Labour Zombies

'...after all that, I make 22 member of Gordon Browns cabinet. 16 were cabinet members under Tony Blair - or 73%! 4 were senior ministers and you can really only say 2 are "new faces" - less that 10%.', writes a commenter on Dale.

So it's not a problem of personalties misrepresenting 'real' Labour then. It's the Labour Government, Party and Movement that is a corrupt, dishonourable, sleaze-ridden, putrid disgrace to its ideals and its once worthwhile achievements.

Housiness and Truthiness

Housiness is an emotion; we have all experienced it but, like all emotion, it is hard to portray. Enter your house and you feel it. If you are used to living with many others then it is particularly strongly felt when everyone is out. There is the house with the familiar light patterns, scents, furniture like a stage set, and quiet; not necessarily silence, but excluded noise. Often people sit down for a moment and savour that, then set about their inner lives. A friend (with 5 children) once remarked that she didn't want to go on holiday to exotic or fabled places; she wanted all the others to do that and she would go on holiday in her house.

It is well known that elderly people taken from their house and put into ostensibly far better care conditions fade and die. That is not the worst of cases for many simply wither and survive.

So when I look at official housing statistics on prices and numbers and accessibility for diverse age- and income groups, and analyses of low-occupation patterns, and over-crowding, and read of planning to decant populations into new and better dwellings, none of it meets the notion of housiness.

Housiness and its irrefutable claim to recognition also results in people experiencing the social exclusion of finding work in their home area but with no chance of establishing themselves in a house in an independent adult role. It seems reasonable to expect longer or shorter migrations for work, then establishing a house is resolved there, but it is hard to find work but no chance of a house.

I agree there are some problems that have no general solution and can only be left to resolve themselves but this is essentially a small-scale solution, it doesn't resolve the widespread crisis in degenerating urban and transport environments that Raedwald's statistics on gross levels of under-occupation in inner urban areas (and some outer and highly desirable areas) evidence.

All this is worsened, and its solution further distanced, by a malign state fiscal policy that results in disproportionate investment in house ownership to the detriment of all other forms of investment, notably in the production of goods and services, that favours a dysfunctional form of saving.

Brown and his incompetence and unintended economic effects is worth another post.