Brown presses on with Home Information Packs

You are buying a house and the seller presses a Home Information Pack into your hot little hand. Do you a: treat the information contained therein like the revealed word of God, or b: nod and smile and then turn away muttering 'caveat bloody emptor'. Unless you would like to buy a bridge from me, I suspect that the answer is b. The whole HIP thing was one of Prescott's wheezes to supposedly help in the housing market but basically no-one supports the idea any more. For some reason Brown has not taken the opportunity of his accession to ditch this particular policy. Casinos are out, but somehow HIPs survive.

So, we have a policy that everyone thinks is useless and which local Councils don't have the cash to enforce. It is a farce that can only breed contempt for the law, but which obviously appeals to the Labour Party's general control freakery. Let us hope that farce does not turn to tragedy if the housing market turns down.

Brown's debt binge falters

Just after the 1997 election, I met with a Conservative MP who was confident that Labour would be out of power pretty quickly. His view was that they would mess up the economy as usual and then the Conservatives would be back in for another extended period. He was wrong of course, because the economy did not implode and the rest, as they say, is history. Moving on to last year I went to a dinner hosted by a major international bank, the highlight of which was a talk by their Chief UK Economist. His theme was the British economy under Labour, and in particular why it had become less cyclic during their period of government. It was quite a detailed analysis, touching on global factors, China and so on, but his bottom line was very interesting: it was that the economy had outperformed its historical trend with regard to growth largely due to the British consumer. It seemed that ordinary people had spent at heroic levels year on year and that had provided the extra percentage points of growth that had kept things looking rosy for Blair and Brown. On Brown himself, the banker gave him two cheers. While had pushed up both taxation and government spending to record levels, he hadn’t done anything particularly dumb, which is not bad by the standards of previous Labour Chancellors.

Hang on though, were has all of the money come from for this extended spending spree? Well there was an answer to that as well; debt. The consumer sector in the British economy is running at truly staggering levels of debt, fuelled by quick loans, credit cards, and equity taken out of houses whose value goes nowhere but up. Now it appears that the era of cheap money is at an end. There is talk in the City of a corporate credit crunch, where the supply of affordable finance for companies dries up, with inevitable knock-on effects on ordinary people’s wallets. Interest rates are climbing steadily, and have now reached the point where buying-to-let or buying-to-speculate has become uneconomic, never mind the effect on people’s mortgage payments. House prices are wobbling, and the new Chancellor must be worrying what happens if the ordinary consumer goes on strike, or just cannot afford that nice new kitchen any more. If growth slows and house prices slip then the political situation could change pretty quickly. That Tory MP in 1997 was right. It’s just that his timing was off.

John Baron on Basildon Independent Treatment Centre and Nurses' Pay

We had a visit in Billericay today from Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary. John Baron, the Billericay MP had a couple of questions for him:

I welcome the Health Secretary’s visit, but he needs to answer certain questions about the running of our local NHS.

One of these is why nurses in England are not getting the full pay increase this year as recommended by the independent Pay Review body – compared to their Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish counterparts who are getting the full award. Ministers are discriminating against English nurses by asking them to accept 1.9% instead of their due 2.5%.

I would also like to ask the Health Secretary why the Government is pushing ahead with plans to impose an Independent Sector Treatment Centre (ISTC) on Basildon. Local people do not want it, the local NHS does not want it, and local politicians do not want it, so why is the Government pushing ahead without genuine consultation?

The second point is particularly important to us here as the ISTC has come with no consultation and the best guess is that redundancies will result at our local hospital. That coupled with yet another review of the NHS by Gordon Brown and the nurses' pay fiasco does not auger well for healthcare locally or nationally.

Cameron vs. Brown

Very good article in today's Telegraph, that sums it up very well. In particular:

There is now a strong streak of nihilism in one strand of Conservative opinion. Some MPs and commentators state that the Tory leader (insert mildly offensive sobriquet such as "Call me Dave" or "Cam the Sham" here) simply has to go for reasons related to his incompetence, schooling, arrogance, Rwanda and forays with huskies.

The country has gone to the dogs, irretrievably.

