The political economy of housing and Left Unity: A note on the policy commission
Andrew McCormack reports from the housing discussions at Left Unity’s recent policy workshops conference:
I’ll readily admit to attending the recent Left Unity policy commission conference in Manchester with a heavy dose of cynicism. Past experience of leftist gatherings suggested the likelihood of a snooze-fest complete with pre-determined conclusions and interminable, one-way ‘contributions’ from representatives of all groupuscules and none.
It was an enormous pleasure, then, to take part in three intensive sessions that were open, reflective, self-critical yet determined. For me, the interaction between a wide variety of approaches and perspectives in the Economy, Electoral Strategy and Housing workshops was challenging and highly productive, a dynamic that hopefully is present in many of the local Left Unity groups. An excellent speaker made the Economy session a particular treat, but discussion was what made the day.
All this notwithstanding. At just 7 participants, the small size of the group looking at housing was striking — and of a piece with the very limited exchanges that have taken place so far on the policy commission forum for the topic. Now I know that everyone has a different area of particular interest that they think should be the most important and should take the most attention. I’ll try and avoid such special pleading for housing, since the other subjects covered on Saturday (as well as some that weren’t) are all essential for socialists to grapple with. But the notion that we face a housing crisis has entered the mainstream in the UK and it’s crystal clear that capitalist logics can’t meet the basic minimum of working class expectations in this area. Housing is an area of special weakness for the entire neoliberal project so it’s well worth grappling with some of its contradictions. We also can’t tackle climate change without taking control of housing production, as I’ll come on to
Housing: systemic failure1
The factors behind the widespread acknowledgement that housing is in crisis in Britain are easy to recognise. For the whole New Labour era falling stocks of council housing have combined with house prices rocketing away from stagnant incomes (excepting the mini-crash of prices in 2007-8). This has produced much overcrowding and homelessness, and many people finding themselves trapped paying high rents without security in often dilapidated conditions. The rapid increase in private renting and fall in home ownership has troubled even some Tories2, and threatens to make renting privately the only option for most working class and some middle class households. To illustrate the scale of potential discontent, as few as 2% of respondents told the Joseph Rowntree Federation they wanted to rent privately3 yet the number of households in this position stands at 17% and rising fast. Under-35s are now far more likely to be private renters than homeowners, a sharp reversal of the position only 10 years ago4.
Source: DCLG [UK Government]5
Council housing meanwhile has been eviscerated by privatisation: while individual properties have been flogged through the Right to Buy, often ending up in the possession of private landlords, wholescale and irreversible “transfer” to unaccountable Housing Associations has led to higher rents and a loss of democratic control over neighbourhoods. Only after much of the high-quality stock had been sold off were councils finally allowed to retain Right to Buy receipts, and in the absence of government finance or borrowing capacities councils have been prevented from building on any meaningful scale since the end of the 1980s.
The bad Keynesian conscience of Atlantic neoliberalism
All this is familiar territory to many. But what is perhaps less widely recognised is the exent of British capitalism’s dependence on the ponzi-like dysfunction of never-ending house price inflation. This was made possible through a huge expansion of “housing equity withdrawal” (HEW) – borrowing against the value of a home, or for owner-occupiers “the ATM on the side of your house”6. Aggregating from 1979 to 2011 HEW stood at a remarkable 89% of growth in the UK’s economic output7. As profit and the super-rich took the lion’s share of economic growth8 HEW offered the ideal temporary ‘fix’ for capital. Instead of paying workers enough to keep demand coursing through the economy (which cuts into profits), the people raking it in could lend homeowning workers money to buy more stuff that they’d pay back some other time. This speculative binge can last as long as everybody thinks real house prices will rise for ever. The problem, of course, with this ‘asset price Keynesianism’9 is that existing homeowners are only one side of the coin; for prices to rise new purchasers have to be able to pay ever more to get ‘on the ladder’. And since the whole point is incomes are being squeezed, there’s only one way to do that — you betcha, more debt! Lower interest and lower deposit mortgages became the norm in the New Labour boom years, and finance capital resorted to escalatingly desperate measures to keep the whole show on the road. All this had the additional impact of inflating the Housing Benefit bill in line with high rents10, the resultant welfare costs being deployed with shamelessness and regularity by right-wing scapegoaters.
