Technology, right? It gets cheaper. You get more for your money every single year. Ferocious competition to meet voracious customer demand makes things cheap.

And that’s good. 

But housing? With housing, the expectation is that they’re going to get more expensive over time. In fact, your house is supposed to get more valuable. That’s the deal, right? You take on ridiculous debt and devote a significant chunk of your income and in return you get something that generates money while you do absolutely nothing. 

In any other walk of life, there’s no such thing as a dead cert profit, but politicians are supposed to deliver it. Their careers depend on it – and with the help of nimbies, environmentalists and zealous planners, they’d still be delivering now if the world money supply had been able to keep pace. 

It’s simple: A) Ensure housing supply never meets demand and B) Have banks lend more (which they were prepared to do so long as A was true). 

Except the legacy of this almost constant increase in house prices is that, for most people, rent and mortgage payments become the single biggest drain on their incomes after taxation, and in a very real way this imposes a great deal of financial hardship – an increase in the value of a house is not an increase in wealth. It’s a reduction in the value of money. It’s a trick – and a pretty nasty one at that. 

It seems to be the British disease that we insist on protecting the value of our houses. To exceed demand for housing – and therefore bring genuine competitive forces to bear on the housing market is to advocate madness. To want better and cheaper housing, not just ‘affordable’ housing is somehow a radical and controversial idea! 

And “Affordable Housing”? Ugh. There’s a euphemism. In the real world it’s propertly like the tiny little peasant huts that are technically houses because they have multiple floors, and the soul-crushing and overpriced ‘luxury apartments’ that dehumanise even Yuppies. The market is flooded at the bottom end of the market with substandard, crappy properties.

These sorry excuses for housing have one thing in common – no-one, in their right mind, would buy these things unless they were desperate to get on the housing ladder to cash in on the fat profits everyone else seemed to be enjoying. Get on the ladder, that’s what matters! Sell it in a year and buy something better with your profits! Houses really do print money!

What makes me incomprehensibly angry about all this is the complete lack of understanding that when a house goes up in value from £100k to £150k, it’s not that the house is worth 50% more – it’s that money buys you 33% less. We’re all being made poorer, and yet we cheer it and welcome it as if it’s a marvellous boon to our civilisation. It’s called the “Feel Good Factor” in fact – which is apt. You feel good, while we’re actually witnessing people being empoverished by rampant inflation in the cost of roofs over heads. But it feels good, and that’s what matters, isn’t it?

So what to do? I look around Halifax, where I live, and I see those old victorian terraces, built as housing for the very poorest mill workers, and I see that even these bottom of the rung houses are actually quite desirable now – and out of my price league, despite being a fairly well paid computer programmer. That houses and flats being built more than a hundred years after these terraces are even smaller and less generously fitted. Something’s not right. In this particular market, we’re going backwards, in the opposite direction to everything else. 

I say again: What to do?

Just how bad do Labour need to get before the whispers of tactical Anti-Labour voting become a deafening roar? It seems stunning to me that it’s something people are only willing to discuss with me in private, but so far, in public? Nothing.

So hey, let’s start a debate. 

For a party that’s won many, many seats as an Anti-Tory vote in the post, even contemplating the idea of an informal tactical voting pact that might benefit the Tories isn’t just difficult – it’s practically heresy. Admitting that you might prefer any Tory Government to this Labour Government is … well it’s taboo (dontcha know they eat babies??), and risks the heretic losing all credibility.

Old hatreds are the most stubborn, and within parties – where second guessing what everyone else might be thinking and second guessing what you think you think you should be thinking…. *breathe* …makes thinking for yourself something of a challenge. As I’ve discovered, challenging the orthodoxy is not a fast track to popularity and fills one with feelings of guilt and alienation. If I wasn’t so obstinate and a chronic anti-authoritarian I’d probably have given this up long ago.

Yet I still believe this is a party that wants to find the right balance between Liberty and Equality. We might argue about what the correct balance is – and I argue that the correct balance is 100%-0% obviously - although I find it hard to believe that any Lib Dem would believe that Labour’s too far in the ‘Liberty’ direction. Equality as the ‘End’ means Authoritarianism as the ‘means’. That’s why it’s a trade-off and why you can’t ever have both. This is Lib Dem 101 stuff. We all know it. And we all know that Labour’s Authoritarianism has gone too far. 

If our party is serious about getting this balance right, never mind what I think is the right balance, it must be willing to stand up and say so when the balance goes too far towards “Equality.” 

If we’re not just secret socialists, if there’s more to our party than a bunch of social democrats who happen to hate Labour, then we need to be willing to say “time for more Liberty,” and be unafraid of doing so. Prove we mean it by recognising that the balance is, currently, skewed too far towards Authoritarianism and help the country put Labour back into the Wilderness labelled, “where people who can’t be trusted to run the country go to learn valuable lessons”.

I’ll take Tories on best behaviour over a vindicated 4th Term Labour Party any day – unless of course the Lib Dems can pluck victory from the jaws of defeat this time, naturally. I know the Tories are barely better. I know that to expect anything other than a slowing down of the bad is undue optimism. But if Labour are forgiven by the electorate for everything they’ve done so far… well, there’s no words for how frightened that makes me feel.