This is an easy get-out: the Tories can concede defeat to Gordon Brown, endure a pointless leadership race, watch as any talent drifts away to the private sector, and moan as the Prime Minister expands the role of the state in quite frightening ways.

For anyone who would rather this country be governed by an administration committed to tackling the root causes of its current social meltdown, such an approach is pointless.

Simon Heffer is one of the primary mouthpieces of the sort of people who would rather whinge than fight, but there are others, and the whole situation takes me back to the Major years. Then we had a Conservative government in deep trouble and the attitude of some Conservatives was to trash it in public as if the Labour Party had disbanded and the argument was about the nature of the Conservative government, now whether there would be a Conservative government. Brown and his merry men are not idiots and they have had a long time to prepare for government. They have analysed the weaknesses of their predecessors, at least in terms of perception, and have sought to remedy them. Unfortunately, the Conservative response has not gone well, and the only real punch landed on the Brown team has come from Iain Duncan-Smith's Social Justice report. This is significant: real policy pushed Brown onto the back foot, and more of that is on the way, which is great because it is now desperately required.

Beneath the political cut and thrust the real world has continued to turn and there Labour's mistakes, many of which are Brown's mistakes, will start to catch up with them. This may include the general economic situation, and while I do not relish any kind of trouble for our country, I think that the current turmoil in the international capital markets cannot help but feed through in ordinary people's daily lives. In simple terms, an economy based on easy credit may find itself with no easy credit. Then things may get very bad very quickly. This makes the puerile attitude of some who call themselves Conservatives even more inexplicable.

Frankly, if the country has gone to the dogs then the debate should be how to get it back not the size and colour of dogs.

Basildon Festival

Every year the Council holds a free festival for Basildon District. This year it was combined with the Paintball Campaign Cup, which is one of the major events that sport's UK calendar. You can see Council Leader Malcolm Buckley talking about the event, and regeneration in Basildon here.

Poll for best Political Blogs

Iain Dale is conducting a poll of the best UK political blogs for inclusion in the 2007 Guide to Political Blogging in the UK. Follow the link here to vote.

9/11 'Truth' Bites Back

A while ago I posted on the subject of 9/11 'Truth'. That is the true believers whose faith is that the terrorist attacks of the 11th of September were in fact a labyrinthine government conspiracy. I have had a number of comments on the post, the latest of which was:

U should just remember one thing planes including titanium engines do not vapourise as we are told the ones did that hit the pentagon and the one which crashed near shanksville. And where sis the molten steel come from found under all the towers including building 7 which was not hit by a plane - do u enven know about building 7? Evidence or thurmite has also been found?

The poster was anonymous, but the style was pretty representative of those that buy into the ‘Truth’ industry, and believe me there is an industry with books and DVDs all at very reasonable prices. Leaving aside the poor spelling and grammar, the argument is a series of factoids gleaned from internet sources that have all been proven nonsense at one point or another. No-one has ever claimed that the aircraft involved in 9/11 vaporised, and plenty of debris has been found. There was no molten steel and the pictures that purport to show it have been shown to be artefacts. A few seconds thought is all that is required here as well as persistent molten steel would mean a persistent very high energy source in the ruins of the World Trade Centre, which of course wasn’t there. Building 7 wasn’t hit by an aircraft, but it was hit by wreckage from the collapsing towers and heavily damaged, as were a number of other buildings. The supposed ‘evidence’ for thermite was the presence of compounds with other more mundane explanations, and thermite is not used for demolishing buildings anyway. I could go on but why bother? These people do not apply logic or evidence; they start from a paranoid worldview and a hatred of the US government in general and George Bush in particular and work back from there. I am an engineer by training and an IT Architect by profession, but if I was a sociologist that subspecialised in the taxonomy of cults then I know which body of people would make up my next research project.

Heffer back to the future on Tax, also likes Gordon Brown

Simon Heffer has never been elected to anything as far a I know. Now that is not a complete disqualification to comment on the political process, but you can't help thinking if he had actually spent any time talking to actual voters than he wouldn't spout such bilge. His latest piece in the Telegraph is interesting in two regards; firstly he's impressed Gordon Brown, calling him a 'formidable force' among other things. This is couched in more in sorrow than in anger terms, but basically it reflects that Simon's desire to bash David Cameron far outweighs any attempt to present a, you know, Conservative, analysis of Gordon Brown. Simon's battle is for the soul of the Right, not for the country. What matters Britain when the true faith is in danger? Later on, we get some real insight into what is going on:

It is hard to meet a Tory MP who will not say privately that the Government is wasting epic amounts of public money, and that there is scope for huge spending and tax cuts without harming public services. Mr Cameron cannot bring himself to say that either. Yet these are central issues that should enable him to connect to millions.