And of course it became impossible even for the City, with its whizzkids, political connections and fraudsters, to maintain this epic web of illusion indefinitely11. The 2007-8 house price crash in the UK, and in the US and some of Europe still more dramatically, acted as a giant gear crunch in the global economy whose effects are still unfolding today. After a brief period of preaching abstinence the Tories are once again acting as dealer to finance capital’s speculation addiction, the Help to Buy cheap mortgage scheme widely expected to fuel “a short-lived property frenzy followed by the inevitable hangover”12.
It should be noted that such a system of escalating debt that is essentially secured against itself is only possible through chronic and severe under-supply of housing. However valuable it may be to a powerful group of capitalists, speculation on a commodity will not happen if its production is flexible enough to be increased until the price falls to the cost of its ‘inputs’ (wages, fixed capital, raw materials and profit). Marxists refer to this as the exchange value but the concept is common to most analysts of capitalism — as is the alternative situation, rent extraction. It is estimated that as many as 300,000 new properties are needed every year13, a level that new building never came close to even at the height of the 2000s boom:
Source: Centre for Cities14
What is impressively clear from this graph is that private sector building in the UK has never provided anything like the number of homes now required and we can confidently expect that it never will. A fixed supply of buildable land, combined with an extreme inequality in land ownership and planning restrictions that reduce developer profits, make it possible for the handful of big private sector house builders to build at below demand levels and increase the value of their holdings. New entrants to the market are unable to undercut their oligarchic competitors because of a lack of access to land and the resources to build large sites. Some capitalists and their Tory spokespeople are very excited by the possibility of a radical removal of planning restrictions, and it is true that this could hold back price inflation by increasing housing supply. But far from being a progressive solution, this would disastrously eliminate the small amount of democratic control over quality of urban (and rural) environment and infrastructure that we currently have.
It is apparent too that despite all the advantages given to Housing Associations in recent years they too have proved unable/unwilling to develop at the required levels. Public sector building can supply at large scale on the basis of need, not realisation of profit. Therefore in the UK Local Authority house building is the only reliable means of providing a massive quantitative increase at decent quality.
So the point of all this isn’t just that we should campaign tirelessly to build more houses because we need them, important as this is. It’s also that doing so would create a serious challenge to the British model of capitalism, whilst pointing to an alternative and anti-capitalist rationality.
Economic criticism from the left and the right
To the kind of people who take note of these kind of things, I’ll happily confirm that what I’m suggesting here is a programme of mass public home building within capitalism. Some socialists15 maintain that any substantial measure of social democracy is now impossible, because doing so would cut into capitalist profits so much that there would be a devastating economic crisis with the result that the reform would either be abandoned, or capitalism would be transformed into socialism (depending on the state of class struggle). I don’t agree with this.
Although achieving 250,000+ new council homes a year would undoubtedly take a huge political fight, an economic crisis would not necessarily ensue in a radical political-economic analysis , because the way profit is made out of housing rests primarily on rent and not value-producing labour. That is to say, ending this source of profit ends the distribution of productive value from one part of the system to developers/landlords; it does not threaten productive capitals with bankrupcy. Still since I’m all in favour of abolishing capitalism too the attraction of what is proposed lies in an ideological challenge to capitalist rationality, and the existence of an identifiable social base for this struggle. This especially is important given the conjuncturally low level of working class organisation and solidarity that we are currently faced with, both within the UK and (more acutely still) across national borders.
Ironically, much the same answer can be given to objections from the social democratic right, although of course it would be expressed a little differently. The essential point is that speculation, rent-seeking and bureaucracy16 are endemic to the housing market and mainly-private provision is deeply economically inefficient/non-productive.
What kind of housing programme should socialists campaign for?
The principles of Left Unity housing policy have already had some debate on the internet forum, and at the policy commission event. I found some of the ideas put forward exciting and there should be much more debate to come. I’m certainly not intending to gainsay this process here so this is only a summary of my own views on the policy area.
- Massive scale public building programme: only homes built and owned by the public sector can offer decent housing for the majority. A minimum of 250,000 new homes per year will be needed from Councils for the foreseeable future.
- Climate change: more than a quarter of CO2 emissions in the UK are from housing17. This can be drastically reduced through universally high new build standards and top quality retrofitting for millions of properties a year18. Both these are bare minimum requirements if we’re to have a chance of averting climate disaster.
