Will we now have to pay for hospital treatment?

The government is planning to make people pay to use NHS hospitals - even though they are supposed to provide treatment free at the point of use.  Some of you may think I have got it all wrong.  The government is planning to make immigrants pay to use some NHS services.  That surely is only right and proper.

Actually no it isn't.  The government wants to crack down on illegal immigrants getting a job, and so now we have to be able to produce a passport in order to get a job.  The government wants to crack down on illegal immigrants getting a home, and so now we have to be able to produce a passport in order to rent a house ... or even perhaps a room.  Now it seems that we will need a passport in order to get hospital treatment.

Some of you may think I am exaggerating the problem.  Earlier this year my passport ran out.  I applied for a new one, and the new passport duly arrived in a matter of days.  Where is the problem with that?

The problem is that the renewal fee plus the cost of passport photos plus the postage set me back nearly a hundred pounds.  I am lucky.  I can afford that.  But many people are struggling to pay for basic essentials like food and heating.  How are they supposed to afford to renew their passport when it runs out?

Update: it has occurred to me since I originally wrote this that a British passport does not prove your right to treatment on the NHS.  Nevertheless I can only assume that David Cameron envisages a system whereby you either prove your entitlement to free treatment or else pay a fee. 

I fail to see how I can prove my entitlement without producing a document of some kind, and I would be interested if David Cameron would tell us what that document would be, how to obtain one, how to renew it, and what costs if any might be involved.

On benefits and in debt

A national newspaper is reporting the case of a young single mother who is living on benefits with her two children, and who owes a lot of money to various loan companies.  The comments are generally far from sympathetic, but I wonder how many of these comments are from people who are sensible about borrowing money.

Let me repeat what I said in a previous post: I believe that we are all morally obliged to live our lives free from debt if we can.

It is easy for someone who is earning a comfortable salary to borrow money and be confident of repaying the loan in full, but almost anyone can suffer a reversal of fortune.  Nevertheless while I believe that people should think before borrowing, I also think that lenders should perhaps think more before lending.

While I wonder why anyone should want to borrow money to buy Christmas presents, I also wonder why anyone would want to lend money to someone to buy Christmas presents.  Children like presents at Christmas, but they benefit from having parents who are sensible with money.

Previous related posts include:
To build on debt is to build on sand
A rent arrears crisis in London

The new power house in Europe

It is predicted that the United Kingdom is on course to become the economic power house of Europe by the year 2030.  Apparently the British economy will overtake that of France in the next few years, and will then go on to overtake that of Germany.

These predictions are based on current trends which may or may not continue in the future.  For example, there is no reason at the moment to think that the Labour Party will not form our next government.  Also, the socialist government which is currently ruining France may not be in power much longer.

Some readers might think that David Cameron and the Tories deserve to continue in power after the next general election if we are indeed on course for economic glory, and it is certainly true that the most recent figures for the British economy are impressive.  The claimant count for October fell by 36,700 to 1.27million. At this rate, the claimant count could be eradicated within just three years.

Nevertheless there are many people in this country who are struggling financially, and that includes working people as well as people on benefits.  Food banks are opening every week as more and more people risk starvation in this supposedly wealthy country.

I have no problem with the British economy growing under any government, but I will never vote Conservative, and neither will anyone who cares about people not having to starve.

Another teenager dies in pre-communist Britain

Tom Acton was just sixteen when he committed suicide.  He had been upset for some time after rumours were posted online about him being a sex offender.  He had also been assaulted.

The thug who assaulted him has escaped a prison sentence, and so far as I can make out nobody has been prosecuted for spreading the rumours which led to the assault and to the suicide.

Compare this with the treatment of Liam Stacey.  He posted an offensive comment about someone online, then deleted it once he realised he had caused offence.  His target was a grown man who was unlikely to kill himself because of just one short-lived nasty comment.  Nevertheless Stacey was prosecuted and jailed.

The difference of course is that Stacey made a racially abusive comment about a black man (Fabrice Muamba).  I do not condone his stupidity, but a prison sentence was surely an overreaction on the part of the authorities - but such is the way of things as Britain slides ever deeper into the morass of communism.

Far more serious however is the failure of the authorities to protect Tom Acton.  Tom was not the first young person in this country to commit suicide as a result of internet bullying, and I do not expect that he will be the last.

