I’ve just had an email from Yvette Cooper. My first thought was: “Bloody hell, after all these years!” Then I remembered that, since leaving college, I have become a washed-up nobody and she has become a member of the Cabinet with two houses—both of which I am paying for. Not that I’m bitter.

Coincidentally, property was the subject of her Labour Party bacn, entitled: “Because fairness isn’t just a word”. She and her colleagues in the government want to do something to revive the housing market, including helping frustrated first-time buyers in their efforts to buy a depreciating asset with money they don’t have—or “trying to get on the housing ladder” as Yvette puts it. This is going to involve their spending more of my money. You can read the details of the upcoming tinkering here.

After getting a First in PPE from Oxford, Yvette went on to go get a Master’s in Economics from Harvard the LSE. You’d have thought someone might have mentioned to her—or indeed that someone might have mentioned to someone in the government1—that speculative bubbles and Ponzi schemes are fairly easy to identify (especially in markets with a well-characterized history of them) and that a lot of trouble can be saved by intervening in them early on, in this case, for example, by enforcing the laws against fraud properly to prevent reckless lending.

Anyway, is any currently-renting member of the current Cabinet likely to take advantage of this generosity with other people’s money to add a central London one-bedder to his or her property portfolio now? Or have they finally spotted a pattern?

UK house market price trendsCan you guess what it is yet?

  1. Oh yes, people have, repeatedly, for years. Didn’t listen though, did they? I wonder why. []