- Skilled, productive work: apprenticeships and better paid jobs are integral to a mass building programme. Many more workers are also needed with the specialist skills required to build and retrofit sustainable, low-carbon homes19, and to bring back many thousands of often-dilapidated empty homes20.
- Democratic and community management: the nature of housing management is often oppressive, prioritizing rent collection and punitive approaches to neighbourhood problems over facilitation for our communities to self-manage. A new liberatory approach is needed that can learn from radical approaches to social work and teaching. Democratic regulation of rent levels and tenants’ rights is also needed urgently in the private sector.
- Land and property appropriation in London: there can be no adequate housing for most Londoners as long as the value of land is inflated to an extreme by the spare cash of the super rich. The ludicrous mansions and penthouses21 are more than bizarre symbols of spatial exploitation, they’re a barrier to a humane built environment in the city and they need to make way for something else entirely22.
- Rebuild working class identity and action: one perceptive contribution on the 28th highlighted that we need a “strategy for class consciousness”. I’ve argued elsewhere that housing can contribute to such a strategy23 since home ownership undermines collective consciousness whereas council housing can promote solidarity and class identification.
Technocratic utopia?
Finally I want to defend these proposals as fruitful campaigning demands, not abstract utopian dreaming. No amount of careful analysis or “reasonable” argument on this or any other political matter will induce those currently controlling the British state to make major concession against the interest of capital. Nor would simply replacing the government through electing left wing politicians.
What is useful is thinking of housing in terms of a vision, as an important part of a transformation that could take place “organically and dialectically from a process of radical reform set in motion by a socialist government”24 (in Ed Rooksby’s phrase).
The organic aspects of this process are not principally about elections but centre on organisation and struggles: against neoliberal structures of domination and for provision by need in place of profitability. Left Unity can be at the forefront of building and rebuilding tenants’ campaigns, advice and support networks and community action against eviction over the long-term. Many of us are already part of fights against the bedroom tax, which the Tories are desperate to keep despite a solid majority of public opposition25. Housing is a terrain where we can demonstrate the value of socialist ideas like solidarity, self-organisation and participatory democracy. We can link the struggles of tenants with efforts to radicalize and expand the trade unions of workers in council housing and benefits. This would be a sharp departure from what most of the left has practised in recent years, and suggests the possibility of a principled but non-dogmatic party that can (over time) become an important section of working class political action.
1 With apologies for the parochialism, housing in Britain is the subject of this article. Through a combination of economic structures and social policy the way housing is provided varies dramatically between different capitalist economies – e.g. the relative desirability of private renting across much of northern Europe. Northern Ireland, it should also be noted, has many differences to Britain and merits further attention in its own right.
2 e.g. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2351471/Generation-Rent-cost-Conservatives-votes-warns-think-tank-home-ownership-falls-lowest-levels-Thatcher.html
4http://www.cchpr.landecon.cam.ac.uk/Downloads/RF%20Shelter%20Final%20Report%20May%2031%202012%20rev.pdf
6 The sums produced through housing equity withdrawal have two destructive side-effects: 1) increasing the power and profits of banks considerably, and 2) making homeowners still more dependent on rising house prices.
10 more detail on this at e.g. http://england.shelter.org.uk/professional_resources/policy_and_research/policy_library/policy_library_folder/bricks_or_benefits_rebalancing_housing_investment
13http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/300000-extra-homes-need-to-be-built-every-year-to-curb-housing-crisis-urges-report-8227467.html
15 e.g. http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=761 , http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/thatcher-there-was-no-alternative/ or http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/post_work_zombie_social_democracy_with_a_human_face
