CoffeeHousers' Wall, 23 February - 1 March

Rhoda Klapp

A couple of things that don't fit into any other threads.

One, isn't it taking longer and longer to get comments up? And I've had a couple not make it at all, which I didn't think were objectionable (maybe they were too me-too or commonplace?). In the near future most of us are going to be spending a long time unoccupied during the day, we need to be able to have a conversation on here, not an exchange of correspondence.

Two, I don't suppose there's a chance of the Spectator getting a right-wing blogger to go with all the lefties? (I discount Mel P, too interested in thwe one subject).

Pete Hoskin

Rhoda Klapp: apologies if comments have been taking a while to appear. It's worth pointing out that they're moderated at out end, so there will sometimes be a delay when, say, we're asleep. Sometimes technical problems slow the process up as well, or stop comments from getting through to us.

To be honest, I haven't noticed any particular slowness recently - although I probably just haven't been looking in the right places. If you feel comments are taking too long to appear - or that you've been unfairly moderated - you can always fire me an email on phoskin @ spectator.co.uk and I'll look into it.

Susan Hill

A friend wants to buy a cottage in my country area so this morning I went round the estate agents for her. She expected prices to have crashed, everything to be sticking, everyone open to offers. Au contraire. ALL the agents report pretty good sales, prices holding, cottages etc selling very quickly so long as vendors don`t ask stupid prices based on a 50% increase over 2 years ago. 3 bedroom houses on modern estates aren`t selling but anything period, including stuff at over 1million, is definitely moving. They were all quietly confident.
I know I live in a relatively prosperous area but .. er.. what recession /house price slump ? I came away with a lot of brochures but no bargains for my friend to look at.

THX1138

Did anyone else notice that the BNP won a council by election in uber middle class Sevenoaks. I worry much more about the rise of the far right than a few lager fueled summer riots.

Mick

Still marvelling at the dysfunctional nature of the Government's communications effort. Yesterday the Sunday's had been briefed that, as part of a return to prudent banking, "irresponsible" 100% mortgages would be outlawed. Later in the day, broadcasters start reporting a return to the lending market of Northern Rock with 90% mortgages on offer.

I'm generally risk averse, but if there was one thing I would bet my house on would be house prices decreasing another 10%. This is a relatively conservative forecast compared to many predictions (www.housepricecrash.co.uk) but what does the Government propose to do when many of these 90% Northern Rock mortgages become 100%, 110% or even 120% mortgages over the next year or so? In true headless chicken style I hope they harangue them as irresponsible.

Mike, Brighton

We had friends over on Saturday. One is a fully paid up leftie and you'll be amused to hear who is to blame for the credit crunch and banking crisis.....non other than Thatcher and her banking deregulation!
When I put it that it was 20 years ago Thatcher was deposed and blaming Thatcher is like referring to the corn laws in terms of administrative reform or the Boer war in terms of lessons learnt for Afghanistan and that the regulatory system that failed was personally designed by Brown and his evil sidekick Balls...she wasn't having any of it.
I think the lefties are in full denial mode after 12 years of Labour. Denial that their policies haven't er worked.

mac

Pete,

As Rhoda says, it would be great if the speed of posts appearing could be improved in the interests of making the blogs more akin to real coffee-house conversation. That said, as the main burden of penning the blogs themselves and moderating the resulting comments falls so heavily on you and James, all credit for what you've achieved.

Incidentally, the willingness of you, James and Fraser to engage regularly - and open-mindedly, at that - below the line is most welcome.

wrinkled weasel

Susan Hill, I expect your experience is a combination of Estate Agents talking up the market and the fact that there is residual equity available to people who have savings and who realise that property is still a better bet than the bank.

As Mick points out, you don't want to put money on house prices levelling off any time soon - they are bound to fall further.

All the signs and portents are that it is going to get very, very much worse.

THX1138

Mike- Well all the Righties are blaming Clinton which is equally absurd.

THX1138

Susan in the City it's called a "dead cat bounce"

Susan Hill

Wrinkled weasel.. points taken. But these were actual houses with SOLD boards. Three sold in my own village since Christmas, one of which has stuck for about a year, the other two on sale/sold in a nano second.
But if you have a tracker mortgage like us and your monthly payments have come crashing down, if you`ve any sense you`ll be paying off the capital fast and investing in extra property. As you say, there`s no point in banking the stuff - they`ll only nick it.

