Tories Impoverish Britain To Sustain Their Property Values.

In the past year the number of people forced to use food banks in order to simply survive has tripled while wages across the board (except for the top1%) have fallen by 2%. The NHS is in crisis, Royal Mail has been stolen and fenced through the greedy and stupid to a gang of international crooks, employment is becoming predominantly part-time much of it resting on zero hour contracts, the elderly are being deliberately placed in danger of hyperthermia this winter to feed the greed and avarice of energy companies and the sick and unemployed are being branded as scroungers with no right of appeal. This is the picture of Britain today under the leadership of David Cameron and his Tory cronies and they are convinced that this catalogue of evil will win them the next general election. Nor do they offer any hope for the future, content to tell us all that austerity for us and unlimited rewards for themselves will continue for the foreseeable future. The way they are selling this is to tell us that we deserve it and that we should take our punishment in order to protect our credit rating (which has already failed) and to reduce the national debt (which they have doubled in the last three years). Yet there must be some underlying reason for this madness other than the threadbare and insane reasons put forward by the Cameron and Osborne. The answer to this riddle lies in the housing market and property values. Osborne has moved heaven and earth to "get the market moving" as he puts it. Moving? Why would anyone in their right mind want to get an over-valued and unsustainable market "moving" again? Why is inflation in any other commodity bad while inflation in the property market is good? It benefits only two sorts of people. The already too wealthy who own several properties and the those who make a living by snatching as much out of other people's pockets through charging high rents for substandard housing. In other words the whole country is being sacrificed for Tories such as Cameron and Osborne who have a substantial proportion of their wealth invested in various properties and Tory voters with substantial investments in the buy-to-rent sector. We are being asked to die so they can live, we are being asked to give up our future so they can stash as much money into offshore bank accounts as they get their sticky fingers on. It is a policy of the greedy, the selfish and the downright evil - it is Toryism red in tooth and claw, the survival of the nastiest and least deserving. It is nothing short of treasonous.

David Cameron And Grant Shapps Talk Utter Bilge.

David Cameron's big idea for winning the next general election, apart from pretending that Ed Miliband is actually Neil Kinnock in disguise, is what he calls mending the "broken property market." This consists of recreating the utter madness of over-priced housing being sold to people who are either priced out of the market and can't afford it or are so wealthy that they can afford to buy a second property they don't need. Only the Tories, he asserts, can thus produce a "stable" economy based on an overblown housing market. To ram home this idiotic message Cameron has sent his favourite moron, Grant Shapps, around the studios to explain to us thickos how pumping up subprime lending once again is good for us all. Of course it isn't. The only "cure" for the housing crisis in Britain is to build more housing, allow prices to fall to realistic levels that ordinary people can afford and prevent the financial sector from creating the fiat money that wrecked the world economy in 2008. There is an old saying that the acorn never falls far from the tree. With the Tories the acorns of their policies are never far removed from what is advantageous for them personally and this so-called housing policy is a case in point. It is designed to support the value of their own property portfolios and recreate the economic conditions that favour them while leaving the rest of us exposed to any bad debt that is generated. This policy has absolutely nothing to do with what Cameron and Shapps like to call "fairness" - it's about greed and protecting their wealth at our expense.

Tories "Revitalise" The Housing Market.

