Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

VALUE READS

Download all five fast reading thrillers now! Offered at 99p or 99c. Or buy paperbacks from £4.99. Orders over £10 postage free.

AMAZON.COM                        AMAZON.UK

All three of the main parties have announced house building programmes, none of which measures up. The Tories want to build too few with too many to buy, Labour will build more and will focus more on affordable rather than subsidised housing but how it will work is not yet clear, the Lib Dems want to build loads including new towns all over the place, but they probably are not going to a a big player in the next government. The Greens are the most ambitious and the best focussed in their plans to build half a million affordable social houses to rent, but sadly their leader’s brain crashed when she was asked to explain how this would be paid for, by whom and at what cost.

This all serves to demonstrate how gravely short is the political class of the skills needed for the hour in which the nation now stands. We are in the midst of a recovery driven by another housing bubble in which house price inflation roars ahead while inflation itself goes negative and if steps are not taken on a dynamic scale to correct all this, the whole thing will bust apart.

An attractive but traditional design is to be introduced for new coins showing a contemporary engraving of the Queen’s head. It is apparently the fifth edition to be issued during her long reign. During Queen Victoria’s even longer (so far) reign there were as I recall only two editions and both were still in circulation when I was young. There were also coins in circulation for King Edward VII, George V and George VI as well as Elizabeth II. The others finally disappeared with the advent of decimalisation. It seems long ago when we had twenty shillings to one pound, twelve pence to a shilling, twenty-one shillings to a guinea and coins with name like thrupenny bit, florin, sixpence, farthing, halfpenny and half a crown. The sovereign was before my day.