Rhoda Klapp

Pete, I'm shocked that you are allowed to sleep or have a life outside these columns. Seriously, you might consider getting outside help, if there is a way. And no, I have not been unfairly moderated, but a double (well, single) entendre I was quite proud of involving Lord M, the Brown Circle and Mr Ed B. did not make it.

Pete Hoskin

Many thanks to Susan Hill for contributing the photos and caption above.

Craig Strachan

I find Alex Massie a very welcome addition to the roll of Coffee House bloggers. At first I wondered about possible duplication with Americano, as Alex often writes on American politics - but his perspective is different. Reflective. Understated. Decidedly not neocon!

Kevyn Bodman

I too am concerned at the recent success of the BNP, but let's make it clear that they are not far-right.

THX1138

Kevyn- That's interesting, if the BNP aren't the far right what are they and who is?

BTW I'm not having a go!

Verity

Number Plate - are you seriously that politically illiterate? The BNP is not of the right. It is a socialist party, except it's not a one-worlder/New World Order socialist party like the Labour Party and David Cameron's Conservatives. It is a Britain-for-The-British socialist party.

Hitler was not far right. He was far left. Clue bat: That is why his party was called the National Socialist Party.

Stalin was far left. Mao Tse Tung was far left. Pol Pot was far left. Ché Gueverra was far left. Allende was far left. Can you see a pattern emerging here? Dictators and suppressors of human rights always lean to the thought-fascist left. Duh!

Jupiter

Does anybody know if there are any obscure laws that could be used to get rid of the prime minister?

Verity

Alex Massie should get hair cut and then I'll consider returning to his gig.

Laura

THX1138, February 23rd, 2009 1:47pm, "Did anyone else notice that the BNP won a council by election in uber middle class Sevenoaks."

You don't say! People are long past breaking point, many of them permanently ex-Labour voters (like me).

Melanie Phillips devotes her column to it today and it is quite obvious from the comments below it that many people have now had it with the mainstream parties. They know that a Conservative government will simply continue the status quo. I don't want to vote BNP but what alternative is there?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1152431/MELANIE-PHILLIPS-The-odious-BNP-gaining-ground-voters-feel-utterly-betrayed.html

Rhoda Klapp

Most of the BNP policies are some flavour of socialist at heart. Maybe National Socialist.

Who IS far right is another question. The answer as far as I can see is anybody the left don't like. It can't be to do with being authoritarian, there is no monopoly on that. I don't think anyone operating in politics is far right in real life. I recall how the BBC called the rump of the Soviet Communist party after the collapse right-wing hard-liners!

D iversity

THX 1138

Have a look at the BNP on the British Political Compass site. They position the BNP as very authoritarian, but a bit towards the socialist end of their left-right dimension. I have the impression that the BNP stance is pretty close to Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists; but without a Leader of even his quality.

Susan Hill
Do you realise that those pictures have rasied the price of a house in your village even further?

Rhoda Klapp

Jupiter, the best bet is some sort of decl;aration that he is unfit to continue. I note that we have seen not one but many intimations that GB is not quite all there, that there is a mental problem. Maybe that's just talk. But I recall that there were similar hints abour Charlie K's fondness for a bottle which turned out to be true. So, for those in the know, if the guy really is chewing the carpet, we the electorate deserve to be told. There must be a mechanism to have his health checked and him suspended from office. But not if it relies on his colleagues doing it, unless things get so bad the PLP start stabbing people in the front.

Tina

I have enormous respect for James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson's economic analyses on Coffee House, but both these two seem culturally confused in their arguments against protectionism. I have been searching in vain for a right wing commentator to come out and spell out why protectionism is necessary. I think Peter Hitchens got close in this piece here:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/02/british-jobs-for-british-workers.html

But in a brilliant column Leo McKinstry nails it today in the Express:

'Without the remorseless pursuit of globalisation, we might still have home-grown car and aircraft industries. Our essential utilities would still be in our hands. Without the open-door immigration policy we would have retained the skills base in engineering and construction that once made our country great.

'Nor would we have been forced to spend £30billion a year on public services to immigrants.

'A sense of national pride, the instinct that lies behind protectionism, would have prevented Britain from enduring the lunacies of multi-culturalism.

