Post by Totheleft on Feb 4, 2024 7:20:02 GMT
Tory social housing plan aims to prioritise ‘British homes for British workers’
Exclusive: Proposals to be put forward next month will favour UK citizens, but experts say they are likely to be illegal or unworkable
Britain's acute housing crisis has been allowed to get ever worse, in part because the wrong targets are persistently scapegoated for it. Migrants are a long-running target, of course; those deemed to be undeserving benefit claimants, such as teenagers mothers, are another traditional favourite. On one level, there is a perversely ingenious strategy at play. The more the government shrinks the nation’s council housing stock as a deliberate policy, the more those languishing on waiting lists feel as though they are competing for scarce resources, and the more they are incentivised to delegitimise other “competitors” as undeserving. The government is let off the hook.
Which brings me to the case of Labour backbencher Kate Osamor, who spent Christmas enduring a media storm because she declared that she was “proud, not ashamed” to be a council tenant. This is a disgrace, apparently, because someone on a parliamentarian’s salary should free up their house for the more deserving. This line of argument is not only wrongheaded, it goes some way to explaining why a housing crisis has enveloped Britain.
Hounding Osamor only lets the government off the hook for a housing crisis created in Number 10
First things first: the architects of the nation’s housing crisis sit in No 10. Housebuilding is at its lowest peacetime level since the 1920s.
3,000 and 8,000 social households whose residents earned more than £80,000 a year: bear in mind that there are more than 4 million remaining social houses in England and Wales. Evicting affluent social tenants from their homes wouldn’t even amount to a pinprick on the housing crisis.
But the logic of this argument is all wrong in any case. Nye Bevan’s ambitious postwar council house building programme rejected the idea that council housing should only be provided for those deemed to be “working class”. As he put it: “We should try to introduce in our modern villages and towns what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street. I believe that is essential for the full life of a citizen … to see the living tapestry for a mixed community.”
Edited by Moderator
Owen Jones in the Guardian
Exclusive: Proposals to be put forward next month will favour UK citizens, but experts say they are likely to be illegal or unworkable
Britain's acute housing crisis has been allowed to get ever worse, in part because the wrong targets are persistently scapegoated for it. Migrants are a long-running target, of course; those deemed to be undeserving benefit claimants, such as teenagers mothers, are another traditional favourite. On one level, there is a perversely ingenious strategy at play. The more the government shrinks the nation’s council housing stock as a deliberate policy, the more those languishing on waiting lists feel as though they are competing for scarce resources, and the more they are incentivised to delegitimise other “competitors” as undeserving. The government is let off the hook.
Which brings me to the case of Labour backbencher Kate Osamor, who spent Christmas enduring a media storm because she declared that she was “proud, not ashamed” to be a council tenant. This is a disgrace, apparently, because someone on a parliamentarian’s salary should free up their house for the more deserving. This line of argument is not only wrongheaded, it goes some way to explaining why a housing crisis has enveloped Britain.
Hounding Osamor only lets the government off the hook for a housing crisis created in Number 10
First things first: the architects of the nation’s housing crisis sit in No 10. Housebuilding is at its lowest peacetime level since the 1920s.
3,000 and 8,000 social households whose residents earned more than £80,000 a year: bear in mind that there are more than 4 million remaining social houses in England and Wales. Evicting affluent social tenants from their homes wouldn’t even amount to a pinprick on the housing crisis.
But the logic of this argument is all wrong in any case. Nye Bevan’s ambitious postwar council house building programme rejected the idea that council housing should only be provided for those deemed to be “working class”. As he put it: “We should try to introduce in our modern villages and towns what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street. I believe that is essential for the full life of a citizen … to see the living tapestry for a mixed community.”
Edited by Moderator
Owen Jones in the Guardian
