Currently, 15 per cent of homeowners want to downsize and in London, that figure rises to 25 per cent. Abolishing stamp duty removes the financial penalty that stops many from doing so.
The Shadow Housing Secretary adds that his changes to the visa regime were opposed by the Labour Party at the time.
It is like the Town Criers Guild saying that not requiring the shouting out of news in the marketplace is impacting the right to know.
What do the numbers say? They are the modern equivalent of omens, or reading entrails, and it should be said, sometimes about as accurate. Nonetheless numbers can be the soulless assassins of any leader, if not all leaders.
Victims of any crime need to feel the forces of law and order are on their side, and frankly too many don’t. Bandy around data all you like, it’s important to look at evidence but it’s also important to recognise how crime makes people feel.
Jenrick’s dominance appears to be unassailable. He places comfortably on top, yet again with +70.4. Holden, promoted to shadow transport secretary, has entered the rankings in dead last at -14.9.
Should Kemi Badenoch falter, Boris Johnson is the clear favourite among those who voted Conservative in 2024 to return and save the party from its post-election despair.
The pervasive feeling at the heart of many Tory nerves is that “she just doesn’t have the knowledge of where to go next”.
She has purchased unity at the price of perpetuating the irreal politics of hoping to deliver transformational change without having to actually change very much.
Stamp duty is one of, if not, the worst tax in Britain – and it should be cut or scrapped altogether. A number of the new, younger intake of Tory MPs are especially keen on tackling it with a selection telling me the policy is “a really stupid tax”, “our most terrible tax” or, quite simply, “crap”.
He also warns that the Conservatives could fall even lower than 18% in the opinion polls.
Real delivered success is actually best achieved through a multitude of individually unimpressive small shots rather than a single bullet. Although nobody wants to hear that and politicians don’t want to say that – they should. Conservatives should, because it’s true.
Henry Hill talks to TalkTV’s Ian Collins about how the Public Order Act 1986 allows the police to invent hypothetical people to get offended by speech.
Labour ministers now have the tools at their disposal to cut or raise migration via secondary legislation and, outside the EU, will have nobody to blame but themselves if net migration ticks back up. As they approach the first year in government, and with an upcoming Immigration White Paper, it is no longer plausible for Labour to blame its inheritance; it must instead focus on the reforms it wants to see.
It is symptomatic of the kind of shallow thinking that has got us into our current energy predicament, with prices rising inexorably, deindustrialisation well underway, and wholesale economic collapse looming.