ANOTHER PR JOB
WHEN the Chancellor announced plans to help first-time home buyers in the Budget last month, he won glowing headlines even from newspapers and Tory MPs who want him sacked as a remainer, in a fine example of the Conservative party and its media cheerleaders pulling together to create a united front against the resurgent Labour Party.
But the measures he announced to such acclaim will only lead to 3,750 more houses being built each year in a Britain of 64 million people. It’s hardly going to change the shortage of houses for thousands of people here, is it?
What’s more, the Government’s own modelling shows that the money it is spending on this plan will inflate house prices for firsttime buyers, and therefore will not help them, it will only help those who are selling houses to them.
We have already seen directors of building firm Persimmon resign over £240m in bonuses – including a £100m bonus for the chief executive – which resulted largely from profits from another Tory wheeze, the “Help to Buy” scheme, by which taxpayers’ money has gone largely to inflate house builders’ share prices and profits without helping people seeking to buy homes.
This latest PR job from the Chancellor is run along the same lines. By email
BAILOUT NONSENSE
AFTER the biggest increase in rail fares for a number of years in a couple of weeks’ time, which will nicely subsidise fares for passengers in Holland, France and Germany since their rail companies run many of our train services, the Government has committed taxpayers’ money to bailing out the East Coast rail franchise – again!
The private franchisees failed when it was privatised, and handed it back to the public sector, which ran it at a £1bn profit without the inefficiencies of private sector companies communicating with each other via lawyers and hiring merchant banks to handle their share offers.
Then it was privatised again by the Tories, because a successful public sector rail operation was an embarrassment to their ideology.
But now private franchisees have failed for a second time, and the Conservative UK Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has bailed them out with taxpayers’ money.
This boosted the private company’s share price by 12% overnight, a clear sign that they got away with murder at the expense of the public. The bailout spares them paying hundreds of millions of pounds of fees which could have been spent on the NHS, schools, the armed forces or reversing Tory cuts in the police.
With Theresa May having agreed to give the EU up to £39bn as part of the Brexit deal, we don’t want to be subsidising European railway passengers as well. By email
BAN IS A SWEET MOVE
REGARDING NHS England’s announcement that sugary soft drinks will be banned from hospital