Social Housing Sell Off - Conservatives Never learn from Past Mistakes

I heard a snippet on the news this morning as I passed a radio that Government are saying that council house tenants may get up to £70k knocked off the cost of their house should they wish to buy it.

Now we all know that the cost of most council houses that form terraced streets are not that large, but have over inflated prices, that the estate agents and BANKS propped up from the 80's and continue to do so today, so there will still be a substantial mortgage left to pay on the property.  Of course another reason for the inflated price of houses in the UK was the last disastrous sell off of council homes, also led by the Conservatives, this time assisted by the LIB Dems, and ignored by Labour, was that Councils were not allowed to use the money to build  more social houses to replace that which was lost.... SHAME ON ALL POLITICIANS FOR THAT DEBACLE OF BAD GOVERNANCE

Of course the Government will argue that SOME COUNCIL HOUSES are too large for some of there occupants and they want to throw them out into single bedroom homes or care homes, just so that their families, sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters can't come for a sleep over, unless they all huddle on the floor of the lounge of the single bed home they want to force the current occupants to move into.....

Grant Shapps MP (@grantshapps twitter) Welwyn Hatfield MP and Minister of State for Housing & Local Government. Website here http://www.shapps.com is always harping on about the good that he is doing for housing and local government, well Grant I have news for you, you aren't!  You are doing exactly what your predecessors before you did, you are creating a disaster for the rest of us to clear up, or not, in the not to distant future.

Is it just me?  Every day I see and hear ministers and opposition members of Parliament prattling on about the need to create jobs, and yes there are undoubtedly SOME jobs being created, but more and more jobs are being lost and unless some government brings in a law to restrict the use of labour saving technological advances that science is making every day, more and more jobs will be lost to these technologies with no hope of bringing them back...

If the work place is shrinking and our children are suffering the deprivation of poor and inadequate education to their and our future detriment, for goodness sake we aren't even teaching them how to claim benefits, although many learn that easy lesson from their parents, yet we do tell immigrants, legal and illegal how to do that!

The point is that while we should all aspire to be more in life than we are and to, if we can, be in a position to, buy and own our own homes it is an easy move from home ownership to being thrown out in the street when you fall behind when that manageable mortgage is suddenly no longer mangageable.  I have no statistics to back this up but I would be interested to know if after the first time this sell off occured under a previous Conservative Government what was the average debt level of a council house tenant when they rented their house and what it rose to after they 'bought' their council house and fell into the trap of being in the coveted position of being a 'home owner'.  What is it with we Brits, why are we conned so easily into believing that home ownership IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO?

Did you know that only 39 percent of Germans own their own home, compared 68 percent in the U.K.   . Apparently Spain has the highest rate among advanced industrial nations in Europe at 82 per cent and in France it is around 56 per cent.  So while Spain beats us in this and I have no idea why, and maybe that is another reason to add for their current economic gloom which apparently is worse than ours, unless you are a banker or an MP or a member of the non elected upper house, with the salaries, expenses bonuses and platinum pensions, can you AFFORD TO BUY YOUR OWN HOME.  If I was sitting in a council house paying rent today, I would have to think long and hard about it and the answer would most definitely be a resounding NO.

Why, when so many people are unemployed? Why, when factories requiring thousand of shift workers are not being planned? Why, when so many people, like the country, are in debt? 

WHY, ARE THE GOVERNMENT TRYING TO CON PEOPLE INTO BUYING HOMES THAT THEY MAY NOT BE IN A POSITION TO MAINTAIN THE PAYMENTS FOR, WHY?

related posts:  It's all about delivery - response to a Grant Shapps speach

                      

Book Review Money is Thicker Than Blood..Murder in the SEC by Stephen Woodfin

Nice little crime drama that starts of with a footballer Eliab McDermott jnr. (American) being shot in the middle of a game!

Thousands of witnesses, thousands of suspects but with the aid of TV the suspect list is soon narrowed down to a small group.  This brings together a seemingly disparate bunch of law enforcement officers from the FBI and the local police with the locals being assigned to work with the FBI.  Their names sound like something out of a 1960's comic book Detectives Sherwood 'Shot Glass' Reynolds and Josephus 'JJ' Jeffers and FBI agent 'Slam' Virgil.  Then the list of funny characters continues, with midgets. a preacher who is into porn, and a demented family of Grandmother, Mother, and Granddaughter and the most powerful man in American football all forming a linked chain of events that goes back 40 years....

The dialogue was crisp and clear, and while the names seemed to be from another era (surely even law enforcement officers in America today don't have such silly names, or is that just me,) this was an up to date tale with nods in the direction of Twitter and Facebook...

It was a tale involving an eye for an eye and good old fashioned revenge, but it is difficult to say to much without giving the plot away.

My only issue with it was that while it was an intriguing story the officers just didn't seem to have to work very hard to get to where they were going, so the story was intriguing but the plot wasn't so much.  It just seemed to all fit together like a kids jigsaw, easily, but in an adult crime thriller it should have made them, and us, work harder... having said that it was still a fairly enjoyable read.

