Ashley Pomeroy notes the Beeb’s disgust with the emancipation of the huddled masses of the estates from sharecropping by that wicked Thatcher – or the right to buy.
On the left is the news report from the time – read it and weep at how neutral-ish it seems compared to now.
Look at the blue boxed editorial – and wake up:
“Many people who bought their homes under Thatcher’s “Right-to-Buy” scheme are now struggling to pay for the upkeep of their properties which are no longer maintained by local authorities.
The controversial scheme has also dramatically reduced the number of available council homes and there is now a huge shortage of social housing across the UK.
Since the introduction of the scheme in 1980 there have been major changes to the size of the discount tenants are eligible for. The maximum discount is 60% of the home’s value or £38,000, whichever is greater.
In many areas of the UK the scheme has been abused and there are now strict regulations about when tenants can resell their property after purchasing it at a discount.” (emphasis added)
If they can’t keep up the payments, they can always sell.
Pity the poor local authorities – forced to lay off slack bloated civil servants who batten off the working taxpayer when the work of telling tenants what colour to paint their homes dried up. I suppose those local authority workers probably did help stem the tide of pebble dashing and gnomes, marks of aspirational Thatcher voting Little England in White City.
This whole lack of affordable housing malarky is pure nonsense – sure housing is expensive in the UK, but the great majority of people do have somewhere to live. “Social housing” is just another euphemism for soaking the working middle class to subsidise those who slacked off at school.
“Abuse” would appear to be what my aunt (who works two jobs) did with her ex-council house – mortgaged it to buy an apartment in Spain. Oh these poor workers, seduced in their false consciousness by the wicked capitalist system…when will they learn that their betters in Islington have worked out how best they should live?
“This whole lack of affordable housing malarky is pure nonsense”
You really all live in an alternate world of 4×4 jeeps, holidays in the med twice a year, property development, social climbing parties, £60 grands a year bank jobs…don’t you?
Get in the real world, toffs.
“”Social housing” is just another euphemism for soaking the working middle class to subsidise those who slacked off at school”
Did they all slack off at school? What, all of them? Aren’t some of them children? Don’t some of them have physical/mental disabilities? Don’t some of them work bloody hard at menial jobs because they weren’t academically gifted? (not like you high flying geniuses).
You people make me puke.
There is a lack of affordable housing and is causing considerable hardship especially for first time buyers and the young. However, I don’t think it’s anything to do with the absence of council housing, nor a lack of housing generally. It’s simply a bubble which began when money fled stocks in the aftermath of the tech stock crash and went for the safe haven of bricks and mortar. The housing bubble will pop in due course, causing hardship for recent buyers and bargains for others. No government seems able to control it.
Shaun,
I couldn’t survive on 60 grand a year.
All those bills, mobile telephone ripoffs, dvd’s replacing videos, plasma screens replacing colour CRT tellies, decent motors instead of old bangers, whats a right to buy AT A HUGE DISCOUNT chap to do.
Some people say I can’t sell my former council house because although I spent a fortune on installing fake oak beams, a stable door at the front with a nice wagon wheel in the garden, it’s in the wrong place.
I have to point out that the “news report from the time” is also a brand new piece of writing; it has been written in the style of old news, rather than being a genuinely old piece of news reporting. I made this clear in my submission.
My gripe was that the supposedly objective postmortem gave a totally negative impression of the legislation, with no balance at all; I genuinely do not know if the outcome of the right-to-buy legislation was good or bad, but I can tell when someone is trying to impose their views on the historical record. Even if the legislation really was disastrous, the postmortem is too loaded to trust.
I want to distance myself totally from the commentary regarding council houses. I grew up in a council house and I earn nowhere near enough to apply for a mortgage; my parents live in a council house and they aren’t lazy. I am precisely the demographic that is now having enormous problems trying to find somewhere to live. I am not so hard-up or threatened that I can apply for the few council houses that still exist, but I earn nowhere near enough to apply for a mortgage, no matter what special scheme Gordon Brown comes up with. It is ironic that a Labour government could preside over a situation whereby housing is out of reach of all but the well-off.
My personal view is that the right-to-buy scheme seems thoroughly sensible; but that it needs to be counterbalanced by an influx of new housing, otherwise there will be no long term benefit. It will be as if Robin Hood had robbed from the rich to give to the poor until the rich had nothing left.
