Home owning no substitute for industrial decline

IT is my strong belief that the working class will pay dearly for its obsession with property. Very often there have been unrealistic expectations that have led to colossal levels of personal debt secured on nothing more than notional figures in estate agents’ windows. The level of property price surges over the past 20 years or so has seen profit made from house price rises become a form of substitute income post-industrial decline. Very clever Mrs Thatcher, but it has run out of steam and quite rightly so!

With most homes more than five times the average salary, it is an absurd expectation for something at best you just might finish paying for.

Meanwhile the banks retain the largest share of property ownership. We have a strange system in this country whereby responsible professional people who now often rent property and have unsecured personal loans see themselves pitted against the binman who bought his council house and has a friendly bank throwing money at him. In my alternative way of thinking, it might even help to have a property crash in order to stabilise the economy.

It’s the old tale of champagne tastes and lemonade money, and the culture of self is turning society’s once pragmatic people into self-seeking monsters at the altar of Sarah Beeney.

From: Michael O’Hara, Ainsdale Road, Royston, Barnsley.

NOW we know why the Met Police were so slow and hesitant in dealing with the rioters in London last year, when a few hard baton charges in the early stages would have stopped them instantly.

The simple reason is that only two weeks before they had seen a colleague charged with manslaughter for merely hitting someone on the leg and giving him a push.

The fact that he then died of a heart attack shortly afterwards – or whether such force was needed at all – is immaterial, the force used was not life-threatening in any way. He 
was merely charged for 
political reasons (as a jury later decided).

When the riots erupted, who at first would be brave enough to strike people in the full glare of publicity or order a full baton charge, knowing that if some unhealthy rioter died you would be charged with manslaughter?