Oh no, house prices are going up again

I see from today’s papers that there has been a minuscule rise in year-on-year house prices. A fairly minor statistic, you might think – funny how that’s front-page news.

But, of course, in papers of conservative inclination it always is – Private Eye has a running joke about it. In reality, house price fluctuations should only be of interest to those actually on the point of buying or selling, which is quite a small minority. But we know that there are vast swathes of Middle Britain where the state of the housing market is regarded as an indicator of financial, social and moral well-being, if not as a direct correlative to the size of the male Middle British appendage. See daytime television for confirmation of this. Actually, for Pete’s sake, don’t.

And don’t you just want to plank anyone who talks about “properties”? It’s a house, you plonker, it’s a BLOODY HOUSE! It’s for LIVING IN! We’re not playing Monopoly here!

It may be political suicide to diss Middle Britain, but that won’t stop me doing so. These are the “hard-working families” to whom all our parties suck up so fawningly. Well, I’ve always been rather derisive of the term “hard-working families”. It seems to straddle the fine line between bullsh*t and nonsense. I know: I’ve been one.

When I was last a nuclear family, in the early years of the present decade, I was a civil servant: ’nuff said. My wife was self-employed, which is no doddle, but it gave her the freedom to take four months annual holiday. And as regards our teenage sons, the word “hard-working” could only have been used in the context of sledgehammer irony. In fact, like most of the bourgeoisie at that time, our family fortunes depended not on hard work or anything like it, but on the precipitous rise in the value of our house (now, of course, her house).

OK, Gordon Brown has his client base in government offices and quangos: but David Cameron has one too, based on secure salaried jobs, asset price bubbles and an unbreachable sense of entitlement, from which derives Tory policy on inheritance tax and the prospect of a peerage for Kirstie Allsopp.

The Britain of the early Noughties. No real effort, no risks, no enterprise required. But it’s gone, and it’s not coming back. No secure jobs, no mortgages, no free money materialising magically from one’s des. res., and the house price statistics back on page 94 where they belong. A government which really wanted to promote enterprise would strip away virtually all taxes and regulations from small business and tax the big ones and their bloated, flabby salariat to hell and beyond. It’s people getting rich which grows the economy, not people staying rich. And the sooner we see another 50 per cent off house prices, the happier I’ll be.