'Without globalisation we would still be an independent country rather than merely a region of the United States of Europe, an entity for which we never voted. We would not have to hand over £12billion a year to Brussels for the privilege of being governed by Eurocrats.

'In a protectionist Britain that looked after its own people we would not be squandering £8billion a year on overseas aid, most of it going to Africa where it is used to prop up tyrannical, kleptocratic regimes. It is the height of absurdity that we are forking out £40million a year in subsidies to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

'Protectionism runs with the grain of human nature, like the desire to help family, friends or neighbours.

'Globalisation, on the other hand, is a destructive creed that treats all of us as nothing more than pawns in a vast system run only in the interests of an international elite.'

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/ourcomments/view/86011

It's that simple. Looking at figures doesn't give you the full picture. You've got to wake up to the cultural effects of globalisation and how they then feed back into the economic picture - and not in a good way.

Verity

I think the definition might be a right winger who has he courage of his convictions might be styled "hard right" by the lefties, who take disagreement with their own stance on any subject as a crime against humanity. A la the "man made climate change" people who wanted to have "climate change denial" made into a crime.

Kevyn Bodman

THX 1138
Sorry for the delay. The left/right split is often an inaccurate way of classifying.
I haven't got anything to add to what Verity, Rhoda Klapp and D iversity said.

I was going to refer you to 'The World's Smallest Political Quiz' but I wonder if D iversity's 'British Political Compass' site does a similar thing.

I was on a new-to-me site on Saturday and found a quiz that measures how 'Liberal'(Classical Liberal) the respondent is. I THINK it was a link into LPUK.

It's a similar sort of quiz; try one of them. They are interesting.

Kevyn Bodman

'climate change denial' made into a crime.
Is this literally true, or is it an image to highlight the absurdity?

I know speech-crimes are expanding, thought-crimes too, but this one really would be a medal-winner in the field of thought-oppression.

Verity

Tina - Thanks for your post!

Thomas

Globalisation stinks:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/czechrepublic/4787835/Czechs-pay-to-send-foreign-workers-home.html

'Czechs pay to send foreign workers home'

'The Czech government has offered to pay thousands of unemployed foreign workers to go home.'

This is the legacy of a world without proper borders: total chaos. The Czech government won't get rid of these people, of course, because it can't. It is simply trying to calm its own population, just like our own government is - it's all too little too late.

Denis Cooper

I would like to share some thoughts on an entirely different topic - how UK taxpayers may be forced to help save the euro.

I noticed this Deutsche Welle article last week:

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4042834,00.html

"German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her country was ready to help eastern European countries experiencing economic difficulty. Aid would come mainly via the IMF and likely go to nations outside the euro zone."

"When asked about the financial woes facing several eastern European economies, Merkel said Germany was prepared to rescue ailing nations.

"If help is needed we are ready, particularly through the IMF," Merkel said. "Germany will not refuse to (financially) support the IMF if necessary."

"Asked whether Germany would offer financial support to ailing euro-zone countries, Merkel wouldn't commit to a pledge made earlier in the week by her country's Finance Minister, Peer Steinbrueck.

"I will not participate in any speculation, but I can say the euro zone is strong and has proven itself in the crisis," Merkel said.

Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said on Monday that although EU rules said countries should not help each other within the euro zone, all members of the bloc would have to help "if it came to a serious situation." "

Then I see in the Telegraph today:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/4782765/EU-agrees-hedge-fund-controls.html

"Speaking afterwards, Mr Brown said the summit backed efforts to boost the fire-fighting reserves of the International Monetary Fund.

"We need international action to help, for example, in central and eastern Europe, where a number of foreign banks have withdrawn to their home banking territories and where it is difficult to recapitalise the rest of the banking system. So we are proposing today a $500bn (£346bn) fund that enables the IMF not only to deal with crises when they happen but to prevent crises," he said."

It seems to me that Germany will do whatever it can to keep the eurozone intact, and it will try to get all the other EU member states to lend money to any eurozone country which is about to go bust; but it may be legally and politically more convenient to launder that money through a non-EU body such as the IMF; and UK taxpayers will be expected to do their bit to save the euro, even though we are not in it; and Parliament may not have any say in the matter.