If you value the lives of Britain's teenagers, then stop voting Labour or Tory or LibDem.  Those parties are led by communists who will always put their ideology above innocent human life.

Related posts include:
Ryan French is dead
Hannah Seeley is dead
Poppy Rodgers is dead 
Who killed Katie Littlewood?

Mariah Carey is not sorry

Mariah Carey is apparently unrepentant about the fact that she was recently paid a million dollars to perform live for an African despot.  I do not know how much truth there is in allegations that President Dos Santos is a tyrant who murders his opponents while enriching himself and his family at the public expense, but I do know that Mariah Carey has nothing much to be ashamed of.

No one seems too bothered about the fact that Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fought each other in 1974 in the country then known as Zaire - and yet that boxing match was hosted by one of the most tyrannical African despots of all time.

The people who criticise Mariah Carey are probably for the most part quite happy to vote for warmongering scum like David Cameron and Barack Obama, and most of them are probably jealous that no African tyrant has ever offered them a million dollars.

A rent arrears crisis in London

An inner London council has courted controversy by sending its seventeen thousand tenants a Christmas card urging them to pay their rent over the festive season.  The council has justified the cards by saying that forty-six percent of their tenants are in arrears.

Forty-six percent of seventeen thousand is just over seven thousand eight hundred.  Nearly eight thousand families in just one London borough are in arrears on their rent, and that is just council tenants we’re talking about.  Presumably it does not include private or housing association tenants.

While this statistic may seem astonishing, or perhaps even scary, it needs to be treated with caution.  First, many of the council’s tenants are presumably in receipt of housing benefit.  Housing benefit is paid every four weeks, and so any tenant in receipt of housing benefit is anywhere up to three weeks in arrears with their rent at any one point in time.  However this alone does not explain the statistic.

The council knows perfectly well that housing benefit is paid every four weeks, seeing as how it administers the benefit itself as well as being the recipient of many of those payments.  Surely it would not concern itself with eight thousand tenants in arrears if those tenants were in arrears merely because of housing benefit being paid less often than every week.

Another possible cause is the bedroom tax.  The bedroom tax has been in place now for roughly thirty-eight weeks, and the under-occupation deduction (the so-called bedroom tax) is either fourteen percent (for one spare room) or twenty percent (for two or more spare rooms).  A tenant with one spare room could therefore be more than five weeks behind with his rent as a result of the bedroom tax, while a tenant with two or more spare rooms could be nearly eight weeks behind with his rent.

There could be other reasons, such as working people either struggling to subsist on low incomes or even behaving irresponsibly with their money.

As I understand it, social housing landlords – be they local authorities or housing associations – are not supposed to seek to evict any tenant except as a last resort.  Therefore we would expect Hammersmith and Fulham not to seek to evict any tenants except for a remarkably bad arrears predicament – but of course the situation must be fairly bad in at least some of the eight thousand cases if the council has seen fit to send out Christmas cards offering a stark warning.

Hammersmith and Fulham is one of thirty-two London boroughs.  A similar situation in each of those boroughs could realistically equate to more than a quarter of a million households across Great London in arrears.  Even if we assume that only five percent of those are serious cases, then that still makes nearly thirteen thousand households in total.

Will 2014 be the year in which thousands of social housing tenants across London are evicted from their homes and end up living rough on the streets?  Will there be whole families begging outside every tube station?  Every shopping centre?  Every public house?

Time will tell.

Previous posts on related issues include:

Rough sleeping: when will it be you?

Another victim of the bedroom tax

 

The future of the Muslim world

Two things catch my eye in the press today.  The first is a comment by Max Hastings about Afghanistan.  Much as I dislike Hastings, I will admit that he makes a good case on this occasion.  He notes that:

The expenditure of hundreds of billions of pounds, the loss of hundreds of American and British lives and tens of thousands of Afghan ones have merely transformed the country into one of the most corrupt on earth.

Whole avenues of skyscrapers in Dubai are owned by associates of President Hamid Karzai, built with cash ultimately stolen from Western taxpayers.

He does not say, however, (unless I missed it) that the elections in which Karzai came to power were rigged by the USA to let him win.  Make no mistake: Afghanistan now is very much in the image of what the USA wants.  I don't know who I am quoting here, but the USA is arguably the ultimate rogue state.

The other news item is that Prince Charles has spoken out about the ongoing persecution of Christians in the Middle East.  While I am pleased that he has addressed this matter, he betrays either his ignorance or perhaps an obstinate refusal to face facts when he refers to fundamentalist Islamist militants.

