Trouble is Rob, little or none of the proceeds from council house ( public housing ) sales went into building new housing stock which the UK could really do with. Rent & house prices rose because of the lack of supply & now it's extremely difficult for most people under about 35 to partake in the 'joys of home-ownership'. Instead they'll spend their lives paying exorbitant rents for poorly maintained accomodation to landlords a generation older than themselves who got their hands on property during easier times. ( & what a bloody smug generation they are ).
( Disclosure: I'm 52, working class, have close family members who bought their own council houses. My other half & I actually own an ex council house ).
Nice to have you back and am enjoying the photos you're posting.
Take care.
Graeme
Thank you for the welcome back! Posting photos is nice (for me, at least) because it gives them a bit of exercise which they wouldn't otherwise get outwith my website. I don't get enough exercise, and even though I know my life depends on my getting it, other aspects of living get in the way; imagine the poor snaps: they depend on
me!
Now, regarding the thing about home-purchasing: where the return from such sales goes I can't honestly say because I simply don't know, and I wonder if anyone even in government, really, really knows. I suspect it works just as with the road tax (which family tells me is now a different ballgame to what it used to be) where one would expect the money raised to be reinvested solely in, well, roads, but isn't.
In one of several nutshells, I think the underlying problem is that we all are, as citizens of developed countries, expecting too much from
all political parties, and conveniently forgetting that every last item has got to be paid for by someone. That inevitably raises the question of who is able to be fleeced more. You can't get blood from a stone, so the juicy alternatives are there to hang out and dry. No wonder they try to protect themselves.
Landlords. My granddaughter is reading medicine in Edinburgh, but family lives in Glasgow. Long-term tenure for her and her fellow flat-dwellers in Edinburgh is a difficult one. Every year, come Festival time, they all get chucked out onto the street for the duration so that the owners can rent out at extortionate rates to the tourists; imagine the chaos, inconvenience and expense of removing all their property back home and then back to somewhere else...
The only possible future for all of these things is the London example, where salaries rocket simply to allow people to make enough money to enable them to hold a job whilst having to spend hours a day in trains just to get there and back. And the more people we get the worse it becomes. I think that's probably more the cause for anti-immigrant growth than colour or language: the fear of being finally crushed to death in a world that physically comes to a gridlocked halt. I remember an afternoon in Glasgow, where I had an appointment with a client. I arrived before time, as normal, and circled and circled without finding a meter or space. I had to go back home and 'phone my apology. That was about 36 years ago! I shudder to think of now.
Ciao,
Rob
P.S.
Regarding my parking problem lo those many years ago: a cellphone would have been a wonderful device to keep a client up to speed! So some modern inventions have uses.
P.P.S.
I timed-out again sending this post before I reached the first P.S. I didn't have to rewrite: I discovered that I could simply copy and then re-login and paste. For me, that's rocket science!