Tim Hardy

Housing market measures

178. For most people the acquisition of a house is the biggest single investment they will make. Homeowners rightly expect their investment to be protected by sensible policies pursued by Government.
179. I am determined that as a country we never return to the instability, speculation, and negative equity that characterised the housing market in the 1980s and 1990s.
180. Volatility is damaging both to the housing market and to the economy as a whole.
181. So stability will be central to our policy to help homeowners. And we must be prepared to take the action necessary to secure it.
182. I will not allow house prices to get out of control and put at risk the sustainability of the recovery.
183. I have therefore decided it is right to take two measures aimed at stability in the housing market.
184. First I will raise stamp duty from 1 per cent to 1.5 per cent on property sales above £250,000 and to 2 per cent for property sales above £500,000. This will take immediate effect after the Budget resolution has been voted by the House.
185. Second, continuing the reforms begun by the previous Government which removed mortgage tax relief at the higher rate of 40 per cent in 1991, and cut it to 15 per cent by 1995, I propose to reduce mortgage tax relief by a further 5 per cent from 15 per cent to 10 per cent from April 1998.
186. The timing of my measure should help to avoid a return to the conditions of the 1980s where the failure to take early action guaranteed worse problems later on.
187. I believe these measures will help to ensure a more balanced recovery.

The gap between Gordon Brown’s 1997 Budget promises and the reality of what Labour allowed to happen would be funny if the consequences of his dishonesty hadn’t been so serious.

As one of the thirty-something generation priced out of home ownership by an asset bubble that inflated faster than my salary grew, I say bring on the crash and end the bail-outs of irresponsible lenders. And kick out the party that presided over this socially disastrous boom.

Brown’s budget promises of 1997 have proved as believable as the official inflation figure of 3%. Anecdotally, my food and electricity bills are up around 15% so far this year and rents have been rising by around 8% pa for a long while.

Anyone who thinks the conservatives will be better is deluded.

The most controversial proposal in the report, which aims to improve the competitiveness of the British economy, would see a Tory government restore the opt-out from the European Social Chapter, which was removed by Labour in 1997. Redwood will also call for EU working time regulations to be repealed.

Tories plan to make £14bn savings in radical move to slash red tape | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics

Although Labour have proved to be every bit as mendacious, greedy and incompetent as the Tories were, in Redwood’s casual proposal to strip part-time and freelance workers (whose wages have stagnated for nearly a decade) of their pro-rata holiday pay and to remove the sparse legal protection low-wage workers enjoy in the UK, we can clearly see the Conservative contempt for anything but profit.

Growing up under Thatcher means I will never vote for that party of self-interest and greed. Her party created this situation; Labour’s main fault lies in refusing to reverse the damage. A decade of Blairite lies and Brownite economic mismanagement has finally driven me to the Liberal Democrats. I think Nick Clegg is a populist fool but maybe that’s what you need to win an election in the brain-dead, celebrity-obsessed wasteland Britain has become. Nonetheless, Vincent Cable, a man who seems widely respected on both political wings of the press, is a man who deserves more influence.

I’ve been dreaming of a time when
The English are sick to death of Labour, And Tories

Too many people consider a vote for the Liberal Democrats to be a wasted vote. But the belief that they can never get in becomes self-fulfilling. They made real progress in the recent elections and I hope that will only continue. Britain deserves better. Maybe the Liberal Democrats are the answer.

A DVD player I bought from amazon developed a fault.

I called them on Monday at lunchtime to report the problem.

Tuesday morning, they delivered a replacement before 8am. Tuesday evening a second courier came round to collect the faulty one and return it to amazon.

I’ve long been impressed by amazon but this time they have surpassed themselves.

Main Entry: prof·i·teer
Pronunciation: “prä-f&-’tir
Function: noun
: one who makes what is considered an unreasonable profit especially on the sale of essential goods during times of emergency
- profiteer intransitive verb

Properteer
Main Entry: prop·er·teer
Pronunciation: “prä-p&-’tir
Function: noun
: one who drives up the prices of a limited, essential resource by treating homes as an investment
- properteer intransitive verb

Inform 7 has been released, a new version of the langugage used to write Infocom-style text-based adventure games (am I showing my age?). Whereas Inform 6 resembled an OO language, version 7 resembles structured English.

