UK Election 2015 – time for a major change

With the UK general election almost upon us isn’t time that we had some radical changes? Here are some to think about:

1. Empty properties in London and other major cities, if they are not being lived in by the owners for more than a month per year then the local councils have the right to rent them out at affordable rents to people. This would stop the one percent using our cities and homes as investment vehicles.

2. Corporations, all corporations in retail, food, clothing and entertainment to be limited. Let’s put individuality, small owners, family businesses back into the running of our cities.

3. Commercial property owners of retail space, cap and reduce the rent they can charge allowing non corporate businesses to start and flourish.

I’m sure that there are a few more that we can think of to divide up the wealth in a fairer way.

Let’s break the chains that bind us the ninety nine percent.

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So many empty properties – so many homeless people – Take back the cities part 1

In London, like many other major cities we have a problem. That’s were the work is but nobody can afford to live here and even if they could there wouldn’t be enough properties but I would love to see the number of empty investment properties around. So here’s an idea so that Londoners can live in London, New Yorkers can live in New York and Parisians can live in Paris etc. Take a city, take the central area where all the work is and make it law that only individuals can own housing in that area. Then make it a law that unless the actual individual owner spends at least one continuous month there that the local authority has the right to house a local person there at an affordable rent and I do mean affordable for as long as the owner is away. Needs the flesh putting on the bones of course. Take back the cities part 1.

Ownership of your City’s Properties

I have been reading in Private Eye 1388 an article entitled “London’s laundry”. The article reports that according to Transparency International, https://www.transparency.org/ , there are 40,000 properties owned by foreign companies, 36,000 of them via tax havens. It is suggested that many are bought with dirty money. If we look deeper maybe we would find that as a Parisian or if you are a New Yorker or from any big city around the world trying to buy a property you may not able to because of a similar problem. The article in Private Eye goes on to say that our Met Police has been able to look at just 120 of these in the last ten years.