21st Century Saviour : Prime Minister Alfred Muggins!

21/7/24 (1/8/24)

Alfred becomes Prime Minister in the Modern Age, winning contests within the Labour Party and becoming their leader. He had already developed some plans, partly in the light of his experiences in Henry VIII’s time, and particularly from the period when he ruled as Henry, and although it all ended in some chaos, it nonetheless stood him in good stead for running the country in the modern period. It was actually much easier in the Modern Age, as computers had by now been invented, which meant all information required to rule, was actually at your fingertips, so to speak. Also there was plenty of good advice from many advisors and ‘think tanks’, who were not afraid to have their heads cut off, and who therefore gave fairly independent advice, instead of just the advice you wanted to hear (Although many of them were funded by lobbying groups who were not entirely independent!).

   One mainstay of his ambitious policy to put the whole economy back in the hands of real people, just like you and me, was to legislate rents for different sizes etc. of property, allowing for some regional variations. The landlord classes were obviously not competent to manage their own ‘market’ fairly, as they largely just placed the rents at generous rates in order to enrich themselves, as no one was stopping them. Due to shortages of property they found they could make people grateful to pay high rents, even though so many of them were extortionate (and tended to enable them to pay off their buy to let mortgages!) Wealthy foreigners would no longer be able to buy UK properties when they were not going to be living in them themselves, And they would therefore not be allowed to buy large numbers of them, even if they did have loads of cash!

    Alfred optimistically thought he had the solutions to most people’s fundamental economic problems, and with a nice anti Tory majority in parliament all of a sudden it looked as if the final stages of the economic reformation would now be possible. All he had to do was to get the politicians to put their money where their mouth was, so to speak, and he would be on track to bringing in the most sensible and sweeping beneficial reforms which had ever been adopted in Britain, at least, and probably in all of the world.

    But alas he had not bargained on the self serving Members Of Parliament and of course also the Property mad House Of Lords, on all ‘sides’ of the Houses, who of course, (how had he not realized?), had rental properties themselves, which they were steadily stuffing with tenants the longer they remained on reasonable incomes in parliament. They actually had such a vested interest, whichever Party they were with, in making their own easy money off rents that there was actually no way to make them actually vote themselves out of all this easy money. They would nod, and make platitudes of consent and sympathy, but when it actually came to voting they would find loopholes and reasons to delay any changes to the rules, or to put off voting for chaos, or against landlords’ needs to make a ‘fair profit’ out of their houses. (But what about the poor tenants who were having two or even three jobs to just make the exorbitant rents, which had unfortunately become standard, particularly in recent years.)