The Muslim who persecutes Christians is the true Muslim.  The Muslim who does not is probably either not a true Muslim, or else is biding his time.

We should not expect the future of the Muslim world not to feature widespread corruption and the persecution of non-Muslims.

My previous posts on related issues include:

The Red Shield versus Syria

Your Muslim faith - really?

The return of the UKIP hamster

It is reported that dozens of Tory MPs are expected to sign a letter to our communist Prime Minister David Cameron calling on him to stand up to the European Union.  They might as well sign a letter to Rebecca Black calling on her to stop singing.

The most highly rated comments on the DM site are in support of either Nigel Farage or the party he leads.  On the one hand, I agree that leaving the EU makes more sense than staying in and hoping for a better deal.  Also, if there were a  huge groundswell of support in this country for leaving the EU, then it is vaguely possible that the EU high command would actually offer us a better deal in a bid to keep us from leaving.

A related point is that if there were a huge groundswell of support for a political party which supports leaving the EU, then the Conservative Party might give some ground on this issue, although I have already stated why we cannot trust David Cameron on this topic.  In fact I'm not sure we can trust David Cameron on any issue.

I am aware that there is currently an upsurge in support for UKIP, but I made clear some time ago why this cannot be taken very seriously.  Support for UKIP can fall as easily as it can rise.

Anyone who is truly concerned about membership of the EU should join a political party which supports leaving the EU, but ideally that party should not be UKIP.  I expect UKIP will do well in the forthcoming European Parliament elections, but they will not have my vote, and I do not expect their support to last.

What is mortocracy?

You will not find the word mortocracy in a dictionary, because I have just invented it.  It means government by the dead.  Take the Geneva Convention.  The people who wrote it back in 1949 are presumably now dead, and so by obeying the Geneva Convention we are allowing ourselves to be governed by people who are no longer alive.

This is not wrong in itself, but I believe in democracy - government by the people.  If our political leaders are going to be constrained in their actions by the dictates of corpses, then they should do so only because those dictates remain relevant in the present day.

The Geneva Convention is in the news at the moment because a man called Haidar Ali Hussein is suing the British government for acting in breach of the convention during its illegal occupation of Iraq.  Of course the government could respond by saying that it has no regard for the Geneva Convention on the grounds that as an elected government they are guided by the wishes of the electorate.

I don't suppose they will make that case however, and also I see no reason to believe that the British electorate wants the government to ignore the convention.  Nevertheless it is fair to point out that the government may lose the lawsuit, in which case it will have to choose between honouring the ruling of the court or turning its back on the Geneva Convention.

I very much hope that the lawsuit will be successful.

The High Street and the economy

A lot of news items today relate to the economy.  A Nobel laureate has decided that the Euro is no longer a good idea, which makes me wonder if the Nobel Prize for Economics is any less of a farce than the Nobel Peace Prize.  After all, giving the Economics Prize to someone who has not yet figured out that the Euro is doomed to failure makes about as much sense as awarding the Peace Prize to a vile warmonger like Barack Obama (who won it in 2009).

Another news item is the ongoing decline of the High Street, which is linked to internet shopping.  Apparently the British spend more money online than any other country in the world, which may seem surprising.  We are a densely populated country in which very few people do not live within walking distance of a shopping centre.  We might therefore expect that internet shopping would be higher in sparsely populated countries like Canada or Australia.

For me, one of the advantages of the internet is that I can buy almost anything.  Nevertheless I do not buy my groceries online, which many people do.  I do however buy most of my groceries in supermarkets, because they stock a wider range of goods than independent shops, and also tend to be cheaper.

I have said before that saving the High Street is a case of use it or lose it.  If we shop in supermarkets, then our political leaders will assume that people want supermarkets, and applications to build new supermarkets will tend to get the go ahead.

One of the main arguments in favour of large new supermarkets is that so many already exist.  If Town A has a bigger and better supermarket than Town B, then it will not be surprising if people from Town B go to Town A to do their shopping.  This in turn creates a case for opening a new supermarket in Town B so as to keep the Town B customers from travelling to Town A.  Then Town A "needs" a bigger supermarket.  Ultimately the High Streets in both towns lose out.