The picture above shows just a few of the thousands of empty homes that represent the complete collapse of the housing market in Spain. That collapse was inevitable given the circumstances of the banking crash in 2008 after the they had gone completely insane and invested in over-valued properties for which there were no viable customers. With prices far beyond the reach of most people and far, far too many on the market even the banks couldn't find enough sub-prime borrowers to support this madness. Many of these empty houses were intended for sale to British buyers - those whose over-valued properties allowed them to take on another mortgage to invest in their dream of a place in the sun. Property values in Britain have, in fact, remained reasonable stable despite the nature of the crisis, though the sudden reluctance by the banks to lend has led to a shuddering halt for the Spanish housing boom. How has this been achieved in Britain? In a word - supply. Successive governments have kept housing in Britain in short supply by refusing to build more and, as a consequence of the ever-increasing demand, have managed to sustain a property price bubble that is nothing short of criminal. The Tories, faced with such a threat to their personal wealth in unearned property value increases, have gone one better and made housing totally unavailable to an entire generation of young people. Now local councils, in the wake of the iniquitous bedroom tax, are preparing to demolish - that's right, demolish - housing stock because no one can afford to rent them. And this is how the Tories have "revitalised" the housing market. Unable to do anything remotely moral in terms of demand and keep the value of their property portfolios intact at the same time, they have resorted to managing the supply. In other words overcrowding in slum conditions and rising homelessness is a price worth paying as far as they are concerned - as long as someone else is doing the paying. They call this a recovery when it represents only a return of the insane greed and utter selfishness that got us here in the first place.

The Great Confidence Trick Continues.

The face above is the face of the neoliberal capitalist system that has shattered the world economy and revealed itself as little better than a criminal conspiracy. Yesterday George Osborne delivered his fourth budget in defence of this unjust and unworkable system. Apart from 1p off beer and the new £10,000 tax threshold, which will benefit the rich just as much as the poor, there was little in it for ordinary people. While the poor are being taxed for having too many bedrooms, the rich are being given the opportunity to buy second homes with interest free government loans. This will "revitalise" the housing market Osborne tells us, but it is a measure designed only to support the sagging value of his own property portfolio. That nothing has changed and cannot change as long as the Tories warm their oversized backsides on the government benches is demonstrated by two facts that Osborne might not wish to discuss but are true nonetheless. The first fact is that Barclays Bank, at a time when they are being fined £290 million for the criminal manipulation of the Libor and Euribor rates, have given £39 million in bonuses to just nine executives. The criminals are rewarding themselves for getting away with it even as their customers have to pay the fines for their crimes. The second fact is that the government's drive against tax avoidance has raised the staggeringly small sum of just £20 million pounds per year. How could cracking down on tax avoidance produce such meagre returns? To begin with the real tax avoiders, the multi-nationals, have been almost totally ignored while HMRC concentrated on plumbers, tutors and ice cream vendors. This is what Osborne has been concentrating his efforts on behind the scenes - defending the banks and protecting the multi-nationals. While the rest of us are being squeezed for every penny Osborne and his rich mates are cashing in. The Tories think they have a right to govern but have no idea as to what their obligations to their country actually are. They are criminals in league with even bigger criminals and we, the people, are not their responsibility, we are their victims.

House Prices Rising And Falling At The Same Time

Two stories today point out in no uncertain terms the madness that reigns in the UK housing market. While, according to the Nationwide Building Society, house prices have "jumped" upwards by 1.3%, Stoke-On-Trent City council is desperately selling off empty houses for £1 each. With 5,000 empty houses and the city literally dying on its feet, the Council feels it has no choice since it simply cannot afford to look after these properties while families are desperate for somewhere to live. These two stories illustrate several different points about the upside-down topsy-turvey world that is the British housing market. The most obvious is the north-south divide, with the south continuing to do quite well out of the institutionalised unfairness of the British economy while the north, forgotten and unregarded, continues to sink into oblivion. The second point is that estate agents, desperate for "the good old days" when they could sell houses at unrealistic prices to people who couldn't afford them, are lying through their teeth - putting up prices in their window displays but failing to sell any of them. But the most telling point is how the London housing market, which has continued to rise on the back of corporate and political corruption, is warping the rest of the market. This simple fact also illustrates well the strategy of the Tory party which consists of turning London into a bunker for the rich, pulling up the drawbridge and turning their backs on the rest of the country. This Tory government has simply become the town council for the capital, determined to protect the privileged position of the financial quarter which, for them, is the only industry that counts.