Gordon Brown to launch house-building boom - headline in the Telegraph.
Here is the financial world in crisis because of people with poor credit records, low wages, difficulties various - the subprime mortgage market clientele to whom the woes of the world are being attributed - failing to keep up with their mortgage payments; here we are with falling house prices, just to add to the hurt.
And the Leader announces his vision: building 3 million houses for people with low wages (probably made even lower by his confiscatory tax regimes), difficulties various, possibly damaged credit records . Where is the funding coming from then? If he has an idea perhaps he'd like to whisper it to Northern Rock.
Lowering transaction costs and imposts on the current housing stock would do more, faster and less environmentally damagingly, to meet housing demand; and ending death taxes on main homes passing between family generations.
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I suppose it is the politician's way to whistle in the dark
but against the background of impending financial meltdown almost any business-as-usual governmental pronouncement sounds ridiculous.
They really do need to tell us how they propose we shall weather this storm
but then again, they can't, can they ? For more reasons than one
It is so upsetting, don't you find ND, that we should say 'business-as-usual' when the proposed legislation depriving us of what remains of our civil liberties is heard. Usual? Unthinkable a decade ago.
On the financial storm: had the Central Bank been made truly independent, (and the stripping out of so many powers, before it was grudgingly lipserviced over to a pretence that euro-entry regulations were being met in 1997, not been performed by our then Chancellor), it would all feel much safer.
Mervyn King has displayed fine judgement, and outstanding grasp of the problems and possible solutions; he has displayed, too,a sense of responsibility to the country and great dignity in not dropping NewlabourNewtwilight into the economic mess of their making. The Leader and his Balls and hangers-on are utterly stupid and wholly contemptible in their attacks upon their own lifeboat captain.
This is a reannouncement of course.Did you know that according to government estimates as quoted by Nicholas Soames 1 million of these hosues will be occupoied by immigrants yet to arrive .
Did you also notice that the planning regulationn are reconfiguyred so as to miss out local objections.
This will become an incendiary issue when local Towns actually see what is being done to them. For example in Lewes a historic Town with a small coherent community there are 7000 new dwellings planned.
Across the country the deep rural spring that fed England is being poisoned and there is little sign that the Labour government have an7y intersst in stopping it .
Why would they ? They hate the country , nationalism and they need voters in the South.
Rage rage rage
Building the Tories out of Britain?
Constant warping of markets in housing, not least by the pretence that university educated young people entering the professions should have a claim on housing subsidised from general taxation, thus from many who will be much poorer than are these public employees with their improper demands, drives all this.
Subsidising the housing costs of the very poor seems reasonable, subsidising those of employees whose wages are too low and for which there are other market-driven solutions, is not.
Any way, as the post says, a let up in savage taxation rates, and lowered transaction costs, and the ending of punitive sanctions on passing a main house to the next family generation, would meet much of this falsely created housing need.
Whether Morrison said it or not, S, he was quite nasty enough to have embraced the attitude.
The garden cities were the very best developments of their kind, iconic in their design and achievements, but who can doubt that rural Hertforshire was ripped to pieces by their building.
What is needed is another tax regime leaving people's earnings for them to spend, and encouragement of the recycling of the current housing stock.
Not restricting all attempts at saving for retirement to investing in housing would help a great deal too, as would ceasing to threaten and wreck the real pension provision system.
But you know so much about this stuff N, so eggs and grandmothers really.
Matthew Parris - a top Brown baiter - excellent again today on Gordon the Moron.
http://tinyurl.com/yrg77v
I do recommend reading the linked Rail Regulator's letter on leaving his post as Chairman. It's shocking in what he writes of the obstacles placed in his path, and at the same time utterly unshocking as it is just what one would expect.
For years I've been watching the public (national and local) authorities splutter aboutThe Thames Gateway requirements to stuff houses in to Kent, East London and Essex.
The incompetence which is endemic in all these pension-grabbing people is breath taking, and explains why one stupid politician can pull any number off the shelf and spout it on TV, to achieve a result of all the others doing absolutely nothing about it.
The sub-politics of 'affordable' housing, and its area of grey governance (with its lack of democratic accountability right through to plain corruption), is part of the very soil in which Labour is rooted.
