My Message To Downing Street

I don't know what it is, but my frustration with the utter incompetence of this Government, the last Government and the selfish, greedy banks seems to be over-flowing right now. I can't keep it in, so like all good bloggers, I've sent a message. This first one is to Mr Cameron, and it read as follows:


Hello. I am writing to convey my utter frustration and anger about the current economic situation this country is facing. I'm writing not only on the behalf of a young population that has become utterly disillusioned with politicians and the greedy selfish bankers, but also on behalf of a struggling and stifled SME sector.


Now I understand that the previous Government has a lot to answer for, what with their recklessly high levels of public spending, burdening our younger generation with huge debts for some time. But your cuts are way to fast, and way too much. Your hoping that private sector growth is going to be able to mop up the job losses from the public sector cuts. But I can promise you that it's not coming. There are too many jobless for the slow growing, if not growing at all, private sector to cope with.


Also, the banks have had a big part to play in all this. Their greed and selfishness has impacted on everyone terribly. You MUST put more pressure on the banks to lend in decent amounts, and you MUST do it now. I fear that this Government, the last Government and the recklessness of the banks have now lost a generation. Well done.


It's probably not word perfect as the original message I sent because I forgot to save it so I've done it all from memory, but it's pretty much all there in the right order!


I'm going to work on a scathing one for the banks tomorrow when I get the chance. I'm not daft. I don't expect a reply from either Number 10 or any bank I send this to. But I do hope people read what I have to say and understand why I'm so angry.


People my age are being crippled by the sheer lack of opportunity to get anywhere in life. I'm still living at home like many people my age, without the chance of getting a mortgage for years. Insurance costs are sky high. There's no job opportunities, there's nearly 1 million 16-24 year old people out of work. I'm lucky to have had such a smooth transition into work. Wages aren't high enough and because of all this, our generation is about as turned off to politics as is physically possible.

If You Don't Vote, Don't Complain!

There are still a lot of people who tell me that they aren't bothering to vote. The main reason these people give is 'non of them are worth voting for'. That's a fair enough assessment, however it annoys me it's obvious people haven't even bothered to look into which party stands for what.

In countries such as Zimbabwe, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, people die for the privaledge of voting. Just recently car bombs and suicide bombers blew themselves up outside polling stations as people queued to cast their vote. Even here, the Suffragets died at the beginning of the 1900 in order for women to have the vote. So when people in this country say they can't be bothered voting, or say they don't know who to vote for, that to me isn't a good enough excuse. If you can't decide on who to vote for, look at their policies, and then your personal situation, way up the pros and cons of the policies to see if your going to be better off depending on what party your looking at. It takes 5 minutes. Don't waste the privaledge previous generations have died for, and what people are still dying for today.

And remember, if you don't vote, don't complain!

Why A Vote For The BNP Is Not A Wise One

I've just seen an appauling video of a BNP candidate and a group of Asian men attacking each other. Both groups of people looked to antagonise each other, but the BNP member shold have been the man to try and diffuse a tense situation. But I'm kidding myself here. The BNP are not known for their excellent handling of public situations.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/england/8663681.stm?ls

The link above is to the video on the BBC website, I can't embed it on here unfortunately. But please take a look and see what thugs we have standing for Parliament in this country.

Scary Look Into A Conservative Future

This is why I haven't voted conservative. Please take the time to read this, it's quite a long extract, but I can assure you it's a very revealing read. The article is from The Independant, and journalist Johann Hari:

This is a dispatch from David Cameron's Britain, the country that could be waiting for us at the other end of the polling booths and the soundbites and the spin. I didn't have to take a time machine to get there; I just had to take the District Line. In 2006, a group of rebranded "compassionate Conservatives" beat Labour for control of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, a long stretch of west London. George Osborne says the work they have done since then will be a "model" for a new Conservative government, while Cameron has singled them out as a council he is especially "proud" of. So squeezed between the brownish dapple of the Thames and the smoggy chug of the Westway, you can find the Ghost of Cameron Future. What is it whispering to us?


