Dr Anton Howes

Why did Scotland punch so far above its weight in the age of industrialisation and enlightenment? The usual answer is education. But I argue that this puts the cart before the horse, and that it was almost entirely down to capital: ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-inven…

The idea going the rounds that this is somehow a right wing neo-liberal government rather flies in the face of the evidence. Me in @thetimes

@Rambaudian @ollieglass They’re the factor for the block, so that’s a major part of it.

@ollieglass @antonhowes Why is the council responsible for paying to maintain privately owned property?

So many of Britain's problems in a nutshell: >1952 council block falling apart, sewage leaking into flats, loose cladding, dangerous wiring >£48m bill to completely overhaul it and ensure it's habitable, so cheaper to demolish and rebuild >council evacuates most social tenants and tries to buy up a majority of flats to be able to demolish BUT >resistant residents, backed by Living Rent activists, don't want to sell because asking price too low, and say council should never have let it get so bad >they submit the building to Historic Environment Scotland to be listed >HES unexpectedly say they're likely to list, which would make repairs even more expensive, and demolition potentially impossible >council stops buying the remaining flats while they wait for a decision, in case they just have to sell what they can or write it off >now residents will potentially be unable to sell at all scotsman.com/news/edinburgh…

Useful context on why repairs are so challenging and expensive:

@mongrelcelt Maybe. This was the first of its kind in Scotland - hence the grounds for listing - so I expect it has all sorts of experimental weirdness too. And yes, could well have been plenty of potential mitigation that could have been done over the years.

@antonhowes Lasting a damn sight longer than the crap devs are now erecting with balsa wood & PVA I grew up in a block not dissimilar to this in S Ldn. Its still there, in good shape. Whatever this blocks problems really are I've no doubt they cld have been mitigated/avoided if not ignored

@mongrelcelt The building doesn’t seem to have been designed to last this long tbh. Unclear how much they could have feasibly done, unless perhaps it was decades ago (have personal experience of a council landlord really dragging feet on maintenance, so I can see it’s a possibility)

@antonhowes Following that timeline back to the inciting incident takes us to '...council should never have let it get so bad'.

@TonklinDiary True, true.

@antonhowes there are a lot of third party weirdos hanging around heritage and development

strangest part of the story is why would the tenants try to get the building listed, and i am not sure they did since i cannot see an applicant mentioned in the story

@geniflo_LDN As far as I can see they want to rebuild with more and better social housing.

@antonhowes What’s the alternative? Let’s give everything to Blackrock 🙄

@ollieglass It’s unclear how much they could have done to actually keep it from getting so bad, unless it was perhaps done decades ago. The building doesn’t seem to have been designed to last this long.

@antonhowes wait - council lets it get bad, then offers a low price for residents flats? sounds unfair what options do the residents have here? not saying listing is the right answer, but what else could they have done?

@kchoudhu @londinburgh Extraordinary, isn't it? It was apparently the original banana block, and so the blueprint of all the other monstrously ugly social housing in Scotland.

@londinburgh @antonhowes This is incredible... what historical importance could a cinderblock monstrosity like this hold?

@EdmundAvalon As the original thread mentions, there are major new problems with the Labour Force Survey’s reliability. Here’s what the ONS has to say about which data to rely upon:

@antonhowes Whoops!

There are two ways to increase economy-wide labour productivity: raise people’s productivity, or drive the less productive out of jobs. The government has done the latter. Like taking players off a team to raise the average goals per player, rather than scoring more goals.

Amid all the talk of freezing the price of groceries, I looked at what goes into the cost of a pint of milk. Two things jump out... 1/3

@AaronBastani True, though the one to watch is Aberdeen South - that’s potentially a winnable seat for them.

The media keep talking about how impressive Kemi Badenoch is… Here the Tories have less than a third of the vote of Restore, and are the *third* party on the right. 🤯

@andreamatranga Open to debate perhaps:

@antonhowes I would assume it was from greek stratioi for army

At first I thought it was a typo for "Almain", or German, but 1540s Scotland suffered at the hands of hundreds of **Albanian** mercenaries, hired by Henry VIII for his invasion. Known as the stradioti, from the word strada, or road, they were Greek and Balkan refugees who had fled the Ottoman advance, settling in Italy and France. Armed with 12-foot-long spears tipped at both ends, they were expert at hit-and-run tactics - effectively mounted guerrillas. They even saw action against the English peasantry, being part of the force of mercenaries - a few hundred heavy cavalry from Spain, Burgundy, Italy, and Cleves, 1,600 German landsknechts, and some Italian handgunners - who put down the 1549 rebellions in the Home Counties, East Anglia, and South West.

@stianwestlake Me too, but Gilbert John Millar says the soldier etymology is false, and he’s the expert.

@antonhowes I would have guessed the name was from στρατιώτες, Greek for “soldier” - but I see Wikipedia thinks it could be either

@worstall Yup! I believe there were three waves of emigration, and the ones in England were the last - so those who fled Venetian-ruled Greek islands, having already fled the mainland earlier.

@antonhowes Rather fun addition. The Albanians in Italy were, largely, Skanderberg's men who got there. And there are still villages in Italy that speak Albanian as the local lingo (it helps to understand that *everyone* speaks a local lingo plus Italian). Quite a town in Sicily too.

@cactusmaac A decade of work and you just tweet it out

@antonhowes I can save you a lot of time. It was due to easy access to coal and a lot of smart nerds who wrote each other letters on what they were doing.

I'm worried that the book I've spent years writing is going to end up as two or three volumes rather than one. Causes of the British Industrial Revolution, but I'm now eight chapters in and still only up to the summer of 1549.