Just as a matter of fact, fines in English Courts are based on income. Offences for which a fine is an appropriate penalty are classified as A, B, or C. A fine for an A offence is 50% of relevant weekly income (RWI), for a B offence it is 100% of relevant weekly income, and for a C offence it is 150% of relevant weekly income. RWI makes allowance for various outgoings. It would not be possible to make a swiss level fine in an English court – almost all finable offence have a £5000 maximum.

@4 – Pointless without also reversing the Coalition policy of making HB force people to seek ever-lower absolute rents. While it’s too much to ask to expect them to raise it to the 50th percentile again, they absolutely must be re-linked to real rents! (retrospectively, so people can once again live close to their workplaces and in the South!)

@Merrymaker – It’s also important to consider that many fines issued do not reach the courts and are simply a fixed amount. E.g. a millionaire getting caught parking in a disabled bay would pay a negligible amount relative to their salary.

1. Just after I trust a hippo to do brain surgery.

2. You header on this is waffle and I assume you’ve never run a business, ” lightly regulated market capitalism”. You could argue, with considerable justification, that business has been badly regulated but given the regulatory burdens, not lightly.

3. Government picking winners. Not at home to Mr. History or even Mr. Sanity today are we?

4.We have a housing crisis because we have restrictive planning laws, as can be seen by the huge premium that land with planning permission has compared to land without. Liberalise planning and we solve this problem, no other solution is required at this time.

5. It depends if you mean LVT, (fairly good idea as far as I can tell), or just trying to discourage the rich from living in the UK. As for the other suggestions here; we had quite enough nannying and stealth taxes under the dreaded Gordon.

“Current social housing tenants could then be sold these new homes for cost price (not market value),”

Oh joy. Cost price in the South is about half market value. So, you’re just transferring huge wodges of cash from the taxpayer (who would get it if the house was sold at market value) to the ex-social tenant (who will get the cash when they sell 3 minutes later).

Deliberately losing money for the taxpayer just doesn’t sound like a great way to close a budget deficit, you know?

“Regaining economic credibility with the public”

Unfortunately as far as I can see in the media, the “credibility” line appears to be playing out as “sorry, the Tories were right, we were wrong, now we’ll promise to do exactly as they’re doing with the cuts (except for student fees), will you consider us credible now?”

This is insanity.

I suspect this results from assembling a group of swing voters and asking them what they would consider to be a credible economic message. Since they are not personally experts on the economy, and are open to Tory policy arguments which are widely promoted in the press, in the absence of any rival ideas coming from Labour they are highly likely to suggest the Tory policy ideas they’ve heard in the press as the solution.

The Labour Party needs to come up with some ideas of its own, rather than panicking wildly and basically adopting Tory policy wholesale but a year late (and then apologising for an event they didn’t cause, implicitly endorsing the Tory suggestion that the entire worldwide banking crisis was caused by Gordon Brown being stupid). This impresses no-one.

As plenty of left-leaning economists have said, you can’t cut your way to growth in this type of crisis. It won’t work. It may even depress economic activity so far that it actually increases the deficit.

Well, I suppose at least now the Greens are the only English political party not actually buying into the idea that enforcing strict and morally upright austerity on the lower income part of society will cause economic growth by (in a manner reminiscent of the business plan of the underpants gnomes on South Park) causing “wealth creators” to feel “confidence” and mysteriously decide to employ lots of British people (rather than lower wage Chinese people) as a result.

Would it be a better idea to bring all social housing under one roof, so to speak? Give the responsibility for construction to the housing associations, but make the local councils responsible for maintaining the houses. Have the councils and the HA’s work together, for the benefit of communities, thereby, pushing the buy to let vultures out of the picture. They are a big part of the problem, owning a vast number of properties yet lacking any sense of social responsibility. HA’s and councils working together can exercise a great deal of influence, not just over the quantity and quality of housing stock, but over the atmosphere within a community. I have yet to see any evidence of social concern amongst the buy to let brigade, profit being the first and only consideration. A joint effort regarding social housing could create jobs, employing the prospective tenants on the construction, management and maintaining of the properties, boosting the local and national economy, upping the tax take and getting people off the dole.