Hammersmith and Fulham is a sprawling concrete sandwich of London's rich and London's poor. It starts at the million-pound apartments on the marina at Chelsea Harbour – white and glistening and perfect – and runs past giant brownish housing estates and Victorian mansions, until it staggers to a stop on Shepherd's Bush Green, where homeless people sit on the yellow-green grass drinking and watching the SUVs hurtle past. Here, high incomes squat next to high-rises in one big urban screech of noise. In such a mixed area, the Conservatives had to run for power as a reconstructed party "at home with modern Britain". They promised to move beyond Thatcherism and make the poor better off. They were the first to hum the tune that David Cameron has been singing a capella in this election.


People who took this at face value were startled by the first act of the Conservatives on assuming power – a crackdown on the homeless. They immediately sold off 12 homeless shelters, handing them to large property developers. The horrified charity Crisis was offered premises by the BBC to house the abandoned in a shelter over the Christmas period at least. The council refused permission. They said the homeless were a "law and order issue", and a shelter would attract undesirables to the area. With this in mind, they changed the rules so that the homeless had to "prove" to a sceptical bureaucracy that they had nowhere else to go – and if they failed, they were turned away.


We know where this ended. A young woman – let's called her Jane Phillips, because she wants to remain anonymous – turned up at the council's emergency housing office one night, sobbing and shaking. She was eight months pregnant. She explained she was being beaten up by her boyfriend and had finally fled because she was frightened for her unborn child. The council said they would "investigate" her situation to find "proof of homelessness" – but she told them she had nowhere to go while they carried it out. By law, they were required to provide her with emergency shelter. They refused. They suggested she try to find a flat on the private market.
 
For four nights, she slept in the local park, on the floor. She is still traumatised by the memories of lying, pregnant and abandoned, in one of the wealthiest parts of Europe. The Local Government Ombudsman investigated but the council recording of the case was so poor she said it "hindered" her report. After a long study, she found the council's conduct amounted to "maladministration". Since they came to power, the Conservatives are housing half as many homeless people as Labour – even though the recession has caused a surge in homelessness. That's a huge number of Janes lying in parks, or on rotting mattresses by Hammersmith Bridge.


Why would they do this? The Conservative administration was determined to shrink the size of the state and cut taxes as an end in itself. Rather than pay for it by taking more from the people in the borough with the most money, they slashed services for the broke and the broken first. After the homeless, they turned to help for the disabled. In their 2006 manifesto, the local Conservatives had given a cast-iron guarantee: "A Conservative council will not reintroduce home-care charging". It was a totemic symbol of leaving behind Thatcherism: they wouldn't charge the disabled, the mentally ill or the elderly for the care they needed just to survive.


Within three months, the promise was broken. Debbie Domb, 51, is a teacher who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1994. She had to give up work, and now she needs 24/7 care. After being lifted up by a large metal harness and placed in her wheelchair so she can talk to me, she explains: "This was always such a great place to live if you were disabled. You were really treated well. Then this new council was elected and it's been so frightening... The first thing that happened when they came in was that they announced any disabled person they assessed as having 'lower moderate' needs was totally cut off. So people who needed help having a shower, or getting dressed, had that lifeline taken away completely. Then they started sending the rest of us bills."


She "panicked" when a bill came through saying she had to pay £12.50 for every hour of care she needed. "I thought, 'Oh my God, how am I going to do this?' The more care you need, the higher your bill, so the most disabled people got the highest charges. Everyone was distraught. I had friends who had to choose between having the heating on in winter and paying for their care ... I know a 90-year-old woman with macular degeneration who can't see, and she had to stop her services. There are lots of people who have been left to rot, with nobody checking any more that they're OK, and I'm sure some of them have ended up in hospital or have died." One of the council's senior social services managers seems to have confirmed this, warning in a leaked memo that the charges could place the vulnerable "at risk".