On the last point, if MPs were openly asked to approve a large additional payment into the EU budget so that the EU could make loans to eurozone countries which were on the point of defaulting on their debts, then there would be public outrage - firstly because we have chosen to stay out of the euro, and secondly because any such loans are supposed to be illegal under the EU treaties.

But I'm not sure that it would even be necessary for the government or the Bank of England to get explicit Parliamentary approval for a UK contribution to Brown's proposed $500bn IMF fund, and in any case Parliament could not stop the IMF passing some of that money to eurozone countries to help keep them in the euro.

I'm pretty sure the IMF would be prepared to co-operate with that, as its managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has supported the idea of a joint eurozone bond:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/23/eastern-europe-imf-markets-equity_berlin_08.html

apparently unaware that any such thing is forbidden by the EU treaties:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/06d04ccc-ff95-11dd-b3f8-000077b07658.html

"The “no bail-out” clause of the EU treaties prohibits countries from becoming “liable for” or assuming “the commitments” of other governments and is regarded by the ECB as an important weapon for ensuring fiscal discipline."

"Should Germany be forced to step in, it would prefer a multilateral approach that would use the EU and the International Monetary Fund to channel aid to individual countries."

Max Kaye

What's the point of Clive Davis's blog? (Especially as it doesn't allow comments)

mac

@ Verity 4pm:

I reckon it's a tribute to Max Wall . . . .

Verity

Kevyn Bodman - Around six or eight months ago there was a movement to get climate change denial made into a crime against humanity. Fortunately, it didn't take off, but it was being seriously proposed by the militant wing of the global warming rag tag of academics, journalists and some politicians.

Stephen

I'd be rather alarmed if the climate were not changing. It has always changed in the past, often violently. Why should it stop now?

The trouble is that perfectly sensible concern about wasting resources has been hijacked by something that amounts to a religion. What is carbon trading but 21c sale of indulgences?

Alf Tupper

Tina.

Nice one tah.

Susan Hill

What's a village?

Craig Strachan

THX: I think the ward the BNP won is the downscale bit of Sevenoaks (really, who knew?) evidently a former Labour ward.

So it's not new evidence that polite middle class folk are suddenly turning facist, so much as further evidence of the appeal of the BNP to a disaffected section of the white working class.

Alf Tupper

Susan Hill.

Was it yourself who recently took the word of a car salesperson as indicative of the actual trading situation?

If so, same applies to estate agents: they found they could lie convincingly when it's needed and so they performed better than those who lied badly, and they got to stay in the job. It's how they do what they do.

Underneath all their nonchalance, they are desperate and they know we are not at bottom.

Vague third-party enquiries are the tactic of the 'messer' and as such will be given little attention. If your friend were to go in person and shove a carrier bag - or about 8 bags where you live - full of readies on the desk, things would start to happen. Show a dog pictures of his dinner, then show him his dinner. Which makes him jump?

Alf Tupper

mac & Verity.

Three possibilities:

1. It's a crash helmet
2. It's the last comb-over in Britain
3. He's Amish.

Susan Hill

Di versity. I was hoping the photos would raise the price of my house actually.
Alf Tupper.. wasn`t me who took the word of second hand car salesmen, sorry.
And I wouldn`t take it of estate agents either - I`m just pointing out that they are actually selling quite a lot of houses round here at the moment -unless they just go round changing the boards from For Sale to Sold for something to do.

Roy

The value of BNP to gather some semblance of a power footing in the country, would be to engender some opposition to the bland efforts of todays toxic cowards to make decisions for the good of the country.

Rhoda Klapp

I intend to use my free vote in june (well, you can't take the EU parliament seriously) t ovote for one of the protest parties. And if the BNP end up with a seat or two in the EU, at least they won't be here.

Tessa

Just as the Conservative Party suffered in 1997 and thereafter because of UKIP taking a slice of the vote, so the Labour Party will see a huge slice of its vote go to the BNP and destroy a huge part of its voter base for years to come.

The Labour Party has always relied on the white working class for its bedrock support but the white working class have over the course of this rumbled just how much contempt the Labour Party, now run by metropolitan elites, now has for them and so they’re returning the compliment by heading to a cleaned-up BNP, which seems to be the only party interested in them.

