Who wants to be Irish? | Brussels Blog

Who wants to be Irish?

posted by on 2nd Dec 2010
2nd,Dec

Here is some advice to the Irish Government. I suppose it’s cheeky but I have given some of this advice to the UK government already. It starts with an examination of planning permission. In a submission to the Treasury Committee, January 2007 I wrote

Over little more than a decade property values in the UK have risen by £2 trillion. The most important factor in this rise has been the supply of planning permission.

It is possible to separate two factors that comprise the value of property. These factors are the value of the structure and the value of the “continuing” planning permission. “Continuing planning permission” means the right to keep a particular structure in a particular place. For most of the property in the UK, continued planning permission over the land on which it is situated is more valuable than the replacement costs of the bricks, mortar and labour by which it is built. It is the increase in value of this scarce commodity, planning permission, which has put two GDPs of wealth into the UK economy in little more than a decade.

and

If it is to be viewed as a commodity at all, planning permission would appear to be one, which cannot be traded across international borders. But “continuing” planning permission,embodied in property, can be sold or rented to foreign nationals as migrants or visitors. The UK has only about 10% of its land area developed and in many cases existing developed land could be developed more intensively. Consequently, we have a large store of a valuable commodity. We should husband it wisely.

I should have put this more bluntly. Planning permission represents a stake in our society and we have a society which is attractive to many foreigners, who have came to the UK and by creating demand for housing has increased its value. We have spent quite allot of the increase in value by borrowing but increasing our mortgages has easily been covered by the £2 trillion or so increase in value.

House prices are falling now but still leaving most home owners with large gains. But we are tightening our belts – a bit – but the binge was good. We should look to ways of reversing the fall in our housing assets either by restricting supply or by increasing demand. Planning permission restricts supply. Immigration increases demand.

Both of these disadvantage the poor. They don’t own houses and immigrants may initially compete for the jobs of the poor. There is a good mechanism that could compensate for this – James Hansen’s version of a carbon tax. His proposal, aimed at tackling climate change, is to tax carbon (coal, oil, gas) as it enters the country but to return 100% of all the proceeds to every citizen as a monthly cheque. Since the rich consume more than the poor, and cause more global warming pollution, Hansen’s scheme would be a transfer of income from the very polluting rich to the less polluting poor.

So my policy for the Ireland (and the UK) is:

  1. Implement Hansen’s carbon tax.
  2. Restrict planning permission,
  3. Increase immigration

Hansen  calls his scheme a carbon fee to emphasise that it is all returned to the citizens. Tax is spent by Governments, his fee is spent by us. It should also have significant employment effects, the monthly cheque giving the unemployed the opportunity to price themselves into jobs (i.e. work for lower pay) without too much headship.

In the case of planning permission, government should find ways of extracting more value from planning permission. My submission to the Treasury Committee suggested the use of development corporations in what I thought was a novel way (actually it was in the 1947 planning act). Look at renewalcities.org for a development of that theme.

It’s outside my scope to make a full case for immigration but as a man on the Clapham Omnibus, now aided by Google, I have found that “immigration and growth” gives the top ten links that point to a strong positive relationship. The cultural issues associated with immigration are more difficult. On Irish culture I am probably less knowledgeable than the man on the Clapham Omnibus – he may have actually been of Irish decent and taking the N31 route home to Kilburn. But I won’t let ignorance stand in my way.

The Wikipedia page “Roman Catholicism in Ireland” says 87.4% of the citizens of the Republic of Ireland are Catholic. A brief google tells us of catholics targeted by extremists from other religions in places such as Iraq and India. There are reports of a catholic exodus from the middle east. They may make suitable immigrants to help Ireland in this time of economic crisis and if the politics could be managed they would make good immigrants to the UK too.

I bet they would want to be Irish or at a push even British.

Geoff Beacon

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