Debbie co-founded an organisation to fight back – the Hammersmith and Fulham Coalition Against Community Care Cuts – and, after appealing, she finally had her charges cancelled. "But there are a lot of people who can't appeal," she says. "You're talking about very vulnerable people – the very old, the mentally ill, the blind. A lot don't know how, or would be ruled to have to pay anyway, because the rules are so arbitrary. Now they're being taken to debt-collection agencies for non-payment. I know an 82-year-old woman who's never been in debt in her life who is being taken to a debt-collection agency for care she needs just to keep going... They want volunteers to do it instead. But you don't want to have to ask your friends or a volunteer to pull up your knickers for you."


Each year since the Conservative council was elected, the pressure on the housebound has increased. Meals
on Wheels brings one good, hot meal a day to people who can't get out. The council jacked up the charges for it by £527 a year – so half of the recipients had to cancel it. A local Labour councillor documented that the council rang up a 79-year-old woman with dementia, and when she seemed to say she didn't need any food, they cut off her meals.


The cost of almost all council services has sky-rocketed, to fund tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy. David Cameron says he wants to make Britain "the most family-friendly country in the world" with "childcare as a top priority", but his showcase council has increased charges for childcare by a reported 121 per cent – a fact that makes the warnings about Michael Gove's planned "top-up fees" for nursery places seem even more ominous.


As I spend days walking across the borough, I find the detritus of the old thriving public sector now shut and shuttered. Next to a big council estate I stumble across the large red-brick Castle Youth Club. It was built in Dickens' time and bequeathed to the local council "to benefit the children of this area for perpetuity". The Conservatives shut it down two years ago to sell it off. The deal fell through, so now it sits empty while the local kids hang around on the streets outside.


***


Ricky Scott, 18, tells me what it used to be like: "It was a really good place. When I left school they found me a part-time job at Sainsbury's – they taught me how to write a CV – and they persuaded me to go to college. They gave you a place to go to stay out of trouble, they got you into the gym, they helped us learn loads of stuff ... They did a lot to teach us about knife crime and how to stop it. When my friend was stabbed they helped us organise a big campaign about knives." After the youth club was closed, there was a surge in anti-social behaviour orders in the area. Ricky isn't surprised. "People don't want us on the streets, but then they take away the only place for us to go, so what do they expect? It feels like we used to have some good things but now they've all been taken away. It always gets taken away."


And in this boarded-up youth club, in Debbie's panic, in the image of Jane and her bump on the floor of the park, I realise I am peering into the reality of David Cameron's "Big Society". The council here told people that if they took away services like this, there would be volunteers; if the state withered away, people would start to provide the services for each other. But nobody opened their home to Jane, or volunteered to feed Debbie, or started a new youth club on their own time and with their own money. The state retreated and the service collapsed. It's a rebranding trick. The Conservatives know that shutting down public services sounds cruel, while calling for volunteerism sounds kind – but the effect is exactly the same. It's as if Marie Antoinette called in Max Clifford, and he told her to stop saying "Let them eat cake" and start saying: "Let them form a workers' co-operative to distribute cake on a voluntary basis."


But it turns out that it's not just the services on the council estates here that are threatened by the council – it's the estates themselves. Recently the leader of the Conservative council, Stephen Greenhalgh, co-wrote a pamphlet called Principles for Social Housing Reform, recommending that Cameron adopt a radical new approach to council housing. He said it provides "barracks for the poor" and helps create "a culture of entitlement", while "deliver[ing] a risible return on assets". He asked: why do we continue to "warehouse poverty in the core of our great cities", on land that is worth good money? Instead of following "the same narrow agenda of 'building more homes'", he said councils should "exploit [the] huge reserve of capital value" in the houses and the land by selling it off and charging "market terms", with some mild subsidy for the very poorest.