16 In the banks’ mortgage policies as well as the planners’ decision-making.
18 For more information see for example the recent report “Zero Carbon Britain”, pp40-46. http://www.zcb2030.org/index.php/report
19http://www.campaigncc.org/greenjobs ; http://www.greennewdealgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Green-New-Deal-5th-Anniversary.pdf
21 one estate agent selling up to a cool £24m at the time of writing: http://www.foxtons.co.uk/properties/uk-london-apartments-290/apartments-for-sale-in-london.html
23http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/building_a_new_world_and_tearing_it_down_british_working_class_housing_sinc
16 comments
16 responses to “The political economy of housing and Left Unity: A note on the policy commission”
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An excellent article – and an issue that must be at the heart of the LU “Policy offer”. A critical point you make, in amongst the rest of your cogent analysis, is that Left Unity must not hold to an ultraleft position that any significant degree of reform is today totally impossible – and only “revolution” offers any way forward at all. As your article on the UK housing crisis correctly says, the UK capitalist state can easily “afford” to unlock the local authority ability to borrow on the Money Markets (currently at rock bottom rates) and build hundreds of thousands of new council houses – given sufficient mass popular pressure to adopt such a policy. That they won’t do is partly ideological, and partly because only inadequate housing supply is supporting the renewed cynically created housing bubble – by a government so bereft of genuine economic growth strategies that this ,( bound to burst) bubble is their one “big idea” to try and create an illusion of growth prior to the 2015 General Election.
We need more , easy to grasp, but well argued articles like this on our site – to arm LU supporters with the vital facts to answer the dominant neoliberal bullshit which saturates the mass media – and hence the ideas in most of our fellow citizen’s heads.
Yes, very interesting and useful. I was at the housing workshop and found it most refreshing. Is the system able to absorb a mass programme of council house building or not? In one sense who cares? We always start from the needs of the oppressed and take on the political barriers placed in our way as we go along. But let us get started, this should be a high profile campaign by LU. In the process we sweep away all the junk about asylum seekers, refugees jumping the queue etc. Adequate housing for all; a simple enough demand to make, and in the context of a wheel coming off the bedroom tax we are well placed to seize the initiative.
Very kind comments, thank you John! Very much appreciated. Council borrowing with rock bottom interest is an important point since I ommitted to state a way of funding all these terrific new houses that I’m asking for.
It would be great to see some more practical/policy pieces linked to the strategic debates that are going on.
It’s amazing really that so many in Britain seem willing to buy into another, much weaker, dose of what lead to the whole economic collapse once already. The forces producing those ideologies are highly effective I guess….
A useful article. I think housing has been neglected as an issue by the Left for a very long time. It is one of those issues that requires long term patient work and I think that has not fitted in with a tendency to chase the latest eye-catching issue that has plagued the Left for years. However, affordable decent housing is one of the central issues for ordinary working class people and especially so for youth who can’t afford to rent in the private sector let alone buy somewhere.
Also I’m pleased with the central mention of climate change in this piece. I was discussing housing, in passing, just a couple of days ago in comments on an article on Climate change. See: http://leftunity.org/a-wake-up-call-on-climate-change/
Still on the theme of putting key political issue , well explained, arguments and analysis up on our site , to arm ourselves with the information needed to demolish the neoliberal consensus claims : we could do with an article explaining the sheer scale of tax avoidance by both companies and superrich in the UK (easily enough lost tax revenue to match the entire “savings” targets of the entire “Austerity Offensive”). Private Eye magazine covers this area very well every issue – and the figures involved are always staggering – but are never totalled up on an annualised basis. I’ll cobble together an article myself if necessary – but a supporter/member out there may already have the facts at their fingertips ?
Yes such a piece would be terrific! I for one have a shortcoming of knowledge on this topic that should really be addressed. And of course that is something that even mainstream commentators/politicians can’t ignore any longer.
This article tears me up inside. I am a signatory to the Socialist Platform and have argued consistently on these pages that there is no way back to the reforms of the past, yet the argument here sketches a strategy forward which embraces a frontal challenge to neoliberal policies, austerity, the lack of unity between trade unions and tenants / private renters and people struggling with mortgages and the practice failures of the Left. That is what I find beguiling.
The core pragrpah around how this is possible seems to be:
“Although achieving 250,000+ new council homes a year would undoubtedly take a huge political fight, an economic crisis would not necessarily ensue in a radical political-economic analysis , because the way profit is made out of housing rests primarily on rent and not value-producing labour. That is to say, ending this source of profit ends the distribution of productive value from one part of the system to developers/landlords; it does not threaten productive capitals with bankrupcy”.