@Tim Worstall – the idea clearly needs fleshing out. 100 words doesn’t go far! You could always make part of the sale requirement that anyone buying it must not sell for a set period, or must split any proceeds made from the sale, for example.

@Blackwidow1 – think the co-operative sector also has a lot to offer in respect to housing too. But agree, it’s important to have coherent approach to ensure that house building gets going.

One thing the Labour Party need to do is assert that the Tories are attempting to run the economy for a small elite at the top at the expense of the rest of us.

The one obvious example was fuel bills. Fuel companies have announced huge rises in prices over the last three months. Rather predictably, Labour have maintained a stoic silence during this debacle, lest Labour could be accused of holding a position on something other than directly punishing those of us who choose via our feckless lifestyles to be poor.

Instead of silence, why not point out that the huge profits that the gas companies are raking in profits at the expense of those in real hardship? Why not point out that pensioners are suffering simply to keep fat cats in cigars? If we are all in this together, why are the chief executives not taking wage cuts to shore up the vast profits of British Gas, E.on, EDF and the like?

I know most Labour activists are too busy crapping into the laps of the disabled at the moment to care about real issues, but come on, even the Lib Dems managed to see an opportunity to exploit profiteering by energy companies.

A few comments from a perspective normally opposed to Mr Balls…

1. Restoring credibility. I’m not sure Mr Balls can do this to be honest – a good politician, but tarnished by his association with the previous policy. A fresh approach probably needs a fresh person.

2. An agenda for the economy. Well, politically that is very useful, but not sure mutualism is really a vote winner.

3. Getting capital into business is a wonderful idea, but the problem is how to do it. Government, if it is serious about cutting the defecit, has no money to invest (and is unlikely to be as effective as the market anyway – nature of the beast, as the market can innovate and take risks far more easily). Supporting local schemes however sounds sensible – perhaps also trying to slap down the idiots who assume tax breaks for investment are tax avoidance would send a good message?

4. The housing problem is partially a result of prices being so high, due to there being so much credit in the economy. If you want to bring prices down, increasing supply would probably work, but there are people out there who will do that for you (as Tim notes, costs are only half price in places – so if price falls, there is still plentiful opportunity to make money). Again, if you want to find ways of encouraging local initiatives, this would be useful, but otherwise it would be politically dangerous to be seen to be ‘giving’ houses away – remember that voters will quite likely not follow the line you want.

5. Tax fairness. Not sure how taxing chewing gum is fair, but I can see the argument there – but shouldn’t this be a local tax, as clean up is a local cost? Can’t see the argument for a carbon tax, but then again if you want to be unpopular and unelectable (and the carbon tax is having a bad effect on Australian Labour – and not simply because Ms Gillard lied about it) be my guest – but as more of the population doubt man-made global warming is really an issue, I doubt this would be an excellent electoral issue. How tax fairness equates to higher taxes is a point that needs to be made…

@Watchman – re: point 5 – agree, chewing gum tax could be implemented locally, would have no problem with that at all. This point does also not neccessarily advocate high overall taxation – it depends on the extent on the reductions you make elsewhere – possible options be a VAT cut, an increase in personal allowance, or seeking to provide tax credits to those on low incomes to subsidise outgoings (such as housing, energy, transport), which have seen significant increases in cost in recent times. It could well be tax neutral.

@5 – Entirely solvable. If they sell within…oh…30 years, they need to pay back the difference. Sorted.

Really, that’s a pathetic argument. The real issue is that social housing won’t be build on the scale needed soon, and we need to control private sector rents NOW, before hundreds of thousands are socially cleansed!

“we need to control private sector rents NOW, before hundreds of thousands are socially cleansed!”

Have you looked into rent control? It has significant downsides on a practical level and that’s before you address the “seizing control of people’s property without compensation” aspect that I suspect would run bang into an HRA challenge.