Hearth and Home

The Nationwide Building Society announced yesterday that house prices had risen by 11% across the UK in the past twelve months. If that’s the case, Mr Nationwide, perhaps you can tell me why my own house is not only worth considerably less than I paid for it eight years ago (despite being fully renovated in that period) but is likely to fetch not a penny more than it would have done last year… or the year before? As always, supposedly ‘national’ statistics are pretty much useless in painting an accurate picture.

It’s like the weather forecast; no matter what the general prognosis, the majority’s experience of specific conditions will differ. In one village an enormous cumulonimbus dumps hundreds of tonnes of the wet stuff in under half an hour while in the next the cricket continues unabated until only the cucumber sandwiches stop play. Similarly, recession or not, companies fail and people are made redundant while others prosper and profit, yet the statistics deal only with aggregated productivity and fail to tell the real stories of the majority of individuals.

What’s my beef? It’s the fact that not only will our own government rarely properly consider and accommodate regional variations, acting instead on overall figures that are representative of almost nobody, but that the EU feels compelled to butt in and do the same. Help to buy has been a real boon to people trying to buy their first house in areas outside central Londonistan yet the commissars are now ‘suggesting’ to Westminster that they take steps to curb this apparent economic bubble by cutting off the only means many people may ever have to own their own home.

How dare the EU, having shown utter profligacy throughout its existence, turn its attention to dictating the detailed policies of supposedly sovereign nations, especially those who thank their lucky stars they didn’t adopt the euro. “Tractor production at an all-time high, comrades. Cease making tractors and divert all resources to bringing in the glorious turnip harvest!” Cue the mighty tractor army of the south-east gathering in a record tonnage of the favourite communist comestible while in the tractor-deprived north the crops rot in the fields. The national statistics show only good news, while in some parts of the country the only growth industries are undertakers and clothes recyclers.

The human rights industry grants rights to criminals whilst denying justice to victims. Discrimination legislation discriminates and criminalises the majority. Employment law puts people out of work. The common agricultural policy makes farming unprofitable and food scarce. Energy policy makes electricity unaffordable, or a luxury item for some. And importing ‘vibrant’ third-world multiculturalism makes no-go areas of our inner cities. For every blue-flagged leisure centre or community outreach hub apparently paid for with ‘EU money’ we have paid IN ten or twenty-fold.

House? Luxury!

We have been ripped off, lied to, insulted, affronted, subjugated and treated as vassals throughout our whole sorry history of association with this shabby ‘communism-lite’ experiment. And still the arguments always spring from an assumption that without the EU nothing good could have come to pass, because whatever successes we do achieve it is easy to turn the passive fact that we are a member into the triumphal and causal claim that it is because we are a member. Just remember all that when your EU-fawning offspring are still eating you out of the family home at the age of 40.