I am not sure that making this distinction between productive and finance capital takes us to an argument which can be taken forward successfully in a public arena in which there is wall-to-wall consensus from Labout to UKIP that there is no alternative to cutting public spending in order to cut the deficit. What is not explained is where the loans would come from, apart from the part, repeated by John Penney, which suggests unlocking “the local authority ability to borrow on the Money Markets”. The money market rates may be low but the 10 to 12 year repayment terms of Bank of England bonds are a safer bet.
Productive and finance capital tend nowadays to be either fused or else finance capital completely dwarfs whatever manufacturers are able to invest from within their own profits. To a large extent, finance capital is capitalism today and its entire post-1970s strategy has been to drive public expenditure and wages down so that it can take more and more.
A third alternative would seem to be to link this to Prince Charles’ suggestion that Pension Fund managers invest, not in ‘quaterely capitalism’, but in long-term social investments. Now, the Left has never talked about investiment as I recall. Such a campaign could link up pension contributors to the proto alliance already mentioned.
But the first line of defence against it would still be none other than the core political assumption of our age – that bringing down the deficit is vital to the prospects of econimc growth and a way out of this crisis – and it would be put forward loudly by every spokesperson from Labour to UKIP. This means that, at this point, we would have then to start arguing an alternative radical economic policy.
Unless and until LU has a radical economic policy which is compelling and credible, every good initiative like this for a particular sector or issue faces exactly the same problem as soon as it gets debated outside the Left, including within the working class.
Thanks for these comments John and apologies that I haven’t had time to respond to the debate on the other thread. I should say that economists like Michael Roberts and Andrew Kliman have forced me into more serious consideration of the different kinds of reforms/demands/transitional proposals that we might think about fighting for. Likewise the platform debate. So although there’s been some understandable frustration on all sides (and none!) hopefully it has had the effect of making positions a bit more robust.
The finance/industrial capital fusion is an interesting one. I don’t think many Marxists have grappled adequately with the implications of this, what happens to our analysis of capitalism when the primary focus of captial is not necessarily “self-expanding value”, or the extraction of surplus value, but a mix of bureaucratic and gambling techniques to acquire the value already produced? (of course this has always been a feature of capitalism – but does it weigh far more now?) Anyway I suppose that’s a kind of seperate topic.
The other thing about the difficulties you raise is I think we need a way to some how deploy radical policy proposals that are something more than simple demands, without getting sidelined into technocratic assumptions or neglecting the centrality of struggle for any kind of advance. What might be helpful is to improve how we use our analysis of capitalism to build positions that we can mobilise around, given the current domination of neoliberal ideologies and practices, and focus theoretical work on what could potentially provide a “bridge” to a stronger working class.
Just a note further to my point about using the BoE bond market to fund this, we could argue, thereby bringing in another issue, that instead of issuing Quantitaive Easing bonds to banks, which so far has resulted in no increase in investment, Local Authorites should be ther preferred destination, so that houses can be built.
Both this and funding this from pension funds are viable policy proposals. The first does not involve any extra public spending and the second involves replacing one part of existing QE with something more appealing.
However, this only partly obviates the need to confront the issue of the deficit with a compelling and credible alternative.
Absolutely agree with you John on both your suggestions for possible alternative sources of funds for a massive house building (and hence also a massive new skilled employment creating) programme. Though actually the potential sources are legion – and all are potentially politically popular, eg, various bank profits and bonuses levies, simply closing the yawning “loopholes” in the taxation of big corporation and the superrich, new land transfer taxes, for a start – as well as the sources you mention.
Also totally agree that we desperately need a credible joined up radical Left economic strategy to knit it all together. On page 3 of this site the Sept 25th article on the recent new radical economists booklet “Building an Economy for the People” has a fair go at such a joined up Plan. I thought it was pretty good (although it ducks the vital issue of political restructuring on the Left). any views on that ?
There will be a riposte from some that “only complete socialist revolution can solve the crisis of capitalism” . I actually agree , longterm, but if we propose nothing in the medium term but “revolution” we wouldn’t even bother supporting workers on strike for better conditions or higher pay, “because this merely perpetuates the condition of wage slavery “. The simple fact is that, even in the midst of a systemic capitalist crisis some meaningful reforms, and betterment of working class conditions are still potentially possible – if mass pressure is forceful enough. If we are to build mass support , through struggle for potentially achievable, apparently “reasonable” objectives we have to have credible short and medium term reformist demands and strategies contained within a transformational (but not essentially “revolutionary”) economic Plan. We just have to always understand, as a radical rather than collaborationist Left Party, that there will always come a point where the capitalist class and their state will obstruct that democratically mandated Plan’s implementation. Then we are in a very different ballgame. Not today though.
