If you’re the guy who stole my laptop and contents of my laptop bag last night (18/5/10) please could I have my Moleskin notebook back? It has only sentimental value and I’ll even pay you to return it…
Thanks.
Category: Musings
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I’m a serial tenant. There’s nothing wrong with renting. On the whole it’s a worry-free life. If the washing machine breaks, I call my landlords and they are good people so they get it fixed up as soon as they can. I rent privately so my exposure to dreaded estate agents is (mercifully) low. I’m also free to move as frequently as my contract permits, which is flexibility I appreciate. However I get fed up with the limitations. It’s hard to have real pride in a place which is never really your own. And when I want to drill a hole in the wall I want to pick up a drill, not write a carefully worded email (with illustrations) to my landlord. I wouldn’t mind those tens of thousands of pounds sitting in my name in one of the most consistent investment markets either. Instead I give them to somebody else to make money for them.
And so it is that every six months or so I go through the optimistic but ultimately heartbreaking process of looking for a place of my own, with the eventual realisation that between arrangement fees, stamp duty, deposit, valuations and the rest, I just can’t afford to buy. Pretty much the only people I know who can have parental assistance which I would prefer to get by without even if the option existed.
Around a month ago, with a failed attempt to move due to inflated rental rates behind me, I embarked on this process once again. After a few days of enthusiastic chats with mortgage brokers I drew the sickening conclusion that I could only stretch to buying a house at this stage if I didn’t live in it. That is to say most brokers would offer me a buy-to-let mortgage with a better rate, lower tax, and higher LTV than an equivalent owner-occupier mortgage.
I am being priced out of the rental market and the government are doing their best to make sure that I can’t take that wild leap onto the property ladder by giving buy-to-let landlords a tax break.
I am struggling to see the motivation for such a move. Perhaps some genius saw an illustration of the current rental market and quizzically pondered “how can we relieve the burden on our strained rental market?” Having presumably been employed for his/her encyclopedic knowledge of economics and ability to think outside the box, supply and demand principles must have come to mind. And as supply typically comes before demand, in the phrase if not alphabetically, our hero rushed to the conclusion that we must get more individuals investing in properties they intend to let. And as such, eyes straining from the glare of the light bulb above his head, Johnny Treasury drafted a range of incentives to encourage those potential buy-to-let homeowners in search of additional income through extended borrowing against the incomes of their future tenants.
I could ramble on for hours. And no, I’m not qualified to. Adam Smith I am not. But I do have to get to the bank before I miss my landlord’s next mortgage payment.
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7pm, Room 8, Lambeth Town Hall
Talk by David Fleming – Energy and Anarchy “The market is not the solution; it is part of the problem”. David proposes an alternative.
Anarchy
Leo Tolstoy drew comparisons with religion, christianity in particular.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon described the power of small local groups and self-organization.
Matthew Arnold wrote “Culture and Anarchy”, and argued for state administered education, suggesting strong education and cultural awareness will lead individuals to good instinctive choices.
Colin Ward was editor of British anarchist newspaper Freedom from 1947 to 1960, and the founder and editor of the monthly libertarian journal Anarchy from 1961 to 1970. He recognised that people will naturally organise themselves.
This propensity to ‘naturally organise’ ourselves can be observed throughout history. The 1956 Hungarian uprising was funded by buckets in the streets into which people put money towards their greater good. Hannah Arendt, often intrigued by the mechanisms of revolution, wrote of community self organisation in the context of the 1956 revolution.
On Organisation
“Organisation is nothing more than the method we choose to get food on the table”
Forms of Organisation
- Command and Control: Authoritarian
- The Market: ‘Fabricated’ rewards and incentives
- Presence (participation): individual involvement
We can judge these forms of organisation by these broad criteria:
- Incentives (Intrinsic & Extrinsic)
- Creative Potential
- Presence/Absence (of the individual)
Incentives
Command & Control Market Presence Extrinsic: Fear; Power Extrinsic: Monetary Intrinsic: System objectives Incentives, particularly the artificial extrinsic ones, don’t work.
- Disincentives – Punishment – lead to resentment towards the ‘powers that be’
- Hence impaired relationships
- Focus on payback
- Sterilisation – we take less risks
- Devalues the task
As an example of this last point, consider this case study: Two groups of volunteers were asked to solve a challenging puzzle. One group was paid, the other was not. A coffee break was announced, and the paid group immediately took the opportunity to get away from the task. The unpaid group however worked right through the break. The task was devalued by the artificial incentive.
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A special screening and Q&A session with John Pilger at the Clapham Picturehouse cinema.
The War on Democracy was very thought provoking. Pilger covered huge political events from the past century in Latin America, where the USA has pursued it’s usual selfish goals at the expense of others.
During the questions and answers session somebody asked “what can we do to help?” To which J.P. had no truly satisfactory answer, instead gently hinting that once you kow enough about the situation to help, the how should become clear.
Lucy and I entered into a long discussion (over steak and chips), about how we could help. Lucy confessed to being inspired to pursue a Masters in South American history, an idea of hers from her Atlantic College days. I challenged this idea, playing my usual devils advocate, by suggesting that the completion of a Masters might not leave Lucy feeling any more empowered to help.
My recently sparked passion for local scale initiatives as a force for wider scale change – see topic green living for examples – led me to suggest that the real answer is at home. My argument was that greed and a desire for security (energy, food, etc.) is driven by the lack of these securities on a local scale. If I were able to fend for myself, it is likely that the burden of responsibility I heave upon the shoulders of the country’s leader would be significantly reduced. Thus it is the responsibility of each of us to become self sufficient and find a way of developing a sociable marketplace for goods and services which focuses on the now and not on our individual, and hence selfish, future interests.
Future interests to me suggests monetary interests. In a simple example, an individual with a surplus of beans could give them to a needy neighbour, and probably would if he couldn’t sell them to a needy neighbour. It is this concept which distills the meaning of the previous paragraph. Local scale economies have no need for complex and often unfair trade mechanisms, instead requiring simple local currencies, if any monetary markets at all.
I think any movement away from our reliance on global markets is positive in both an economical and political sense. As such I will be doing all I can to move towards local sustainability. I’ll plant my own crops, buy from local sources, build instead of buying at all, and investigate renewable and local energy sources. The idea of a local currency has even been considered in my area (Brixton). You’ll find mention of it here – http://www.transitiontownbrixton.org.
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Lucy and I were sitting outside a little corner cafe (Cafe Gena, pictured right) in the eastern backstreets of Florence, Italy on 6th August. Elated at our purchase of a day-old copy of The Guardian, we were both eager to digest as much news as the flimsy international edition could feed us. Typical then, that we should settle upon a small news item on the front page to debate for hours upon end, leaving little time in the day of two busy tourists for all that news.Katie Allen’s article of 5th August 2006 announced the intentions of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) to publish details of boardroom salaries and bonuses on a new website, allowing employees to compare their below-inflation pay rises to some of the 25%-plus salary hikes experienced by their bosses. Lucy sparked our lunchtime conversation by asking how one could possibly justify the expansive difference between boardroom salaries, and the salary suffered by the bottom rung employees. Never one to shrink from such a challenge, I suggested the responsibilities of a manager were so much heavier than those placed upon the shoulders of the average employee, and the influence she could have on the fortunes of the company though poor performance so much more significant. Poor management can lead a store into the ground within weeks, but a poor till clerk is replaced without any real impact upon the branch performance.
