Social housing in expensive areas of England should be sold off and the money used to finance the building of new homes in cheaper areas, the think tank Policy Exchange says.
Neil O’Brien, (PPE Oxford – say no more …) director of the think tank Policy Exchange, said he does not believe anybody “has a right to live in the most expensive parts of town.”
“People do have a right to be housed but not in the very expensive areas,” he explained.
This of course almost sounds logical until you think about it more deeply.
It is actually a nasty ethnic cleansing method of maintaining high housing rent & prices whilst creating social division through social engineering with future catastrophic consequences of social unrest. Anyway Neil, who will do the odd jobs and clean the carpets of the rich?
So then, why don’t we have enough affordable housing to rent or to buy?
Argument 1 – Thatcher started the sale of social housing in the 1980’s under the banner “tenants right to buy”. What this actually did was to start the debt based property boom we are still suffering from today. When a young high earning couple earning say £75,000 between them, cannot afford a house, then ‘something’ is fundamentally wrong. That ‘something’ is that house prices are still artificially too high because political parties dare not let the “market” shrink any further because that affects GDP which affects the magical ‘growth’ monster the parties serve. The political parties dare not trust the voters with the truth.
Solution 1 – Announce that mortgage interest rates will go up to 4.5% in say 2 years time, and then stay there for 50 years. The artificially low interest rates set by the Bank of England (the government by another name) have maintained the personal and corporate debt mountains, therefore allowing the ridiculously named financial ‘services’ sector to keep creating artificial money and growth. The effect this will have is that inflated financial assets will decrease in value – a few banks and hedge funds will fail and the government will collect less taxes than they currently expect but we will all be better off after a few years because the relationship between money and value will be more realistic. Yes it will be painful – but there simply is no alternative – it will happen anyway, all I am suggesting is that we plan for it.
Argument 2 – Population growth has reached an unsustainable level in the the South East of England and the water supply for one will not support it. Any rational government would have realised the mistakes of privatising water and be actively pursuing a logical method of re-nationalising it. Even if that is achieved you stll have the prospect of unbridled population growth in all the wrong places. The EU mass free migration agreements are ridiculous.
Solution 2 – Leave the EU immediately whilst maintaining economic links (the EEC was a jolly good idea – the EU was not). We then have a chance to control immigration population growth – in the EU we have no practical control. Plan for water re-nationalisation – we just have to do it – even if it takes 50 years – it is simply the rational thing to do. I would do the same with the National Grid too, railways etc. – but that is slightly off topic.
The current tinkering with “social” housing is shallow, socially divisive and designed to maintain high rents for the new Russian and Chinese immigrants who are desperate to leave their own polluted and corrupt countries with their ill gotten gains.
Sorry – no jokes in this article – just had to write it because I cannot believe the shallow incompetence of the Tory coalition policy claptrap – grrr.