Rather depressing

According to a BPIX Poll in the Mail on Sunday, when asked "What would make you more likely to vote Tory?", the responses were:

Tougher on crime 45%
Tougher on immigration 45%
Cut bankers' bonuses 44%
Offer tax cuts 31%
Cut public spending 22%

Let us assume that these are factors that would make it more likely for people to vote for any party, and that, being the Mail on Sunday, crime and immigration are always going to be top of the list, let's work backwards from the bottom...

It appears that the LibLabConsensus have won the argument on public spending by perpetrating the Big Fat Lie that all government spending benefits the public at large, as a matter of fact at least a quarter of it is wasted on quangos, chronic overspend and propping up the banking system.

But they know perfectly well that people associate 'public spending' with useful stuff like teachers or nurses (which may or may not be better provided privately, separate topic) even though the total salaries of those two groups are barely five per cent of total government spending. Ditto tax cuts, if people knew what their taxes were being spent on they wouldn't be quite so placid.

But it's the bankers' bonus bashing that worries me. Sure, it's probably true to say that a large part of what they were doing has no social value, but what the bankers have achieved is a trebling in house prices since the mid 1990s. Let's assume that total bankers' bonuses over the past ten years were about £7 billion per year (of which a large but unknown part had nothing to do with the house price bubble) and

a) Total household mortgage indebtedness increased by about £70 billion per year, that's only a ten per cent commission, or

b) If the average UK house price went up from £80,000 to £180,000, that's an average annual increase in the 'value' of all privately owned UK housing of £200 billion a year, making it only a three per cent commission.

And as ever, the general public does not know what it wants. The Home-Owner-Ist majority are happy with their £200 billion a year unearned paper capital gains (and don't want to relinquish a penny of it) but look down on the bankers who do the actual grubby work of lying and cheating to create the bubble.

If people were serious about reducing bankers' bonuses, what they should be calling for is an end to the whole too-big-to-fail mentality, but the flipside of ending bank bailouts is of course that mortgage lending will have to be reduced significantly (as Andrew Ellson explained on Saturday. He might be a Home-Owner-Ist but at least he's accurate on the facts).

So ... the real question is: is the Home-Owner-Ist majority prepared to accept falling house prices (which benefit future generations) as the inevitable cost of the only policy that will put an end to these bonuses?

Answers on a postcard postage stamp.