For the uninitiated I will translate: a Conservative MP or two has sounded off at Simon, who has obligingly rehearsed their mutterings for the newspaper-reading public. No names of course; that would be bad form in Simon's world. The point itself is, of course, nonsense. The 'central issues' are the ones that the Conservative Party is talking about, the loss of control of our borders, the failing welfare system, family breakdown, the resurrected EU constitution and so on. Of course taxes are too high and of course there is government waste, but how do you run with that argument? You cannot promise to cut taxes come what may, because the economy might not let you when you finally come to power some time in the future. You can point out how money can be saved, and the Party is doing just that, but connecting that directly to people's wallets can only be done in the actual run-up to an election because then is when you have some idea of the real numbers. If the Conservatives did what Simon wanted then they would just sound vacuous, and of course the Labour Party would like nothing better than to portray the Opposition as savage cutters of public services.

It is actually quite difficult to work out where Simon is coming from politically. Right now he seems content enough that Labour are up in the polls, and I think there is a clue there. Mrs. Thatcher described them a 'false squires', Tories who supposedly harked back to bygone days, but who had really intellectually surrendered to socialism and considered their duty to manage an orderly surrender to the ideology of the Left. I reckon she had Simon's number.

Basildon Exemplar at Building Zero Carbon Homes

The government has decreed that all new homes build after 2016 must be zero carbon. This is easy to say, but quite difficult to put into practice for a number of reasons. Some are quite practical, for example getting the new building codes and the new building methods and technologies right. Some are to do with the building industry itself, which will have to change the way it operates in a world where designs have the over-riding constraint of energy-efficiency, but the most important consideration will probably be price. Put simply, how much more would you pay for a zero carbon home? Would you, for example take a new zero carbon three bedroom home over an older, less efficient four or five bedroom property? That would imply that the incremental cost of zero carbon was several tens of thousands of pounds, a price that most people would probably not pay. Of course, the number may be less than that, or technology may make for a better payback from energy efficiency or micropower. At the moment there is no real economic case for the routine installations of things like solar panels or CHP, or other measures that require thousands of pounds upfront and take a very long time to pay back on the investment. That doesn't mean that there are no cases where they make sense, but not for every house on every street. If the technology improves then that might change radically; there are some very interesting things going on in thin film solar for example, and the government must be hoping for such advances in time for 2016.

Here in Basildon we are, as ever, leading the way, with a small development of zero-carbon public housing. We hope that it will be an exemplar to show what can be done today and to explore the economics of zero-carbon with the most up-to-date technology and methods. However, the critical number will be the cost-per-unit of this approach. If it comes out at too high then that will be a warning sign. Houses are unaffordable enough as it is without putting a further premium on new properties, especially as any increase in price will apply after an arbitrarily fixed date. This is probably why the current government put it comfortably far in the future.

Building on Flood Plains is not a very good idea

There is a picture in the Times that sums it up: a flooded field with a sign at then entrance announcing that it is shortly to be the site of an exclusive development of 4 and 5 bedroom executive homes. I'm not in the property business, but I reckon that they will rather more difficult to shift than the builder was expecting. Of course, this does not help the poor people who bought newly-built properties on flood plains from developers who relied on the fact that floods don't happen that often, honest.

The government has a policy of building a great deal of housing, and the events of the last few days will have reduced the amount of potential building land, as the danger and likelihood of flooding is reappraised, even where no floods have not yet occurred. For some this will be the salvation of the character of their communities, as the only bulldozers that they will now see will likely be those shoring up flood defences. Others, protected by chance lie of the land may see much more building. In all cases, there will be much more pressure on available brownfield sites. In the short term, the government is taking a pasting for a lacklustre response to the crisis. The longer-term effects on policy are likely to be more significant.