Gloomy Tuesday

A post and some of its comments on the blog of the Telegraph’s Edmund Conway about house prices have profoundly depressed me.

Conway says in short (and he’s right) that talk of the house price crash being over is tosh. Further net falls are likely for several years, he says, despite up-ticks from time to time. He’s right – and this prospect will make outgoing and incoming governments very depressed.

Sure you want the job, Dave? No? Well, please take it anyway or the Brown Bastard will seize the opportunity of prolonged depression (which is what we are going to get - you can ignore all the cheery shouts of 'it's over!') to further Stalinise British political life and introduce even more quasi-Stasi operations than he already has. Frankly, looking ahead, given his mad economic and immigration policies, one can almost imagine a scenario in which a bastard of his cast of mind would think a Stasi-state no more than common sense.

Conway’s commenters seem to believe that the property market is being manipulated upwards (or at least prevented from falling too much) by Anglo-Saxon governments with the connivance of eastern governments (China) for the simple reason that none of them knows any other way to restore global financial stability, the sine qua non of peaceful governance anywhere.

As one commenter said, the entire global economy since World War II has been a function of the sale of debt - in the form of domestic real estate - by one generation of UK and USA house-buyers to the next, in unbelievably Earth-shaking quantities. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did.

There is more food for gloomy thought in comments like these:

Sadly in the UK the national obsession with property ownership and investment is being refuelled by a government and Bank of England determined to keep pressing on the accelerator via record low interest rates and quantitative easing. The inevitable result, with a strictly limited supply of suitable land, will be renewed inflationary pressure.

and

The (government’s) proposals about HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation) are an example of how the political class fails to understand housing is a commodity like any other. The proposals will just reveal some of the Hidden Homeless and put pressure on local authorities to house them when they have no housing available. Houses (or flats) don’t just “Sit There” they are commodities like any other you buy. If they get scarce, due to demand, the price goes up. If the money is not available to borrow to buy then you rent and the rent is subsidised by Housing Benefit if necessary. One thing is certain, the population of Southern England increased faster last year than the number of houses/flats built.

Everything Brown has done since 1997 has entrenched the problem, e.g. uncontrolled immigration of millions and millions of people requiring somewhere to live and the expansion of the state-spending sector which he controls, at lethal cost to the wealth-creating sector which he cannot. He has deliberately capitalised on and aggravated the problem in order to extend his (central government) control because he, a delusional bloody Socialist to his last corpuscle, will believe unto his final breath that Planning, High Tax and Central Control are the way to the Utopian (lit.) Fair Society. The only thing he did not foresee was his own extreme, election-losing political repulsiveness which, the people having had a good look at him, will ensure that he is evicted from Number Ten at the first opportunity. His enormous political vanity made the idea unthinkable until now when even he, not entirely stupid, can see which way the wind is blowing. And so the immoral bastard will subject the nation to scorched earth solely because of his visceral hatred of the Conservative Party. Even when he is gone, the unutterable shit plans to make sure the country pays dearly for voting Tory. And he will smile his unnatural, disturbing 'smile'... Labour since 1997 and the Conservatives in earlier years both engineered and inherited (according to the date) house price inflation. Actually, for once we are all to blame: everybody thought this was a good idea. Yes, all right – except you, sunshine, except you. Can we get on? On the other hand, they had to keep non-property prices and inflation (hence the CPI, sans housing costs, and not the RPI) down in order to keep the public pecker up and themselves in office, therefore, as long as possible – by almost any means available. The chief means was maintenance of the house price bubble for as long as the wheeze would work. The wheeze is no longer working. Eventually, first time buyers, the suckers life-blood of the wheeze, simply could not afford the vast debt they were being asked to buy because no-one was creating the wealth needed to sustain and service the debt.

The brakes started to scream. Finally banks collapsed. The economy stalled, house prices crashed and homelessness started to increase.

Step forward the Saviour of the World and his disciples Poulson and Obama. At any cost, the fiction was to be reinstated. At any cost.

