25th March 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘Dear Ernest……….

                                 …….. warm regards, Douglas’

            You would probably imagine that the above was the salutation and farewell of a personal letter from a close friend or relative, and that between that ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ there was a communication of great interest to both ‘Ernest’ and ‘Doug’.   It wasn’t; and although presumably it was of interest to the sender it certainly was not to me.

            It wasn’t a personal letter. I have never met, and almost certainly never will meet the ‘Douglas’ who addresses me by my first name and sends me his ‘warm regards’.  Nor was it a personal letter.  It was a circular letter, probably sent to every Tom, Dick and Harry and every Jane, Mary or Kate in the Clacton-on-Sea parliamentary constituency from Douglas Carswell once our Conservative MP but currently, thanks to a lightning conversion and an expensive and totally unnecessary by-election,  one of two UKIP MPs in the House of Commons.

            A remarkable feature of that by-election was the fact that Douglas Carswell the UKIP candidate, was the only one who seemed to make a real effort to get elected.  I was deluged by UKIP leaflets, brochures and at least one of those ‘personal’ letters from Douglas Carswell.  I received a phone call on behalf of UKIP and a canvasser who called at my front door.  He seemed a little shocked when I assured him that I would never vote for any UKIP candidate. There was also – so I believe – a well-attended public meeting addressed by both Douglas Carswell and his political boss Nigel Farage.   I received just one leaflet from the Conservative candidate, one from the Liberal Democrats and one from Labour.  There were also a Green candidate and two independents from whom I received nothing.

            The General Election is now only a few weeks away.  History seems to be  repeating itself.  During the past week or so I have received three glossy brochures or leaflets extolling Douglas Carswell’s virtues, a canvassing phone call, and today (21st March)  this ‘personal letter’ from the man himself.  The content of the letter confirms my opinion that, apart from leaving the European Union and reducing immigration, UKIP’s policy is simply to jump on any band-wagon that offers the promise of a few extra votes.   I have so far received nothing from any of the other candidates.

            Douglas’ circular letter promises that UKIP will abolish hospital parking charges, funding this by ’cutting overseas aid and EU payments’ (could be a vote winner – parking at Colchester General Hospital is difficult and expensive – and getting worse!).  They’ll also ‘defend the NHS, defend winter fuel payments, bus passes and tv licences for older folk’ (there are lots of ‘older folk’ with votes in this constituency) ‘stand up to big corporations’ (I don’t know quite what that means but it certainly sounds vote-catching!) and ‘introduce an Australian-style points system’ to control immigration (locally our most serious immigration problem is created by fellow-Brits driven from the London area by ridiculously high housing costs and the ‘bedroom tax').

             

            At the end of the letter there is a chart based on figures supplied by www. ElectoralCalculus.co,uk which suggests that UKIP can expect to gain 48 percent of the votes in this area in the general election, and the Conservatives 45 percent.  Douglas Carswell appeals ‘Only UKIP can keep David Cameron’s candidate out of Clacton’.  I’m inclined to reverse that message and proclaim.  Only the Conservatives can keep Nigel Farage’s candidate out of Clacton. 

            Regular blog readers will know that at the by-election I ‘voted strategically’.  For the first, and probably only time in my life I put my cross against the name of the Conservative candidate in the hope of denying the seat to Douglas Carswell.  It didn’t succeed!    The closeness of the two parties in the forecast tempts me to do the same in the General Election – but I won’t.  This time I’ll vote Green because I am convinced that it is only the policies of the Green Party that offer a cure for Britain’s ills.

           

Final Note:  

The reason that, in both the by-election and in the months preceding the coming general election I had so much potentially mind-bending material from the UKIP candidate and so little from the others, is not I am sure, because the Labour, Conservative, Green and Lib.Dem candidates and their supporters lack enthusiasm and conviction, but that they have limited funds – and good quality printing and distribution costs money.  UKIP presumably has some very wealthy and generous financial backers – or perhaps Douglas (as he uses my first name I’m sure he won’t mind my using his) has a very considerable personal fortune that he is prepared to use to secure electoral success.