Sorry, but I think you’ve not thought this through at all. The housing market is key to the livelihoods of millions of workers in this country, but nobody has mentioned them. I’m talking about people like me, who have just spent the last 25 years struggling to pay off a mortgage.
Yes, I bought into the Thatcher idea of buying a house. At the time it was so much cheaper than renting, and my endowment policy promised a welcome nest-egg at the end. Needless to say that has morphed into a shortfall, and I will have to bite into my pension just to get my hands on the deeds.
Building 250,000+ new council homes a year is an absolute requirement to meet the housing needs of the working class. But how can you do that without bursting the bubble in the housing market? And that will affect millions of workers – who will vote for a party that will take away their only wealth asset?
Think about it. We need to plan for a new ‘Housing Settlement’ where owner-occupied houses are priced at the cost of construction. We need to win all the working class to this policy, so some package will be necessary, compensation for ‘nationalising’ the housing market.
Thatcher and her successors have used mortgages to atomise the working class, to remove solidarity and disarm the strike weapon. Sorting out housing is much bigger than building houses – getting the right policies will help to rebuild the fighting spirit of our class. Personally, I can’t see any pro-capitalist government going anywhere near meeting our demands for this very reason. Who would have thought it – housing! a revolutionary demand.
You are quite right of course Vernon, that building hundreds of thousands of new houses , and refurbishing old ones, to top class energy efficient standards, sufficient to abolish the current dire housing shortage in the UK, would destroy the ludicrous shortage-based overvalue “housing bubble” feature of our economy of the last 30 years or so.
That this “unsustainable “property price bubble economy” is a recipe for repeated “bursting bubble” property price crashes and directly related banking collapses, was clear to everyone in 2008 – but already the new housing price bubble created by the government’s mortgage subsidy scheme is growing apace ! It is quite clear that the current property bubble is even more tenuous than the one that burst so disastrously in 2007/08 – and will certainly have burst in a couple of years – so unrelated is its impact on the very misleading “growing GDP” figures that Osborne is boasting about, to any genuine growth in the UK’s productive capacity.
The absolute certainty of another housing bubble crash and related banking crash in just a few years time will make a serious commitment to build masses of new council houses, for rent at affordable levels, seem very appealing to the masses of working class people who by then will be back into negative equity, and finding it hard to continue to pay their mortgages, as wage freezes and unemployment continues indefinitely – under the Tories OR Labour.
In an even slightly rational capitalist housing market the house a family buys should require a mortgage only around , at most, three times that family’s annual income – rather than the extraordinary repayment burden more usual today – so over time the average price of housing for the ordinary person will simply have to fall by at least a third. It’s a grim reality – and one that the politicians of the major parties know is an ideological and economic timebomb – for both the politicians who engineered the UK’s long term overvalued housing market, and all those who bought, willingly, or by necessity, into the spurious Thatcherite “everyone a homeowner” project – that destroyed our national stock of affordable good quality social housing. And yes that includes ME, just the same as you, Vernon !
The “everyone a homeowner” dream is already in ruins of course, with a major new rapacious landlord class set fair to hoover up larger and larger swathes of what was originally council housing stock – as the “Right to Buy” ex council tenants are increasingly dispossessed of their homes as they fail to keep their mortgage payments up. Left Unity has to orient its economic policies towards the working class increasingly being dispossessed of their “Right to Buy” acquired houses, and also those landed with unsustainable mortgages from the years of ” No Deposit – 125%- Self Certificated income” mortgages – also facing homelessness – in ever increasing numbers.
The only way to break the toxic cycle of repeated housing price bubbles and bursts is to undertake to build a massive new public housing supply. A policy of massive , affordable rent, guaranteed secure tenancy, Social Housing construction, will seem even more attractive to a ever widening circle of working class people as the next few years pass – and yet another property and banking crash eventuates from the Coalition’s totally irresponsible housing bubble-based , unproductive, personal debt-based economic stimulus.
