Society

I think this can bear repeating:

The result of the right to buy legislation is the destruction of secure public housing – on of the pillars of the Welfare State.

I believe what happened over the past forty years since the introduction of the right to buy, is that the people who for the first time owned their own home believed that they had somehow become middle class with disposable assets – just that the value was tied up in the home. And they told themselves that as long as house prices increased and affordable mortgages were available, they could trade up when the credit card debt was too high. Of course, in the early years, credit cards were much more restrictive. And the amount one could borrow on a mortgage compared to one’s income was more restrictive. And similarly, the grounds upon which one could remortgage were also more restrictive.

Then credit loosened up, and at the same time holidays on the Costa del Sol and Turkey and wherever made it seem like there was no limit to what one could do. And then the cost of living, mortgages rates, house price crashes, and just poor money management by these babes in the wood resulted in people losing their homes.

The aspiring middle class with ready cash or mortgageable assets could now buy to let and take out mortgages to fund the purchase. Then the Government took away mortgage interest relief on buy to lets. So landlords sold. House prices had risen so much that as often as not the only buyers liquid enough to buy were the true middle class. And so the properties have become concentrated in fewer hands. And as an incentive to landlords, the long term rights of tenants were legislated away, leaving tenants with more anxiety and less will to complain about defects in properties.

Education, housing, and health care, the three pillars of the Welfare State, have been knocked down. We rail against the loss of the NHS, but I think the vision of being safe in a Local Authority house lost its flavour with many people. People wanted to own their own home in the new world of holidays abroad and call centres and Starbucks cafes. What has happened though, in the long arc of this evolution has been to remove Local Authorities housing as one of the three props of the Welfare State, and leave people less able to make ends meet and with nothing beyond their holiday snaps to show for the years they invested.

Take a step back from the COVID-19 pandemic, and compare one country against another. I wonder which will benefit and which will suffer from the consequences of COVID 19. I mean in the long run, measured over the next thirty years.

In the UK, the oldest in the population have died and will die. Their wealth will pass to the next generation. The age profile of the country will change. There will be more people of working age and more spending power for those who inherited unexpectedly early. The drain on the Health Service will be less because the vulnerable will have died. For non-COVID patients there will be an increased demand. That will come from those whose disease progressed more than it would with earlier treatment. But that will be offset in part or whole by those who died waiting for treatment.

Life expectancy will decrease because those who could have had treatment for non-COVID disease early did not. And pension funds will benefit, according to XPS actuaries:

Article In The Times November 30th 2020

Employers with large pension deficits are expected to seize on Covid-19 to justify making smaller payments in their negotiations with the funds they sponsor in the coming years.
An analysis from the actuaries XPS, formerly Punter Southall, suggests that deaths in Britain by the end of March will be around 100,000 higher than in a normal year. In its worst case scenario, which it says is unlikely, it sees 250,000 excess deaths in total.
These so-called “excess deaths”, along with a recession-induced reduction in life expectancy growth in the years ahead, will cut the liabilities of defined benefit schemes in the UK by between 1.5 and 3.5 per cent — or £25 billion to £60 billion, it estimates on its central case forecast.

COVID-19 Case Fatality Rates

Britain had a case fatality rate of 15.4% early on in the pandemic. That was in part caused by decisions made by the British Government to move elderly infected patients from hospital to nursing homes. Once in nursing homes filled with the elderly, the virus spread like wildfire.

The COVID-19 death rate when I first drafted this article at the end of 2020 was down to 3.6%. Now at the beginning of 2022, the death rate is down to a fraction of 1%.

The initial case fatality rate in Britain was much higher than almost anywhere in the world. Britain will benefit, therefore, from having a older generation die early. It’s positively Machiavellian.

The unknown is long-COVID, and how long it lasts. How long is the ‘long’ in long-COVID? And what proportion of the affected will find life less than optimal far into their lives?

As of July 2018 there were up to 24,000 patients in the NHS In England in either a permanent vegetative or minimally conscious state, according to an estimate by Professor Derick Wade, a consultant in neurological rehabilitation in Oxford.

This was reported because of the decision by The Supreme Court. The decision was that families and doctors of patients in a persistent vegetative state no longer need permission from a court to withdraw end-of-life care if both the relatives and the doctors agree.

First, the number is staggering. If you asked one hundred people to guess or estimate the number of such patients, who would say 24,000? Second, does this represent a dangerous slide towards something we might not be happy with? After all, once a law is enacted it can serve any kind of society.

Last year, the German company Thyssenkrupp declared force majeure as the reason for lawfully getting out of its obligations to complete various of its contracts or to complete them within a certain time.

Specifically, it cited the Rhine’s low water levels for disrupting the delivery of raw materials to its Duisburg plant. 

The water in the river was so shallow that the ships, laden with raw materials for the factory, could not float free of the bottom of the river. They would simply run aground if they tried to navigate the Rhine.

Photographs showed people walking on a broad stony beach that would normally be under water.

Around 40 percent of Switzerland’s diesel is brought into the country along the Rhine, with the rest by cargo trains, pipelines, trucks and the country’s own refineries.

Switzerland stores diesel against the possibility of interruption to its supply. This Monday, the Swiss Federal Office for National Economic Supply decided to allow the release of 30,000 cubic metres of diesel.

That is about two-and-a-half percent of the amount Switzerland has in storage.

It has done so because they cannot bring any diesel into the country by ship up the Rhine because the Rhine is dry.