“Donate just £3 to Oxfam, so that our middle class managers can live in Islington and not be forced to suffer in Croydon”.

I don’t really want to say anything about the hypocrisy of the Labour left in general and the Kinnocks in particular as I’ll be writing for days and you said it so well anyway. Anyone who votes Labour expecting them to anything for the population at large is sadly mistaken. And of course you wont see anything like these tales appearing on Al Beeb or the Graun.

Of course the many people who benefited are not all ‘evil’ schemers but the unregulated system, created an environment for greed at the expense of others, which of course, has led to deepening inequality. Greed is a fact of life, the Government would be well aware of this and instead of implementing laws to rein in, this human instinct, they in fact stoked the fire, no doubt to benefit from taxes, on higher house prices etc.

The Government’s interference in bailing out the banks and supporting the housing bubble, can be seen as a form of State Capitalism, benefiting poor economic judgement of the few, at the expense of the wider population, particularly those that had the sense to see that it was a bubble, it certainly doesn’t represent, free market forces etc.

How can the correction be made ”fairly’ or ‘painlessly’ as you say, well what is the the old adage that the banks wheel out, ‘your investment, may go up, as well as down’, everyone should have been aware of the risks of investing in an inflating housing market, where was the logic that house prices could only go up, when this doesn’t apply to any other investment? Besides, a housing bubble did burst under the John Major Government, an event that would be in living memory of many of those who have bought multiple properties, this time around, why should they be treated with Kid gloves?

You can cover your expenses for a property in Denmark, and this would include mortgage, maintenance, improvements, etc, but the State will set what rent you can charge on a property, so there is a fair rental system and this will limit what profit can be made, this also has the effect of keeping house prices more stable. If Danes want to buy a second home, most opt for a Summer house, which are in designated areas and are generally used as a pension option with certain tax breaks etc. These houses can only be lived in during the summer for the first 9 years of ownership and are under a separate housing status, in different areas to the main housing stock, so do not impact on the local community who live in the area on a permanent basis.

Draconian perhaps, but look at the mess that is the unregulated housing system in Britain. It’s more important to use houses for living in, than for pension schemes and more positive for economic growth in Wales to encourage making other investment choices, in the wider economy.

¨as I understand the Law in Denmark, you are not allowed to own a property, without having somebody live in it and you are not allowed to make a profit out of renting your property¨
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So if someone for example inherits property in Denmark, say on the death of a parent, that would leave the house empty. What happens then, does the government seize it? Bit draconian for country that takes pride in its liberal reputation? Also if you can´t make even a modest profit on renting property there would be no incentive to let and therefore no private rental accommodation. I don´t believe that the world should be profit-driven, but .letting property can involve hassle and risks, so without some ´compensation´ why even bother? Better simply to let the house fall down or convert it to some other use.

Anyway this is all very interesting, if only to show that there are other ways that no doubt appear entirely normal and reasonable to those involved. Do you ever get the feeling you´re living in the wrong country?

Thank you for that. I agree that house prices are ridiculous and the root of many wider social problems. Unfortunately many of those who have benefited are not on the whole evil or scheming individuals but simply got swept up the process. You obviously understand the multiple causes far better than most of us. Conspiracy or Cock-up?

TBH I was expecting house prices to crash years ago, and yet somehow they have just continued to soar into the stratosphere without the expected corrective forces kicking in. Another question, even if there was ever the political will to correct matters, how could it be done fairly and painlessly?

Just to add, as I understand the Law in Denmark, you are not allowed to own a property, without having somebody live in it and you are not allowed to make a profit out of renting your property, plus you have to be a tax paying resident in Denmark to buy property. The obvious effect of this in contrast to Britain, is that people invest their money else where. Denmark did however, have the same problems with the banks and loose lending, but a major bank was allowed to go bust and the housing market was allowed to correct.

If you look at, for example one fundamental area, such as Housing policies, from the time of Thatcher to the present day, it explains in multiple ways, why there is growing inequality in Britain.

The banking crisis, the ‘boom and bust’ that happened on Gordon Brown’s watch, in the UK, was brought about, in great part by the massive, inflation of house prices, through sub prime mortgage, loose credit, artificially low interest rates, cheap tax credit and the deregulation of the Bank of England and through greed! The banks were never held to account for playing roulette with one of our basic needs, housing. The housing bubble was never allowed to deflate, as ‘Quantitative easing’ otherwise known as printing money, was introduced to bail out the banks and devalue the pound, while inflating the cost of living and creating a huge deficit. A measure that the poorest are now paying for, through ‘austerity measures’, totally unjust and we certainly are not, ‘all in it together’.