He seems to be trying to act on this agenda. He has stopped building any affordable houses for rent, and he is searching for council estates to sell off. I walk to the Queen Caroline Estate along the river, and it is one of the most calm and bright council estates I have ever seen – a walkway of houses and flats lined with trees, all washed over by a gentle river breeze. Teenagers are playing on a football pitch; an elderly couple is watching them, eating sandwiches. Everyone I talk to says they like it – "You've got a good mix of people, and it's so friendly," says one woman. On the other side of the Thames, staring down, is the £25,000-a-year St Paul's School, where Greenhalgh was educated alongside George Osborne in the 1980s.


Greenhalgh has declared that this estate is "not decent", and has offered it for sale to property developers. Maxine Bayliss is a 42-year-old mother who lives here with her two children. She says: "It's frightening to discover there are plans to sell off your home so they can give the land to rich developers. At first the council denied it, but when we challenged them they finally said, yes, we do have plans, actually. One Conservative councillor shouted at me that this was a ghetto and I shouldn't want to live here. Does it look like a ghetto to you? This is my home, it's my children's home. If they charged market rents, people like me would be forced out of London totally. This should be a city for normal people too, not just rich people. It's so insulting to say people like me shouldn't be living here."


Together with a coalition of other mums from the estate, Maxine has formed a group to stop the sell-off. When David Cameron came on one of his visits to the area to cheerlead for the council, she asked him about the threat to her home – and he accused her of "black propaganda". When she explained that the council itself had admitted to having plans, Cameron snapped: "If you don't like them, you should stand for election."


***


Do we want our cities to look like Paris, where the rich own the centre, and the poor are banished to grey concrete slums on the outskirts where they riot with rage once a decade? If we hive out all our housing to the market, that will be our future. Or do we place a value on our land – and who lives there – that is more than purely financial? Do we think some things are more important than the market price? Later that night, I watch Greenhalgh on YouTube, lecturing these single mothers, and I keep thinking about that phrase he is so fond of: "a culture of entitlement". Who has really grown up in "a culture of entitlement": Maxine, who has so little, or Cameron and Greenhalgh, who have so much?


I walk the borough for days, trying to find what Cameron celebrates about this council – until, at the tip of the borough, I find a large grassy metaphor for Conservative priorities that seems so crude that I wonder whether it could have been secretly designed by the Socialist Workers Party cartoonist and plonked in my path. Hurlingham Park was a big vibrant patch of green where kids from the local estates could play, and run on one of the few professional running tracks in the country, in a setting so classically beautiful it was used in the film Chariots of Fire. But then the Conservatives were elected. They handed the park over to a large international polo consortium that has ripped out the running track and shut the park down for a month every year – so rich people can watch polo for hundreds of pounds a day.


Lying in the sun on the edge of the green, I find Nick Anderton, a 17-year-old from the local estate. He stares at it sadly and says: "The park is meant to be for everyone, isn't it? But we have to stop our football now so they can get it ready so these people can play polo, and we won't be able to use it for most of the summer ... My friend used to run on the track every day, he wants to be an athlete, but they got rid of it so he can't now ... It feels like we don't have the right to be here any more. They've taken our park and given it to these snobbish people who've got nothing to do with this area. Look at us. Does it look like we need a polo pitch round here?" Later, I read that Monty Python came to this park to film one of their sketches: "The Upper Class Twit of the Year."


So what is Cameron so proud of here? There seems to be only one answer: in this area the Tories have managed to cut council tax by 3 per cent. They've given back about £20 a year to somebody on an average income, and about four times more to a rich person. That's why, when Cameron was challenged about what has happened here, he said: "When I look at the record of what the Conservatives have done here in Hammersmith and Fulham, far from being embarrassed as the Conservative leader, I'm proud of what they're doing." As I heard this, I remembered that earlier this year Cameron's close friend and shadow cabinet member Ed Vaizey said Cameron is "much more Conservative than he acts, or than he is forced to be by political exigency". The principles that run through Cameron's politics seem to become visible at last, as clear and as stark as the Westway on the Hammersmith skyline: tax cuts, whatever the social cost.


