As predicted yesterday HBOS is dying. The housing market has done for them. Some, Telegraph readers, say that housing benefit and life on the dole is at fault. I think to blame housing benefit is puerile. It’s not housing benefit that has pushed up rents and house prices. It is the planning system that has prevented new housing from being built, buy to let landlords, estate agents and banks manipulating the market to generate higher commissions and fees, and most contentiously - immigration.

While we have a political class with a direct financial interest in property prices going up there will be corruption within the whole system. The dude who said you can’t buck the market was right. American and British governments (one and the same?) have colluded in this for votes: low interest rates and artificially high house price inflation gets votes. The whole world pays the price for a few million making a few quid. It’s the home owners who’ve bought at the top of the market and the dopes who re-mortgaged up to the hilt who will pay in the end.

The best plan for the British debtor is to stop paying. If we all cancel our direct debits for three months that will be the end of it: the Courts wouldn’t be able to cope, debt collectors would be swamped; the utilities companies and banks would go bust; the government wouldn’t be able to pay their huge wage bill and ridiculously high pensions; councils would get no council tax; insurance companies would go bust.

Now that would make life interesting. A house in the UK should cost about £20,000.00. Housing should not be a huge financial issue for families. In Europe they don’t do this and they are not suffering like we are, it’s not really a global problem it’s an American one. We are feeling the effects of the “credit crunch” not because it’s a global issue but because we live in a monarchical society, we have less democracy than Saudi Arabia and the Americans have a direct veto on all our politics. In other words we are part of America with none of the rights that American citizens have.  Think about it. Tony Blair didn’t have to go to war in Iraq. The British people didn’t want him to, it was political suicide. Anyone watching him could see him visibly crumble and crumple as a result. Politically, if domestic politics was his only concern, he should not have done it. He did it anyway. He had no choice, he was told he had to. Lets face it the CIA can kill anyone. Another example of this was the government reclassifying cannabis from C to B when their own scientists said this was stupid. The Federal American Government see such moves as contrary to their national interest. Quite simply we are living in an American satellite with none of the rights of American citizens. Harold Wilson knew this and sought to gain American citizenship for us all. Look what happened to him…

Anyway I’d better not rabbit on about it too much or I’ll have a car accident. Think I’ll get the bus.

The bubble has burst. The banks have spent the last decade blowing it up and now it has burst in their faces. I feel more sympathy for the shareholders, and the pensioners whose pensions are devalued as a result of the bubble. These merchant bankers have colluded in ramping up the housing market to generate commissions for themselves. It is the pensioners and home buyers who are going to lose billions, the bankers will go fishing. They don’t need our sympathy, they aren’t suffering at all.

If you’ve got money on deposit in banks realise you will only be covered for £35,000.00 in the UK. There is no way that the Bank of England will help another bank. The Northern Rock was a special case, because the northern based Labour Party needed to protect the feckless geordies who borrowed money. Money they could never afford to pay back if interest rates went up a tenth of one per cent.

Talking of geordies I see Newcastle United and Kevin Keegan are starring in their own pantomime. The fans are the panto horse. I saw a dude from geordie land wittering on about how geordies should run the club. Now that made me laugh. Say a hundred thousand geordies decided to buy the club. That will cost about four grand a piece. And that’s for a load of debt. Then they need probably the same again to pay the debt off and be at a zero starting point. Then they need the same again to buy a team and a manager. Not likely is it? Now this Ashley fellow would appear to be a cockney, like me. Now geordies don’t like us. I should know I lived amongst them for thirty years. Predictably they are insulting the poor bloke and threatening his family. The thing he should remember is that most geordies are all mouth and trousers, full of wind and piss and couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag. Manchester United fans, back in the seventies, the heyday of football hooliganism easily trounced thousands of them (they’re usually to pissed to do much). If I was Ashley I’d let the club disappear into the League and then the conference. I mean all the lad has tried to do is help the ungrateful soft cocks out. Look how he gets repaid. Now Newcastle supporters aren’t typical geordies, although they think they are, and I hope Ashley craps all over them. Threatening his family? What a bunch of turds in black and white shirts.

There seems to be a lot of chat amongst the political class about class. Something to the effect that the class war is over. I’m not so sure it ever started. If it did I haven’t noticed it. People are generally quite selfish and unpleasant when it comes to philanthropy. But the Telegraph newspaper consider it to be hugely relevant that the Labour party are going on about it. The Tories predictably rabbit on about the “politics of envy”; the Labour Party then go on about “the rich” or “the very rich”. I think this may be a distinction without a difference but more likely a way of avoiding the problem most Labour MPs have when it comes to class as they see it. Most “working class” people, and a definition would be helpful, would view an income of £300,000 and above as being rich. So most labour MPs are rich, by their definition they are possibly “upper class”. So if there is a class war it’s that lot that the workers need to be fighting against. But do you have to work to be working class or does it make a non-worker classless. Probably unless they claim benefit when they become “under class”.

