Randomly Selected Article or Link

A little piece in a well researched blog on house prices around the world I keep an eye on:

Fighting over their castles:

"OF ALL the forces that have changed Britain over the past decade or so, the long bull market in housing is perhaps the strongest—and the most anonymous. High house prices have done their work quietly, reshaping concentrations of wealth and stoking clashes over supply. Other rich countries have had house-price booms too, but Britain's has been faster and more furious (see chart). And high levels of home ownership (Britons are more likely to own bricks than even Americans but less likely to own equities) have magnified their effect."

"Generational Equity" features highly too. Read it all here.

I noticed this on the Guardian News Blog - The world: just how dangerous is it?

So, it's not just the Daily Mail that believes we are all doomed. According to a new survey almost three-quarters of Britons think the world is a more dangerous, war-like place than it was 50 years ago, writes Peter Walker.

And it got me thinking about the sorts of changes I've seen. Despite appearances, I'm actually a full decade away from fifty - oh yes I am! - but when I was a child we lived a lot in Africa. And whilst I haven't travelled a great deal since leaving school, it's interesting to recall how different the world actually is.

When, in 1972, we lived in southern Tanzania, it was a minimum of two stops on a flight to get from the UK to Dar es-Salaam, with a flight in a Dakota DC-3 from there onwards. The DC-3s of East African Airways were flown still by WWII Belgian pilots, I seem to remember.

Most of the people in the UK probably didn't even have passports at the time. What we did was really quite "exotic". Even in 1980 it was so relatively unusual to have children traveling alone that British Caledonian provided special hostesses for, essentially, the British public school crowd going out to parents in school holidays. Even if we did go abroad, we could take so little money with us under exchange controls one wonders if it was really worth it. Not even everyone was "banked" by the end of the seventies - the Conservative government really saw to that when they removed the ability of folk to demand their wages in cash, in the early eighties.

We had of course, no internet, as one of the commenters to the Guardian blog noted. But we should also realise that most of the world wasn't really covered by television. It was commented on in one of those 20th anniversary of Live Aid programs last year that in 1985 it was the first live broadcast transmitted to a stadium in South Africa and the people that were present say they remember being gobsmacked that someone on a stage in London was yelling "Hello South Africa!" live at them.

Jon Snow, in a Christmas Chancellor's Lecture here at Brookes in his first year I think, reflected on how much the media has changed - he recalls when he first started being sent somewhere like Iraq or Afghanistan (not much changes there then!) with a film camera and a notebook and filing stories every few days or weeks, not presenting his news program from the top of a hotel in Bagdhad live with bombing going on in the background. I remember working at Central TV (remember them?) Facilities for a short while in 1989 and it was relatively new to be hiring out "ENG" (Electronic News Gathering) kit even then.

The power of "world leaders" was vastly different too. Whilst we have given away most of Empire within the last half century, which you might think would have reduced the power of the heads of the European governments, actually I'm not sure that's the case. The patronage of appointing governors was great, to be sure, but if it took so long to get instructions to them they were probably less "controlled" by Whitehall than are their "successor" diplomats in those same countries. While today the G8 leaders stride the globe exerting influence and projecting power much more directly perhaps than even under Empire.

The irony for me in all this, and the reason I think we are more fearful, is that we haven't really used all those technological and transport advances to get to know and understand our fellow planet-dwellers while many others have had a window opened into our lives. The vast majority of Islamic peoples have been poor for a long time, for example, and most remain so, beyond our understanding of poor, but now they too know we are rich by comparison. Wouldn't it be natural to want some of that? Or to feel that we are rich because they are poor?

Some, the former, make their way here in the hope of having some of that wealth and we feel threatened by them. Others, mercifully few, but nowadays with the ability to communicate their cause to millions of their own, come here in the hope of shaking us up, and we feel threatened by them. And so, in many ways, we should, because potentially they are legion. Unless we learn to use all this technology to bring the peoples of the world closer together, not start a new age of empire in an environment in which them hitting back will not mean the odd Mao Mao uprising but an event like 9/11 right in our backyards.

A bit pissed off today. In one broadcast & newspaper article Michael Gove has done more to spread the word about Community Land Trusts than my own dear Lib Dems have managed in the nearly two years we've had them as a key plank of our housing policy.

But good on him - I've been trying to speak to Michael Gove about CLTs since March last year or whenever it was Cameron promised to build more homes so long as they were "beautiful". He explained it pretty well. And if Cameron can get his people on board with them Oxfordshire CLT Limited could begin the New Year in bullish fashion with all the county's MPs onside.