It would also help if we vote for political parties, and ideally join political parties, which want to save the High Street.  Perhaps the best thing that our political leaders can do to help save the High Street is to boost the economy so as to minimise the number of people who have to count their loose change when going shopping.  I for one would happily spend more money in the High Street if I had more money to spend.

Previous posts on the economy include:

Goliath comes to Margate Does the High Street have a future? The fakery of Bushmills

We get monkeys anyway

Once again I return to the subject of fat cats.  Some of you may have read the Daily Express comment which argues that MPs are entitled to a pay rise.  It begins by comparing the salary of an MP with the salaries of people who earn more:

the director-general of the BBC gets £450,000, the chief executives of major firms can pocket millions in shares, and footballers regularly pick up more in a week than most of us can expect to earn in a year

However as I noted in a previous post about MEPs (who earn the same salary as MPs):

Nevertheless  £66,396 is more than the salary of a university professor, and also more than the typical earnings of road maintenance workers - but of course they do an important job and do it well.

I have also in another previous post discussed the comparison between fat cat salaries and those of football players and pop stars.

The DE comment also argues that If we pay peanuts we'll just get monkeys in Parliament, but we get monkeys in any case.  If Britain's legislators are fit for purpose, then why has Britain not had full employment in more than forty years?  Why is violent crime no longer shocking?  Why is the nation drowning in debt?  I could go on, but I think you get the point.

If you feel that MPs do not earn enough, then feel free to keep on voting Labour or Tory or LibDem.  If however you want a change, then feel free to JOIN a political party which actually seeks change.

Previous posts about fat cats include:

The cats stay fat

Energy sector fat cats

Fat cats and commies

Stamp duty: no hypocrisy please

A national newspaper is reporting that rising house prices will result in more people paying more money in stamp duty.  Stamp duty is a tax payable on the purchase price of a house, and has the clear advantage to the government that it is hard to evade.  Non-collection rates are routinely low.  In fact I am not aware that non-collection rates even exist.

Does anyone like paying taxes?  Tax revenues meet the cost, or some of the cost, of government and local government spending.  The balance is met by borrowing at interest, which requires ongoing taxation to meet the interest payments.

It is easy for someone who is affected by one particular form of taxation to complain, but taxation needs to come from somewhere.  It is easy to adopt an attitude that someone else should pay tax instead of yourself, but I repeat that stamp duty is hard to evade. It is therefore arguably the last tax that the government should seek to abolish.

If you do not like paying taxes, then join a political party which has realistic policies for reducing public spending.  If you vote for high levels of public spending, then please do not complain when you are taxed to pay for that spending.

Mandela was a communist thug

Those of you who follow me on other sites may well know that I never buy national newspapers.  This morning I am reminded of the reason why not one national newspaper is deserving of my money.

All, it seems, are leading on the death of Nelson Mandela, but so far as I can make out not one of them is even hinting at the fact that he was a vicious terrorist who led a criminal gang called the ANC.  A favourite trick of the ANC was to abduct South Africans who hindered their plans, take them to secret training facilities in Angola, and torture them.

Thousands of innocent people died at the hands of the ANC.  This link contains photos of the Church Street bombing, and this link contains more information about the ANC.

Tributes have been paid to this vicious communist thug by the war criminal Barack Obama and by the South African president Jacob Zuma - a man who enriches himself and his harem at the public expense, despite widespread poverty in his country.

One communist is dead, but communism is still flourishing.

The shooting of Mark Duggan

A witness to the killing of Mark Duggan has described it as an execution.  I do not know how accurate a description that might be, but I recall that witnesses to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes gave testimonies which differed significantly from the police account.

Either we are to believe that lightning does occasionally strike twice, or we must accept that there are a lot of sadistic (and possibly even murderous) liars in the Metropolitan Police.

The death of Mark Duggan in 2011 led to the August riots which claimed the lives of five people.  It also resulted in 186 police officers being injured.

My previous posts about the police include:

Police priorities
Police get shot at in London
Police and Muslims: get real
The story of Peter Francis

Crime and censorship

Censorship is always a tricky subject.  There have been a lot of cases in the press in the past year about people committing serious sexual crimes, including child rape, because they were obsessed with violent pornographic films.  It is tempting therefore to argue that violent pornographic films should be illegal.  (Maybe they already are.  I'm not sure.)