An Anniversary

          We have recently seen the first anniversary of the annexation/recovery of the Crimea by Russia.  It was marked by a public opinion poll in the Crimea that revealed that 93 percentage of the population were happy to remain as Russians and had no desire to be once again citizens of Ukraine.   Ninety-three percent! That’s the kind of result that one would only get in a place like North Korea – it must have been fiddled or fabricated!   Well, that’s what ‘the west’ would no doubt like to believe.  The only difficulty with that explanation is that the opinion poll was carried out by a Ukrainian polling agency commissioned by the Ukrainian government.  That was not the result for which the government in Kiev was hoping!  Certainly in the 1950s when both Russia and Ukraine were provinces of the Soviet Union, the citizens of the Crimea were not consulted when Nikita Khruschev decided that their land (which had been part of Russia since Tsarist times) should become part of Ukraine.

            Meanwhile the fact that we have heard no recent news from the disputed region of Eastern Ukraine suggests  that the terms of the cease-fire are being observed; that hostilities have ceased and heavy weaponry withdrawn from the front line.   I hope that prisoners are being exchanged by both sides and that talks are in progress about the degree of autonomy to be granted to the Russian speaking eastern areas of Ukraine. Meanwhile the British Government, which played no part in the cease-fire negotiations, has supplied the Ukrainian Government in Kiev with armoured cars, and is sending units from our army (depleted by government cuts and by less-than-totally-successful campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan), to help train the Ukrainian army.  That’s our contribution to the cause of world peace!

            

           

           

           

     

18th January 2015

Tendring Topics……….on line

The Parliamentary General Election

          There was a time when political parties existed to promote specific policies – the Conservative Party on retaining the status quo and, in general, observing the sage advice, ‘If it ain’t bust, don’t fix it’.  They were naturally the party of the ‘haves’ rather than the ‘have nots’.  The Labour Party on the other hand, was the party of change.  They wanted a fairer, more equal Britain, a Britain without nuclear weapons and without imperial pretensions or ambitions.  They argued that these objectives could best be achieved if most or all public services were owned and run by the public.   They were the party of the ‘have nots’.  Both parties tried to persuade a majority of the electorate to support them.

            Now both main parties, and what’s left of the Liberals, claim to serve the interests of the whole country.  In reality they all have just one overriding policy. It’s the same policy; to win elections, gain political power – and keep it.  To this end the Conservatives under Mrs Thatcher became a party of revolutionary change; among other things selling off most public services to private enterprise and compelling local authorities, who had built houses to rid their districts of overcrowding and homelessness, to sell them to sitting tenants at bargain basement prices; thus very cleverly buying votes with other people’s money.

            New Labour, ‘to make itself electable’, sold its own soul by going along with the retention of a nuclear ‘deterrent’, accepting the revolutionary changes that had been introduced by Mrs Thatcher and erasing ‘Clause 4’ from its own constitution.  I have little doubt that many party members voted for the removal of Clause 4 imagining that they were simply acknowledging that some activities were best carried out by private enterprise.  If fact they were accepting the wholesale privatisation of every public service.  In addition, they allowed our country to become the puppet of the most reactionary American president in living memory.  This resulted in our engagement in two ‘colonial’ wars – one illegal and the other unwinnable – resulting in the loss of billions of pounds and the sacrifice of hundreds of British lives

            Party policies are decided nowadays, not by principles or by the exercise of reason and compassion, but by the findings of the latest opinion polls.  And influencing opinion polls is the popular press, owned largely by foreign billionaires who owe no loyalty to the United Kingdom and care only about ‘circulation and profit’. I don’t find it in the least surprising that thousands of electors are now disillusioned with the traditional political parties.  It is upon the way that they react to that disillusion that the future of our country depends.

Don’t bother to vote

            Probably the commonest reaction is to decline to vote.  What’s the point?  They’re all the same – feathering their own nests.  If voting changed anything they’d ban it. Our first-past-the-post electoral system makes sure that the voice of those who can’t bring themselves to vote for any of the main parties, is never heard. The Chartists of the nineteenth and the Suffragettes of the twentieth century must be turning in their graves.  They suffered and died to make sure that everyone had a vote – and they really believed that universal suffrage would change the world.