I think to say the class war is over is to misunderstand two hundred years and more of political history and philosophical analysis. It’s an issue of class to say something as crass, and wrong-headed quite frankly. Envy is a loaded word. In the context of the smug “I’m okay, it’s your fault you’re not” attitude it may make some sense. But it’s unintelligent to put it forward as a rational comment. Define “class”, define “envy”. Get real.

Of course birth is everything. To say otherwise is to fly in the face of, as the not very funny Pyhton smugsters may have allegedly plagiarised, “the bleedin’ obvious.”

Gordon Brown’s woes are not a Labour problem - we are all in trouble Telegraph Comment 15/09/08

It isn’t Gordon Brown’s fault that the US thought that houses make money. But it was his fault that he did. He let the banks, the brokers, the estate agents and all the others with a vested in the rest in ramping up house prices fleece trillions from the economy. He has presided over the ransacking of private sector pensions. He fiercely resists the needed rationalisation (ie redundancies) of the public sector. And of course he had a vested interest in the commissions generated in the housing boom - tax receipts. He ran out of money two years ago, Blair saw it coming and bailed out.

Houses don’t generate wealth, they are for living in. Production creates wealth. Ask the Chinese. They know this.

I don’t know. I’ve never read any of his books and not been told what it is that he may have been right about. However I have just finished watching about three quarters of a programme with that title. For those who may not know David Icke was a sports reporter with the BBC before he had a revelatory experience that some have said was a schizophrenic episode. I do not know the truth or otherwise of that claim. He is of course a charismatic and interesting man. In this programme he seemed to posit the idea of a global conspiracy that is genetic in origin. In other words a group, or groups, of people, that include the Royal Family (but not Harry - mmm) and the Bush dynasty in the States, control the world. These folk are called the Illuminati. They seek to create a global government, with a world army, and presumably bureaucracy and legal system. He doesn’t describe the jurisprudence of this legal system or the structure of the proposed bureaucracy. He believes that this will be precipitated by a way of a contrived war. This war will (and indeed does) include an Islamic uprising and China. The UN will be overwhelmed and chaos will ensue. He also predicts the hurricanes and so on. He is quite animated about “labeling”. He is alluding to semiotics of language here and the power of discourse. I’m not sure what he’s read but I have to say that lot of what he is saying has been written about before. I have been reading Derrida, Foucault, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and so on recently and these chaps do seem to have considered all of these possibilities in various ways. Of interest to me personally is the use of words, discourse and language to shape thought and thus behaviour. He calls people like doctors, lawyers, teachers and reporters “repeaters”. In other words they repeat what they have learnt to trick us all. He seems to have the idea that there is a great grand narrative that these people are reading from and “repeating” in order to con us all. He argues that there is the reality of existence and an alternative depiction of it in the media. The media is of course controlled by the Illuminati. I’m guessing language is as well. Lyotard and others have considered these ideas of course and called it “postmodernism”. This in turn has a strong grounding in the ideas of the post structuralists and the deconstructionist approach towards literature. Icke’s scepticism at the depiction of reality is nothing new here. Kurt Vonnegut and many others have written on the dubious (in their view) nature of history and historicism in the canon.

He seems to be of the view that he is some sort of prophet. He may well be. On the other hand he may be a classic example of the simulacra that Lyotard considers in “The Postmodern Condition”. He is in fact a creation of the very media that he now derides, indeed he worked within it for twenty years and because of that gained a platform. His ideas and what he considers to be original thought are in fact nothing new, but creations of the media and philosophers, they are pieces of “knowledge” that he has assimilated over the years. Subsequent to what he calls his “Turquoise Period”, and what some call schizophrenia, he has distilled this input and has himself been transformed into a “repeater” and is simply repeating what he has subconsciously assimilated.

Nonetheless he is an interesting man and a charismatic speaker. Much of what he says is reminiscent of L. Ron Hubbard’s ideas of aliens and so on. Indeed he has some theory about reptiles, I didn’t catch it all but am guessing it’s as interesting as Hubbard’s ideas on Thetans.

It was well worth watching and respect to him for preaching this view. I agree with his theory of the World Government. But this is simply a natural progression for humans. After all humans are social animals, they live in herds and have a herd mentality. As the world becomes smaller, whether this be as a result of an Illuminati plot, reptile invasion or Thetans et al, it will be natural for there to be bigger and bigger government. The EU is an example of this process.

In short I would say that he is not an original thinker, however the way in which he preaches his ideas is original. His books have merit because they will make some conspiracy theorists think they have a champion. Of course how are they and we to know that David Icke is not an Illuminati placed man and nothing more than a “repeater”.

Then again, what is knowledge? What is truth? What is justice? What is virtue? What is reality? What is good?

Didn’t Socrates start the whole sorry business a couple of thousand years ago?

Philosophy is where it’s at, and well worth “repeating”.