The understandable lust for blood once the public realised the magnitude of the (stupid-government-created) catastrophe had to be diverted from politicians at all costs. It would be satisfied by stringing up bankers and totally innocent but heroic politicians would chair the Court of Public Opinion lead the lynch mob. Uttering bloodcurdling threats in the general direction of their chosen victims – bankers – and whistling in the dark making stirring speeches (OK, we lack a Churchill, here) about a Brave New World Order and No Turning Back (oh, wait… that sounds wrong… ) the world’s ‘statesmen’ are inventing and deploying the sort of economic palliatives which only governments can, in order to restore the status quo ante because, as the taxi driver said, it’s the only language those bastards understand. They print money. They impose ASBOs (All-Socialists-now Banking Orders) on banks. They strut. They speak in sombre voices. The clear message is: ‘It weren’t me, guv. Trust me – I’m a Socialist.’

As far as I can see, the single most important distinction between the Conservatives and Labour in government is that the former are more honest than the latter. Brown (Labour Prime Minister since 1997 in all but name and in sole control of all domestic politics by agreement with Blair) was prepared to do anything – anything – to maintain himself and his party in office, as John Major and the Tories were not. The Conservative Party has a conscience in a way that the Labour party does not. This is about as fundamental a distinction as it is possible to make: one party is honest and the other dishonest. While individual followers in either Party may be either venal or foolish and delusional, the philosophies behind the Parties are, in my view, morally different. This is why I am a Conservative and why I will always fight the Labour Party.

Conservatives do not believe that the end justifies the means and they do believe in democracy.

Labour believes that its ends do justify the means – any means – and Labour thinkers do not believe in democracy. They believe in collectivism which is a horse of a very different colour.

Fortunately for Labour, the electorate generally does not see the distinction clearly. When liars like Gordon Brown pontificate about democracy when they mean collectivism and state control, the electors relax and tell themselves their democracy is safe. But it is not.

And then political-economic reality strikes like a tornado. Unemployment. Homelessness. Hopelessness. The phrases ‘billions in debt’ and ‘higher taxes for a generation to pay for it’ become part of the newsreader’s nightly report, even on Channel Thicko. The natives begin to think revolting thoughts.

Worst of all, the reality dawns that one’s children are going to be poorer, more worried and less safe than we have been, for the rest of their lives. And there is nothing we can do to help them. This was not how it was meant to be: They didn’t tell us this.

And where are They? Retired. Gone out of the public eye. Taken a cushy academic post in an Ivy League university across the Pond, with tenure and accommodation provided.

So who do we curse, now? The millions of immigrants?

Step forward Adolf Hitler. Now do you begin to see why I am depressed? For God’s sake, Dave, do it. Get into Number Ten.

Fuck the unions. They and their evil, statist, Utopia-believing, sod-you-Comrades (aka employees) in the fucking Labour Party have brought us to this. Let them do their worst. We are British, and we will deal with it. And them. They have had their time and time's up. They can die either a slow death or a quick one. Your call, Barber. Cut the shackles of the state, Dave, and set the limbs and minds of the people free. Cut the crap and tell the people the truth. Take a chance that they'll howl at you and throw you out. At least, be a real Conservative - an honest politician.

Get on and repeal some of the evil stuff, fast, and then (your Number One priority) free the people to provide real education (as the state does not) for their children and so equip them to dream realisable dreams and to create the wealth which Socialism would have us believe grows on its childish, plastic, fool-some-of-the-people-all-the-time government-engineered tree. Let’s start building a new house on solid rock, not on sand. As the man said,

Conservative thought consists largely of self-evident truisms that even the stupid can recognize as true, while anti-conservatism consists largely of what George Orwell so aptly described as 'the sort of nonsense only an intellectual could believe'.

And as another man said,

If the grass looks greener on the socialist side of the fence it's because they have a better class of bullshit.

Ruin. Labour always brings us to this, only this time it's much much worse. Ruin.

They are utter, utter bastards. Lying, immoral, control-freak, destructive Socialist bastards.