           

Those who don’t bother to vote have no right to complain when they find themselves represented by someone whose views they thoroughly detest.  Those who can’t bring themselves to vote for any of the candidates must surely be able to select one of them whose policies and attitudes they detest more than those of the others. Vote for the candidate most likely to defeat him or her.  For the much-publicised recent Clacton-on-Sea by-election I voted Conservative for the first (and probably only) time of my life.  Although I disliked the Conservative candidate’s policies, he seemed to be a nice enough chap and I thought he was the candidate most likely to defeat Douglas Carswell who had defected to UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party).   He didn’t do so and Clacton had the dubious honour of returning the very first UKIP MP to Westminster!  Still – I did my best. 

Vote for one of the ‘minority’ candidates

            We don’t yet know how many candidates there will be for our own constituencies in next May’s General Election. In every English constituency there will certainly be representatives of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal-Democrat Party.  There will almost certainly be a Ukipper (in my Clacton constituency he’ll be the sitting MP) and a Green Party Candidate.  Also there’s likely to be a variety of fringe party and special-interest candidates ranging from the Official Raving Loony Party to those eager to publicise local or special concerns like ‘saving a hospital from closure’, ‘building a new bypass’ or, as we had for the Clacton by-election, a lady who wanted to raise the status and ensure the safety of ‘sex workers’.   

            My guess (and you can’t exaggerate how much I’d like to be proved wrong!) is that in the Clacton-on-Sea Constituency Douglas Carswell (the sitting UKIP MP) will retain his seat though with a smaller majority, The Conservative Candidate will come next but with only a few more votes than  his Labour opponent, followed by the Green, the Lib.Dem. the Official Raving Loony Candidate and the various ‘special interest’ candidates who will get only a tiny handful of votes each.

UKIP versus GREEN

            In my constituency (Clacton-on-Sea) our sitting MP is a Ukipper.  That is true of only one other constituency in the United Kingdom.  In most other constituencies there will be a Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat MP who will be looking nervously over his or her shoulder at the UKIP contestant and wondering what effect this new and apparently growing party will have on the election result.

            UKIP and its leader Nigel Farage, remind me uncomfortably of the NAZI party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, in Germany in the 1920s and early ‘30s.   There too, the electorate was disillusioned and tired of the old political parties and their failing policies.  In Adolf Hitler they found someone who was a fervent German nationalist, just as Nigel Farage is a fervent British Nationalist, who disliked the ‘old politics’ and offered a new path for Germany of action rather than talk.  What’s more he assured the Germans that they weren’t to blame for their country’s problems – it was all the fault of ‘the Jews’.  At first most Germans thought that he was a bit of a joke,  Then the wealthy thought they could manipulate him for their own purposes.   One morning though they woke up to discover that he and his brown-shirted followers had taken over their country. – Hitler’s Third Reich had arrived.

            Nigel Farage also assures us that outside forces – the European Union (demonised as ‘Brussels’) and all those foreign immigrants for which the EU, so he says, was largely responsible – were the cause of Britain’s problems.  Shake off the European yoke and get rid of all those foreigners, and Britain would be great again!  At first everyone thought that Nigel Farage – usually seen holding ‘a fag and a pint’ to assure those who saw him that he was ‘one of us’ - was a bit of a joke.  Then, as with Hitler, the wealthy and powerful thought they could use him for their purposes. They have poured their spare thousands of pounds into his party’s coffers. The story is on-going……….. UKIP is essentially a ‘one-objective party’.   The EU and immigrants are its main target.  Other causes are taken up as seems opportune, but generally UKIP policies are those of the extreme right of the Conservative Party.  Abolish ‘green taxes’ and cease subsidising solar and wind power schemes.  Encourage ‘fracking’ for cheap oil and gas.  Ignore the warnings about climate change and global warming.  It either isn’t happening or, if it is, it’s got nothing to do with human activities so there’s nothing to be done about it.  Vote for UKIP and cheaper fuel oil!  I have little doubt that thousands will be short-sighted enough to do so.