Hi AP,
Yep, I agree the comments about council houses were a bit OTT. There is a problem with the price of houses but the problem can’t hardly be what someone did 26 years ago. Where the price of an asset is skyrocketing with no corresponding increase in supply, that’s a dead giveaway for politicians at work.
Prescott is the main offender, but there are plenty of other idiots out there. Bottom line: if the car market was run like the housing market, Ford would only be allowed to produce two-seater sports cars, they”d have to have square wheels and braille controls, and they’d have to give one in ten away to Algerian asylum seekers.
The problem isn’t lack of government intervention, it’s way too much.
Ashley,
It is ironic that a Labour government could preside over a situation whereby housing is out of reach of all but the well-off.
Not really. Labour relies on the votes of the poor and disadvantaged, so it is in Labour’s electoral interest to keep on creating as much poverty and disadvantage as possible. This is why the gap between rich and poor always widens under Labour governments, and always narrows under Conservative ones. It’s in Conservative interests to make people more prosperous, and in Labour’s to make them less so. Conservative governments that fail to deliver on this get voted out.
Labour fans racism for the same reason. Why do you think Labour is so keen to let in unemployable immigrants and put them in crappy housing in ghettoes? It’s called ‘multiculturalism’, and it means votes for Labour.
This is why Labour is quite happy to see house prices rocket beyond the reach of its supporters. It creates grievance, which in turn creates electoral advantage. If poverty and racism were eradicated overnight, who do you think would lose out at the polls?
Labour voted against council house sales because they hated the idea of people becoming independent of the state and joining the propertied middle class (whom they also hate).
Selling council houses to their occupants was the biggest redistribution of wealth ever undertaken in this country and it took, of course, a Conservative government to do it. The first female PM was a Conservative and the first black PM will also be a Conservative.
Basically the mental illness called Leftism runs on jealousy. It’s in the interests of the lefty ruling class to create as much to be jealous about as possible to ensure their continued vampirism of the wealth creating few.
Rob,
Correct, but isn’t it interesting that the typical lefty, while being driven merely by base and disgusting economic envy of people who are harder-working and more intelligent, also needs to feel holier-than-thou about his hatred?
Chief,
Still fighting the class war?
If you lefty types would free up land and allow people to build houses, there would be no housing crisis.
I’ve never been called a ‘toff’ before. You have no idea, mate.
Go back to channel 4 and watch yet more repeats of the Simpsons.
And grow up.
Sorry, toff was too extreme.
Yuppie will suffice.
As for fighting the class war, well, I’d call it a retaliatory gesture after the complete denigration of those in this country who, for whatever reason, live in council houses.
If you want to see an example of class war, look at how Biased BBC consistently demeans those on the bottom end of the economic scale.
Many people who bought their homes under Thatcher’s “Right-to-Buy” scheme are now struggling to pay for the upkeep of their properties which are no longer maintained by local authorities.
Anyone who owns a property has to pay for its upkeep but by doing so they maintain an asset that has and will continue to increase in value. It should also be mentioned that councils often let property they own go to seed.
The class war is fueled by socialistic parasitism.
Chief Wiggum – kindly desist from tarnishing the whole of Biased BBC with the words of one particular poster from the other side of the planet.
I, for one, disassociate myself entirely from Toby’s comments – to my mind they are ill-considered and immature, and do Biased BBC no credit, but that is not a reason for you to attack everything and everyone else.
I wish that the post had been written differently and better – the underlying BBC ‘On This Day’ page is certainly in need of a proper fisking rather than the hasty treatment it has been given in this post.
I’m confused. How can helping people own their own homes be bad? On this side of the pond we call it ‘the American Dream’.
Sorry, toff was too extreme.
Yuppie will suffice.
Chief Wiggum | 20.12.05 – 3:18 pm | #
If only you knew.
I personally don’t see why people on low wages should recieve coucil housing in premium areas of London(e.g. the middle of Bloomsbury), when other people who work longer hours in higher paying jobs cannot afford to live in similar locations.
I do agree with key workers being given such housing, as it is far cheaper than paying them properly.
As someone who works within the housing market I believe one of the key driving forces in the recent price boom/crisis/shortage is the ability of buy-to-let investors to get tax relief on mortgage interest set against rent.
Result is a flood of investor money in the last few years snapping up every other first time buyer property that comes on the market.
Odd for a Labour government to be subsidising millionaire property investors in this way. A high proportion of such mortgages are interest only for this reason, encouraging high borrowing and keeping first timer buyers out of the market.
