Rents for social housing have gone up over the years in the UK and have been subsidised first with rent rebates and then that was changed to housing benefit. They went so high that workers couldn’t afford them.
Tax on fuel has made that rocket too and food prices have soared, so the government had to subsidise council tax and even wages with tax credits. Now the Tory government has decided all this costs too much. It was a Tory government who brought out council tax after the poll tax failed miserably and brought the people onto the streets in protest.
I can remember when people had decent jobs working in industry or commerce and could afford to pay their rents, because rents, rates and water rates for social housing were cheap. Much of industry has gone, mines have shut down, but the finance sector in the city of London is booming. They are making million pound bonuses while the miners of Yorkshire languish in minimum wage jobs and are often told they can’t keep their homes because they have a spare bedroom. How do the bankers and financiers make their money? The scandals of PPI and rigging LIBOR might give you a small clue.
Is it surprising that Britain is now a divided society and the division is so deep that it showed very clearly at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral this week. We saw clearly whose side whom was on and some Labour politicians didn’t do themselves any favours. The sad thing is there is now a political void in Britain that an extreme party could fill. We have a very right wing government, but the opposition isn’t left wing like in Thatcher’s day and the unions don’t have much power. We now need the Labour party and the Liberal democrats to become a liberal force and remove the Conservatives with their monetarist ideas from office in 2015.
We need new ideas for our economy to work. We need politicians who understand that money is the means to exchange wealth, not wealth itself. The world economy is in a mess and we need sustainability in developed countries so that developing countries can grow. We need international economic agreements, but stubborn right wing politicians like Cameron, Osborne and Merkel can’t compromise; so we need to get rid of them.
Do we print money like America and Japan? Printing money devalues the currency, but we do need money to exchange wealth. The problem occurs when we print too much, or when another nation prints too much. We need international agreements so that we can trade fairly. Even China appears to be having problems now and the mighty Germany is threatened with having it’s credit rating cut. Do the politicians and economists really have a clue? Is it time to use science and logic over political doctrine that has become a belief system; effectively a religion for politicians.
What do you think? Are you being affected by this international economic fiasco? Please us the comments box to share your thoughts…