A related news item is the attempted murder of a homeless man in Newport in Wales by two teenagers.  The crime is being likened to the film A Clockwork Orange in which a homeless man is attacked by teenagers.  This film was withdrawn from circulation in this country for many years by its producer and director Stanley Kubrick following at least three apparent cases of copycat violence.

So far as I am aware, there is no reason to think that either of the teenage attackers in Newport were influenced by Kubrick's film.  What I am sure about is that as a society we should not be listening to excuses where serious violent crime is concerned.

People who commit rapes or attempted murders should be punished severely.  Whether or not their criminal behaviour was influenced by violent pornography or 1970s films is not a matter which should have any impact on the sentence handed down by the judge.

To build on debt is to build on sand

While many families are struggling to survive in these times of austerity, the Tudor Whelans are unusual in that they used to enjoy a life of luxury.

Home was an £800,000 six-bedroom house with views across the Lancashire countryside. They drove a top-of-the-range Audi and Range Rover and their daughters went to private schools where fees cost up to £12,000 a year.

The family owned five horses ...

The reason why they are now impoverished appears to be that their vast business empire, when it existed, was built on debt.

Many people buy houses by taking out a mortgage, and many people get into financial difficulties as a result.  In many cases I am inclined to be sympathetic, but of course most people in Britain would not be able to buy a house without taking on debt.  Likewise, many people who start up businesses do so with borrowed money, but that is very different from trying to enlarge an already successful business by taking on yet more debt.

The Tudor Whelans did not need to build up anywhere like as much debt as they did.  Why on earth would any sane couple with debts buy a six-bedroom home for themselves and their two daughters? Why would anyone in their right mind buy expensive cars on credit?  Of course I do not know that the cars were bought on credit, but they were certainly bought at a time when the Tudor Whelans owed a lot of money.

The poet and politician Hilaire Belloc argued that rich people are morally obliged to give employment to the working classes.  I firmly believe that rich people are morally obliged to live their lives free from debt.  In fact I believe that we are all morally obliged to live our lives free from debt if we can.

The Tudor Whelans should have bought a three-bedroom house, and driven modest cars.  Their daughters should have gone to state schools from the outset, and a gerbil or a hamster would have been far less expensive than five horses.  At some point they should have stopped borrowing money to fund their business ventures, and set about the serious business of reducing their debt burden.

If they had gone down that route, then they might still have the three-bedroom house, and the modest cars, and the gerbil.  People who borrow money beyond what is reasonably necessary are a disgrace to their country.

A very British holocaust

If a dictator in a foreign country were to have thirty thousand people machine-gunned to death, the establishment would almost certainly portray it as a holocaust, or something along those lines.

The United Kingdom kills on average around thirty thousand elderly people every winter by making them freeze to death. I call that a holocaust.

The British government is tackling this holocaust by helping NHS hospitals to prepare to treat the victims of freezing weather, but maybe it would make more sense for people not to have to freeze in the first place.

Related previous posts include:

The next big freeze

Energy sector fat cats

The story of King Ed

People need to get real

Sometimes it is hard to avoid coming across as lacking in sympathy.  It is reported today that a Mumsnet survey indicates that many women feel that having a child harms their career, and it is also reported that the government is selling off £900m in student loans debt.  Apparently a lot of graduates fear that this will result in them being hounded for outstanding payments by private companies.

Regarding women in the workplace, Britain has persistently very high levels of unemployment.  In fact I am not sure that unemployment has been below the million mark since the 1970s, and even then the level of unemployment was much higher than in the 1960s.

People who are in work should therefore be grateful that they are lucky enough to be in work when so many people are not so lucky.  People who think that they are being unfairly held back in the workplace are welcome to complain, but would do well to reflect that they could be a lot worse off.

If you are not unemployed and miserable right now, then you could be before long.

As for graduates worried about debt, I feel compelled to point out that they are all volunteers.  Not one of them was forced to go to university, and therefore each one of them chose to burden themselves with graduate debt.  Of course they could refuse to vote in elections except for a political party which has pledged to cancel all graduate debt, but will they?  Does such a party even exist?

Evil Tories, communist LibDems

The Daily Mail is reporting that the Liberal Democrats are not happy about a Tory MP and government minister speaking out about the Pakistani community:

Qassim Afzal, the Lib Dem chairman of the party's Friends of Pakistan group, criticised what he called Mr Grieve's "loose language".

