Do not blame the poor for Croydon's problems Mr Steve Reed

There was a superbly run hustings last night at Praise House by the Free Christian Church. Pastor Damon Luke chairing with very well organised MC and staff. The whole event was the most fairly run I have seen so far.

At the post meeting gathering, where the real politics goes on, I had a really rewarding chat with several of the priests there, on biblical economics and politics. Leviticus 25:23, 1 Samuel 8, Mark 12:13, Romans 13. Fascinating. I also bumped into the camerman whom I met at St Pauls last year, Rajeesh. Great.

The more I meet Mr Steve Reed, Labour candidate, the more I'm dismayed by how he insists on blaming the riots on the poorest classes. Who have already been robbed by the kind of policies he talks about adopting when he is formally elected after the 29th.

That of giving enormous tax payer funded handouts to landlords, property developers and bankers, disgracefully disguised as encouraging business.

Its a bit like blaming soldiers in trenches for a war. This is the quality of character who will be elected on the 29th unless people have a change of mind.

Two very good questions came up for which I requested particular attention for the Young People's Party:

1. Crime
2. Employment

What can be more obvious than that these are integrally linked by cause and effect? Crime rises as wages fall. ALWAYS. History so testifies. Until the elastic snaps and the people desperately start to take by force what was robbed from them in the first place by dysfunctional government, rewarding free gifts to the 1%, taken from the earnings of the poorest class.

I do not condone theft. I'm merely pointing out cause and effect under natural laws. Desperate people do desperate things. Treat people without love and they will not love you.

I attempted to point his out to the crowd with as much grace as possible by showing who the major robbers are right at the top. Bankers and Landowners. But it was completely overwhelmed by Mr Reed pretty much supporting the crowd's objection to this by implying the riots had nothing to do with systematic robbery by the 1%. He writes in his Lambeth seat about it frequently, his policy in general is to avoid questioning the 1% at the top, to blame the poorest class and to mitigate the effects later with yet more welfare.

Its a real pity the other candidates did not stand up and reinforce my point particularly Mr Jasper. The Monster Raving Loony guy pretty much said the poorest should be treated with even less parity than already. Unbelievable.

This is from the Labour party, who are supposed to be raising the wages of the poorest.

To improve Croydon one must start from the bottom. Because the top do not need any help, and by improving the condition of the poorest is shown to improve things for everyone above them too.

Alas, celebrity and handouts seems to be more important than wisdom these days for the people of Croydon. Not so for the YPP. Onward.

QE & FLS: Rubbing our noses in it

From City AM:

Under QE the Bank prints money to buy government debt, to push down interest rates. This is meant to stimulate the economy, but it also drives up inflation. In addition, QE has been criticised as it reduces the value of the annuity retirees can buy with their pension pots, attracting the ire of the older generation.(1)

Weale yesterday defended the policy, arguing that young people have been particularly badly hit by the downturn(2) and so need support from the central bank.(3) In particular he noted that almost 10 per cent of young men have been unemployed for more than six months, compared with just over three per cent for men aged 31 to 64.

As a result he feels hitting the old with QE has been justified because it helps the young.(4)

1) The first paragraph is a fair summary, apart from the bit about QE being intended to "stimulate the economy", there is absolutely no reason to assume that it will achieve anything of the sort, like just about everything else the UK government has been doing for the last five years, it's about propping up banks and house prices.

2) Yes, just about everything the government is doing - propping up rents and house prices, taking away benefits, hiking tuition fees, increasing taxes on labour which destroys jobs and makes it disproportionately harder to get a job in the first place, massive deficit spending etc - is designed to fob off as much of the burden onto the young and future generations, so the end result is hardly surprising.

3) The central bank is part of the government, if it wanted to "support" the young , it would be doing pretty much the opposite of what it is actually doing (see long list in 2).

4) Woah! False choice there! This is not a question of sharing a dwindling cake between the under-40s and the over-65s, what's happening here is that the usual suspects are f-ing over both groups simultaneously, the only winners here are the bankers, insurance companies and landowners.

Just to illustrate the point, also from City AM:

MORTGAGE lending climbed to an 11-month high in October, according to data out yesterday, as the Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS) entered its third full month of activity...

Mark Harris, boss of SPF Private Clients, a mortgage broker, said he expected the mortgage market to ease further and further over the coming year. "This bodes well for next year – as lenders saturate the low loan-to-value (LTV) market with a plethora of rock-bottom rates, they will be forced to turn to the higher LTV bracket," he predicted.

The FLS is out of the same stable as QE, it's about reducing interest rates for the benefit of the already wealthy and the Baby Boomers. Apart from the fact that easy credit and high house prices are what got us into this mess in the first place, the only people to benefit from FLS are people who are selling land (because they can sell them for higher prices) and people with a lot of equity who can double on their mortgages and expand their BTL empires.

Croydon - Who will offer you the biggest bribe. Stranack or Reed?

In the desperate fight to deliver a newsworthy story the Croydon Advertiser says:

Steve Reed and Andy Stranack trade blows ahead of Croydon Advertiser debate

In that desperate struggle, the press have missed the key point:

Labour and Conservative candidates are avoiding root cause of the Croydon's big social problems. And  instead of that integrity are seeing who can give the BIGGEST BRIBE in welfare, tax breaks, political gain, to buy the vote of the Croydon people.

The incinerator, the hospital, the library are important issues of course.

But the primary cause making them an issue is that the natural fund that would far exceed the costs of dealing with them easily, is being sucked out of the Croydon economy by high rents and high taxation. There is no finance left for it because land owners and banks have it.

The unwritten policy of Labour , Conservative is to keep house prices and taxes as high as possible. So this will go round and round and round like a playground argument.

The people of Croydon are about to vote for one of these spoilt children. So be it!