David Dundas: What to do about the UK housing market?

David Dundas is a Lichfield City Councillor, Managing Director of Lion Industries and an active member of CPF. He has a science degree from St Andrews and an early career as a field service engineer in the oil industry that finally took him to Brussels, where he worked for Texaco Europe.  He stayed on in Belgium for 22 years, working for several American companies including Dow Corning in their Energy department, and for a time, was a consultant to the European Commission on toxic waste disposal.

The house building industry is undoubtedly in crisis; workers are being laid off, which is dragging the economy into recession.  The government has run out of good ideas and is fiddling about with bad ones like the eco-towns and now the suspension of stamp duty.  So how can we restore confidence in the housing market and bring it back on track?  Just pouring money into the banks is an expensive way and on its own is unlikely to produce a significant improvement, because it is not sufficient on its own to address the problem of confidence.

Most housing developers have either stopped, or are stopping building new homes.  As building workers are often sub-contractors, it has been easy for  developers to terminate their work.  Whilst many tradesmen have found other work in the short term, in activities such as refurbishment and house extensions, there is a limit to the amount of this kind of work available, so construction workers are going to find themselves progressively out of work, placing a further strain on the economy, as unemployment rises.

Whilst the media gets excited about house owners with negative equity, this misses the point because they are only small proportion of all mortgagees, so  this is not the major threat to the nation.  Banks will not repossess, if borrowers continue to repay their mortgage;  the far greater threat comes from those who lose their jobs and therefore cannot pay the mortgage.  It will be the construction workers who will first dominate this group.

David Dundas: Why nuclear?

David Dundas is a Lichfield City Councillor, Managing Director of Lion Industries and an active member of CPF. He has a science degree from St Andrews and an early career as a field service engineer in the oil industry that finally took him to Brussels, where he worked for Texaco Europe.  He stayed on in Belgium for 22 years, working for several American companies including Dow Corning in their Energy department, and for a time, was a consultant to the European Commission on toxic waste disposal. David also wrote about our energy future last July.

This is the latest in a series of articles about LibCon co-operation.  The ConservativeHome.com editorial on LibCon co-operation can be read here.  The editorial summarises a survey of Tory members' views on working with the Liberal Democrats.

It’s fair to blame Green parties for global warming; they have campaigned long and hard to ban nuclear energy, so nuclear power stations have been shut down around the globe, and replaced with fossil fuelled power stations, that have signficantly increased the production of global warming CO2.  Not only should you thanks the Greens for our global warming, but also the Lib-Dems who are clearly anti-nuclear; while Labour sits on the fence, instead of showing leadership and persuade us that nuclear energy is essential to stabilise our climate.

There are two critical reasons why we must quickly switch most of our energy needs to nuclear power:  security of supply and global warming.

For centuries we had control of our energy supplies, first with coal and later with oil and gas, from countries where our Empire ruled with an iron fist, and later still from the North Sea.  But we no longer control our oil and gas, for it now comes from unstable regions who can cut it off at a moment’s notice; and our North Sea wells are running dry.  Our few nuclear power stations are reaching the end of their working lives, and the present plan is to replace them with power stations fired with gas, mainly from Russia.   Meanwhile the Russians are building nuclear power stations to release their gas for sale to the west.  The danger of leaving our energy supplies in the hands of other, possibly hostile countries, is too risky to contemplate.

David Dundas: Our energy future

David Dundas is a Lichfield City Councillor, Managing Director of Lion Industries and an active member of CPF.  He has a science degree from St Andrews and an early career as a field service engineer in the oil industry that finally took him to Brussels, where he worked for Texaco Europe.  He stayed on in Belgium for 22 years, working for several American companies including Dow Corning in their Energy department, and for a time, was a consultant to the European Commission on toxic waste disposal.

A realistic energy policy should be central to any government's plans, for reliable energy at reasonable cost is vital to our future.  Whilst there has been much talk about the important subject of climate change that is threatening our environment, this has sidelined the equally important subject of the security of our energy supplies.  Since the industrial revolution, we have had control of our energy supplies, first with coal, then oil and gas, but these are either running out, or in the case of coal, have been abandoned as a largely unacceptable source of energy.

We all want to save the planet from climate change, but there is a great risk that we will be swept along by popular dogma, at the expense of reasoned thought.  It is important that the Conservative Party adopts a realistic energy policy that combines energy security with technologies to quickly combat climate change.

On climate change, it can be argued that this has been accelerated by the misguided actions of  arious green parties around the world, in particular here in Europe.  For example: in Germany, the Green Party has been largely responsible for the closure of nuclear power stations which have been replaced by gas fired power stations, fuelled by Russian gas.  The Russians, in their rush to sell ever increasing amounts of gas to western countries, including the UK, to earn valuable foreign currency, are now expanding their nuclear electricity generation, to release their gas for sale to the west.  This has effectively moved the nuclear power stations from Germany to Russia. If we replace our aging nuclear power stations with gas fired ones, fuelled by Russian gas, we will be doing the same.  Are Russian nuclear power stations preferable to our own?