Chancellor to "aid" first-time buyers

Here's another brilliant idea to waste taxpayers' money. Gordon Brown knows that the "boom" in Britain is fake - fuelled entirely by billions of pounds of consumer debt. Britain has 75% of Europe's personal debt.

People are borrowing long-term (on mortgages and re-mortgages) to spend short-term (on holidays and cars). If they stop, the "boom" will stop and everyone will see that it had nothing to do with Mr Brown's friend "Prudence" at all.

So Gordon is going into the buy-to-let business - with your money of course. He will "go halves" with first-time buyers on their house and rent the taxpayers' half to them at 3%. That's a great investment, Gordon! What a good job you have access to money extorted by force. You wouldn't raise a lot for that deal any other way.

If Mr Brown was interested in making houses affordable, he could (as the State controls the supply of building land through the planning system) make more of it available. But Gordon is not really interested in "helping" first time buyers or anyone else. By intervening in the market, he will simply drive up demand and bolster ludicrous prices. He is aiming to buy the votes of those who bought at those prices - which long-term economic analysis suggests may be as much as 60% above sustainable levels. In other words, he is intervening in the market for electoral advantage.

The trouble is that when the market moves, no Government can stop it. Norman Lamont learned that on "Black Wednesday" when he cost the nation an estimated £3.8 billion "supporting the pound." All he did was dump taxpayers's money in the laps of cleverer men than himself (an estimated £1 billion to George Soros alone) and destroy the Conservatives' reputation as the party of economic wisdom.

Brown is not New Labour, any more than anyone else in his party. "New Labour" is a dishonest slogan; a meretricious "re-branding" of the same raddled old product - Socialism - that half the population of the world in the 20th Century suffered and in many cases died "market testing".

Brown is "taxing and spending" in an attempt to defeat market forces. That's as Socialist as can be. It will work every bit as well as it worked in the Soviet Union, Cuba and Eastern Europe.

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