Time to end the grumbling

Its effect on the dire housing situation will be minimal. Indeed its motivation is less aimed at putting homeless people into homes of their own than at handing over more public assets to the private sector.

The private housebuilding sector - construction companies and banks - has failed dismally to deliver over decades except in the area of making higher profits, yet this is the vehicle chosen by the coalition government to deal with a chronic problem.

It's an indication of how lightly the government takes this problem that its headline figure is just £400 million, when it slashed 10 times that figure from housing last year.

Cameron's intention is not to deal decisively with the growing demand for homes but to hand over public finance and public land to the speculators who already have plenty of both.

And the Prime Minister's pledge to reduce "regulation and other burdens on house-builders" will send shivers down the spines of those fighting to protect greenbelt land and those defending health and safety at work.

Despite the bold assertions of Cabinet members, most of whom, as beneficiaries of inherited wealth and privilege, have never had to find a proper job, regulations are on the statute book for good reasons.

Big business wants an end to them because deregulation promises increased profitability, but it is paid for in vandalism of the countryside and death and injury for construction workers.

Cameron doesn't explain why the taxpayer should stand in for the financial sector by guaranteeing the 95 per cent mortgages being offered to new buyers.

Isn't that what banks and building societies are supposed to be for?

All of them have already benefited from the government's quantitative easing measures that have funnelled cheap cash to the finance sector, supposedly to enable them to loan money to small businesses and would-be homebuyers.

But in spite of cosy platitudes from the government, banks still refuse to risk their ample assets on social necessities such as economic development and buying homes.

Banks that became notorious for gambling billions on he international lottery of derivatives and toxic US property bundles are now too timid to do the job that they are supposed and for which their top executives continue to be very well rewarded.

The High Pay Commission reports that pay and bonuses for top executives are "out of control," outstripping employees' average pay rises and concentrating wealth on the richest 0.1 per cent of the population.

Top Barclays executive Bob Diamond was paid £4,365,636 last year while his Lloyds equivalent Eric Daniels left the company but still pocketed £2,572,000.

Such greed sickens most people, but Confederation of British Industry president Roger Carr thinks that the time has come for an end to the "demonisation" of banks and other businesses. Bless his tender skin.

Carr and his ilk expect the rest of us to continue being milked by the rich elite and to stop grumbling about it.

It probably is time indeed to end the grumbling and to opt for a more decisive approach of demanding that the banks and other vampire capitalist firms be taken into public ownership and directed to meet public need, such as council housebuilding, rather than the obscene profits enjoyed by the elite.