Gordon Brown also removed pension provision, so a generation of people who already owned their own home, started investing in property. This was made more attractive by special buy to let mortgages, low interest rates, tax breaks, easy supply of credit etc. Politicians also had a vested interest in BTL, as many of them have milked the system, to buy multiple properties, so few of them would have had a desire to change the regulations and tax system on housing policy, when they were/are making a fortune out of it. Meanwhile, nobody was considering the effect of all this wealth accumulation, by one set of people from one generation, on the next generation, who have also been handed a huge bill for University eduction etc, which the former generation, had for free.

Another significant factor in the rise in House prices, has been supply and demand. Immigration increased massively under the Blair Government and was still rising under the Cameron Government, there is a vested interest in importing cheap labour, which has the effect of driving down the wages of the poorest, whilst putting pressure on housing and services. At the same time, very limited numbers of social housing etc have been built in response to this increased demand, no doubt to keep houses at artificially high prices. The ‘right to buy’ policy, brought in by Margaret Thatcher and continued under Labour, has compounded this situation, as the old social housing stock was sold off and not replaced. A whole generation, of monied individuals, have done very well over the last 30 years, with the help of Government polices, at the expense of others in Society.

Another significant aspect to the housing boom, has been foreign investment, much of this money laundered in London, could be coming from any corrupt regime from around the World. The knock on effect, as the prices of London property booms, is that those who have done very well, just by buying their house, by good luck, at the right time, are now able to sell and buy a place in areas such as Cornwall or Wales, with the obvious impact of inflating prices there. Measures could have been brought in, at any time to stop this obvious effect, but still haven’t. In contrast, the Danish Government don’t allow external foreign investment in property, you have to live and work in Denmark for a number of years before you can buy property. This is a thought out policy, to stop house prices inflating, at the expense of the populace.

In Wales, the housing crisis has another dimension, as wealthy english retirees and multiple, holiday let owners, buy up the housing stock and increase prices, way over the traditional, x3 mortgage average for the local earner. If the Welsh Government were serious about dealing with the Housing Crisis and the migration of Welsh people and Culture, they would have brought in measures to deal with it years ago! The folk in St Ives Cornwall have at last, brought in measures to deal with the BTL plague, but really, it’s the epitome of shutting the door after the horse has already bolted!

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/02/homing-in-on-the-housing-crisis-where-did-it-all-start-to-go-wrong

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/28/uk-housing-crisis-in-breach-of-human-rights

http://england.shelter.org.uk/campaigns_/why_we_campaign/the_housing_crisis

http://home.bt.com/lifestyle/money/mortgages-bills/opinion-st-ives-reserving-homes-for-locals-should-be-copied-by-more-councils-11364059923244

Thank you for those links btw. In looking into this a bit further I came across these maps. They rate Gwynedd as having the lowest wages in the UK (with Ceredigion as a close second), lower even than in the Outer Hebrides (move the cursor over the places you´re interested in) :

http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/HTMLDocs/dvc126/

Also the UK seems to regularly fall behind Ireland on the various lists of GDP per capita and so on. And yet somehow we still think of Ireland as poor country full of ragged barefoot kids etc. All a bit of a shock really when you get in ¨in your face¨. Clearly in my case, and I doubt I´m entirely alone, unconscious attitudes lag behind factual knowledge.

Well I´m old enough to know that we had social policies in the UK after WWII, really up until Thatcher to a large extent. The question is why it all went wrong in the UK which continues to promote itself as the champion of freedom etc. (e..g. all the fake ´patriotism´, royalty worship, WWII remembrance, faded imperial trappings …) while on the continent, countries that created and/or submitted to blatant oppression, outright genocide and so forth have, you say, continued to promote social equality and something approaching a classless society. I mean they had their lords and ladies, their industrial magnets and so forth in the past, so how come they didn´t revert to type after a few decades just like the UK? Serious question btw, I´m not just arguing for the sake of it, if we understood this difference maybe (just maybe!) we´d be in a better position to do something about it.

And of course Wales, as you say a poor region of the UK, voted with England to leave the EU, what kind of insanity is that?

Britain is the 5th richest ‘Nation’ in the world, but the richest 1 percent own the same amount of wealth as the poorest 55 percent of the population. The inequalities in Britain, are to do with the very unequal, distribution of wealth, not as a consequence of resisting Hitler!

http://orcap.co.uk/uk-is-fifth-richest-country-in-total-wealth-survey/

/www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/may/15/britains-richest-1-percent-own-same-as-bottom-55-population

http://poverty.org.uk/09/index.shtml

There is clearly something very ‘rotten’ and this can clearly be seen when considering where the poorest areas are in Northern Europe and where the richest area is, 9 out of the 10 poorest areas are in the UK, with West Wales being the poorest, the richest area is of course, being London. The same inequalities don’t exist in Denmark and the other Country you mention, Germany, because of very considered, Government social policies after WWII.

http://inequalitybriefing.org/graphics/43_poor_North_Europe_700.png

http://inequalitybriefing.org/brief/briefing-43-the-poorest-regions-of-the-uk-are-the-poorest-in-northern-