            The Green Party is almost the exact opposite of UKIP.  Below is a brief account of their policies and intentions.

We live in unsettling times. Many of the securities that our parents and grandparents fought for – a functioning National Health Service, free education, and an affordable home – now look out of reach for most of us. Coupled with this, climate change is bringing unpredictable and threatening weather patterns. People feel let down by politicians, and yet there has been an explosion in political activism. People want to do things differently and aren’t afraid to be bold and challenging.

We believe that public services should be for the benefit of the public, not sold off in bits; we believe that education is worth investing in and not something that should mean a lifetime of debt; we believe in leaving behind a better world for our children and grandchildren. This is the only world we have and its welfare, above all things, should be the highest priority for us all.

Politics should work for the benefit of all, not just those who shout the loudest or have the deepest pockets.  We believe in “The Common Good”. A vote for the Green Party is a vote for The Common Good.

            Like UKIP, the Green Party is growing.   They have just one MP – in Brighton – but in the European Parliament elections and in recent by-elections (including that in Clacton) Green candidates received more votes than the Liberal Democrats. Currently there is controversy as to whether The Green Party’s President is to join with the leaders of the Conservative Party, Liberal-Democratic Party, Labour Party and UKIP in public televised debate before next May’s general election.  David Cameron is refusing to take part in the debate unless the Greens are also invited.  He is probably wise to do so.   Green arguments, persuasively presented, are far more likely to draw voters from Labour, Liberal Democrat, and even UKIP than they are from the Conservatives.

            If (and it’s quite a big ‘if’) I’m still around in May, I shall vote for the Green Candidate.  I hope that a great many other people will do the same.    

           

Week 21 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

Thursday’s Vote

          This Thursday (22^nd May 2014) is voting day for the European Parliamentary Elections.  Please don’t just yawn and ignore it.  The European Parliament is the one truly democratic institution of the European Union.  It is more democratic than our own parliament in Westminster since its members are elected by proportional representation instead of ‘first past the post’ as in UK parliamentary elections.  That means that every vote for any party can count.  It is impossible for a candidate to be elected by a minority of the electorate, as is possible in UK parliamentary elections..  It also means that minority parties’ voices are heard – in proportion to the number of electors who voted for them.

            That is why in European parliamentary elections we vote for the party rather than the individual candidate (though the names of the candidates from each party are listed).  That’s how it is that there are UKIP members of the European Parliament with no purpose other than to destroy the institution that made it possible for their voices to be heard!  It is true that, thanks to the determination of some national governments (including our own) to limit the European Parliament’s powers, these are not as wide and all-embracing as they should be.   However European parliamentary power is steadily increasing and will continue to do so if we, the electors, demand it.

The claim made by UKIP’s leader that 70 percent of British laws now come from the European Parliament is totally untrue. Although exposed as false in Radio 4’s More or Less programme on Friday 2^nd May, it continues to be quoted as a fact.

Our own European Constituency covers the whole of ‘Greater East Anglia’ and there are no less than nine parties hoping for seats.   They are ‘Independence from Europe’, ‘British National Party (BNP), Christian People’s Alliance, Conservatives, English Democrats’, ‘Labour’,’ Liberal Democrats’, NO2EU, and ‘Green’.

            Some of those parties you will never have heard of – and the chances are you’ll never hear of them again!  I think that those which may reasonably hope to secure enough votes to get at least one member from East Anglia in the European Parliament are Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats, UKIP and Green.

            Many people who are entitled to vote are totally disillusioned with the main traditional parties.  Conservative policies have widened the gap between wealthy and poor that is, I believe, at the root of many of Britain’s troubles today.   They have run down our conventional armed forces that can have a peace-making and peace-keeping role (as well as being a disciplined force available to help with civil emergencies) while slavishly preserving our nuclear weapons and our Trident submarine fleet. These weapons and the submarine fleet have no purpose other than destroying our fellow men, women and children.  They have totally failed to deter the many acts of aggression, violence and terrorism that have sullied recent history.  If nuclear weapons were ever to be used it would probably herald the end of civilisation as we know it – possibly the extinction of human-kind.