Presumably, Sacks, the Leader is relying on going back to his roots . The appointed housing authority to be set up (lovely jobs and pensions there) that will over-ride local authority planning obstacles, indeed whole democratically answerable competencies, and 'nimbyism' in some (read Conservative) areas looks typically Labour.
Yet it took the Conservatives to provide so much of the post War housing, and all of the decent post War housing - the Labour -provided stuff had a nasty tendency to collapse from a great hight, with people still inside engulfed in a cloud of asbestos dust - just as it was the Conservatives who provided the possibility of a universal decent education.
Noblesse oblige seems to be a better and more honest motivating force than socialist redistribution; it certainly produces better outcomes.
Elby, you have gone into the black again; wot no blog?
Attacking the Leader and sitting ducks comes to mind; perhaps it is time not to come to the aid of the Party but to go for the organisation and interests that forced this financial fool (everything he's meddled with, everything, in the financial and economic world, since 1997, has been damaged and stunted)
and utterly selfish, arrogant egoist, onto our interests.
HG, I am dog bound! Many thoughts keep popping into my head which might meriting bruiting in the blogosphere, but finding the time when I am not knackered seems to be a problem.
The hound is a delight, but clearly the offspring of two breeds who are full-on working dogs - Patterdales, beasts bred to dig other beasts out of holes, and apparently quite happy to spend all day doing such, and border collies ; indeed, dad, down the road from mum, is cowherd at the local farm (on the Somerset Levels; beautiful, but odd - if cows run around in the field you are walking next to, the road vibrates).
So, Pig is a delight, but very time-consuming. And as Lilith's houseboy,other tasks now seem to take up *all* the remaining time. I'm cooking big time today - two of my boys, one with partner, coming over tomorrow to stay over, so a fine stew of gorgeous Stourhead beef, and local veg is on the slow cook at the mo.
The dogs just farted, got to strike a match ... help, can't find them.
Tonight we have "Supper Club" - L's been doing this for some years with a few friends down this way. As the title suggests, we meet for supper, every week possible, moving from home to home. Chez nous tonight, so I am cooking. Smoked Haddock Chowder, and Apple Crumble with local organic double cream, quite literally to die for, and local vanilla ice cream. A good time had by all.
So - in eventual conclusion - blogging still seems a little distant, though that arsehole Brown does spur me on. In the meantime, always a pleasure to drop in here for some refined exchanges :-). I have at times got fed up when L disappears up her blog for long stretches, but also acknowledge that the bringing together of so many disparate people has to be a good thing. It must be that which we have in common that binds a society together, rather than that which we don't have in common causing said society to fracture. Which seems to be the case here in England's green and pleasant land.
Postscript (the entropic thoughts of an aging hippy). Spent Friday from midday to 5pm in the woods at Westonbirt, with walking boots, an old mate and the dog. Boy did we have a good time - Pig as happy as a pig in shit, and we had some hilarious encounters with other dogs - it's doggy paradise and then some - which ended up with total strangers cracking up in public watching them! We staggered out muddy, tousled and all very content. Tomorrow I plan to do the woods at Stourhead - a lot closer, 20 minutes to Westonbirt's hour, as the little bugger clearly needs to be walked and walked and walked bless him. He chills well, but you can not only see the deep pleasure he gains from being FREE! and the chill that settles on him of an evening after. All good stuff.
Pig doesn't seem to have grown fully into his legs yet either, Elby. Are you polishing up his coat to full gleam with Cherryblossom and a yellow duster or is the gloss joie de vivre?
'It must be that which we have in common that binds a society together, rather than that which we don't have in common causing said society to fracture.' Precisely, and what we have in common we find amongst ourselves, not by state edict; different strokes...it's always local and personal. Have you noticed that whenever people talk about immigration it's always in terms of - 'not the people I know and actually get on very well with, they are my friends/ neighbours/relatives' it's the others, the one's we don't know, we worry we can't get on with. What causes society to fracture is being ordered about abstractly into correct attitudes - it would make anybody bolshie.
Yeah, Pig's a great gangly git like I am - we look good together, and walk in a similar manner. Kiwi black boot polish and a good chamois leather keep him spick and span; tho' we had to bath him yesterday as he had rolled in something at Westonbirt that turned him into a stink hound. A good walk today, and I suspect we will have lots of conversation about state intervention and smells in the undergrowth. He's wonderful company :-)
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