Randomly Selected Article or Link

Responding to Michael Gove's announcement on Tuesday that the Tories were going to support the idea of Community Land Trusts as a key part of housing policy Dan Rogerson's press release was out today:

Liberal Democrats : Tories are playing catch up on community land trusts - Rogerson:

Tories are playing catch up on community land trusts - Rogerson

4 January 2007

The Liberal Democrats today attacked the Conservative’s latest housing policy initiative as a desperate attempt to catch up with reality without offering a new vision. Liberal Democrat Housing Spokesperson, Dan Rogerson MP said:

"There’s no need to set up a taskforce to look at whether community land trusts can deliver affordable housing - they already are, and have been doing so for many years in the UK.

"The key issue is whether there is land available to make them work. One answer is to use surplus land held by Government departments such as the MoD, the Department of Health and English Partnerships.

"Another is to use the planning system to require developers to provide land that can then be handed over to the land trusts.

"For all of Mr Gove’s claims to be following in the footsteps of the 17th century Levellers, I can’t imagine he’ll be clearing the millionaires’ mansions off St George’s Hill in Weybridge, Surrey, where the Levellers’ first community land trust was set up."

The problem I have Dan, as a Lib Dem activist and Community Land Trust activist, is that two years ago we were all very excited about the party supporting CLTs in the Housing Policy paper. We had a conference at Warwick the following week and a magazine did the rounds with Charles Kennedy in full flow at conference on the cover setting out our Community Land Trust policy. But in those two years we have done absolutely nothing to back up our policy that I can see or hear, and I'm pretty well plugged into the CLT gossip.

Tell your local government planning and housing leaders that "there’s no need to...look at whether community land trusts can deliver affordable housing - they already are". You may be convinced but that hasn't filtered through to local policy making even in those local authorities we actually control. I know of one council with a "CLT officer" if you will, and another paid for out of housing pathfinder money or whatever it's called.

The plain fact is that Michael Gove on Tuesday did more to get CLTs in peoples' minds and on their lips than we have in the two years we've had the policy. Truth is, I never did really believe we understood the model when we adopted it as policy and have been shy in promoting it as a result. I have offered your team leader that I could go round to Lib Dem council groups to explain it to them if he thought it was worthwhile and it didn't even get a response.

Well guess what, tonight I've written to all the Tory group leaders in Oxfordshire offering to go and give them group briefings on it. When will we as a party learn that if we have good ideas, it's no use sitting back and waiting for one of the others to adopt it and then complain that they're johnny-come-latelies adopting a good policy that we first thought of?  We need to yell about such things with conviction as soon as we adopt them and be the obvious reason others adopt it too!

Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see the local MP speaking on the same platform at Burford as Billy Bragg and Tony Benn!

Good. No election. Well, I'll qualify that a little - the relatively short pain of a three week campaign could have seen friend and former council colleague Steve Goddard give Andrew Smith some unwanted leisure time for Christmas, which would have been fantastic - but I'm pleased we won't have to for now.

There may now be three, four, even five more party conferences in which to whip up a storm of revolutionary liberalism to really wow the electorate with a genuine alternative to the "cosy consensus" which, in my opinion anyway, is not evident right now in our policies. Time to give the FPC some breathing space from the poll obsessed campaign strategists to come up with really radical policies and instruct those strategists to sell them, not be hemmed in by what they say they can and cannot sell.

2009 will see the centenary of Lloyd George's "People's Budget" and we can develop a compelling theme in two years around "Liberal Britain: unfinished business" hijacked as the political landscape has been for a century alternately by the socialism and protectionism of Labour and Conservative governments, now merged into one amorphous mass of interfering statism.

That the hysteria of the past few days can be put down to a Tory announcement of a tax shift amounting to not much more than a half of one per cent of the government budget from the super-rich to the merely very rich just proves the paucity of imagination currently pervading both politicians and public. Ming Campbell has been right in suggesting that there's not a fag paper between the two halves of the statist party led by Brown and Cameron, and the past two weeks have seen nothing to disabuse us of that.

The time for radicalism is now. Radical liberalism. We don't merely want the "people to decide" but for the people to be able to take back power over their own lives. The power that once marked us out as British; dynamic, enterprising and freedom loving but which has been subdued, even nearly killed off perhaps through decades of dependency and government managerialism.

