Government Plan To Increase House Prices

Prescott says he doesn't understand why house prices rise faster than inflation, and then wants to add fuel to the fire by subsidising house purchase.

Government Approves Discrimination

The sex discrimination lobby get the EU to pull back from their scheme to enforce equal insurance premiums for motor insurance despite different risks for each sex, thereby avoiding women having to pay the same as men. Would the EU have relented had it been women who posed the higher risk, and men who faced higher premiums?

A contrasting story is the intention of the Lake District National Park to scrap volunteer guided walks because they attract only middle class middle aged whites. There is no suggestion that the walks are not worthwhile in themselves, or that walks are not available to others. Sounds to me like discrimination against middle class people, middle aged people, and whites.

Examples of the politicians and officials institutionalising discrimination, and how easily rationality goes out the window.

EU Regulation Costs Rise £17 Billion

The EU is about to cost us another £17 billion each year as its emissions quota scheme starts, and an artificial market begins in emission trading - see the EU Referendum site.

Planning Ruins English Towns

It is ironic, but not surprising, that planning laws, supposedly needed to stop England turning into a concrete jungle, have precisely that effect.

A story in the Telegraph tells of a large Victorian suburban house in Nottingham, which is to be pulled down so 16 flats can be built in its place, typical of what is happening all over the country as developers struggle to meet demand for housing within the tight restrictions on land use imposed by the government.

It's a story I've seen repeated many times in our local newspaper too.

For many years new houses have been crammed into the gardens of older houses in all England's towns and villages. Now the pressure has increased and with government demands for ever higher housing densities, the older - more spacious - housing is being demolished to make way for flats.

I know people don't like to see the countryside encroached on, but the price is inferior new housing, the disappearance of traditional housing and gardens, and everyone having to live in less space.

It seems mad to me when farmland is often not even farmed, and in receipt of massive subsidies.

If land were not subject to planning restrictions people would likely have bigger, cheaper homes, with decent sized gardens around them. The quality of life would be generally improved. As it is, we seem to be spiralling into a world of ever smaller, more cramped, and expensive housing.

In ostensibly trying to preserve the countryside, planning laws are in the process of destroying the quality of life in our towns and villages. Not only are more and more houses being packed into the same space, but prices go up, and locals have to move away. And if the countryside is being preserved, it is true in only a limited sense: farms are being amalgamated, the old farming communities are withering away, and government interference in food trade and supply has rendered much farming uneconomic.

Unfortunately planning laws do not let the market - the net result of the choices we all make every day - decide how land might best be used, and substitutes the decisions of a handful of politicians and officials: the result is less flexibility, less innovation, more uniformity, massive development on greenfield sites when it does happen, and more greyness.

Unfortunately the Tories don't get it either, and are playing the same game.