Evil Diaries: Voting For A Purpose

I do not wish to be thought flippant but I have always been amused by the old lady who, on being asked how she would vote, replied: “I don’t vote – it only encourages them.” This is broadly similar to my father asking a fellow classicist, Sir Ronald Syme, how they should be voting on a particular matter in Oxford’s parliament, pointing to the massed majority grouping for a particular direction, only to elicit the response that they cannot all be right: therefore “we should vote against.”

That said, regardless of how great the Labour majority will prove to be it all promises to be a pretty good mess. The fact is that Labour has always taken the country insolvent and I am quite sure that they will take this opportunity to do it again. It is just the country’s bad luck that the Conservatives have been led by a cad and some fools at one or two critical stages with the resultant disaster we now see being lined up.

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Brummer disease is prevalent whenever Alex Brummer thinks that by twaddling for breakfast lunch and dinner about a “foreign” takeover of a London-listed company enhances his readership. He judges that the Daily Mail’s readers are opposed to a 500 years old company being taken over by a Czech. He therefore sentimentalises. It cannot be because he actually believes the points he makes. He is just engaging in immoral deceitful behaviour. Today’s Daily Mail City Comment refers to “the national interest”. How this could possibly be adversely treated by the Czech’s arrival I have no idea. And nor does Brummer.

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Returning if I may to the election I note that some Labour party activists wish  to control rents. The history of such control emerged in the UK with DORA (the Defence Of The Realm Act of 1916). It caused a vast mess of decaying properties since no sane landlord would ever see the point of repairing his investments. Eventually, sixty years down the line, fortunes were made through scooping up vast numbers of these properties since the buyers knew that HMG would have to grow up.

Where a form of intervention must be counted desirable is a punishing regime of accelerated planning permission to cause the building of more residential property. This would lead to more such property coming on to the market and a throttling of the NIMBY brigade which reckons it has a right to strangle the rest of us.