[Ramrod]

It was in 1989, as communism was imploding across the world, that the Vietnamese foreign minister gave a press conference in which he discussed the most fatuous mistakes of his fellow revolutionary socialists. For sheer bone-headed stupidity, said Nguyen co Thach, there was one policy that stood out. It was more destructive than American bombing....
“The Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi,” he said. “But we have destroyed our city.” Overcrowding was worse than ever; buildings were collapsing or in an advanced state of disrepair – and new ones were no longer being built. What was this policy? It was rent controls – exactly the policy that Ed Miliband announced yesterday in a classic attempt to get a headline while proposing diametrically the wrong thing for the economy......
The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck has said that rent control is “the most effective technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing”; and the reason he has come to that conclusion is that experience has shown that it is an idiotic way to tackle the problem of high rents......
In London – where more and more people are being driven to rent at ever higher prices – two factors have come together to produce a crisis. The first is the sheer popularity and success of the city. London is the most dynamic urban economy in Europe, with a growing population and an enormous demand for housing. And that demand has been exacerbated, secondly, by the total failure of the previous Labour government – in which Ed Miliband served – to build enough homes. Don’t just take it from me. As Miliband admitted himself in 2010, after he had been (rightly) kicked out of office: “We refused to prioritise the building of new social housing”. Or as Ed Balls put it: “Labour was wrong…We were late in recognising the importance of building more homes, and more affordable homes.”
One of the Labour members of the London Assembly, Tom Copley, has even called for the party to apologise for its failure to build more homes. As you might expect from Labour politicians, they are in fact understating the scale of the disaster, or their role in it. In the 13 years of the Labour government, housebuilding plunged to its lowest level since the Twenties. They saw the number of available affordable homes fall by 200,000; and indeed – this is the statistic that should really make them hang their heads with shame – they built fewer council homes in 13 years than Mrs Thatcher did in one year of her premiership......

How the hell anyone could vote for these idiots is beyond me...

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