Doubt Brown would dare pull the plug at this stage of the market cycle though.
So all of the sound and fury is merely at the provocative statement about social housing. I take the point that not all of those who receive welfare (that’s what “social’ housing in fact is) slacked off at school, although a awful lot of them do (and never thought it anyway – Hayek allowed for a minimal safety net – but the failure of such housing in Silicon Valley – where the free market prices lower than social housing now that the tech sector has crashed is proof of Mises’ central point about state price fixing), but at base of this rhetorical overstatement is more than a kernel of truth (and remember, I am not asking for anyone’s taxes to post my biased stuff).
Where else does the money to build this sort of housing come from? – increased allocation of the resources of better off people who are forced to pay more for things to transfer wealth to others.
Where I live is irrelevant – and pointing it out a naughty rhetorical trick. I have paid an awful lot of UK tax in my life, not that that is even relevant.
The point remains – “social housing” is a euphemism cooked up to sugar coat extra taxes.
The real source of housing price rises in the UK (as they are in Australia mutatis mutandis) are money transferring from the stock market, Livingstone red tape over brownfield sites and the green belt. No amount of taxing the better off will alleviate those.
Toby,
You forgot increased pressure from uncontrolled immigration and the fact that long term unemployed aren’t asked to be unemployed somewhere cheaper (London home affordability would rise greatly if the unemployed were asked to go North).
Rob – interesting point. That applies on a micro level in Australia – it is one of the factors pushing the Sydney bubble (that has now burst anyway). The Australian government started offering potential immigrants extra qualifying points if they promised to live for x years outside Sydney on arrival. I suppose under Blair that would somehow “racist”…
Oh and before I get accused by the thought-police. I live in SW London. So many East Europeans moved here it was difficult to get a new flat. But they are very welcome (especially that foxy Polish chick I met at a party), seem to enjoy themselves and don’t cause any trouble. They therefore add to the area, unlike some cultures (IMHO)…
You won’t get “accused” – rather a friendly constable will visit you about non-criminal conduct, just to let you know “the state is always there” (when the PC gets round to it after finishing all of those questionnaires about how racist or homphobic s/he is – expect a visit in about a week)!
Can the foxy one fix your plumbing, or is that just in France?
I’ve seen pics of those Polish plumbers who are (allegedly) taking over France. Oh la la, they are welcome to fix my pipes any old day.
Something for everyone in Poland it would seem!
I own an ex-council house, I’m always about a grand overdrawn, I work in a factory and me and the Mrs own two second-hand Daewoo’s, and B-BBC is the first website I look at everyday….
I sure don’t feel like a toff or a yuppie !
King Chillout – it would appear that you (like my aunt) have “abused” the system.
Go figure…
Bong
That doesn’t add up! For it to work rents would have to be higher than mortgage payments, and they are not. Otherwise in the current slack market there is nothing to be gained from sinking money into property.
I know – I rent my house out and in turn I rent the place I live in. I only keep ownership for stability and simplicity, for pure financial interest I would have sold it 6 months ago and invested the cash elsewhere.
However why should the costs involved in running a business not be tax exempt? Are you saying that the property business should be unlike any other business? What about a limited company? If I set up a limited company to purchase my house off me with a business loan, and then get it to pay me each month the difference between the costs (servicing the loan and those associated with the renting) and income should I then bizarrely have to pay tax on the loan interest? Tax on money I have not been given?
Richard,
The problem of house affordability has really been caused by massive monetary inflation caused by too low interest rates.
This is not a discussion for BBBC though.
Time to stock up on tinned food and bury Krugerrands in the back garden.
Richard
I agree returns now are limited but I am referring to last few years. Also returns elsewhere are still limited, post tax and lack of confidence stock market/ins.co.’s.
Tax relief OK but not for purely speculative property vehicules in country with housing shortage. Maybe difficult to distinguish in practice though.
Apologies for OT.
Social housing is NOT a way of Taking away from Working middle classes to pay for those that bunked of school. It is much worse than that. Hitler had a more inexpensive way of giving favours to HIS people. That was just put the owners in a gas chamber, and give the house to a loyal party official. As we still have elections here that means people that have a very good chance of voting Labour. Social workers, nurses ,probation officers, tax collectors, etc. Flood marginal urban constituencies with your mates that vote, Tony knows it makes sense.
So Social housing is akin to state sanctioned murder? That’s a good one. You fucking twat.