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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • To the UK they are emigrants.

    Expat is a casual term referring to someone whose employer sent them overseas on a posting. Diplomats are the most obvious example, but companies will use the same employment structure.

    Different jurisdictions have different official terminology for this type of migrant worker, but their legal status in the host country is typically different to that of other categories of migrant worker in the same country, they are usually paid & taxed in their home country, and employed under the regulations of their home country (though in some instances, a host country may extend protections or impose obligations over them).

    The confusion arises because when the UK had an Empire, huge numbers were sent abroad to run it, whether for companies like the East India Company, or as civil servants or on military postings, and so the British now think of “people who live abroad” as “expats” because that’s the word the older generations always heard, and then continued to use long after this ceased to be the predominant vehicle for of British to be living outside the UK.

    The word is absolutely couched in a colonial past, but those using the term to describe other types of British people overseas are not generally doing so out of some sense of white supremacy or British exceptionalism, but plain old lack of awareness.




  • Correct.

    You qualify through low income, and as the list to get council housing is long, need is taken into account also.

    Right to Buy allows council tenants to buy their homes at a substantial discount on market value. This is alright, as it promotes stability and gives tenants equity, but at the same time, council tenants don’t get evicted anyhow, even if their income has become very high, and you can pass on a tenancy when you die if a relative was living in the council house with you.

    But the money from the sale of council houses to tenants does not get ploughed back into buying or building more council housing, and the people who bought them can in turn sell them on the open market rather than back to the council.

    This has made it near impossible for councils to maintain levels of housing stock, let alone increase it to reflect population growth. In central London, many types of essential worker are hard to obtain as too few can afford to live within commuting distance - large & high quality housing estates in the centre and all through the Boroughs having been sold off under the scheme long ago & snaffled up by developers.

    Thatcher brought it in as a populist policy, and to weaken state services, but every other PM after permitted the policy to carry on unaltered.





  • Right now, they can’t.

    Money has gone, opportunity for very cheap borrowing (which is what a sane government would have grasped enthusiastically grasped in the wake of the last crash instead of breaking out to exploit everyone harder) is gone.

    Maybe, if Reeves is given scope to do her shit, this country can not merely stall the accelerating decline, but turn stuff around.

    Nothing is more vital right now & for some time than keeping faith against the odds that that can happen.

    There is nothing to lose by trying to hold our nerve.







  • Most one could do is go after them once in office if they lied whilst campaigning for election to that office. You could maybe go after them even if they don’t win that election.

    It probably needs to be done as a strict obligation to not say anything in office or when campaigning which is not verifiably true.

    Would also need to be backed with hefty fines on parties if one of their candidates are proven to have lied, or if the party spread that lie.

    Tbh any version would be very hard to get right, and if it isn’t robust the likes of Farage will use it as yet another tool of discord & disruption as they attack democratic institutions and the rule of law.