The first step should be to for us to draw up a UK national emergency plan to deal with the following issues:-

Regain control of the money supply from the global merchant bankers.

Start the long and difficult task of returning our currency to the gold standard.

Disentangle the UK from the UN, NATO and the EEC, as these bodies prevent us managing our own country and impinge our civil freedoms.

Stop wasting money on our useless nuclear deterrent, and invest the money saved in building a strong, well equipped ‘home defense’ army and police force capable of upholding our laws.

Pull our troops out of Iran and Afghanistan and stop interfering in the politics of other countries, we do not have any right try to impose our brand of ‘shamocracy’ on all the countries of the world.

Stop the phony ‘War on Terror’ – anyone stirring up an hornets nest deserves to be stung. As we know from our experiences in Northern Ireland, these matters are only resolved by negotiation, not guns.

Invest significant resource in the quick development of nuclear fusion reactors to meet our long-term need for cheap, clean power.

Stop the high levels of immigration and only invite people who can contribute their skills or wealth to our country to work here.

Bring honesty and integrity back to UK politics and stop the media cartels manipulating the UK public so that they, along with the bankers, become the real arbiters of how our country is run.

Stop treating the UK public like children, who’s every need must be met by all invasive government. Most of us are quite capable of looking after ourselves. Think context, not content when dealing with UK issues.

Land planning law is a mess. As a ex local councillor, I have seen the results at many Planning and Development committee meetings. Numerous conflicts between national planning “guidance” diktats and local citizens desires, expressed through their Councillors. The requirement for PPS 12 Local Development Frameworks, just added insult to injury.

Land owners / Developers all know that making a local planning application is just the stage before you go to appeal to some Inspector in Bristol who will decide the application according to Whitehall rules! As he does with LDF submissions, his (Whitehall’s) word is final. We already have “nationalised land”.

LVT will not change this on its own; but, it will force owners to think about holding land out of the economy for decades. It will force planning authorities to think about the land value impact of their decisions and how local tax payers can get a share of it – they are not allowed to at present – the ballot box will tell them if they are getting it wrong.

reply: Land Value taxes amount to nationalising land, as the government decides on how the land should be used and prices its accordingly. The owner no longer takes the lead in determining how to use it. Govwernment can then take people (and businesses) out of house and home.

Land Value Tax – which will start out as a property value tax; if we adopt it – is for me the answer. It could replace Council tax and inheritance tax, even Business Rates.

The concept of sitting on a plot of land, that was bought for peanuts; watching its value go up because of private and public investment all around it; at no cost to the owner, is unfair to all taxpayers and local council finances.

LVT would put an annual cost on holding this land out of the economy. As said above, it is relatively easy to get back to the land value – not the development “residual” land value – from the property value.

Apart from increasing the supply of land into the market, it will reduce its price. And, it may even cross the mind of the local planning committee that the more land they zone for development, the richer their council becomes.

Reply: Why does nationalising land increase its supply – everything else nationalised reduces supply and raises price.

Reply: I want to live in a country where people are better off and can afford their own homes. That requires lower and fewer taxes, not higher and more taxes.

i.e., “…bankruptcies in the housebuilding and related industries and services, job losses, reduction in the number of new homes…”

However, your new-found concern (never evident when you were in power) fools no-one, and look at the consequences: savers lose out (indeed, saving is dicouraged while debt is encouraged), first-time buyers are squeezed out of home ownership in favour of BTL investors, low interest rates cause the economy to inflate in every other area, and for what? So that political parties and financial institutions can coast along on a feel-good factor largely predicated on debt and the illusion of prosperity. At least the ECB is keeping its powder dry.

Watch the economy fly when a house can be bought for £50,000 again — you will never see so much spending (of real money). Get interest rates up and people will only borrow what they can afford; thankfully, it looks like the banks will force this issue through self-interest, by only lending to secure borrowers / those with deposits.

I don’t think we can expect a reasoned response from the politician here but it is encouraging to see so much common sense from individual people. If only economic policy had the same, we might see our individual and societal propensity for greed also reigned in.

However, I think we all remember what the Conservatives said of society in their last term in office.

I wonder if Vince Cable has a blog?

Reply: This old scheme (originaloly proposed by henry George) would create economic chaos. the whole banking system is based on land and property values and people have paid good money to buy them.

On the contrary John; I care considerably about my home and its people. I am simply incensed at the blithe responses of those empowered to govern. These are substantive issues: let’s have a substantive response from you on them.

You assert that falling house prices will result in “…huge damage to the economy”, yet this is baseless. If you bought a house to live in, it’s current value is irrelevant and there is no reason to move when that value drops. What if you owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth (the dreaded negative equity)? The same can be said of all purchases (ask anyone who owns a car). It is a mistake to mould financial policy to bail out those who bought houses for other reasons — a disgraceful state of affairs from the US that, like all things, is now being mimicked in the UK. Keeping interest rates low to sustain house prices puts the cost (or burden) of individual home ownership on the public purse. We heard no noise from these people when prices were going up and profits into pockets and remortgages, yet now the music is stopping it seems everyone else has to cover their mistakes — the privatisation of profit and the socialisation of loss. If I were one of those who has made a bad financial call (it does not matter if I was badly advised — I was the one who ultimately made the decision), it seems I can cry foul and put the burden onto someone else — i.e., the lender (with a knock-on effect for everyone else the lender deals with, and the economy generally). Astonishingly, it is only because enough people bought homes they couldn’t afford with money they didn’t have that the taxpayer is expected to respond. In the context of free hand outs, we never hear about the renter who can’t afford to get on the housing ladder, for whom falling house prices down to a reasonable multiple of income are a good thing. Where are the billions for them? Cash and tax gifts to bring these people up to the affordability level would soon cause the pips to squeak. One hundred billion pounds of ‘liquidity’ to ease jitters in the financial world? How about the same sum spent on reinstating the housing stock that your party scattered to the market winds?