Even if, like me, you have studiously avoided watching any of the Olympic coverage, you will probably have seen the odd medals table on a news program or something. They all show the glorious People's Republic beating the evil Empire and its Poodle into second and third place respectively. But hang on, the host nation is the largest nation on earth by population and, whether or not there has been any cheating, such as using babies in the gymnastics or whatever, the simple fact is that their human resources are vast. So, as a completely meaningless bit of fun, I have compared the medals table (at least those nations who have won golds) with their respective populations.

Looking at it this way, we find Jamaica in first place with tiny Bahrain in second. Georgia beats Russia by a mile. Team GB are down in 15th place, but that is well ahead of Russia (25), the United States (29) and the Glorious People's Fatherland is way down at 45th out of 53 countries who won any gold medals at all.

Eat your pants, China! If they had won just one gold, Taiwan would have beaten you by a country mile!

Here's the full list:

Now, after all the spin, I wonder how many of the Chinese gold medalists are going to have bits amputated by the Glorious Central Committee of the People's Games so that they might also win in the Paralympics?

It has been estimated that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between them underwrite debt of some $5,000,000,000,000 and that US losses from the current credit crunch could amount to $1,600,000,000,000.

The entire external debt obligations of the world's 40 odd Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) is some $300,000,000,000 - that's about 6% of Fannie and Freddie's problems. So any bailout of the US mortgage system is going to amount almost certainly to more money than would write off all that, mainly African, debt (were that the best way to proceed, which I believe it is, with conditions).

By contrast the EU has today decided to support the idea of giving the surplus it has made on the Common Agricultural Policy as a result of rising food crop prices (so it has been subsidising less) to "African farmers". That's about €1,000,000,000 - or one three-thousandth of Fannie and Freddie's problems and two hundredths of Africa's problems.

But where did they get that money from, how did it arise? Robbing those very African farmers by denying them access to our markets and subsidising dumping on theirs. Tariffs are pure evil, aren't they?

So, whenever anyone says to you that it's difficult to find the finance for debt relief in the poorest countries, you'll now know that is total bollocks.  Just think of the scale of the US mortgage debt and what such sums could do for the 600 million or so poorest on the planet.

It's 47 minutes long, but one of the most important lessons you will ever learn, IMHO (NB - some good quotes in this from our Liberal forebears Reginald McKenna, Josiah Stamp, McKenzie King - all feature in our "pantheon" of Liberal economists):

And, lest you believe all this to be the province of eco-socialists, this one from the Mises Institute, in tribute to Murray Rothbard's work on money, attributing the same causes to inflation but advocating a completely different solution:

And now read how the modern central banker does it...he doesn't even bother to turn the printing presses, he makes us pay for his monetary expansion policies:

Ex-Governor George says Bank deliberately fuelled consumer boom

By Jane Padgham

Published: 21 March 2007

The Bank of England deliberately stoked the consumer boom that has led to record house prices and personal debt in order to avert a recession, the former Bank Governor Eddie George admitted yesterday.

Lord George said he and his colleagues on the Monetary Policy Committee "did not have much of a choice" as they battled to prevent the UK being dragged into a worldwide economic slump by slashing interest rates. And he said his legacy to the current MPC was to "sort out" the problems he had caused.

Lord George, who headed the Bank for a decade from 1993, revealed to MPs on the Treasury Select Committee that he knew the approach was not sustainable. "In the environment of global economic weakness at the beginning of this decade... external demand was declining and related to that, business investment was declining," he said. "We only had two alternative ways of sustaining demand and keeping the economy moving forward - one was public spending and the other was consumption.

"We knew that we were having to stimulate consumer spending. We knew we had pushed it up to levels which couldn't possibly be sustained into the medium and long term. But for the time being, if we had not done that, the UK economy would have gone into recession just as the United States did."

He said he was "very conscious" that stimulating consumer demand could give rise to problems in the future. "My legacy to the MPC, if you like, has been 'sort that out'," he said. Under Lord George's governorship, rates were slashed from 6 per cent in 2001 to 3.5 per cent in 2003, pushing house price inflation above 25 per cent and high street spending growth to its highest since the late-Eighties boom.

Technorati Tags: debt money, fiat money, monetary reform, Rothbard