Housing
Chancellor in a pickle

Brown's uneventful Budget was, in one respect, an absolute mess. The mess was in "housing".  Part of the explanation lies the growing UK wealth-divide, fuelled by a property-friendly legal regime which Labour is entrenching ever more deeply: see Dane Clouston. 

But the other part of the explanation is that the Government refuses to sanction the construction of public rented housing, for those left behind by the property-value boom.  The suggestion of a "Planning Gain Premium", payable immediately upon the grant of a high-value planning consent will fail.  That was the scheme of the 1966 Betterment Levy, which failed for precisely that reason.  Thousands upon thousands of citizens were called upon to pay out cash which they did not possess, merely because planning consent had been granted on their property.  That system will not work, Gordon.

It saddens me that my own Government is making such a pigs ear of a policy sector which is peculiarly my own.  In the 1970s I was a Special Adviser on housebuilding to the Wilson/Callaghan Governments, on precisely this issue.  We got the right solution with Development Land Tax (1976) only to have all our good work unpicked by Thatcher (1981).

• I owe you a fuller explanation - which will follow. I promise.

This speech
was absurd

I mean, of course, Tony Blair's speech last Saturday to the Spring Labour Party Conference in Manchester.  He has lost touch,  perspective.  He likes making crisis speeches - and this was another one. These are his words, E-mailed to every Labour Party member within the hour.

The task of our leaders is to put terrorist attacks into perspective, not to go in for such dramatisation every time.  They should not be using the vocabulary of war at all.  As we did for thirty years in Northern Ireland, they should use the language of peacetime, of civil disorder, and ordinary criminality.  We should not be the ones to unleash, or to legitimise, the language or the ways of war.  To do that is to lose the confrontation, from the very outset.

Why does he do it?  Because he knows he has lost personal legitimacy on other fronts.  George Bush is similarly bereft of personal legitimacy, albeit for different reasons.  They seek therefore to clothe themselves in the gory legitimacy of crisis. They both believe that they somehow acquire stature from the very awfulness of the event. 

• Theirs is the wrong leadership style.  They must both be replaced by men or women who are not discredited, and who stand a better chance of finding the right style of leadership. The terrorists designate themselves as the men of war.  We should not ape them.  Ours are the ways of democracy, of law, of personal dignity - and of peace.

Affordable housing
a will'o'th'wisp

Words matter.  They matter because they are our universal means of persuasion, encouragement, seduction, illusion, deceit and deception.  Including self-deception.  And the Labour Government (like the Tory Government which preceded it) has deluded itself with the notion of "affordable housing".  Young rural couples are said to be denied a future - because there is no "affordable housing".  Welsh culture is under siege by English incomers, because there is no  Young professionals have to commute for hours, because there is insufficient "affordable housing".  Public services are under pressure because there is no "affordable housing".

That is nonsense. The very terminology fudges the key distinction between owner-occupied and rented housing.  In an open market-place for freehold accommodation, there is no such thing as "unaffordable" housing - house-prices merely reflect purchaser-demand, and purchasers' willingness to pay. 

• The real problem is that "the market" fails to provide housing-for-rent - the very commodity that many young and lower-income people need.  That is a systemic market failure, and demands public intervention.  And that is the challenge which successive Governments have been trying to duck, by way of self-delusion.

Gentle Massage
by Human Rights Act

Some important cases never make the headlines.  And the adjudication by the House of Lords in the cases of Colin Middleton and Sheena Creamer was not destined for the headlines, although it was creditably picked up by
The Guardian.  Both had committed suicide, in separate incidents, while in jail - and the issue before the Lords related to the scope of of the inquest juries' findings. 

• Hardly headline-gripping stuff! But the Lords judgment demonstrated clearly how the leavening effect of the Human Rights Act 1998 is working its way, slowly but surely, through our Constitution, and our society.

Grave Injustice
at Cross Hands

Two of you have asked for more about my new crusade to made the Coal Authority pay up for wrongs done by the NCB to former miners who bought their houses from the Coal Board, in the 1980s, in the panic of privatisation.  It is a dramatic story, and you will find it fully set out in my speech to the Cross Hands public meeting last Saturday.

In a spirit of comradely commiseration, I publish the commemorative stamps issued for England's World Cup victory Down Under... Cheer up, the English!

Tough Campaigner

I met Shami Chakrabarti for the first time last week, the Director of LIBERTY who last year succeeded John Wadham. At 35, she is a great campaigner, having worked as a lawyer both with LIBERTY and the Home Office. 

Shami already has important victories to her name.  She lacks nothing in terms of commitment or public courage.  Katherine Gun was represented by James Welch from LIBERTY, in her defeat of the Government in the GCHQ Cheltenham case.  Shami does not come to the post (as many of her illustrious predecessors did) as Labour political animals: hers has been the non-Party Civil Service path, and that will stand her in good stead at the head of LIBERTY, as a independent non-Party agency.