Think about things this way: how would it be if I had a preferential arrangement with the exchequer to buy up all the bread or milk and then sell it back to you at my price? Would you regard that as a morally acceptable situation for a government to put its people in? This is what throwing tax dodges and money at the private BTL investor (and the banks) has done.

Your thesis is flawed John. Britain does not grind to a halt when house prices are low, anymore than any of us are truly prosperous when they are high: making fixed rate mortgages the norm would consign boom and bust housing cycles to history. Re-read James Caffery’s comment above about the BTL investor laughing in the face of government and the public to see the true losers in this.

Yours is the politics of self-interest and discursive sops to those who vote you in and pay your wages. You don’t engage; you just evade. A genuinely sorry state of affairs.

Reply: I do not evade. I give clear answers, some of which you disagree with. If we have a sharp fall in house prices there will be bankruptcies in the housebuilding and related industries and services, job losses, reduction in the number of new homes etc. I am surprised you want that.

Quote: “Houses do need to become more affordable – that is best achieved by a period of no house price growth so wages can catch up”.

Indeed? So you are content to wait a century for that to happen, house prices having risen 300% in the last decade while wages have only risen ~ 30% in the same period?

Responses such as this confirm what I have only dared to suspect previously — that people like me could probably govern better than people like you. The quack and the charletan are alive and well in the world of politics. No wonder people don’t vote any more.

Reply: It is unrealistic to suppose real house prices are going to fall as much as you want, without huge damage to the economy. You are the unrealistic one. I care about people, and their mortgages and commitments. Clearly you do not.

We did point out that the “independence” of the Bank and creation of the FSA and the split of responsibilities was potentially dangerous. We did highlight the shift to 2% CPI from 2.5% RPIx was actually a loosening of the inflation regime. We have highlighted every year since 2001 the fact that Brown and now Darling, have missed their budget targets and had to borrow more and more and more.

Vince Cable may have got some prominence for a good joke over Northern Rock, but I don’t recall him making much impact when Kennedy was in charge of the LDs? Right up to 2005 all they could do then was bleat about Iraq!

In truth, the economy is like a ball in the middle of a big ring, attached to it by three big pieces of elastic: interest rates, exchange rates and Government spending and borrowing. If the Government is profligate and over-spends and over-borrows, the exchange rate and interest rates will take the strain. That is clearly happening now and the root cause of the problem is excessive growth in Government spending.

I recently listened to a radio programme, I think about 1968, and the Civil Service going on strike because they had not had a pay rise for 2 years. Imagine what would happen if we tried that now? The sad truth is, we need a cash freeze, ie a real terms cut, in Government spending, to force efficiencies into the big spending departments. Boris Johnson has shown the way with his slashing of the PR budget to pay for uniformed officers.

I agree with others here that the conservatives must accept some criticism over the years for letting Brown get away with so much, especially with constantly trumpeting his “fake facts” about inflation, interest rates and the level of unemployment, so that many people believe him to have been a superb chancellor.

I would also have liked us to have been stronger on regulating irresponsible lenders over the years. I know we believe in letting the markets dictate but lenders should not have been allowed to lend to people way beyond their ability to repay.

Properties are now seen to be much more of an investment than a roof over our heads.

Reply: Like you I prefer owning to renting, so I would myself give any incentives to owner occupiers rather than to landlords.

1) with the huge increase in prices since 2000, I’ll have retired and passed on long before my wages catch up with house prices.

2) given the stagnation in non-home equity gains-based income for normal people over the last 5 years or so, how do you propose to keep the economy going, and therefore grow wages, without house prices rising? Sounds to me like you want your cake to have and eat.

3) Every article I read says that wage inflation is the worst possible kind. With every banker, politician, and CEO doing everything they can to keep wage increases at a minimum, how do you propose to discover this ‘wage growth’ that we’ll need to catch up to house prices?

Regarding interest rates, keeping rates high tries to avoid the toothpaste effect, and I think Mervyn’s got it right. We had a bubble in house prices, and nobody can deny that. We’re going to have to feel the pain – the question is how much pain do the banks share?

Reply: I welcome wage growth, which should be similar to productivity growth in the economy – it used to be around 2.5% real per annum, and may now only be around 1.5%. The Economic Policy Review looked at how we could lift the real growth rate, which would also lift real wages. I want people to earn more, not less, in a low inflaitonary environment so they can buy something with the extra wages.

Reply: That was a Conference before the latest sharp rise in house prices and I stand by what I said then. I also made clear my opposition to the CPI switch and the lower interest rates that led to.