The British don’t live like Europeans because the planners won’t let the British live like Europeans
As we all know we’re told that we should live more like Europeans. In flats. You know, stack-a-prole worker flats because that’s communal, social, and that protects our precious natural countryside. As we’ve pointed out there’s a problem with this. The Europeans don’t live - not solely - in stack-a-prole worker flats.
It is, wholly and entirely, true that the Spanish and Portuguese towns are compact and densely urban areas. Flats and townhouses - a useful definition of a townhouse being a house without a garden of any size. So, rather like central Bath then. But then, just like central Bath, there’s another part to that same housing system. From the OECD:
Second home owners up and down the country have been left reeling after being hit with double council tax bills this month.
The Telegraph is calling for the premium to be abolished, and we have heard from scores of readers who feel vilified by the levy.
From April 1, over two thirds of town halls opted to take advantage of new powers, granted in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act, which allowed them to impose a 100pc council tax premium on second home owners.
It means second home owners in more than 200 local authorities across England have received four-figure bills – following in the footsteps of Scotland and Wales. The premium is charged on properties which are furnished but not used as someone’s main home.
No one is - or at least, everyone is being heavily taxed out of - allowed to live like the Spanish and Portuguese. Even as the system tries to insist that everyone must live as the Spanish and Poruguese, in compact urban cores.
The reason the British don’t live like Europeans is because the planners won’t allow the British to live like Europeans. Despite that repeated insistence by said planners that the British should live like Europeans.
Now, this could all just be ignorance, could be just stupidity - no one’s ever claimed that a bureaucracy is intelligent nor informed, in and of itself. There’s always that possible explanation of simple deep misanthropy. Much of British governance can be best explained by the idea that they hate us.
But we’re still left with this basic fact. The British state, in its glory, is insisting upon a certain pattern of living. While also taxing us out of the ability to live by that pattern.
Doesn’t this just have implications for all those who insist that we can make life better by having that state plan more of our lives for us? Even with the promised strict conditionality and cross-cutting goal orientation.
Tim Worstall