Ratings:
Editing for Kindle: 5 out of 5
Reading Enjoyment: 4 out of 5 
Plot: 3 out of 5
Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Is it Spicy? by J.R. Barrett

A short story, it really is, only takes about 15 minutes to read, but what a delightful way to spend 15 minutes of your time!

I suspect this story was probably more than a little autobiographical, just seemed that way, about a mothers relationship with her parents and particularly her own mother as they get older and more distant with infrequent visits and the criticisms that start, even before the arrival  for one of those infrequent visits...

The story describes a family visit to a local Thai restaurant and the conversation between the 'mothers' over the 'spicy' food.. I had a flashback to a restaurant in Germany where Ishbel and I took my mother, on her first ever visit to an other country back in the 70's.  It may well have been another planet as far as my mother was concerned, and I too was getting as frustrated as the author seemed to be with her mother in the Thai restaurant.

The thing is though, they are our mom's and for all their quirks we can't help loving them, while, with equal measure, we probably feel like strangling them, but only for a fleeting moment......  We want to get away from them and then we miss them...... love is but a fickle creature

This is a moving, well written little story and you won't laugh out loud, but it will make you smile and cringe as the parents, as I think we all do from time to time,  speak what we think, even at the most inopportune moments......

Well worth a read, available from Amazon Uk here or at Amazon US here

Book Review: The Istanbul Puzzle by Laurence O’Bryan

The Istanbul Puzzle by Laurence O’Bryan   

The Istanbul Puzzle, the New Da Vinci Code.  Not quite, not nearly quite that good I am afraid.

Don’t get me wrong it was a good book but it was not the absolute page turner that Dan Brown's novel was. 

Sean Ryan’s friend and co worker is on assignment in Istanbul when he is captured by persons unknown and beheaded.  Sean travels to Istanbul to get some answers and is embroiled in a huge world wide conspiracy that is going to culminate in a plague being released in London, and we go through the whole book with him not having a clue what is going on and yet he is the 'hero'.  Well I suspect he did know what was going on but the book just did not make it very clear at any time.

There was a fair number of inconsistencies in the book that were fairly irritating by the end:

The Turkish Police Inspector who intercepted Sean as he lands at the airport and took him to the morgue seemed to be going to play a central roll in that part of the book, as sSean looked into his friends death, disappeared without trace...

Chapter 38 Sean and Isabel, a British consulate employee are chased and manage to avoid capture by escaping into a tunnel underneath  Hagia Eirene church  in Istanbul.  While down there they hear part of a snatched conversation and agree that the voice belongs to Peter, another British consulate employee which suggests that he's working with the killers of Alek......   Then in chapter 48 they are in a meeting in the Commons telling a govt minister that Peter is working with terrorists to attack the UK.  Now we know from the segues to Sgt Mowlan, a Met Police officer, who is monitoring events in London and the continent and in particular meetings with Arap Anach, the main villain of the piece,  and Lord Bidenor that there is indeed an attack underway but at no point up to chapter 48 is there anything to suggest that Sean or Isabel were aware of any of this.... 


Sean's flat in London being broken into, why it made absolutely no contribution to the story....  Who broke into it, was it the Security services or the baddies, no one knows and it served no purpose.... 


Then there is the manuscript found, by Sean and Isabel while trapped in the tunnel in Istanbul and that had been buried and lost for centuries, suddenly becomes central to the plot and we are asked to believe  that the Turkish government who have just been handed this important find casually hand it over to the Brits for authentication!


The Segue to Iraq to meet a mad Greek orthodox Priest who was an expert in mosaics, who was then blown up in his vehicle as they left a dig, messy....  not the blown up bit, that clearly left a mess, but it just seemed like the introduction of a character that didn't do anything for the story...

Other little things let the author down, like getting of the tube at Temple station and walking along Fleet street, nowhere near each other.  Someone said to me recently, that when writing a contemporary novel that you have to make sure that when you are describing some place in detail, that you need to ensure that the details are correct, as people will notice, well that was one of those details!


Lord Bidenor, appeared to be a central character, but disappeared from the storyline like a ghost.... 


This is Laurence O'Bryans first novel and a new story is planned again with Sean and Isabel as the lead characters.


The premise of the story was good, but I really didn't find it as much of a page turner as billed.  A page turner for me is a book where I am really torn between putting it down and getting on with my day to day life with mundane things like work, and shopping and eating and TV, and sleeping, The Istanbul Puzzle did not draw me away from any of those things, but it had the potential to.


I hope that Laurence settles in to his writing and doesn't write himself into blind alleys as he has done with this one and if he manages to put a better structure together in his next book, we will all be the better for him joining the ranks of great story telling 


Ratings:
Editing for Kindle: 5 out of 5
Reading Enjoyment: 2 out of 5 
Plot: 2 out of 5
Overall Rating: 2 out of 5