UPDATE: According to John at ‘Liberal Revolution’ the answer to the question “How far should the Lib Dems keep away from Labour?” is “as far away as Saturn is from the Earth“. He’s been doing actual canvassing.

With all the drama surrounding dirty smears on the Internet, I was reminded of a bunch of blogs that appeared during the Lib Dem leadership election.

These blogs were pure smear – transparently so – that disappeared just as soon as they appeared. Huhne, especially, attracted blogs that condemned him for ‘marital problems’, his property portfolio and having ’5 houses’.

We never did find out who created those blogs, and it’s hard to say whether or not they had much – if any – effect. I wonder though… was Number 10 more afraid of Huhne or Clegg winning? Would a more militantly left Lib Dem Party been more of a threat to their core support? Or did they believe that Clegg might destabilise the Tories?

Now if someone could find out who was behind those sites …

So 50 hours of compulsory “community service” is to be demanded of all 16-19 year olds, under plans that form part of Gordon Brown’s “please for the love of God don’t make us clean up this mess” manifesto for the next General Election.

Oh where to begin with this?

Let’s talk about enforcement, because, ultimately, if it’s going to be compulsory then there needs to be some sort of disincentive for evasion.

Will these young adults be subject to fines for failure to comply with a work order?

One can easily imagine that the well heeled will simply pay the fines as a means of getting their offspring out of this indentured labour.  To guarantee compliance, as with convictions for cannabis use in the states, being banned from attending university will be the only means of ensuring all children, from all backgrounds, are forced into this unpaid, unvoluntary labour. Or, at least, the nice middle class kids will attend, while the kids from the estates will find themselves in an even worse situation.

Of course, it may be that the parents will be the ones that suffer the burden of fines – it will be have to be determined who, exactly, is responsible. There are children that cannot be made to go to school… how do you make them attend a compulsory work order?

See, from a libertarian perspective this is simply a means of taxing young people. It’s taxation ‘in kind’ because they have no wealth worth taxing, but as yet they remain an unplundered resource, so they’ll pay it in pure labour. Based on 3.2 million 15-19 year olds (2001 census), and a minimum wage of £3.53, that equates to a levy over half a billion raised on the least powerful, the least democratically enfranchised part of the British workforce.

It took the Ancient Egytians an average of 15,000 people working over 10 years to build a pyramid (with numbers of workers peaking at 40,000 at times). With this scheme, Brown could build a pyramid in over 9 years (assuming that they get their half a billion worth of free labour once every 3 years). I just thought I’d put that in a bit of context for you.

If we accept that it’s good for the state and the nation to have state mandated compulsory labour (also known as slavery, even if it’s just for 50 hours) from 16-19 year olds, pressure will grow to have 50 hours from absolutely everyone. Think what you could do with 30,000,000 people doing 50 hours of work? A windfall to the state of £86 billion (based on full national minimum wage) every single year!

Taking cash is one thing, and there’s enough problems with that as it is – but taking tax in kind through labour is a whole new level of evil, as far as I’m concerned – and it must be fought, stopped and whatever else necessary to prevent this abuse of human beings as commodities to be exploited.

What makes all this possible is the ID cards programme. It’s easy when all young people have ID cards. You’ve got a centralised database of all the ‘eligible’ teenagers, and you can track how many hours they’ve ‘donated voluntarily’ through that. No exemptions, no excuses.

Worst still, they’re not going to be able to vote against this, just like they can’t vote against being forced to take up ID cards.

The minds that dreamt up this policy seem to me to be sick. That this has come from the Labour Party doesn’t surprise me anymore – it would have done 10 years ago – but to me this, when I talk about ‘socialism’, is what I’m afraid of. I can’t help it. I have this irrational fear of people making me do things against my will, and a sense of anger and outrage when I see someone else being made to do something against their will, too.

Of course minors are a special case, but to exploit this is beneath contempt.

Call me weird.

UPDATE: Anton Howes kindly reminds me that he did, in fact, send me a link to a Facebook group opposing this. If Web 2.0 based Cyber activism is your thang, try this facebook group.

I’ve been using this Easter Weekend to try to tweak a few things on this new blog – mostly the side bar. 

I’ve written a bit of code that pulls in my twitter updates (Haiku fail at the moment though), and I’ve got old blog posts listed with a little bit of blurb about them as a way of, hopefully, tempting you lovely people into reading other things on the site once you’re here.

If anyone’s a bit of a WordPress hacker and wants my Twitter code, I’m happy to share. It’s not a Widget (because my sidebar does not use Widgets) so requires you to get down and dirty editing template files directly… not for the faint of heart.

Update: Except, of course, the Twitter importer spontaneously stopped working for some reason… oh well. Fun while it lasted.

Update Update: Okay so I got it working again, except now I reduced it to just my latest update only. Also, I removed the rather poorly looking ‘libdig’ button, which forever showed “0 lib digs” and was rather embarrassing.

Update Update Update: Well, I got sick of the sidebar taking forever to load - especially with the new twitter thing -  so I decided to write a bit of Javascript to pull that box in after everything else has loaded, which makes the page load 3 seconds faster – down from 4 seconds. I also turned off Twitter Tools, which I only use for notification to Twitter but which loads a load of junk (including the dreaded JQuery library) in pages. Desperately trying to keep the page weight down as low as possible. The faster the better!