I was the youngest of four children and I had a much older brother that I always looked up to. When I was small he would play tricks on me, including one where he would pretend to have some thread that was so fine you could barely see it. He would grip the ‘thread’ in one hand and draw the fingers of his other hand slowly down the thread, all the time telling me how fine it was. I would peer at it trying to see the 'thread'. If I tried to grab it, he would pretend I had snatched it away and that I had somehow lost it.
I am sometimes reminded of this on Twitter by people claiming that Brexit is a benefit.
Have a look at this one.
Will people stop pretending things are bad at the moment. Yes, their is a few issues but we are richer and happier than EVER since Brexit 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧
— England my England (@ever_england) August 11, 2022
@ever_england describes him or herself as "Dislike Europe/ Hate EU. Trump was robbed. Opposing all vaccines. Ban the BBC. Free thinker"
I would suggest @ever_england is anything BUT a free thinker. They almost certainly treat The Sun, The Express and The Mail as equivalent to Encyclopaedia Britannica instead of organisations with an agenda, staffed by ignorant and fallible journalists.
We are apparently “richer and happier” than ever since Brexit. This to me is like being promised a present for Christmas that is the most wonderful thing ever. You open the box on Christmas morning and it contains nothing at all. But you pretend that it does.
Whatever else you can say about Brexit it certainly hasn't made us richer. Not even its most ardent advocates are claiming that. At best they claim it has made little difference although the vast majority of economists - including at the OBR, the ONS and the IFS - say it has made us poorer and there is plenty of evidence of that if you open your eyes.
Has it made us happier? It has made some people happier but only because they seem to think we are now 'free' of Brussels regulations and that their lives are at least going to be better even if they haven't seem much improvement so far. These people have been absolutely brainwashed.
What kind of people are they? And how will they ever be convinced?
Housing
At the end of 2019 I wrote a post about canvassing for Labour on a Wakefield council estate and how depressing it was for me, who was also brought up on a council estate, to see what the right to buy had done.
Thatcher's dream was to create a property owning democracy and my own parents took advantage of the right to buy and bought the house I grew up in. When my mother died in 1998 the house was sold at auction - to a private landlord I suspect - for a pittance.
The FT have an article about this very topic which is really interesting. Read this:.
"Today, a combination of house price inflation fuelled by central bank quantitative easing, alongside austerity and the unintended consequences of Right to Buy, has turned that dream on its head. Right to Buy was a remarkable success in that it led to the sale of more than 2mn homes and resulted in an immediate transfer of wealth. But one of its direct, longer-term consequences has been that, rather than increasing home ownership, it contributed to the rapid growth of an under-regulated and precarious private rented sector.
"In 1979, more than a third of people in England lived in council housing built, owned and administered by local government. Now, more than 40 per cent of the council homes bought under Right to Buy have been sold on to private landlords, who rent them out at three or four times the price of an equivalent property in the social housing sector. The result is that, in many parts of the country, private renting is unaffordable for those on lower and even middle incomes, excluding people from the market and leading to a continuous cycle of eviction. At the same time, a comparison of 35 European countries ranks the UK among the lowest 20 per cent in terms of home ownership, putting paid to the myth that the British are a nation of homeowners."
What did the right to buy achieve? I am not sure it achieved anything in the long term. It made ordinary working people feel wealthier for a while but who cares about the houses now? Who cares about the tenants? Who looks after the community? Where is the affordable housing now?
The answer I'm afraid is that nobody cares and the estates look like ghettos.
Apparently even Michael Gove has "repeatedly made it clear that far more social housing is needed " but there is no plan to address the issue at all.
I think the right to buy was a mistake and I think the whole privatisation drive under Margaret Thatcher has been a mistake. We are now suffering big problems with water and energy shortages and have the highest rail fares in Europe. The private sector was supposed to solve it all, offer better services at lower cost - and it has simply failed. A small number of people have become rich and that's about the extent of it. CEOs are paid obscene amounts of money for doing little or nothing beyond enriching shareholders.
In Britain, the idea of "outsourcing" has become entrenched. A lot of companies buy-in services, rent office space, sub-contract stuff to China and so on, in the belief they are doing things cheaper and in some cases perhaps they are, but the downside is that you lose expertise and you lose control. You end up with a business which you don't fully understand and can't control the quality of.
If you're unhappy with one sub-contractor you can always find another who might be a little cheaper and a bit better - or worse. Companies do this because they lack the confidence themselves to understand things, to learn how to provide their own services as far as they can.
Governments in this country are the same. There is a belief that you can somehow shuffle off responsibility for something you don't fully understand and the chosen supplier will magically solve all your problems. And the suppliers are of course all complicit and encourage the belief they have all the answers when quite often they don't, they are only interested in making money.
They are little different to @ever_england who has sub-contracted his thinking and opinion forming to someone else in the press.
I honestly believe it's time for a re-think.
