Property

Betting men Sir: The bet between Martin Rees and me that Matt Ridley recounts pits two kinds of scruples of disinterested rationality against each other (‘Wuhan wager’, 7 December). One is the scientific ethos that calls for factoring in all relevant information in updating one’s degree of credence in a hypothesis. The other is the logic of the epistemological tool of betting, which demands an agreed-upon fixed criterion and deadline for resolving the bet. My degree of credence has been influenced by Matt and Alina Chan for the lab leak hypothesis, but also by counter-arguments from Peter Miller for the zoonotic theory. When Martin and I joined the bet, neither

In they pour, one after another, cheerily thudding on to the doormat: ‘Thank you for insuring with us again! Now, pay us more than you earn in a year!’ Yes, it’s insurance premium renewal time – and they’re shooting up once more. Insurance premiums have swollen unstoppably, expanding upwards for all the world like a batch of evil mushrooms. In our household, home insurance alone now comes in at the same size as a monthly mortgage payment. Whack on to this car insurance (necessary), pet insurance (necessary?) and health insurance (in this day and age, yes), and you’d have to be earning the annual equivalent of Andorra’s GDP. What are

There are many, mutually reinforcing causes of the property crisis: it is too easy to borrow; there are too many people; there aren’t enough houses; what houses do exist are in the wrong place; and many houses have the wrong people living in them. Solutions exist to all of these, some of which involve building and some of which don’t. In south-east England it is not uncommon to find people living in£1 million homes who are skint Today we are going to focus on the fifth problem. Too many people are living in houses which are too big for them. In south-east England it is not uncommon to find people

Britain’s farmers are in a bind. Despite sitting on land worth millions, they are unable to release that wealth without selling – and many struggle to make money from what they produce. According to Defra, almost one in five farms make a loss, while a quarter made less than £25,000 last year. Yet there are parts of the Labour movement that see farmers as money-grubbing, tweed-clad elites benefiting from special tax breaks and hefty subsidies. James Buckle, a farmer from Suffolk, understands those frustrations: ‘If our farm is worth £10 million, and we’ve got these new inheritance tax rules, we’ve got to pay something like £1.6 million to pass it

Working people Government ministers may have had trouble defining what was meant by ‘working people’ in the Labour manifesto, but where did the idea of classifying people who earn their living as a distinct group come from? – According to the OED,the term ‘working class’ has been traced back to the 1757 edition of the Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce written by Malachy Postlethwayt, a former adviser to Horace Walpole. Postlethwayt was born the son of a wine merchant in Limehouse, east London, in 1707. He certainly fitted Starmer’s definition of a working person in that he appears to have died, in 1767, owning no assets. But he would

My friend Tim Leunig is a cerebral thinker of the best kind. Though not party-political, he has worked for Tory chancellors and would give the same advice to governments of any stripe. Wikipedia calls him a prize-winning economist and that’s right, but he has a gadfly instinct and a remorselessly rational intellect that takes him into the deeps: into first principles, logical consequences and the reductiones ad absurdum of some of our trains of argument. He writes a substack (timleunig.substack.com) and it was his recent summary there of proposals he wrote as chief economist for the Onward thinktank that caught my eye. ‘I bought this house from savings that were

While working as a callow speechwriter for the Labour party in the mid-1980s, I suggested to a member of the then shadow cabinet that perhaps we should do something in support of the teachers, who were clamouring for more money. ‘Sod them, they’re all Tories,’ came the response. Well, how times change – and also how little. This supposedly marginal land is in danger of disappearing, and with it the wildlife that abounds These days there are just nine teachers in the country who vote Conservative and they keep their heads down in case a colleague dobs them in for the hate crime of existing. However, the principle of helping

Disappearing England Sir: Rod Liddle’s reference to Labour’s intention to build 1.5 million new houses (‘The great bee-smuggling scandal’, 13 July), even though there is not a shortage, leads one to worry where they will be located. The green belt was introduced for London in 1938 and the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 extended powers with local authorities for self-designation. In 1937, John Betjeman wrote for one of his BBC talks: ‘England is disappearing and there is growing up, where the trees used to be and where the hills commanded blue vistas, another world that does not seem to be anything to do with England at all. This

Sitting ducks Sir: James Heale is right to highlight the important question about Rishi Sunak’s replacement (‘Who will lead the Tories?, 13 July). A weak leader will be a sitting duck for Nigel Farage to target, resulting in a worsening split on the right and an open goal for Labour to exploit at the next general election. They need a bold, principled and pragmatic leader who is prepared for fierce resistance by Reform UK. All the proposed candidates are great at preaching to their own respective choirs, but are any of them prepared to bravely fight for their beliefs like a Margaret Thatcher? They need to reinvent themselves, akin to

It is a tenet of neo-liberal economics that there is no such thing as a free lunch. This is obvious baloney. There are free lunches everywhere. The problem is that those free lunches are no longer served to people doing useful work. They are instead handed out to the owners of a few favoured asset classes through untaxed gains. We have created far more tax breaks for rent-seeking than for productive work… and then we wonder why Britain has a productivity crisis. Under a future Sutherland regime, there would be no tax paid on beer drunk in a pub I must admit I enjoy a few free lunches myself –

Of no account  Nigel Farage claimed that his bank has told him it will be closing his accounts, without giving him a reason, although he suspects it is because of his political views. Is it possible to live without a bank account? – According to the Financial Conduct Authority, there are 1.3 million adults in Britain who are ‘unbanked’. – A third of them do not want to have a bank account, sometimes because they have got into trouble with debt in the past. – There are 7.45 million ‘basic’ bank accounts designed to offer essential functionality for handling payments, without offering credit and other services. Around the houses How