UK Prime Minister and Labor Leader Brown Unveils Housing Plan
United Kingdom Prime Minister and leader of the Labor Party Gordon Brown unveiled ‘plans on Tuesday to boost the country’s slumping housing market.’
The timing is good considering the fact he has been trailing in the polls for about a year now, making it quite difficult for him to win reelection (that is, he was not even elected in the first place; he became PM because his predecessor Tony Blair resigned halfway in his third term).
At this moment, Labor is trailing 20 points in the polls.
With his plan Brown hopes to make a comeback in the polls, to win the upcoming elections and to do something about the gigantic housing crisis in Great Britain. The prices of houses are falling there ‘and home repossession orders in England and Wales have risen to their highest level since the housing market crash of the early 1990s.’
According to Brown his package would ‘help vulnerable families struggling with mortgage payments avoid losing their homes and bring forward funding for new social housing from existing budgets.’
The Labor-led government ‘also plan to offer five-year interest-free loans for some first-time buyers — both to help people move into affordable homes and support the house building industry.’
Communities Secretary Hazel Blears said the package was aimed at “people who just need that little bit of extra help to keep them afloat.”
“I think it’s the responsibility of government … to do what we can to help the decent people who want to stay in their homes,” she told GMTV television.
The plans will cost 1 billion pounds. That is 1.8 billion dollars; a high amount by any measure.
The main concern most people will have is whether or not Brown’s plan will work out well in the long run. Labor has often advocated policies that were in the country’s short term interest, and that allowed them to win elections, but that were harmful for the country’s economy in the long run. The more dependent the economy and private citizens become on the government, the more difficult it is for the both to recover after a meltdown.
Furthermore, one has to wonder whether the government is part of the housing problem and other economic problems. All too often, too much government influence is the problem, not the cure. Strangely, Britain’s Labor Party all too often believes that the solution for too much government is even more government.
This plan sounds, at least to a degree, too much like that.
