4March
An interesting letter in Monday's Indytab, from Adrian Buckley in Leeds.
I have followed your campaigns against the banks with a degree of desperation because the real issue is not being addressed, which is the issue of fractional reserve lending and the disgraceful way in which banks have progressively loosened lending criteria.
In 1970, a family was limited to borrowing a maximum of one year's salary of the principal wage-earner to buy a home. Property prices reflected that availability of money and cost, not surprisingly, about one year's salary. Lending is now offered at a five-times multiple of double incomes, so houses now reflect that and cost five times average total household income.
This lending should be renamed creation, because that is what it is; banks lend nothing, they create the money out of thin air. It is widely known within banking circles that money ceased to have any intrinsic value after sterling came off the gold standard, together with the dollar, in the early 1970s, and they were free to create as much debt as they chose.
The banks encouraged women to take on debt alongside their husbands, which effectively snared young women into 25-year financial commitments, ignoring the fact that they may choose at some time to care for their babies.
This, in turn, led to children being denied a full-time mother because she had no choice but to continue working to pay the mortgage. This led directly to higher levels of delinquency, and ultimately, to the gangster culture we have recently read so much about.
If politicians are serious about supporting the family, helping women and children, and reducing crime and other societal ills, they should ask exactly what contribution banks make to society, and set lending limits.
That would allow house prices to reduce to an affordable level for average families and liberate women from the shackles of a mortgage which denies them choice in the most important aspect of their lives, the upbringing of children.
The New Statesman has been researching the first draft of Iraq Dossier I. This wasn't the one that M Khan copied from the interwebs, that was Iraq Dossier II - This Time They're Really Making It Up. No, this was Dossier I - Forty-Five Minutes To Save The Planet. The Hutton inquiry had not heard of this document, and John Straw (when he was foreign secretary) blocked its release under the Freedom of Information act. The Staggers reports how Number 10 sexed up the dossier, and that it wasn't entirely written by Scarlett and the Joint Intelligence Council, contradicting the Labour line to Hutton. More: IraqDossier.com Two further questions: 1) Can we have Greg Dyke back, and 2) Will Alistair Campbell be apologising?
Douglas Hurd wrote last week-end on the case for an inquiry into Iraq. Learn what went wrong, see how we can avoid making such a balls-up again. Such an inquiry will, inevitably, turn into a trial of Mister Blair, precisely because he identified so strongly with the entire revenge fantasy project.
Speaking of fantasy projects, Richard Ingrams has some interesting points.
In part two of Michael Cockerell's
Blair trilogycurrently showing on the BBC we saw film of Mister Blair telling his audience that we all supported the US because they had stood side by side with us during the Blitz. As Geoffrey Wheatcroft points out, America was actually neutral at the time of the Blitz. Some kind Americans may have been sending food parcels at the time, but that was about all.Mr. Blair has also let it be known that the reason Britain went to war with Hitler in 1939 was not, as had been previously thought, because Germany invaded Poland. The real reason was that for some years Hitler had been persecuting the Jews and that finally we decided that enough was enough and that we had to do something to stop him.
Mr. Cockerell's programme was too kind to Mr. Blair but it had the merit of showing how very dangerous a man he is - a man determined to set the world to rights, convinced of the justice of his cause and convictions. What makes him more dangerous than others of the same ilk is that he is a very ignorant man - even ignorant of the most basic facts of our recent history.
For us, the main point of Mr. Cockerell's hour was that the bloke in the Indytab is right: Mister Blair really is a psycopath; if he believes something strongly enough, it is right, and he cannot cope with any form of dissent from the truth as he sees it. Not necessarily mad, but dangerous to know.
John Straw, the Lord Privy Seal, claims that if we don't elect Lords, the house will wither away. Bullshit, John, and you bloody well know it. The upper chamber has been doing a far better job than the lower one of holding a power-mad executive to account for the past decade, and the chamber is able to perform its checking role precisely because its members are not acting with at least one eye on the next election. There is a strong argument for letting the current reforms bed in for another five or ten years, test them against another government, preferably one of another political colour, then draw some sensible conclusions. But no, Mister Blair - and his spineless lackey - wants action for the sake of action, not because it's the right thing to do.
On lighter stuff, Joan Smith compares and contrasts Jade Goody and Diana Windsor; and Sarah Sands raises a toast to Charlotte Church.
