Category: National politics

Ten weeks from today we will be going to the polls to decide whether or not we want to keep our first-past-the-post voting system. I will be campaigning hard over that time against AV which I think is a fundamentally unfair system.

It is dangerous to patronise voters but AV is complex and too many people make mistakes with it. The voting for the London Mayor uses the AV system and I noted almost three years ago that 41,000 Londoners, 1.7% of the electorate lost their first vote as a result of the complexity of the system. I said back in 2008:

Anyone at the counts will know how many people wasted their votes as a result of being confused by this system. Some people put the numerals 1 and 2 in the left-hand column – both votes rejected. Many people put two crosses in the left hand column – both votes rejected. 41,000 or 1.7% of first preference votes were rejected. 412,000 or 17% of second preferences were rejected and 408,000 or 17% of voters didn’t bother with the second vote.

If 17% of second votes aren’t even counted you have to start asking some hard questions. This was the third time AV has been used for this election so it is no use arguing that voters were inexperienced.

The second reason I think it is unfair, as Carmeron says in the video, is that it gives a minority of voters two bites of the cherry. So, for instance, the left can appear to be much bigger than it is. The Marxist entryists in the Green Party can vote once for the Greens and then vote again for the Labour Party.

AV is complex and unfair. FPTP is a bit harsh but very transparent. Bit like me!

According to this calculation UK government debt goes through the £1 trillion mark today. This figure excludes PFI, unfunded state pension schemes and a list of other liabilities such of those of the state banks, Network Rail and nuclear decommissioning.

Last year the UK government spent £155 billion more than it collected, the deficit. This year the figure will be about £150 billion. That is something like £5,000 per tax payer per year.

Guido Fawkes points out this morning that LibDem and Tory votes in the Oldham and Saddleworth by-election exceeded Labour’s vote. If Labour’s narrative is going to be that the country is turning away from the “Conservative-led” coalition in disgust then it is hard to see how this first by-election where the “ConDem” coalition has beaten Labour by 923 votes plays to that narrative.

The result was:

Labour 14,718 (42%)
LibDem 11,160 (32%)
Conservative 4,481 (13%)
UKIP 2,029 (5.8%)
BNP 1,560 (4.5%)

Angela Harbutt on the Liberal Vision blog suggests that an AV style system would have seen the LibDems win. I am quite happy to stick with FPTP me.

I am a member of the Tory party, not the coalition party, but still I am content that Labour can’t beat the coalition at a by-election in a safe seat. I have always said that the coalition will go to term. At the end of that term Labour will not come back. In the meantime Labour will win most by-elections, except in the safest of Tory or LibDem seats. Labour will stay ahead in the polls and it will sometimes be a hairy ride for Tories, but in 2015 Labour will get smacked as people have to decide whether they want to be led by grown-ups or rather expensive sentamentalists.

Much of the commentary around last year’s student riots focussed on the unfairness of the boomers, who went to university pretty much for free and have done well out of the UK’s property market over the last 40 years or so, visiting £9,000 tuition fees on the next generation. As a late boomer myself I can’t help feeling a little guilty over this.

This morning the Radio 4 Today programme followed up on the Grant Shapps interview in the Observer on Sunday. There he talked about the craziness of first time buyers, without the benefit of help from their parents, having to wait until they were 36 to buy their first properties. I started paying my first mortgage when I was 23. Maybe that was too early. Shapps talked about the desirability of the housing market lagging wages and making housing more affordable over time.

Shapps is on dangerous ground talking about pushing the cost of housing down and in the past I have had people get angry with me when I have suggested that it would be desirable if this happened over time. As a nation we have an unhealthy relationship with property ascribing to it supernatural powers. Most commentary on the housing market blames supply but the demand picture is just as important. Not many people have lost money being long in property over the last few decades and as a result many of us have rather large homes. We believe that we simply cannot lose if we pile further and further into property even branching out into buy-to-let when we can’t envisage an even larger home.

As you walk around London suburbs where maybe 80% of properties have been extended by say 30% with rear and loft extensions you can’t help but wonder how we have increased the size of the property stock by a quarter say and still the price has greatly risen above inflation. Surely we are doing something weird? We are. Many of us are effectively hoarding. I know there are other factors at play such as immigration and foreign property buyers in London but these factors can only have a big impact in a market which is already overbought.

There are two things which the new coalition government has done which will have a big impact on property prices over time. Firstly, it plans to take about £2 billion out of housing benefits. The social housing advocacy industry worries that this will lead to large movements of benefit recipients out of more expensive property. I am not sure how many taxpayers are that worried about this. The most likely outcome is that rents will fall. This will blow back on property prices.

The second big change is those tuition fees. Because Brits think that property is magic the price of property is strictly tied to their ability to borrow. The liquidity problems in banking have already flowed through to stable property prices. Interest rates will march up to 5% or so over the next couple of years and will bear down further on any hint of exuberance in the property market. Over the medium term tuition fees will feed through too. If future generations of young people have their property borrowing limited by education loans on a large scale this will feed through to lower property prices. Instead of maxing out their borrowing on property alone young people will need to share their credit limit between education and property loans. What this means is that when the boomers come to cash in their property chips they will get less than they would have if tuition fees had not been pushed up.

The next generation will borrow and repay pretty much the same. Tuition fees will be offset by lower property prices. The UK property market will get more normal. The boomers will pay. Rejoice!

I have not been keeping up with the news and blogging much over the holidays.

One of the things I have been waiting for since the election is for the left to start quoting half of one of the dialogues in Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windemere’s Fan. They did this throughout the eighties and into the nineties. It was tedious then. I guess we will have to put up with it for another fifteen or twenty years.

