Green Party members across Stroud District have been responding to the recent budget with mixes of frustration and dismay. There is so much that needs to be done, and we are so far short of what is needed.
Writing in the Huffington Post, Molly Scott Cato said, “Casual readers of the budget might wonder whether it had been written by chancellor George Osborne or George Orwell. A garden city built in a quarry and growth built on a reinflated housing bubble are hardly reassuring evidence of the economy based on “more economic security and economic resilience” that Osborne claims to be his objective.” You can read the whole article here
She also said,“A garden city built in a quarry and growth built on a re-inflated housing bubble are hardly reassuring evidence of the economy based on “more economic security and economic resilience” that Osborne claims to be his objective. While on the issue of finance, we should also tell George that his desperate attempt to re-inflate the housing bubble through extending the life of Help to Buy is storing up exactly the sort of catastrophic financial collapse that put us in this economic mess. It also does nothing for those who are most in need of reasonably priced housing, since it will only support mortgages they cannot afford and encourage house prices to rise even further beyond their reach.”
We don’t feel there’s anything here to help Stroud. There’s no help to create affordable housing, make homes affordable to live in and nothing to tackle hunger. There is no long term thinking about climate change, instead this budget will help polluting industries, and that is only going to make climate change worse. It’s short term, irrational thinking and simply not good enough.
Green Party Housing Policy is here http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/ho
For more on Zero hours contracts and Living Wage http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/wr