I guess it comes down to location. "Places where there is demand from buyers with deep enough pockets" also tend to be "places with a strong NIMBY contingent."

People can't afford to buy at the asking price, certainly. But surely those *must* include a fat profit margin for the builder? The cost of building a house has surely inflated far less than house prices the past 25 years?

Or have land values, planning costs, S106 etc. expanded to eat said margin?

Inevitably they're areas where I've walked to or from the station gone 11pm multiple times.

Even for a middle-aged white bloke with a full set of Privilege Cards, mid-sized towns at pub kicking-out time are far more likely to be dangerous.

I can't help noticing that the Scrounging Foreigners (green line) are now just a fraction ahead of the Hard Working Brits (blue line) in terms of employment rate.

Yep.

Despite the Gbeebies crowd's paranoid fantasies, there is literally no neighbourhood in the country where you'll get grief merely for being white. Nowhere.

Sadly the same is far from true if you're Black or Asian.

At a national scale, maybe? Inner London (Zone 1 & 2) feels like it's up to about two-thirds coverage in terms of routes that are safe enough for working-age adults (roughly a clockwise arc from Chalk Farm to Clapham) and the modal shift is huge at this point. But it's a tiny part of the country.

They're the Right Views, and therefore Neutral and Balanced, and therefore the Right Views.

The difference , I guess is that the Telegraph is paid for by its readers*, whereas the BBC is funded via the license fee.

* In fact, heavily subsidised by its owners to push their agenda, but buyer and seller each like to maintain the illusion of classical capitalism as it suits their narrative.

Aw, sore knee? Bit of a headache? Here, these oxycodone will patch that right up.

Connectivity more generally. Zuck and his ilk vastly underestimated the sheer quantity of pale things lurking under rocks.

Example counterfactual - they set out to build HS2 fifteen years earlier on the tech/connectivity curve. How many billions less does it cost, and how far along is HS3 by now?

Just for perspective, you'd have had two choices of moon base: 1950s America (Elvis records forbidden, lest they corrupt the youth with those Negro rhythms) or 1950s USSR.

Bluesky! We found one! Fetchez les guillotines! 🤭

Depends on your definition of long vs short I guess, five years is IME plenty to establish community and contribute - even for those that do, and I know plenty who mostly don't. The flip-side of course is that moving around not only creates opportunity but can broaden minds a bit.

Yep - or even same-size but somewhere else.

I know it's First World Problems territory, relatively speaking, but SDLT on moving across town or to a different city would cost me more than six months' worth of post-tax income. That is straight up unaffordable.

Sure - it won't help first time buyers, more about making it easier to move around for work, not have to waste big chunks of time/money on long commutes etc.

(I feel as a culture we're rather too attached to v long term ownership, contributes to NIMBYism, vs finding something that works "for now").

That'd be getting on for four hours each way, even from Newport.

And just.. why? Teaching isn't an easy job, but one of the perks is that of the professions, it's by far the easiest to find work near wherever you are at the time.

Know a couple of people with 90 minutes (each way, daily) by car. Real "Doctor, it hurts when I do this" territory, unless you love podcasts enough that 3H every working day is time well-spent.

Norwood/Ealing, Harlow/Osterley...

And several with 2H train commutes, but they tend to be hybrid work.

There's effectively an IHT *penalty* for downsizing, where there should be an incentive.

But as regards work, I know a fair few people who've ended up with absurd commutes because the market is stagnant and the overall expense of moving too high. SDLT is only one part of that, but it doesn't help.

She's gone full Burchill.