A Place to Stand

Iain Dale has ripped off Tony Benn in this idea of 8 things he would like to see next year. Here are mine:

1) Scotland starts achieving a growth rate greater than the UK average (preferably by ours going up rather than a UK recession which is on the cards).

2) Gordon Brown substantially cuts corporation tax (this would help UK growth. While this may seem a Tory policy Brown knows enough economics to know this would increase growth; he did cut the CT rate last year, though only by getting rid of the lower small busines rate; he needs to do something to look useful.

3) Start building nuclear power stations. (Probably only possible in England which will make us utterly dependent but better that than massive contiuous blackouts. It is probably to late to prevent some blackouts)

4) No war or genocide in Kosovo (This is probably the least likely. Alterntely if there is genocide it would be nice to see our media, for once, not censoring the fact)

5) The Chimese do something really big in space & this encourages everybody to take space development seriously (I think this is quite likely - China is clearly pulling out all the stops to look good over the Olympics & if they were to do something psectacular the the US plainly can't - launch a genuinely reuasble shuttle, start their own space station, land a vehicle on the Moon - a month either way they would certainly manage that).

6) Somebody start funding X-Prizes on a major scale. (I would rather it was an English speaking country but I would very much rather it be done at all)

7) House price fall due to builders being allowed to build more (Gordon Brown has called for an increase in housebuilding to build 3 million by 2020 - this a long step in the right direction - now he has to walk this walk.) This is quite different to a house price fall due to the collapse of a financial house of cards which has beeen built on the theory that house prices can only go up. It would have some of the same appearance & would require Alasdair Darling's successor to refrain from the temptation to pour hundreds of billions of our money into propping up banks. If he didn't do so some banks would be in trouble & probably get merged but the real productive economy would do well.

8) The Scottish Parliament decides the new Forth Bridge should be a tunnel, built by Norwegians, for the sort of price the Norwegians build tunnels for. (ie £40 million rather than £4,200 million - this is going to be my next campaign - if it succeeds then the Scottish Tunnels Project would be likely to follow fairly automaticly).