Is wielding the Hammersmith hammer really worth it? Is cutting taxes by a fraction justified if it means abandoning the most desperate people – the homeless, the disabled, the poor? Is that who we want to be? The last time I see her, Debbie Domb tries to move a little in her chair – painfully, slowly – and says: "People should look at what they have done to us in Hammersmith. This is what Cameron and Osborne want to do to Britain. They say so. Remember, the people running this council said before they were elected that they were compassionate Conservatives. I can see the Conservatism. Where's the compassion?"

David Cameron expects the government to let go, and as they are letting go, they expect the general public to volunteer for services which they are going to cut. This simply is never going to happen. As morally righteous as volunteering is, most people do not have to time to do so, so David Cameron's 'Big Society' is a dream which is unachieveable, and one which could put the country is a serious mire.

The article was provided by the good team at Roseview Windows!

BNP And The Lib Dems To Form Coalition Government

God forbid that actually happens. But according to my poll, May 6th would produce a great result for the BNP and Lib Dems.

Thinking critically here, I'm sure the BNP don't have that many supporters, so I'm inclined to think that the same person or people may have voted a number of times. Or maybe I'm wrong, and the BNP do actually have more support than I give them credit for!

Thinking ahead to May 7th, I'll bet all I have on a hung parliament. The polls have suggested it from day one, and they haven't changed much since. In that scenario, we have to hope that the different parties manage to make some sort of agreement and make sure that any uncertainty lasts a very short time.

Could The General Election Affect Public Spending?

Taxes have to be raised and public spending will have to be cut, but not before the result of the General Election is announced. So, will the public hold fire on their spending until they know the outcome?

Labour's approach to the deficit is to start cuts at the beginning of next year, whereas the Tories want to start their cutting the minute they get into power. From the public's point of view, if cuts were to start straight away, they may be tempted to hang onto their money. If that were the case, then consumer spending will fall and we can expect a knock-on effect for the window and conservatory industries. However, were Labour to retain power, and cuts were made later, maybe the public won't be as cautious and carry on spending their money.

In an ideal world, Labour might adopt the Lib Dem strategy of giving everyone a tax break where they don't pay any on the first £10,000 they earn. Though doubts remain how they will be able to fund such a big difference.

Hopefully the general public won't be scared into stopping spending just because there is an election on. We need the momentum that the window industry has built up since the end of 2009 to carry on.

Which Party Will Best Serve The Double Glazing Industry?

Unless you have only just woken up, you will know that Gordon Brown has officially announced that May 6th will be election day.

Now personally, my vote will be going to Labour. The reason is that if the Tories were in charge during the recession then I'm sure we would have been in a much worse situation now. Not once did the Tories give the public any idea as to what they would do to help the country out of the recession. All they did was blame the government for all the problems, rather than lend a hand. This tells me that George Osbourne lacked in any real experience or proper knowledge, which would have made him completely useless if he were in Alastair Darling's shoes at the time. Secondly, they have been very thin on policy. I'm not going to vote for a party without them giving me a single reason as to why. All parties have been thin on policy, but Labour has at least given us a few morsels to analyse. The Tories haven't. It's all just electioneering and sound-bytes.

So for me it's Labour. They aren't going to start cutting back on a large scale immediately, risking the country going back into recession likes the Tories would rather do. They seem a tad bit more competent than the Conservatives do.

Please vote on the poll on the right hand side. It might give us a bit of an idea as to how things may pan out...but probably not!

Budget Day

We've now had the last budget before the election and there was no direct mention of any help to our industry once again. Though we didn't expect any did we?! The Chancellor did however talk about the funding for the green technologies market. Hopefully some of the new new funding will increase interest in the greener advantages of the PVCu window industry.

Other plus points was the staggered introduction of an extra 3p per litre on fuel. This is now going to go up by 1p on the 1st April, 1p on the 1st October and the other in the New Year. Obviously any increase in fuel is going to hit hauliers and transport departments of all businesses hard. But this is arguably a better way to do it rather than one big hit immediately.