He told BBC Radio 5Live: 'I'm profoundly disturbed at a statement from such a senior Conservative MP against the British Pakistani community.

'This doesn't help bring communities together.'

Maybe the Liberal Democrats should judge the comments on the basis of their truth rather than on the basis of whether or not they help bring communities together.

It is unsurprising to see the communist Liberal Democrats showing contempt for the truth, but we must remember that the Tories are not exactly known for their love of the truth.  After all, a Conservative government led by the evil communist Margaret Thatcher tried to have a man jailed because he dared to expose their lies.

The present day Conservative Party is at the moment trying to persuade the government of Iran to stop enriching uranium.  Maybe they should stop meddling in the affairs of other countries, and start to pay more attention to their own failings.

Update: the Conservative Party has not abandoned communism after all.  Grieve has recanted his heresy.

Come to the Forest of Dean, dear Roma

The Minister for Immigration, Mark Harper, has been trying to pretend that Britain is not in fact about to be flooded by immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria.

 

Apparently his reasoning is that people in those countries who wish to migrate to the west will opt for Germany and Italy and Spain instead.  Perhaps he could tell that to the people who live near Marble Arch, who have to contend with homeless east European immigrants.  He could even try talking to people in the Page Hall area of Sheffield.

 

Personally I think it would be ill-judged of Bulgarian or Romanian immigrants to head for either Page Hall or Park Lane when they could instead set up camp in that beautiful area of Gloucestershire which lies between the River Severn and the Welsh border.  The local MP is called Mark Harper.  Let's see how he likes the impact of Britain's open borders on his home turf.

Fat cats and commies

Once again I find myself writing about fat cats and communism.  It is reported today that the fat cats are still very much in the business of putting themselves first, with directors of big companies enjoying huge pay rises while millions of people are struggling and some are even turning to food banks.

How exactly do these companies benefit from paying excessive salaries?  Are they guaranteed not to become insolvent?  Are they guaranteed never to break the law?  Are they guaranteed always to pay their creditors in good time?

When people are poor, it is only to be expected that they will vote for socialism.  Socialism basically means that the state intervenes to assist people who would be disadvantaged otherwise, and so even the Conservative Party can be seen as a socialist party - in spite of the fact that they do nothing to curb fat cat salaries.  The main problem with socialism is that it can so easily spill over into communism.

Of course the Conservatives - like Labour and the LibDems - are communists.  Together they are leading Britain into ever higher levels of public spending and ever decreasing levels of personal freedom.  People should not vote for this, but they do.

If the fat cats do not want Britain to become a communist country in the next few decades, they should immediately cut their salaries and pay larger salaries to all of their employees regardless of status.  That way the ordinary people would have less incentive to vote for socialism, and thereby risk adding petrol to the fire of communism.

House price inflation

The press are reporting a surge in house prices, and linking it with economic recovery.

Prices fluctuate with supply and demand.  Consider the price of something for which supply is fixed.  There are only so many people who can be accommodated within the Wembley Arena at any one time, and so ticket prices will be governed primarily by demand.  The only way a given act can increase the supply of tickets is either by playing more than one concert at a given venue, or else choosing a larger venue.  Demand for tickets is influenced by who is actually performing on a given occasion, and also by how much money people can afford to pay.

When times are hard, many people spend their money primarily on necessities.  When the economy is growing, people are more likely to spend money on luxuries such as concert tickets.  With more people wanting to buy tickets, the price can be expected to rise.

It is only to be expected that people are more likely to want to buy a house when the economy is doing well, and yet the difference is that the supply of houses can in theory increase to meet demand.  In reality though it is unlikely that supply will increase to meet demand, and that is why house prices rise.

Perhaps the greatest pressure on demand for housing is immigration.  Another pressure is caused by fat cat company directors or public sector managers whose obscene salaries allow them to buy two or more houses while millions of ordinary people struggle to afford just one house.

It is misleading therefore to present rising house prices as an indicator of economic wellbeing.

The best way to ensure that demand for housing does not exceed supply is to stop immigration at once.  Another helpful move would be to make it illegal for anyone to have more than one mortgage at any one time, and also to place a cap on the value of new mortgages.  If fat cats are going to buy more houses than they need, then they could at least do so by paying cash instead of taking out yet another mortgage.

Previous posts on the subject of housing and fat cats include:

Micro-life

Has immigration killed the middle class dream?

The cats stay fat

Energy sector fat cats