            Sadly, Labour Governments have failed even to try to follow the lead of pioneers of the Labour Movement like Kier Hardy and George Lansbury.  In ten years of New Labour Government the gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and poorest actually increased.   They too are prepared to spend millions on a nuclear ‘ultimate deterrent’ that doesn’t deter!  Ramsey MacDonald is said to have failed because he was ‘dazzled by duchesses’.  Tony Blair and his New Labour colleagues have been ‘blinded by billionaires!’ and their policies are merely modifications of those of the Conservatives.

As for the Liberal Democrats.  There’s really no point in heeding any of their pre-election promises.  The issue of student fees has illustrated that they’ll abandon any of their high principles for the sake of a few seats in the government and the empty title of ‘Deputy Prime Minister. 

            No, I can’t summon up any enthusiasm for Conservatives, Labour or Lib.Dems.  Neither can thousands of others – many for quite different reasons than mine.    This disillusion could give UKIP its chance – Nigel Farage, its leader, is quite sure that it will.  I do urge readers of this blog not to let it. Apart from a determination to leave the EU nobody can be quite sure what UKIP’s policies are because its leader has disowned everything on its former manifesto.  Leaving the EU will not solve all, or any of Britain’s problems.  We are inextricably part of Europe, historically, geographically and economically.  The EU gives our exporters, of both goods and services a ‘level playing field’ in which to conduct their services.  Those ‘petty regulations’ that some find so irksome ensure the health and safety of all EU workers.   The countries of the EU are our biggest market. Of course we need to sell our goods and services elsewhere as well.  There is nothing that the EU does to prevent or discourage this.  Exporters are almost unanimous in their support of EU membership.  Leaving would cost thousands of jobs.  Is that really what we want?

            Apart from getting out of Europe the speeches of prominent Ukippers suggest  that, on the whole, they support the policies and the attitudes of the extreme right-wing of the Conservatives.  They don’t believe in man-made climate change and would stop the provision of wind turbines and solar farms.  They’d encourage ‘fracking’ -  provided it wasn’t carried out in their own back yard!  They’d permit fox-hunting again and allow smoking in pubs and public places where it is now forbidden.  Is that really what we want?

            Fortunately it is possible to react to disillusion with the main parties by voting for a party whose policies are almost the exact opposite of UKIP.   The Green Party, already a force to be reckoned with within Europe, and (unlike UKIP) with representation in our House of Commons, realizes that, unless we do something about it, climate change will destroy ‘the best-laid plans of mice, men’ and political parties.  Have we already forgotten the storms and devastating floods that caused such havoc in this country just a few months ago, the typhoons in the Philippines and the Indian sub-continent, the bush fires in Australia and the arctic conditions in the USA?  The policies of ‘the Greens’ give human-kind its best chance of survival.  They support continued membership of the EU because they realize that to be effective in protecting us from the worst effects of climate change, action needs to be taken on a regional and global level.

Polling day is on Thursday but thousands of us, who vote by post, have already voted.  I have, and I voted GREEN!   Those who wish their grand-children and great grand-children to inherit a world worth living in, will do the same!

Cause and Effect

The devastating mine disaster in a recently privatised coal mine in Turkey that claimed over 300 lives is a timely warning of the possible result of a free market economy, unfettered by the kind of ‘pettifogging health and safety provisions’ imposed by Brussels, from which Nigel Farage and, rather less stridently, David Cameron and George Osborne, are promising to free us!  It certainly does produce higher dividends for shareholders and encourage investment; tough about all the widows and orphans, but you can’t make omelettes……………

Green Party Policies

Since I wrote the above, the Green Party has launched its campaign for the European and local government elections.  Afterwards leader Natalie Bennet was interviewed by the BBC.  Below is the BBC report of that interview.

Speaking to the BBC after the campaign launch, Natalie Bennett said the party hoped to treble its number of MEPs to six, and would need a swing of just 1.6% to do so.  Even with a small number of representatives in the European Parliament, it is "possible to make a real difference" she continued, "as we have done on issues like bankers' bonuses, on fishing policy, on making Europe more friendly and more social".