What does annoy me slightly is the inability for the opposition parties to come up with alternative ideas that they think will be better for the economy than what has been announced and debated. All the opposition seem to be able to do is to shout and rant about how bad everything is but not give any indication as to what they would do differently. At this moment in time my vote is going to Labour. I'm not saying they have been perfect, far from it. But to me their measures seem more sensible than the Tories' 'cut cut cut' strategy. The last thing this industry needs is to be plunged back into recession due to premature spending cuts. However, if the other parties pull their finger out and give me a substabtial reason to vote for them, I'm open to reconsideration.

That's my political broadcast out of the way. We've finished the first draft of our trade price list. It's been a while in coming but the initial draft is now complete and ready to have the finishing touches made to it. We decided a while ago that along with the many cheap and cheerful builders out there looking for very basic, poor quality windows and doors, there are others out there that look for a quality window or door to finish of their high quality workmanship. We understand that builders always want to make a good impression when they finish off a job. And all too often we hear from customers that when they had their extension built they were unhappy with the quality of the windows and doors the builder chose to install. This is all down to the builder wanting to make as much money as possible, while sacrificing the quality of some of the most important items of the extension. We are going to be aiming at the higher end of the market. Aiming at the builders who don't just think of their back pockets, but of quality, security, energy efficiency and overall customer satisfaction.

Will The Budget Provide Any Cheer For The Window Industry?

We are going to have the last budget before the upcoming election on Wednesday, and I'm sure many in the window industry will be looking to the Government for some much welcome support. Like the car industry and boiler industry, there has been a concerted effort on the Government's petitions website for Number 10 to implement a similar scheme to gove the double glazing industry a boost.

However, I fear that not enough of us went on and signed the petition. Out of the tens of thousands that work in this industry, only 4367 people actually put their name down. This is a very poor showing, and just proves that the window industry remains splintered and lathargic when it comes to putting our collective weight behind things which can improve the sector we work in.

Alistar Darling has already said that the upcoming budget is not going to be a 'give-away' budget, but one that is sensible and one that is designed to secure the economic recovery. Sounds promising, but we need to be hearing of more support for the contruction and green industries.

Wishlist: 5%/0% VAT on energy 'A' rated windows.
                 Scrappage scheme.
             
No how likely do you think these things are?!

Which Government Is Best?

As if any of you didn't know, there is a general election coming up in May, and this one really does matter. The way things are shaped now, we could end up having our first hung Parliament.

But, this is still uncertain. The Tories could still form the next government, but if they carry on losing the points they gained from Labour, they could still be in power by next May.

My personal opinion is that if the Conservatives win, they could do a lot of damage to an already fragile window industry. The reason? They want to cut like there's no tomorrow. They think the best option is to plunge the economy into the next age of austerity. If they carry out their planned immediate swingeing cuts, we can say goodbye to any sort of consumer confidence. They will be putting the recovery at risk.

Labour on the other hand have said they will put back any major spending cuts for another year. There is logic behind this. Providing the economy grows during that year, any extra GDP the country makes will go towards shrinking the budget deficit, which is the main issue. Once the economy has become stable, cuts can be made without plunging the country back into major problems. From the window industry's point of view, this has to be the best way to go about things. To make immediate cut backs now will kill consumer confidence and eradicate any ground gained.

I don't want this to sound like a party political broadcast, but doing it Labour's way has a lot less risk for the double glazing industry. Things are hard enough as it is, we don't need it any worse.

Going back to the hung Parliament situation. I'm not confident enough that the MP's will be able to form a fully functioning, efficient Government. There is too much squabbling, and the task of picking a leader to run the coalition Government could be an impossible one. Moreover, the task of dealing with the deficit could become more difficult. Half of the Government would support immediate cost cutting, the other may not.

I know who I'm voting for!