A possible policy addition by Left Unity to appeal to working people facing losing their homes because of an inability to repay their mortgages could be a programme of “local authority property acquisition/BUY-Back” or Thatcher’s “Right to Buy” put into reverse – whereby under a LU government local authorities would be able to secure the finances (from the numerous ways discussed on this thread already) to directly purchase homes up to value of, say, £300,000 (with a London extra weighting) – with a guarantee that the existing occupants would be awarded permanent tenancy- at a reasonable rental. In other words we need to provide a different, socialist “social housing” alternative route to the current actual fast developing pathway for housing in the UK – ever further away from the 1980’s Thatcherite “everyone a homeowner” Tory dream – to most working people actually ever faster becoming super exploited tenants of the new emerging super landlord class.
Dave – thanks, and exactly! My hope is that a critical mass has been reached of working class households who have no stake in the way housing now works in Britain so building an effective movement on it could be possible. I certainly appreciated your comments on the climate change artice, it’s something that I would like to see featuring more prominantly for Left Unity. And on the left in general, I think it’s fair to say — unions should have been much more forthright in linking “a million climate jobs” type campaigning to anti-austerity work.
Hi Bob, I completely agree, the point about scapegoating is a really important one. It would be great to see this taken up more seriously across Left Unity! Would be good also to have a chance to discuss things in person again soon, maybe someone like Owen Hatherley could be persuaded to lead off a seminar or something….
BROKEN BRITISH POLITICS –EXEMPTIONS FOR BEDROOM TAX IN IRELAND (11/10/13) A deal to pave the way for the introduction of the bedroom tax in Northern Ireland is due to be announced ‘within weeks’, senior political sources have said. Inside Housing reported in August that a behind closed doors deal had been reached with the Treasury that existing tenants should be exempt from the penalty. Sources within first minister Peter Robinson’s office have said a deal is ‘close to being announced’, after months of negotiations with the UK Treasury. The Northern Irish Government has the power to decide its own package of welfare reforms, but will have to foot the bill if it deviates from Westminster policy. A welfare reform bill is awaiting consent from the executive before being bought before the assembly. The Chartered Institute of Housing said it had lobbied for the policy not to affect existing tenants, and to only hit those new tenants with two or more spare bedrooms. Cecilia Keaveney director of CIH Northern Ireland, said: ‘The best solution would be for the bedroom tax not to be introduced, but if it has to be we recommended ways to mitigate it.Is the reason behind this because the People of Northern Ireland have a voice on their side.
http://brokenbritishpolitics.simplesite.com
Excellent article. Very well laid out and as someone else said, sketches a vision. Shared!
Since Engels wrote the Housing Question there has always been a crisis.
When soldiers came home after WW1 they needed housing and could only get it if they squatted. After WW2 the state frightened of revolution sweeping Europe embarked on an ambitious council house programme. Once Russia was on its way out it did everything in its power to reverse the previous gains.
The rapid expansion of the EU to 27 states, the growth of single unit households (due to a variety of factors one of which is de-industrialisation, part time temporary contracts and 7 day a week working all working against young families) has led to enormous pressures on housing in particular in London where old Victorian houses were converted en masse to flats (govt subsidies under Thatcher in early 80’s) and new builds are certainly smaller and more expensive to maintain (with rentier parasitical management agencies which charge as much if not more in annual amounts as council tax).
The opening up of the London market to the world (no more capital controls) to house purchases and remortgages (on existing house purchases) has created an inflationary house price spiral the likes of which haven’t existed since Germany in the 20’s. At the bottom end of the market the minimum wage plus transport costs and housing costs ensure it is impossible realistically to rent your own place for over more than a decade and a half now and living in rooms or sharing rooms for many has become the norm. Up until recently you could purchase but the house price spiral meant that became impossible after wages in relation to house price rices have become a bit like the old Brazilian gini coefficient in terms of wealth vs poverty. A young worker of today needs between £25-50k just to get a foot in the ladder and on the wages one is expected to receive that could take a decade or more to raise.
This situation will only get worse and worse. The overbuilding in London hasn’t reduced those on housing waiting lists it has only made it worse and it is set to get worse and worse. The agenda in my eyes is to create another Japan in the UK, adding another 40-50million people in smaller and smaller units which all belong to the private sector but which get cross subsidies (Quantative Easing, working tax credits, slimmed down Housing Benefit etc.)