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The Labour manifesto contains the pledge to build 150,000 new council houses every year for 5 years.

There were good arguments for council houses when slums were being cleared in the 50s, 60s and 70s when the country was recovering from the war, but the UK is a very different place now.

The vast majority of those who have lived on council estates are decent upstanding hard-working citizens. However, public housing schemes can have negative effects. They encourage the belief that it’s the state’s responsibility to provide homes for everyone.
People become lazy when there is no motivation to work to put a roof over their families heads. If they hadn’t been disincentivised, these people may have led happier, more successful and fulfilling lives. If they had had to strive to provide accommodation for themselves and their families, they and society would have been better off.

Allocating council houses is a nightmare.
Who should be offered a council house first, the homeless, the poor, families with children, families with large numbers of children, families with disabled children, families living in overcrowded accommodation, families with long-term unemployed parents, families with low-paid parents, families with only one parent?
A system for assessing those in most need will be devised and there will be a waiting list as there will be a limited number of homes available at any particular time.
People will become aware that to move up the list they will need to increase their amount of need. There will be many who will inevitably try to game the system.

Council housing estates are notoriously expensive to maintain. They are also difficult to manage and susceptible to anti-social problems.
Some tenants will run up arrears in the belief they will not be evicted as the council would still have to provide them with accommodation.
Some tenants will neglect their homes as they have no reason to look after them as they have no stake in the property and only rent them.

150,000 new houses will not come cheap. A very conservative figure to build 150,000 new homes over 5 years is £75billion and that’s before the costs of managing the estates are added in.
Rents will be subsidised and many tenants will be receiving housing benefit, so council housing is an ongoing drain on public resources.

Rather than building council houses, it would be better to spend the money on helping people turn their lives around or improve their employment prospects so they can stand on their own feet while contributing to society.
There needs to be a safety net for those who can’t look after themselves such as the mentally ill, but it would be far better to give people the ability to thrive rather than a reason to skive.

Several people have been sued for using images of a frog in social media postings.

So here’s Wolfie – a completely free image. No accreditation required. Just download (left click Woolfie’s image, then right click and save a copy). You are free to resize, alter and use for any purpose you want. In other words, Wolfie’s image is in the Public Domain.

One America News Network‘s brilliant political analyst Liz Wheeler lays out the Democratic Party’s playbook for bringing down the Trump administration.

A = Angry
N = Nihilistic
T = Thuggish
I = Intolerant
F = Fecal
A = Anarchists

Identity politics is designed to strip us of our free will.

It takes away our ability to make choices.

It stops us being individuals and turns us into heard animals..

It makes us see everyone as a member of a particular group.

It then decides which groups are good and which groups are bad.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and London’s Labour mayor Sadiq Khan have led the calls for Donald Trump‘s invitation to the UK to be withdrawn.
Theresa May invited the US president to make an official State Visit a week after his inauguration in January.
Corbyn and Khan’s calls have been enthusiastically backed up by many Labour MPs, the hard-left Momentum group and a host of party supporters.
A petition to call off Trump’s visit was signed more than 2 million times and the campaign appears to have born fruit.

Although there has been no official announcement, in early June Mr Corbyn tweeted, “Cancellation of President Trump’s State Visit is welcome, especially after his attack on London’s mayor & withdrawal from #ParisClimateDeal”

Mr Corbyn’s claim the visit had been cancelled was given credence by reports Mr Trump told Theresa May during a telephone call that he didn’t want to come to the UK at present to avoid the possibility of anarchists and left-wing activists using his visit as an excuse to mount violent protests against him.
An unnamed Downing Street adviser, who claimed to have been present when the call was made, told The Guardian newspaper that Mr Trump informed the PM he didn’t want to visit the UK while there was so much hostility in the country towards him.
The official reason why the visit has not taken place is that a date has still to be decided.

In late June, French president Emmanuel Macron took advantage of this hiatus and invited Mr Trump to France for Bastille Day (July 14th).
The visit was quickly arranged and it seems to have been a considerable success.
Macron and Trump were depicted smiling broadly together at a series of functions in Paris and the two men appear to have developed an excellent relationship.

The French have made no secret of their desire to grasp any benefits and business opportunities in the wake of Brexit. Therefore, to see Macron assiduously positioning France at the head of the queue to make trade deals with the World’s biggest economy will have been a very bitter pill to swallow for many at Westminster and in the UK’s boardrooms.

It’s impossible to put a figure on how much potential business may have been lost by Trump’s UK visit being put on hold but it will undoubtedly be a very significant amount.

The Left’s public antipathy towards Trump has already cost the UK dear but it’s only the start and could easily become far more calamitous.
Whether you approve of Trump or not, to deliberately disrespect the office of the President of The United States and to encourage anti-American feelings is stupid. As the old saying goes “it’s biting off your nose to spite your face”.

The hostility of Jeremy Corbyn, Sadiq Khan and their left-wing supporters towards a sitting president ensure there will be no “special relationship” if the Labour party form the next government.
With Mr Corbyn ensconced in Number 10 Downing Street, the UK would find itself at the back of the business queue with the US.
However, the most dire consequences of the Left’s fibril antipathy towards Mr Trump is its potential to irrevocably damage the bonds of kinship, respect and shared values that have served the UK and the US so well for so long.