Has George Osborne learned NOTHING from the financial crisis?

Thanks to George Eaton for flagging up what George Osborne reportedly told the Cabinet recently:

“Hopefully we will get a little housing boom and everyone will be happy as property values go up.”

George Osborne believes that “Help to buy” is a political goldmine – despite what the polling says.

That’s despite the fact that poorly targeted cheap credit funding an unsustainable housing bubble a) is what got us into this crisis in the first place and b) bubbles eventually go *POP*. Thinking otherwise is the same kind of dangerous thinking that led Gordon Brown to declare he’d abolished boom and bust. He hadn’t. We went bust. The bubble will one day pop, just as sure as bust will surely follow boom. That has been a difficult but cruel lesson than many in the Labour Party have had to learn.

Yet George Osborne seems to have learned nothing from the mistakes that preceded the 2008 crash. Except this time it’s actually worse as the UK government becomes a major lender, helping artificially inflate house prices even further beyond their real value and making it even harder for “generation rent” to get on the housing ladder.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing but expecting a different outcome then Osborne’s housing plan is wilfully and deliberately and dangerously insane. But can we really expect better from someone who once believed that we could learn much from the Ireland’s “shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking”. One day the Irish housing bubble went *POP*.

If you’re trying to buy a house at the moment and prices are rising faster than you can put in an offer, or if you ever wanted to buy your own home but know the chances are becoming more remote by the day, that’s why…