrants have chosen to come here and ended up in poor and over-crowded accomodation. In some cases starting adequately housed with one adult in one room in a shared house, finding that they have no priorty claim on social housing, then importing other family members, including children, until serious over-crowding gives them priority. There's a fair bit of gaming the system.

We do also have the situation that people who are only marginally employed, such as lone parents working part-time and earning below the income tax threshold, come into the UK, bringing school-age and even school-age-with-special-needs children with them. They will be net takers for a number of years, but may end up to be contributors in the fullness of time. The worst case scenario for the economy is if we housed, educated, and provided healthcare for parts of another country's population in their dependant years, only to have them leave in their productive years.

I do, however, think that people moving into the UK to work and live ought to have a basic competance in spoken and written English before they are allowed to claim their NI numbers. Coping with translation costs at local government and local policing levels is an unwelcome burden; stats published by our regional police authority revealed an eye-watering translation bill, up ten-fold from that of a decade before. Our own is pretty steep, too.

thriftwizard and nuatha, yes, there's an old saying that sheep eat men. Meaning that where the landowners decided that it was more profitable to turn their land into sheep runs than have tenant farmers, the people were thrown off the land. Some of the dispossessed starved, some were able to relocate to other parts of the UK. Some emigrated, even in the agricultural depressions of the early twentieth century, to Canada and Australia/ New Zealand.

I know places in England where, due to extremely poor soil, cropping was only possible 1 year in every 10 years. Modern fertilisers and irrigation from acquifers are flogging these heathlands into annual arable production but more topsoil blows away in the wind each year. The local Uni takes their students down there to look at an environmental catastrophe on their own doorstep. We're hardly in a position to lecture abroad about ecology when we abuse our own so badly.

Two days ago, I removed a young oak tree from my strawberry bed, and a day before that, a young sycamore from elsewhere on the lottie. Jays plant them as food preserves. They 'give' me walnuts too, and I wish I could ask them where the donor tree is, as I've never found it. At this latitude, soil wants to become grassland, grassland wants to go to scrubland, and then to temperate forest.

We've been interfering with that cycle for several thousand years, with one of the greatest deforestations taking place in the Tudor times for the wood for ships and for houses. And we mustn't forget that this was prior the widespread use of coal, and most of the fuel was firewood, and that had to be grown and cut, too. I'm presently nose-deep in Ben Law's Woodsman, living in a wood in the 21st century.

I think, in general terms, a thoughtful person cannot help but conclude there are too many people on this planet and it would be sensible to make a staged slow-down and eventual reversal in population growth. Because the alternative is misery, war, starvation and disease for many of our descendants, and destruction of most of the planet in a form habitable by humans.

nuatha

Reading the news this morning - Police about to evict 800 migrants from a camp near Calais, migrants who are determined to get to Britain, two things struck me.
The first is EU law, the first country a migrant lands in is supposed to deal with them. On that basis, if they don't meet whatever the criteria are for assistance, surely that country should then deport them to country of origin?
Second was a gentleman from Eritea mentioned in the report, who was determined to get to Britain as he believed he would get better treatment here. I wonder how much the Daily Mail et al have contributed to making this country the desirable destination it seems to be.

thriftwizard

I think, in general terms, a thoughtful person cannot help but conclude there are too many people on this planet and it would be sensible to make a staged slow-down and eventual reversal in population growth. Because the alternative is misery, war, starvation and disease for many of our descendants, and destruction of most of the planet in a form habitable by humans.

Hear hear! Says she who contributed 5 of the next generation, before realising that...

GreyQueen

thriftwizard wrote: »

Hear hear! Says she who contributed 5 of the next generation, before realising that...

If you consider that neither myself nor my brother have any children, it probably equalises things in the long run.

Love to continue to chat - heard that interview from the French camps too - but must go to work. Laters, GQ xx

[Deleted User]

I think that I'm entitled to my OWN opinion, no one has to agree with me and no has the right to tell me I'm wrong either!!! I think there is always vexation in life and there will always be things that are more trying than others and I would like to state here and now if you hadn'e guessed it already that one of my most besetting sins in life is a horribly active sense of the ridiculous and an extremely warped sense of humour which I share with you freely. It seems that the sense of humour seems to ruffle the occasional feather for which I DO NOT apologise but say there are more ways of killing a cat than by skinning it, my stupid sense of humour helps me to deal with more problems than superior toned lectures ever will!!!

nuatha

I think, in general terms, a thoughtful person cannot help but conclude there are too many people on this planet and it would be sensible to make a staged slow-down and eventual reversal in population growth. Because the alternative is misery, war, starvation and disease for many of our descendants, and destruction of most of the planet in a form habitable by humans.

thriftwizard wrote: »

Hear hear! Says she who contributed 5 of the next generation, before realising that...

GreyQueen wrote: »

If you consider that neither myself nor my brother have any children, it probably equalises things in the long run.

You're welcome to Herself and mine's quota as well
Unfortunately I expect that a deliberate slow down, let alone a reversal is likely to be impossible.
Though the world's population is currently growing at 1.3% (doubles in 54 years) which is considerably lower than the 2% (doubles in 35 years) of the 1960s.

Love to continue to chat - heard that interview from the French camps too - but must go to work. Laters, GQ xx

I hear you, have today off, work interferes with all the things I'd rather do. Have just about caught up with my reading web stuff having been working all weekend with no internet access.