Into the New Year

  

 

Subject: Into the New Year.

Another Christmas has passed and the new-year looms out of a fog of international and local chaos in which we have little or no say and are left only to examine the cards we are dealt.
Those cards vary with the demographic, age, sex, race, marital status, children, etc etc but most have your economic status tied in there somehow. Even with advancing age where frailty is the key, your ability to obtain help is crucial, house maintenance, gardening and eventually care in your home prior to seeking a retirement home are all economic question that only money can answer.
I was listening this morning to a phone-in program discussing the latest suggestion from the Tory's about completely abolishing inheritance tax which for some is always a threat  looming in the future, this wish a parent has to leave the kids some money on the sale of the family home. The philosophical conundrum of whether increased house prices, which have risen due to a political reluctance to build houses (a sort of status quo) is an  unfair reflection of a proper market and  leaves an ever increasing proportion of the population isolated and left behind, never able to own a home and caught in the double whammy of an overheated rental market. The lack of any plan to build social housing  has distorted this rental market as people with cash buy up what little stock there is and then rent the houses often with little regard to their obligations to the tenant.
''This dystopian Mad Max society is infused with television programs highlighting the work of the bailiff whose job it is to evicting people from their rented homes.  Admittedly the eviction is often after non payment of rent, sometimes stretching over months by people gaming the slow moving legal system which allows them to stay in the property long after the first non payment. A whole under-current between the landlord and the rent avoider breeds a dysfunctional ecosystem of which the children growing up in such a chaotic temporary environment can only lead to the sense that 'criminality pays'.
The children seem to be missing this year in our street, parading up and down on their Xmas gift bikes and scooters, perhaps it's simply timing, the young ones have grown into teenagers and are only too aware that there's no street cred' to be gained by the innocent display of "look what Santa  brought me this year".
The weather has been mild with no snow. The Weather Forecasters seem determined to try to scare us with notices of extreme weather and playing on the theme of climate change, announce the storms by name and a traffic light sequence of warnings. These warnings announce dire results for those who ignore them but the authorities also ignore the climate change scenario  by continuing to allow unscrupulous building on the flood plane and scrimping on flood defence. It was ever so.  Unprotected tenets and home owners are then unable to obtain insurance and have to bear the brunt of the disaster whilst the authorities sidestep any responsibility.

We are having a rest from the political jamboree which purports to be parliamentary governance, whilst the output from the ‘think tanks’ leak ever more ill thought through policy designed to titivate an ever gullible public into believing someone has a solution.