The party aims to scrap tuition fees and prescription charges in England and Wales, increase child benefit, and renationalise the railways and energy companies These policies would be costed by the 2015 general election, she said, but the party was considering imposing a top rate of income tax of more than 50% on the highest earners"We need a society that works for the common good, not just the good of the few, which it does at the moment," Ms Bennett said. "We need real change in our society. It's working for the 1%, not the 99% of us. We need decent benefits, we need to make the minimum wage a living wage, and we need to insure that privatisation doesn't keep costing us an absolute fortune.  "What we need is for multinational companies, rich individuals, to be paying their taxes, which they're simply not doing at the moment."

Later, appearing on BBC One's Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Ms Bennett acknowledged that the Greens were "identified with" campaigns against the extraction of shale gas, or fracking. It was, she said, a "very uncertain industry that may very well not get off the ground", she added, and there is "massive and growing public resistance to it" with her party on the "front line" of protests against fracking.

Having read the above, I am now more than ever glad that I voted 'Green' in the European parliamentary elections.  Every one of those Green policies was among those that I included among my political aims a fortnight ago in this blog.

             

                                          

Week 19 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line          

‘Call the Midwife!’

          Clacton isn’t a town noted for its political activists and its violent (or even non-violent) marches and demonstrations. It is astonishing therefore that there were two protest marches, for the same cause, one on Saturday 26^th April and one on the following day. The cause was the hospital authority’s decision to close the Maternity Units in the Clacton-on-Sea and in Harwich and to concentrate maternity services in Colchester.   The reason is not because of shortage of midwives or other staff in either Clacton or Harwich – but because of a shortage of midwives in Colchester!   They need Clacton’s and Harwich’s midwives to make up the numbers.

            This is said to be a ‘temporary arrangement’ but we suspicious Clactonians suspect that it’s one of those ‘temporary arrangements’ that go on for longer than expected – until, in fact, everyone comes to accept them and it is then decided to make them permanent. `

            No-one likes to see a local service closed down and local people compelled to go further to a larger more distant centre, but the nature of the maternity service and the geographical situation of both Clacton and Harwich make it doubly undesirable in our Tendring district. A glance at a large-scale map of south-eastern East Anglia will make it clear that the Tendring peninsula is almost-an-island bounded by the estuaries of the rivers Stour and Colne, a relatively narrow isthmus extending from Colchester to Manningtree, and a wide length of coastline with the port of Harwich/Parkeston and the popular holiday seaside resorts of Dovercourt, Walton-on-the-Naze, Frinton-on-Sea, Holland-on-Sea, Clacton-on-Sea, Jaywick Sands, St Osyth and Brightingsea.

            The only road access is through that Colchester/Manningtree isthmus from which highways fan out to serve resorts which attract motorists from London, the Midlands and the whole of East Anglia to their safe, sandy beaches, seaside holiday attractions – and the lowest average annual rainfall in the United Kingdom!  It follows that throughout all the summer and at weekends in the spring and autumn (particularly bank holiday weekends) those roads are often clogged up with holiday traffic, sometimes reduced to a snail’s pace by sheer numbers, or by the occasional road accident.

            Tough on the mother in labour, perhaps with her first baby, stuck in a traffic jam somewhere between Clacton – or Harwich – and Colchester!  I don’t suppose that the time-and-motion experts who calculated that under ‘normal circumstances’ neither journey should take much more than half an hour, even thought about that.  Babies in a hurry to be born know nothing about normal circumstances, holiday traffic or traffic jams.

            I’m not surprised that Clactonians have protested, marched and demonstrated against this stupid and thoughtless decision of the hospital authorities.  Why though were there two almost identical marches with two lots of protesters?   The Saturday march was the Conservative march, organised and led by Conervative Tendring District Council.  The Sunday march was the Labour march and was organised by the local Labour Party and led by the prospective Labour candidate Tim Young..  The closure of Clacton and Harwich’s maternity units is not a political issue.  Gilbert and Sullivan wrote in one of their comic operas ‘Every little man-child that is born alive is either a little Liberal or a little Conservative’.  Luckily they don’t know that and, luckily or not, nowadays it isn’t only male babies involved, nor is it limited to just two parties.

