Denjin

One of my favourite things to do online is browse the comments of their torrents looking for the people saying "you're so pretty" etc

Washing always helps

Prior to the mid 1980s, housing in the UK was roughly split in 1/3s. One third in owner-occupier (you own the single home you live in) either outright or with a mortgage. One third lived in private rental (you pay rent to a landlord). The last third lived in council houses.

These were owned by the local government and rented to people on lower incomes at reduced rents and on very liberal terms. To all intents and purposes, you could live in a council house all your life.

Because this 3rd of residents tended to be on a lower income, tended to be working class and tended to vote Labour, Margaret Thatcher and the Tories saw them as a large threat to their electoral chances.

The tories also spent many years courting the upwardly mobile, middle class home owners because in an era of deindustrialisation, they were a growing demographic and largely voted Tory.

Right To Buy was, at least publicly, designed to give poorer people the right to purchase their council houses at reduced rates. This has two main consequences. Local governments were stripped of large amounts of their incomes, forcing them to strip services, starting a decades long decline in things like road maintenance, schools, youth services etc. A decline that has continued to get worse to this day.

The other consequence is most of those council houses which were sold were then flipped into private rentals. The market now is split with still roughly 1/3rd owner occupied, council houses (now mostly owned by what's called housing associations which have their own issues) are down to about 10% and private rentals now make up about 55%.

As others have commented, because the policy was designed to reduce the amount of people in council houses, there was no requirement for councils to use the revenue they generated from the sales into building new houses. This meant that money was largely used to plug temporary gaps in funding rather than ensuring the next generation of houses were built.

Some that held out like the big cities like Birmingham and some of the poorer London boroughs were actively punished by Thatcher with reductions in Central government funding.

Albrecht Albrechtson says yes it is far to progressive.

The biggest extraction of wealth from public to private hands wasn't privatisation of any utility or pumping money into "too big to fail banks" it was right to buy. And it was all fueled by Thatcher's belief that council tenants vote Labour so we should get them to buy their houses.

And cut off water to 13,000 people for nearly a week and continues to blame "victorian infrastructure" for their problems despite being in sole ownership of that infrastructure for 36 years and not doing a single thing to improve it.

Or just being plain nasty.

Raviolo

Leopards Fuck Gently

No

globally all forum sites would just fold up because the UK has a stupid law

They can just block access from any UK based IP address and carry on as normal. Like many of them are doing already, including some Lemmy instances (although funnily enough, not lemmynsfw).

Yeah, where do you get off making out Stalin was the bad guy? Don't you know FDR was mean to an old person once?