The only diehard Labour voters I meet are middle class people who work in cosy office jobs. If you want a reflection of what the white working class feels, you got a glimmer of it in that nastily biased ‘white’ season the BBC had. There was a documentary on a northern working men’s club that barely scratched the surface of the anger many white working class people now feel about the way they are treated. They know they’re being thrown under the bus by Guardian readers – and they’re finally going to do something about it.

The reason why they’re not going to the Conservatives is because you can tell from all the noises coming out of the Conservative establishment that the Conservatives won’t do anything different.

Look at the pronouncements from Conservative politicians like David Davis, Dominic Grieve and Right-wing commentators like Peter Oborne. They know what the future is under the Conservatives: more rights for terrorists, because they’re too cowardly to take them on.

The other thing I think that’s fuelling this is the media itself. The mainstream media will always circle their wagons to try to stifle support for the BNP, but if anything these attacks probably now becoming counter-productive.

We’re told by the mainstream media to hate the BNP, that they are the lowest of the low, but that we should try to ‘understand’ terrorists. The mainstream media sees no contradiction in this and thinks that no-one outside the media bubble notices this. We notice – and we return the contempt too.

And look at the endless well of media sympathy for terrorist suspects. Binyam Mohamed had almost 10 minutes on him at the top of the Channel 4 and BBC News at Ten last night as if he were a returning hero or something. I open the paper today and there’s a double page spread on him as if he’s Princess Diana or a national hero or something.

If there is anything that will drive me into the arms of the BNP it is the sight of people like the appalling Shami Chakrabarti, who laughably heads a ‘human rights’ organisation, Liberty, who was sat on Question Time recently shrieking about Binyam Mohamed’s ‘rights’.

Well, guess what, Shami, I’ve got a ‘right’ too. It’s called a right to live and a right to vote and if you think muggins here is going to vote for another government to roll out the red carpet for Islamic terrorists [cf, the trash that comes out of the mouth of David Davis] the way this one has, you’ve got another thing coming.

Tom

The media constantly tells us how 'vulnerable' minorities are and the reason why nobody believes the British media any more is because of things like this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/4740691/Swindon-school-faces-inquiry-after-brutal-racist-attack-by-Asian-teenagers.html

I'm astonished that story even made the papers given how much effort all these journalists put into covering stories like that up. That one probably slipped through because it's so serious. Listen in the street, though, and people know what's going on.

That's why the BNP vote will rocket. We have had enough.

Paul B

Congratulations to Corpus Christi College, Oxford for winning this years University Challenge. Speacial mention to the quite brilliant and beautiful Gail Trimble, she was simply astonishing in all rounds.
It shows Gov` Jindal`s decision to attend Oxford,rather than an Ivy Leage college to be a very wise decision.
http://tinyurl.com/aum7ad

Alf Tupper

Susan Hill.

Please excuse my attributing someone else's comment to you. It did appear but obviously from elsewhere.

Could I just ask though, if you are seriously contending that the current difficulties are being overplayed? You see, the impression I got from your comments above, was that you were, from observations made of your 'relatively prosperous area', offering this as evidence
that all is in fact well.

When you state that, "3 bedroom houses on modern estates aren't selling but anything period, including stuff at over 1million, is definitely moving.", I don't know, it just comes over (alongside the photo's of the lovely parkland) as a bit of casual oik-baiting that's all.

Linda Smith

Did anyone hear Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty speak out against the Government for stifling free speech by barring Dutch MP Geert Wilders from addressing the House of Lords?

Where was she hiding- and why?

Austin Barry

I see that Lord Ahmed is to be sent to jail. This news has quite made my day.

Sharon

Shami Chakrabarti was on Question Time the week there was a question about Wilders being banned from Britain. This is a man who has to live under 24-hour protection in the Netherlands to protect him from violent Muslims.

What did the leader of a 'human rights' organisation that calls itself 'Liberty' say of Wilders and his film? That we should condemn racism. Of Wilders being discriminated against to the extent that his is now deprived of any normal sense of liberty, Shami Chakrabarti said nothing.