            I think it a great pity that the two main parties hadn’t got together for a united protest march, thus demonstrating that compassion and common sense aren’t the sole prerogative of one party, and that they can unite when the occasion demands it.  They might have persuaded some of the others to join in – the Lib-Dems, the Greens and the Ukippers (I’m sure they’re convinced that it’s all the fault of ‘Brussels’) might well have joined them!

Those Market Forces

            I don’t like living in a society with an economy reliant on Market Forces.  I believe   that co-operation is better than competition, that we shouldn’t all be trying to get as much as we can for as little as we can get away with, and that we shouldn’t need to follow the advice to ‘shop around’ and change our power supplier, our banker, our savings account, whenever it may seem that it would pay us to do so. Old people - and there are a lot of us in this area - don't like unnecessary change. The cheapest is rarely the best and the supplier or the banker may change his charges as soon as you put your phone down. In the 17^th and 18^th century Quaker businessmen – grocers, brewers, bankers, manufacturers – made their fortunes by declining to yield to market forces.  They bought in or made the products they sold, added just sufficient to make themselves a reasonable living and stuck to that price and to that quality of goods.  Quaker businesses may not always have sold the cheapest goods but customers could be quite sure that they hadn’t been watered down or adulterated, that the price wouldn’t be put up if there were to be a sudden shortage and  that there would be no hidden ‘extra charges’.   That policy benefited both the buyer and the seller.

            Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  The ethics of the market place have made us a nation of cynics.   We’re interested only in prices.  The only ‘value’ market traders recognise is the highest price that goods or services can command at any given time ‘in the open market’.   A diamond ring commands a higher price than a shovel (though there are situations in which a shovel could save your life and a diamond ring would have no value whatsoever), and a merchant banker (a money lender) can demand a higher price for his services than a brain surgeon!

            Market prices depend upon supply and demand.  Increase the demand for any desirable product without increasing its supply will raise that product’s price as surely as night follows day. 

            It was this axiom that made me predict confidently in this blog that the government’s help to buy scheme for would-be house buyers would have the effect of raising house prices.  You will recall that a major factor in the creation of the financial crisis from which we hope we are now emerging, was the unwise lending of large sums of money for the purchase of homes.  Because there were not enough homes for hopeful would-be purchasers to buy, the price went up…and up, until it toppled over.

            Many house-buyers had taken on a debt they couldn’t hope to pay off.  Hundreds were rendered homeless and lenders were left with bad debts that could have rendered them bankrupt had the government not bailed them out – with our money!

            Determined not to make the same mistake again, banks and building societies increased the deposit they required from would-be buyers to as much as 25 percent of the price of the property, effectively putting home ownership out of the reach of most first-time buyers.  However David Cameron and George Osborne, determined to pursue the chimera of ‘a nation of home-owners’ introduced their ‘help to buy’ scheme which offered an additional loan to help with that deposit so that the initial sum required by the house-purchaser would be no more than 5 percent of the price of the property.

            This has had two totally predictable effects. Demand for homes once more greatly exceeds supply and – as I had foreseen – house prices are again rising well ahead of general inflation.  The other effect is that the government has, by guaranteeing most of the required deposit, taken on a debt that the professional money lenders had thought was too risky – and, without consulting the electorate – has done so with taxpayers’ money!   This has clearly worried the professionals and they are now asking would-be borrowers a series of very intrusive questions before they will arrange a mortgage. ‘How much do they spend on holidays, on dining out, on alcohol, on entertaining, on children’s education and other financial commitments, and how they would manage their mortgage repayments if – or rather when - interest rates rise?

            The best response?  It’s surely to accept that home ownership is not everybody’s obvious choice.  Repeal the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation and encourage local authorities to build homes for letting as they did for a century before the advent of Margaret Thatcher – and allow those same authorities to allocate those homes as they think best.  In a word; to restore some of the democratic local decision making that is an important aspect of the ‘localism’ to which the government pays lip-service but has been systematically destroying since taking office.