As I’ve personal reasons to recall, Britain experienced previous house-price bubbles in the early 1970s, as the result of low interest rates due to the “Barber boom”, and then again in the late 1980s into 1990 because Nigel Lawson, as chancellor, had manipulated interest rates to ensure a “competive exchange rate” for the Pound prior entering the Pound into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Inflation was revived so Lawson resigned in 1989 after rowing with Alan Walters, Mrs T’s personal economic adviser, and his successor as chancellor, John Major, was left to do the silly thing.

Conservative governments have a terrible record for mismanaging the housing market, which is why it is all the more surprising that history was allowed to repeat by this Labour government. I’m not a regular fan of Hegel but he was absolutely right about one thing:

“What experience and history teach is this – that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” [Philosophy of History]

None of the measures are talking about buying cars and houses- it would be unusual for loans for those goods to be at these really high levels, and its certainly not what we are defending so take that outrage elsewhere. Although its only due to the structure of our economy renting is a scale cheaper than buying…

The idea that someone earning £12k year can afford to run both a car and a mortgage is absurd.

Hurrah! Finally the abolition of the National minimum wage. For of course living wages differ in different parts of the country.

This is just the first step of course. Now that this simple and obvious point has settled into lefty minds, we can get about destroying national wage rates as well.

Labour markets are local, living costs are local so wages should be local as well.

Hurrah!

(that’s not entirely fair: I rather like Crass, and think that everyone ought to listen to them Or Present Day Equivalent when a kid)

making the rich pay for the crisis,
a radical redistribution wealth and power,
nationalising the banks,
closing tax havens,
ending the obscenely inflated rewards a tiny minority award themselves,
launching a crash building programme to provide new housing,
greatly improved pensions and social security benefits,
creating an egalitarian society?

Poverty of aspiration is the phrase that springs to mind. Someone must have searched long and hard to find the claimed thousands of people who could agree on setting their sights so pathetically low.

3, ditto. What about “making sure you can’t borrow cheaply because it will all depend on whether someone saved enough in your local postcode”. Yup, another fine idea.

4. I think it’s always nice to have a recommendation that has only been tried by the previous 1000 governments.

“5. Create statutory charter for responsible lending”. If ONLY someone had thought of that. The credit crunch would clearly not have happend, if only someone had had a statutory charter with the right wordings.

You can’t ask people polling questions about something like a financial crisis and expect it to add up to an answer, or least one that works. Any more than you can write computer code by getting each person to vote on their favourite line of code.

I’m sorry but people don’t have to spend £250+ per child at Christmas and any single mum who thinks she does has more than financial stuff.

Rather, we have a “free” banking system. What this means is that fees for bounched cheques, breaking credit card limits, overdraft charges, ect are all very high. Taking out a high-interest loan for a period of a few weeks can avoid these charges and provide a substantial saving to the individual concerned. Having a seemingly ridiculous APR doesn’t mean nobody could actually benefit from the service. Mutuals and credit unions follow the same model as the banks here, so I see little to commend them for in this regard.

Making this type of credit unavailable while leaving the rest of the structures standing is unlikely to actually benefit people with debt issues greatly. It is the kind of completly not joined up thinking I would expect from government by survey, however.

But on expanding lending: no. The problem is poverty but the solution is almost certainly not credit.*

Increase the incomes of the poorest instead. That way they are less likely to need loans for the necessities of life, will be more able to access loans without predatory interest rates, and will be less likely to default on any loans they do take out. Or they may not even need to take out loans at all.

*(Yes, I have heard of the Grameen Bank. And no, I haven’t seen the research that suggests that something which has benefited a minority of women in rural Bangladesh is the magic bullet for poverty in inner London.)

i) greater access to credit for the financially disadvantaged;
ii) an end to high interest rates; and
iii) a charter for responsible lending.

Pretty hefty contradiction isn’t it?

Making sure banks don’t mislead people is one thing (transparency, responsible marketing)*, but otherwise “responsible lending” means “lending to people who will be able to repay” doesn’t it? – meaning those who will be unable to repay are financially “excluded”.

* There is already a great deal of legislation trying to ensure banks don’t mislead people.

Out of interest – who framed the choices and made the final decisions on what items would be chosen as this top 5 – was it the leaders of the member organisations of London Citizens who are then mobilising their own members from the top down, or was there some way of the grassroots voting etc?