Despite professing her interest in prejudice against others, Chakrabarti had nothing to say about the verses in The Koran that appear in Wilders' film. You know the extracts:

8:60 - “Prepare for them whatever force and cavalry ye are able of gathering, to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies, of Allah and your enemies”

4:56 - “Those who have disbelieved our signs, we shall roast them in fire: Whenever their skins are cooked to a turn, we shall substitute new skins for them, that they may feel the punishment: Verily Allah is sublime and wise”

47:4 - “Therefore, when ye meet the unbelievers, smite at their necks, and when ye have caused a bloodbath amongst them, bind a bond firmly on them”

4:89 - “They but wish ye should reject faith as they do, and thus be on the same footing as they, so take not friends from their ranks, until they flee in the way of Allah. But if they turn renegades, seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take no friends or helpers from their ranks”

4:89 - “If they turn renegades, seize them and kill them, wherever you find them”

8:39 - “Fight them until there is no dissension, and the religion is entirely Allah’s”

The leader of 'Liberty' objects to somebody who lives under 24-hour protection from Muslim-made death threats from pointing all this out.

No wonder the BBC love getting her on TV so much.

Austin Barry

Shami Chakrabarti does appear to be hiding. Perhaps the police should be tasked to search for her at the outer limits of fatuous self-regard, bleeding heart appeasement and pixilated pomposity.

Paul B

Austin Barry @1131. Mine to. Pity its only ten weeks and not ten years.

Verity

Austin Barry - I could vote for that.

Alf Tupper

Poor old Fred Goodwin.

Twelve and a half grand a week pension AT AGE 50! for steering his firm - and the taxpayer - into the biggest loss in UK history.

He'll be one of those 'wealth creators' will he? The ones without whom we cannot hope to survive?

Aidan

Some good news from the BBC - see here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7913967.stm. NI residents will soon be able to vote for official Conservative candidates for the first time in many years. I hope that Labour and the Lib Dems follow suit.

Susan Hill

ALF TUPPER.. I caught this late, sorry. Read carefully what I said. It was that houses are selling in the part of the world where I live - not all houses ( modern ones on new developments for e.g.)but older period properties, whether cottages or manors, are selling well. Now how is this 'oik bating ? 'It is simply an observation. I put up what I thought was a pretty pair of pictures of a bit of my garden with a field behind and I am accused (if it is indeed an accusation) of having 'parkland' and showing it off to bate the oiks ! This is the Spectator, not the Trotskyite Times. Why do you sneer even if I did own 'Parkland' ?- (which I don`t.) Since when was it a crime to work hard over a lifetime and to put what you have earned into the place in which you live ? Neither of us has ever inherited a penny or a blade of grass. I simply do not understand where you are coming from in your insinuations and, apparently, your accusations. You know nothing of my background, where I came from, how I got where I am and you know nothing of any of the people with whom I mix daily. You know nothing of how much money I earn and what I do with it. You deduce all sorts of things from some observations about the relatively strong housing market in my general area and two small photographs.

Verity

I'm with Susan Hill. She accepted the longstanding offer from The Speccie to post personal pics on The Wall that would liven up the page. They were pretty photos. They weren't a statement.

How petty can people be?

Kevyn Bodman

I'm also with Susan Hill.
I didn't see any 'oik-bating'.

I don't own any parkland either but I don't care if someone owns a whole county if they've worked for it.

Full respect to anyone who earns an honest living, in any field, whether that brings them a high or low income.

Now, today is St. David's Day. I've done my work for the day so it's time to have some fun.

Alf Tupper

Susan Hill.

I too am a believer in hard work. You're right, it is nothing to do with me how much money you earn, who you mix with etc. I made no comment on such.

I look at the photo's and congratulate you. It is very lovely land and to me looks like a park. That you have striven to succeed and to attain such a view can only be applauded.

If there were a Trotskyite Times, I would consult it only to keep a fix on the enemy camp.

But my response to your comments was I think, in order.

A 'relatively prosperous area' is by definition one in which the majority of people do not and cannot reside, therefore yours is a privileged and special area. Again, God save us from any attempt to rid the country of such places.

If though, as you report, sales of houses where you are, seem to be unaffected by the present difficulties, then this means no more than that a niche market continues to operate healthily.

To go on from this to ask ".. er.. what recession /house price slump ?" was perhaps offered light-heartedly, but to those many people who have worked hard to keep up payments on their 3 bedroom houses on modern estates, and who find themselves nearing repossession; I think it would be easy to look on such a question and regard it as naiive and perhaps insensitive.

If such a reading is taken as Trotskyite, then I think we have more of a divided nation than we admit.

Jenny

Susan, like your photos, you're a breath of fresh air.