I am sick of buying other peoples’ houses for them. For years I have been earning 0.05 interest on my savings so that the banks can then lend it to house buyers for 1.5%. Buyers is too kind a word. Thieves perhaps? So talk of base rates reaching 6% is music to my ears.
The consequent 10% mortgage rate will plunge the property market into recession, the government could then buy back hundreds of thousands of empty properties to rent out in the public sector while real savers, not the borrowing spivs who presently inhabit the “Borrow to Let” market, would have a chance of buying a couple of empty properties left over and live off the rent. Council houses could be let at commercial rents with the money going to the Treasury. Reduce the taxes on bankers? I would reduce them to living in shop doorways. There are plenty of highly competent honourable people would run our banks for a £1 a year as a public duty.
A 15% inflation rate would stop people buying expensive junk food: Reduced to real poverty (not Labour Party defined poverty of a 65 inch TV set, a car in the garage and three overseas holidays a year with nobody in the house going to work, they would be forced to eat potatoes plus free dandelions picked in the local park, with maybe rice as treat on Thursdays. Booze would be out of reach of all but those wise grasshoppers who saved during the post Thatcher summers as the Conservatives, in a bidding war with Labour, stole the nation’s wealth. The incidence of diabetes would plunge. Obesity would vanish, a brisk market for taking in skirt and trouser waists would develop.
Those who then begin to cry for government handouts should be reminded that we live in a time of labour shortages not seen since the Black Death. If you have never really done any work in your life and lived on Conservative bribes for your vote, if you want to buy that extra packet of crisps or a pint of beer once a week; hire yourself out for 50p an hour. Hurry ! In a recession vacancies will be few.
A 10% bank rate would see the noise and pollution from Heathrow cut by over 50%. How’s that for a green target?
Immigration would cease. The authorities should keep all those dinghies ready at Dover. £200 for a wet rubber seat on a returning inflatable to Calais ?
Bravo.
All this Talk of a harsh Winter. I doubt it.
I remember the winter of discontent, power cuts etc.
One of the few objective experts on Putin, Dr Mark Galeotti, suggests that a pre-declared US-UK response to the folly of a Russian tactical nuclear attack on its fraternal neighbour should be a purely conventional but devastating attack on Russian military capabilities (“The Spectator”, 8 October).
“Mark where his carnage and his conquests cease”, he makes a radioactive desert, and he calls it a liberated acquisition. Why not instead a mutual NATO/Russia de-escalation and a negotiated Russian corridor along the eastern region of Donbas and of Crimea, which had a Russian majority in the 2001 census? This at last may appeal to the Russian Orthodox church and influence the Kremlin.
Truss makes a geostrategic priority of the Ukrainian ethnic control of all Ukraine (including its Russian minority) above all other ethnic conflicts worldwide. What about the English ethnic control of all England where she personally lives and has a finger on the nuclear button? Sauce for the goose?
You might be miffed at the paltry rate on your cash savings, Mr Harris, but this is only a small part of the picture. Returns on other assets have soared in the last 15 years in the form of capital gains, precisely as a result of monetary policy so loose as to be criminal. So your pension, for instance, is likely to have earned returns well above the 0.05% you mention (partly due to pension funds investing in the buy-to-let mania you rightly abhor!). Most significantly of all, if (as I rather suspect, though I don’t know) you’re a home-owner, you’ve likely enjoyed a colossal wealth windfall in the last twenty years on that account. The net result of the appalling monetary incontinence over the last few decades has actually been an enormous transfer of wealth to owners of capital at the expense of those who have only the wages from their labour to get by on – as long as that capital hasn’t held as cash, which by and large it hasn’t been.
So it’s wise to at least consider the bigger picture before grumbling about that 0.05% on your cash savings.
The old surplus-value argument (Ricardo & Marx) of the transfer of wealth from labour to the owners of production has developed into the transfer of productive wealth to speculators in finance (Lenin & Douglas). See Ivo Mosley’s “Bank Robbery” for an introduction (no more than that) to the escalating debt situation, and the social world in which Mr Kwarteng moves. Rod Liddle in a hyperbolic epigram reminiscent of Ivo’s grandpa suggested that the PM was someone who cannot speak dancing to a Chancellor who cannot count, but most disturbing in press comment is their conversion of the notorious Pangloss-Pollyanna of economic prediction, Hamish McRae, into a Jeremiah-Cassandra.
The Conference is over with all the critics of the PM dishonestly lumped together as the “anti-growth coalition”. How about the “anti-debt coalition”?
We need a “strong economy”, or we won’t be able to “stand up” to the autocracies around the world – the Blair-Neocon-Soros global (selective) interference and intervention.
Let’s start with the Ukraine, and the historic Russian areas of Crimea and Donbas. What will Field Marshal Truss do to prevent their re-union with Russia, and the commonsense corridor to the warm-water Black Sea.
Two military views:
1. Former senior Pentagon advisor Col. Douglas Macgregor (Srdja Trifkovic, “Chronicles”, August 2022) said the longer the war lasts, the more damage will be done to Ukraine…already ‘a failed state’… Putin ‘was never interested in all of Ukraine’… NATO’s ‘strategy’ means supplying Ukraine with enormous quantities of weapons…while most of Europe sinks into a wintry recession (and much of the Third World into hunger) …. The other unrealistic hope in this dubious strategy is [that it will] weaken Putin’s resolve.”
2. “As assistant chief of the UK Defence Staff, Maj-Gen Shaw was responsible for maintaining the military component of Britain’s nuclear deterrent. He said ‘Putin has nowhere else to go. So we should expect nukes…there is only one route out of his predicament and that’s nuclear.’… Putin is preparing to move to a nuclear-proof bunker with his family” (Mark Nicol, Defence Editor, “Daily Mail,” 5 October 2022).
Not only the British “economy” is likely to go up in smoke, if Liz is not careful.
Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs is not my favourite pundit, but his articles on the NATO-Russia conflict over Ukrainian dead bodies, and the risk of nuclear confrontation, are worth reading by Conservatives in the UK and EU. See for starters, “The great game in Ukraine is spinning out of control,” Pearls and Irritations, 1 0ctober 2022, online. Big debt today, big bang tomorrow?
There are various experts on Putin worth consulting without the noise of mutual propaganda. I would add the debate on Noah Carl’s easily accessible website online.
Re Ms Liz, wrong on the Banker Biz, beware the Bunker Tizz? “There could be developments in Ukraine – I am imagining the use of nuclear weapons by the Russians – which would make normal politics seem irrelevant and give Liz Truss an opportunity to show her qualities,” writes Sanctimonious Stephen Glover in the “Daily Mail” with no sense of irony (8 0ctober 2022). Or self-preservation.