Makes you think eh? More news analysis soon! n YOU with me will have noticed the
Posted in General on 25. Jul, 2010
Makes you think, eh? More news analysis soon!
n YOU, with me, will have noticed the Prime Minister’s tie on Tuesday What a knot! A knot of remarkable, awesome proportion. You should know, too, that five years ago a blind Bulgarian witch told The First Secretary’s daughter that her father would one day get the keys to No 10. I should mention that the hats of John Redwood and Michael Portillo appear courtesy of Moonlight magic, but I think you get the picture. Then we have Tony Blair, Princess Diana, Baroness Thatcher and Prince Charles. Get away with that, and you can get away with anything, as you saw last week with our new Prime Minister – whoops, sorry, Deputy Prime Minister – there on the left.
WONDERING about those photographs along the top of the page? They are, in fact, the subject of this week’s Special News Analysis. For it has long been my contention that you can spot a winner in public life by the way he or she looks in those funny white hats you have to wear on factory visits. They are too busy showing that they are more orthodox than the Tories”.It may be different once a Labour government is in office. Labour will be under pressure to choose some areas of divergence from the policies of its predecessors and housing could be one such area. The White Paper has exposed the bankruptcy of Tory thinking, so it would need only the merest whiff of inspiration, just the shadow of a policy, for Labour to seize the initiative. But the depressing absence of radicalism on Labour’s side and its mind-numbing caution offer little solace either for those home owners struggling with their mortgages or for the homeless who need a council home.. But, according to Mr Wilcox, Labour’s Treasury team “dismissed the idea as soon as they saw it.
The borrowing would not be counted against the new measure of general government deficit which, incidentally, is the one specified in the Maastricht treaty and used throughout the European Union.Sounds simple They already do it in Sweden. “They have a measure which counts government spending but not borrowing by public corporations.” His solution, therefore, is that councils should set up companies at arm’s length which would take over their housing and which would then be free to borrow on the financial markets in order to invest in more housing. But it does not need to spend vast amounts of money.A little bit of courage is needed. Steve Wilcox, who has just co-authored a pamphlet for the Institute of Housing called Challenging the conventions, argues that all that is needed is a little tinkering with the definition of the public sector borrowing requirement (PSBR) “No other country has a creature such as the PSBR,” he says.