Green fields (and common sense politics)

This is part of the no man's land between the A65 and the "back road" to Kendal. Bits of what you can see are owned by the school and some of it is owned by local farmers.

The land is earmarked for development in our local development framework and, of course, some people are up in arms about it. But this bit of the school playing fields isn't used (too boggy) and, at the risk of sounding blasé, we have lots of beautiful countryside around here. Losing this little bit is not going to make a difference, especially as it's almost invisible except from where I'm standing now. And, you know what? We need the houses.

Now, I wouldn't say I'm actually qualified to be chancellor of the exchequer but, on the other hand, I wouldn't say I was less qualified than George Osborne. And frankly, if I was going to do a bit of 'quantitative easing', I wouldn't have given the money to the banks to distribute.

Here's where the Telegraph says it went "Much of that cash has gone into repairing a broken financial system. Some has gone towards repairing banks' balance sheets. Some has contributed to bank lending. But its effects have been to soothe the financial pain rather than completely curing it. And precious little of the money has filtered back into lending to households."

The Guardian told us that "Threadneedle Street said wealthy families had been the biggest beneficiaries of its £375bn quantitative-easing" and that "The Bank of England calculated that the value of shares and bonds had risen by 26% – or £600bn – as a result of the policy, equivalent to £10,000 for each household in the UK. It added, however, that 40% of the gains went to the richest 5% of households.". (I'm not being cynical when I say that that's no surprise under a Tory government.)

If it had been up to me to decide what to do with £375 BILLION pounds, then quite apart from not closing libraries, introducing a bedroom tax, capping benefits, making people redundant and picking on people who are both disadvantaged and poorly represented, I would have done this: I would have done LOTS AND LOTS OF BUILDING HOUSES.

Because, for a start, we NEED more houses, lots more houses. And building more houses will effectively prick the stupid housing bubble once and for all. And building houses would put money directly into the pockets of people who will spend it (as opposed to sticking it into tax avoiding offshore trusts) and therefore give us an economic recovery. And it would create jobs. What's wrong with that as a plan?

So, vote for me :-)