25th March 2015

I guess that it is little more than a commonplace to note in passing that generally the Labour Party is for public ownership and the Tory Party prefers to privatise stuff.

So with Railways as with the NHS, with Water and Gas and other Utilities and Technology and the Post Office all, under this Tory led, co-alition Government shifted from the public to the private sector.

The East Coast Railway, a victim of its own success after the failures of the previous private sector franchisee and having been run successfully as a public company, the company has gone back into private ownership.

Little enough is said about the costs of privatisation, the public funds invested to allow BT to compete with Sky in bidding wars to show premiership football on TV.

And why not allow Mr Branson his  very own life size railway set to play with, I don't imagine that his private Island has one, so hey!

It's OK come and play with ours, why don't you?

But hidden in the pages of the Newspapers last week there was a story about another privatisation.

After five years of austerity, during which the national debt has barely shrunk at all, the Con-Dems appear to have come up with a cracking new plan.

Privatise the debt.

So, instead of each and everyone of us taking the strain of the cost of maintaining a fairer society in which rich and poor share the burden proportionately the latest wheeze is for each of us to carry our own debt as best we can.

This at least it seems to me, thinking aloud as I often do with only the indoor critic to notice my muttering, is the plan for the years after the election to come.

Apparently according to my Newspaper, the average UK household is likely to be £10, 000 in debt by the end of 2016, not including their Mortgage, if indeed they are lucky enough, or not, to have one.

I'm not entirely sure that there is a coherent logic to this thinking and whether I am comparing like with like or whether I am comparing Pears with Oranges?

But if the National Debt costs everyone of us in interest payments and is held by the Chancellor to be a bad thing is it a better thing for private debt to be costing each of those in debt over £2500 a year in interest payments?

I suppose if you happen to be one of the lucky few who are not in debt then, well .......!

But if debt is the method by which we have each managed to survive the last five years of austerity.

And if we have exchanged inflation for deflation during the process.

And if it is at all true that we have halved the deficit as Mr Cameron likes to claim.

Or indeed that the plan is working as Mr Osborne claims.

Why is it that household debt, excluding mortgages, over the period has risen by 10%?

And why also is it that much of that borrowing appears to be, not for luxury high price-tag items, but that people are increasingly depending on credit, both credit cards, personal and pay day loans, to afford essential items.

Or are borrowing simply to make ends meet?

The inevitable bump in the road ahead will be felt, and felt pretty dramatically, when interest rates start to rise.

If loans are affordable with interest rates at 0.5% will they remain affordable when rates increase?

Privatising the public debt is the logical conclusion of privatising everything else but the corollary of this strategy is the growing evidence (published by The Bank of England) that whilst people borrow to spend, thereby providing some support to consumption within the UK and helping GDP.

The increase in private debt has contributed to the depth of the downturn in the economy and a much slower return to growth.

5th March 2015

The election is now only a couple of months away.

After five years of austerity it feels that the 2015 election is critical for the future becoming of our society.

I have always been committed to fairness, peace, justice, multi-culturalism, rock and roll and motorcycling.

Of course the austerity we have been forced to pursue was only ever a sham austerity.

Anyone relying on social support for their survival will in all likelihood have had their benefits reduced whilst bankers will have retained their bonuses.

The disabled have had DLA replaced with PIP.

Whilst the Bar Bills at Westminster have kept up with inflation.

Those in receipt of housing benefit will have lost some of their benefit if they were adjudged to have a spare room.

Whilst houses in London have been extended downwards not for spare rooms but for essential Gyms and Swimming Pools.

People faced with impossible choices will have been sanctioned.

Whilst Hedge Fund Managers will have been promoted.

And throughout the past five years strivers have been contrasted with shirkers although how those struggling to manage to maintain family life on a reducing budget whilst balancing increasing costs for food, energy and transport can be thought of being anything other than strivers is beyond me.

The idea of Universal Credit has been planned, developed and rolled out (sic) on the assumption that all have access to the Internet that monthly payments can be managed in order to last until the month has ended before the money has run out.

Last week we received a letter telling the indoor critic and myself that our household had been chosen at random to take part in a study being managed on behalf of the DWP.

The study was into Family Resources.

For agreeing to take part  in the study we received a book of stamps!

Apparently the results from this survey 'allows the DWP plan for the future and monitor the impact of policy changes in the United Kingdom'.

Oh Yeah?

The leaflet that was enclosed with the letter and the book of stamps included a pie chart.

Apparently the last survey? found that:

74% of UK household income was in the form of Earning and Investments.

14% of UK household income was in the form of pensions.

9% of UK household income was in the form of Benefits and Tax Credits.

3% was described 'as other'!

Bank Robbery?

Maybe! Although whether that was banks robbing us or us robbing banks is not clear.

My first reaction was to not participate in the survey. The conspiracy theorist in me was highly suspicious of the fact that the survey was being conducted on behalf of the DWP, but having spoken to another person who had participated in the survey and found the experience interesting I began to soften my attitude.

So much so that when the knock came, i.e. the researcher just turned up at the door without first 'phoning to check that we were home or that it was a convenient time, my initial hostility had changed from a 'No' to a 'Maybe'.

Keeping him on the doorstep seemed discourteous, so the two of us, the indoor critic and myself aka 'The Household' sat at the dining table with the researcher and his battered lap top.

He didn't know our names, he still doesn't, but he knows where we live.

The information we were asked for and which we gave was so general as to be of no use to anyone, apparently because we are retired, the survey is less interrogative, but how Mr Duncan Smith and his team could make any kind of use of the knowledge that our income is from our pensions and that we don't have a mortgage, other than adding us to the 14%, I don't know.

I am told by another friend that the DWP need to find the 'tipping point' for the moral majority because they need to demonstrate that we are in the middle of an economic recovery and that the cuts need to slow down not increase further.

It was after receiving that message that I opened my paper to read that the Chancellor is planning a giveaway budget.

First they guaranteed the pensioners income, then they raised tax allowances, then they restored tax credits and then they sat back and hoped that they'd done enough to win the election.

So far I have received, apart from emails from the Labour Party, one election leaflet from UKIP.

There is a strong link between UKIP's unfunded promises and the promises made by the Conservatives to win our votes.

Protecting jobs, increasing prosperity, repairing the economy and reducing the debts we leave to our grandchildren.

The headlines are user friendly but the devil as always is in the detail.

Just read the small print and don't get taken in by a free book of stamps even if you need one to cast your postal vote.