It happened last Thursday when the Independent and the Guardian dutifully picked up Ed Miliband’s press release on the Bookstart cut, since withdrawn. The Labour press release said:

This Conservative-led government knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The abolition of Bookstart will deprive children of an early opportunity to discover the joy of reading. It is one of the programmes introduced by Labour of which I am most proud. It was a gift from the government to the next generation.

Note the use of the Newspeak term “Conservative-led government”. As a full-on socialist Miliband makes the mistake of describing your money (which he is eager to spend on your behalf) as belonging to “the government”. Maybe if Miliband himself had more booklearning he wouldn’t have chosen this quote. The full dialogue from Lady Windemere’s fan goes like this:

LORD DARLINGTON. What cynics you fellows are!
CECIL GRAHAM. What is a cynic? [Sitting on the back of the sofa.]
LORD DARLINGTON. A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
CECIL GRAHAM. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.

The whole point of the dialogue is that there is a happy medium and the socialist position which says we know how best to spend your money is an extreme one. With the deficit still running at a rate of about £150 billion per annum, the equivalent of £5,000 a year for every taxpayer in the UK, there are some nasty cuts to come and Miliband’s sentimentalist is simply not the right man for the job. Cameron clearly is.

This video showing a man in a wheelchair being manhandled by police at last Thursday’s student riots has gone viral as they say. The man was interviewed on the BBC yesterday and apparently some people thought that the interviewer, Ben Brown, gave Jody McIntyre an unnecessarily hard time.

It seems to me that Ben Brown treated McIntyre like anyone else.

McIntyre is not being particularly honest though. Although he presents himself as a cerebral palsy victim in a wheelchair he does not mention that by his own account he walked up the 9 stories of stairs of the 30 Millbank building during the student riots of 10th November. His account, here, also makes it sound like he is quite happy to be at the sharp end of these demos; always at the front, dismantling barriers and walking himself to the top floor of 30 Millbank. The quotes below show give you some insight I think:

The sun was shining on the morning of November 10th, and our blood was boiling.

We passed Trafalger Square, and half way down Whitehall found ourselves approaching the main bulk of the demonstration, which had assembled there. It was an endless sea of people, but unfortunately, they had been corralled by police and NUS stewards into one lane of the dual carriageway. Me and Finlay immediately set to work, tearing down the metal barriers which separated the two lanes.

We were approaching the Treasury on our right; “That’s our first target,” I told my brother.

All of a sudden, the bicycle burst out of the crowd, rushing through the pair of armed police guarding the private road of the Treasury. A group of 200 followed, including me in my wheelchair, and Finlay pushing at full speed.

We continued down the sixty stone steps at the other end of the Treasury road without so much as a pause for breath. We were on the rampage.

As batons began to swing, me and Finlay stood our ground on the front line. I stood up on my wheelchair …

In front of us, a huge glass building towered; it was the Conservative Party’s Headquarters, and it was under attack. The crowd was so tightly packed that even with the wheelchair, it was a huge effort to force our way through. Around half way we gave up. The crowd was swaying. “They’re smashing the windows…”

Me and Finlay looked at each other. We knew that we had to make it to the front. Kareem started pushing the wheelchair again, and Finlay cleared a path in front of us.

Two rows from the front of the crowd, I saw a close friend, Jonte. He grabbed my arm. “This is so tight, we are going to break the police line any moment now. Me and Finlay went for one last push, and forced our way to the front.

It was an epic mission to the top. Nine floors; eighteen flights of stairs. Two friends carried my wheelchair, and I walked.

The police are entitled I think to start pushing and shoving when hostile and potentially violent protestors will not move out of their way. McIntyre is using his disability as a stick to beat the police with. He wants to be treated as an equal but apparently feels he is somehow inviolate because he is disabled. McIntyre seems to want to indulge in riskless thrill seeking. If he dishes it out, he should learn to take it.

A local man is planning to bring the recent left-wing inspired rioting in central London to the streets of Ealing tomorrow. In today’s Evening Standard an Ealing man was quoted on yesterday’s student riots. Noel Doyle, apparently aged 30 and an ex-student at Cardinal Wiseman in Ealing, condoned yesterday’s violence saying:

I see broken windows as being totally justified compared with the damage being done to the public sector. This is just the beginning.

The ends justify the means again. What a creep? From the way that the Evening Standard is reporting it seems that Doyle took part in yesterday’s riots. Doing a bit of research it appears he has an active Twitter account and is active in far left politics.

He does not admit on Twitter to being at the riots but he tweets admiringly about last night’s appalling mayhem.

Doyle seems to be an organiser for Ealing Alliance for Public Services (EAPS). This is the SWP related group that organised a meeting on 11th November in Acton where RMT’s bully boy Bob Crow and silly Ealing Labour councillor Daniel Crawford both spoke, see here.

It seems he has morphed his little, local EAPS event into a UK Uncut event, advertising it on the UK Uncut website. I suppose he hopes to attract SWP and various other hard left types to come to Ealing to swell the numbers.

Setting up stalls and dishing out leaflets is all very well. Trying “to close down the shops of tax avoiders, specifically Vodafone and Topshop” is just not legal. It is simply thuggery.

Maybe Doyle is a silly fantasist. Maybe he is something more dangerous. I hope that the recent thuggery does not come to Ealing tomorrow. The police have been informed.

I don’t know how long the Select model agency will keep up this portfolio of photos of the emaciated and weedy looking Charlie Gilmour who was photographed yesterday desecrating the Cenotaph. Apparently the Mail thought that he was a girl.

I hope that this vile young man never works. Not that he needs to apparently.

More free loveliness from the unlovely Bob Crow of the RMT.