In place of traditional computer programming, the design is built by writing natural English-language sentences:

1. Martha is a woman in the Vineyard.
2. The cask is either customs sealed, liable to tax or stolen goods.
3. The prevailing wind is a direction that varies.
4. The Old Ice House overlooks the Garden.
5. A container is bursting if the total weight of things in it is greater than its breaking strain.

Although the exams are over, I still have my project to complete so I probably won’t touch this for a few months but I’m looking forward to exploring it.

One week before the exams are due and the university has finally confirmed that, following a meeting with the local branch of the AUT, the exams will be going ahead as scheduled.

My revision has suffered from the uncertainty. Let’s see how much I can catch up in seven days.

The AUT action short of a strike continues. Exams start in eight days and we still don’t know if some or all are going to be cancelled. If they do go ahead, they may be missing questions by lecturers who are on strike even though we have told the university we do not want to sit partial exams. Revision is difficult to say the least.

The unions have taken us hostage and the university seems happy to regard our education as collateral damage. They acknowledge that exams may have to be delayed but they refuse to make that decision, reserving the right to let us know 24 hours before they are due in spite of repeated demands to give us more notice.

This is even worse for the part-time students who are taking time off work to sit exams that may not happen.

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the AUT, accused universities and colleges of ignoring her request to return to negotiations.

“Unless we can get them to come and negotiate with us, those poor students are in danger of not graduating,” she told BBC Radio 4’s the World Tonight.

BBC news

Am I the only one who feels sick when Sally Hunt talks about “poor students” and then blames everyone else but her fellow militants? Sally, you put the gun to our heads, you are the one holding us hostage and whatever sympathy I may have had for your cause went out of the window the minute you did so. The students who do support you are suffering from the Stockholm syndrome.

Sally Hunt is refusing to ballot AUT members on the latest pay offer, unilaterally deciding that it is not enough. Final year students are having their education sacrificed for her election campaign for leadership of the combined AUT / NAFTE unions next year. She and her fellow strikers are a disgrace to their profession.

Revising for finals is not being made any easier by the customers from the neighbouring pub who seem to regard a little good weather as an excuse to take the afternoon off work, get drunk and see who can shout the loudest, confusing, as idiots often do, being noisy with being witty.

The only time I don’t have to wear earplugs in my own home to concentrate is when it’s raining and since I can’t control the weather I thought I’d google for some creative common’s sound effects.

This thunderstorm may not drive the drunkards back to work but at least it helps drown out the sound of their braying, fake laughter and senseless cheering.

I’ve just spent a couple of hours trying to track down an error in some Java code I’m writing that uses generics (an area I do not know as well as I would like).

I’ve been tearing my hair out, assuming that the problem must lie in something I’ve misunderstood about the new area. The code implementing generics looked correct, but then what do I know? It’s not an area where I’m confident so I must have made some kind of idiotic, beginner’s mistake with it that I’m just not noticing. Or so I assume.

I refactored the code substantially. The bar stayed red. The same test kept breaking.

And then I found the error. A typo in the unit test itself. My code had been generating the right results all along but I had been checking the wrong thing.

When I’m confident of something and there’s an problem, I check the simplest things first. But when I’m not confident, I assume that the problem must lie in the area I don’t fully understand and dive straight into that without pause to check anything else.

I’ve fallen into this trap often enough that perhaps I should consider it a personal anti-pattern. Hopefully articulating it is the first step towards breaking it.

If you sent me a birthday gift the other week, please let me know via email. I may have had a parcel stolen but I don’t know what it was or who sent it.

On Tuesday, a slip was left from the postman saying that he had tried to deliver a packet that was too large to fit through the letterbox. I was a little annoyed because I had been in that morning and he had not rang the bell. I didn’t notice at the time that the date on the slip was from the previous week.

When I went to the post office this morning to collect the package, they told me that someone collected it a week ago and that “They must have said they didn’t have the slip with them and shown a bill or something with your name on.” Top marks for your verification procedures, Royal Mail. Good to know that all a thief has to do to prove he is you is steal a bill while he’s going through the rest of your post.

Obviously there are no managers working at the weekend so I’m waiting until Monday for a call back from someone who might be able to work out what happened. I’m still hoping that the whole thing is an administrative mistake but given our recent troubles with dvds being stolen in the post I am tempted to think the worst.