Nonsense

Back in April (see reference 1) I commented on the bad press that pay day lenders such as Wonga were getting, suggesting that perhaps these people did have a role to play, that they were filling a gap which neither government, church nor charity cared to address. This continues to be my position, although I do not care for some of their advertisements, advertisements which deck last resort borrowing out with pretty girls and generally trying to give the impression that all is well with the world.

So not impressed to see that government is regulating these people out of business. That is to say, by putting a ceiling on the interest rates etc that they can charge, a ceiling which means that the business does not pay, with the likely result that they will not do it, at least not on the high street. But at least the Guardian had the wisdom to suggest that this might mean that we push back to a world of illegal back street lending. That we criminalise the business of helping people who cannot help themselves. Will we never learn that criminalising activities which people are going to get into anyway is not a very clever way forward?

And while we are on the business of helping people who cannot help themselves, there was another piece in the Guardian which suggested that not only are we not building anything like enough social housing, but that such social housing as we do build is still subject to right-to-buy. So no sooner do we build a nice new social flat at, say, £250,000, than we give the incumbent the right to buy it for £125,000. The incumbent, who has not actually got the necessary, then sells it on to a private landlord who goes on to collect from the housing benefit system. I perhaps overstate the case, but that does seem to be the general idea. We cannot afford to provide social housing in this way.

On the other hand it seems that we are all set to spend getting on for £200m on a garden bridge across the Thames. To my mind, a complete nonsense, serving no other purpose that to inflate the Mayor's already inflated ego. I am reminded of the sorry business of the millennium tent, initiated by a previous Conservative administration and costing the equivalent of a small number of hospitals. We might live in a crowded island, but we are not so short of land that we cannot plant our gardens on dry land, which is where they belong. OK, so he is a clever & able man, but he should be told to manage without this particular ego fix: it would be hugely cheaper just to give him a dispensation to snuffle up the white powders, which might do just as well. How can a government which is having to trash all kinds of useful services think that this is a good use of money? Maybe it will pull in a few more tourists, but it seems most unlikely that it will pull in enough to generate this sort of money.

A story made worse by the knowledge that government is still running at a loss of say £100 billion a year and will need to make even more savage cuts in public services to balance the books in the medium term. By the end of which one wonders how much more of our green and pleasant land will belong to the Arabs and the Chinese. I draw hope from the thought that the Arabs are unlikely to be stupid enough to trash their assets here by installing Sharia law in them.

And that the electorate either is stupid enough or is thought to be stupid enough to fall for a few election carrots in the form of tax cuts before the spending cuts - or tax raises - kick in.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/how-awful.html.