You might think this is good news. From The Times:
Council homes for life ‘to be scrapped’ – People living in council houses will no longer be entitled to a subsidised tenancy for life under Whitehall proposals to address waiting lists. New tenants would have fixed-term contracts under the plans, with regular reviews every few years, The Times has learnt. […]
At the moment anyone allocated a council home can usually stay for life, irrespective of circumstances. People in council homes paying subsidised rents can end up relatively wealthy, and in some cases they can bequeath the tenancy to their children. Frank Dobson became a Cabinet Minister while living in a council flat in his London constituency.
But no, even this is not a move to logic and fairness, removing privilege from state clients and getting the state out of people’s lives. The bit I cut out reads:
If a tenant’s financial position improved he or she would be encouraged to take an equity share or to move to the private sector. If they refused they could face higher rents. The right to a council home is also likely to be tied to a requirement to have or be actively looking for a job.
The measures are being considered by Margaret Beckett, the new Housing Minister, in the most radical shake-up of the social housing system for decades to ensure that those who deserve council homes get them.
So this is not, repeat not, a plan to reduce dependency, to diminish the proportion of the population in receipt of the taxpayer’s subsidy, nor even to relieve poverty.
It looks like the proposals will be both more intrusive, bureaucratic and moralitarian than the present ones. Instead of in old socialist style checking people are poor enough to qualify for subsidised housing and leaving them to it, on the (generally correct) assumption that the dependent poor are unlikely in general to get much better off, and not worrying if some do, we are to look forward to a new grand scheme of supervision, whereby people are compelled continually to immiserate themselves for the inspectors in order to keep their roof. So there is to be a new premium to be created for inadequacy and profligacy.
But the dependent class may not be too miserable or helpless. The very people who in a reasonable humane system we might be willing to help (those too feeble or disturbed to be able to earn a living) will not be the ones that are targetted for assistance, but those who have or are actively looking for a job, who show every sign of being able to look after themselves, in other words.
How to explain this? It is neither likely to be economically efficient, nor is kindly (foolishly or otherwise).
We need to note that as a project it embodies Gordon Brown’s puritan obsession with “hard working families”. I do not particularly care if people are feckless or pleasure seeking as long as it is not at my expense. I rationally wish I could be a bit more feckless and pleasure seeking myself, but I can neither afford it, nor do I have a sybarite’s soul. But the Brownite regards suffering and struggle, social compliance, and resentment of the easy life, as the core moral values.
And this is of a piece with the politics of New New Labour. For the struggling compliant, resentful of others pleasure, are reliable voters for the gifts of authority. The feeble and disturbed who can make no shift for themselves are not voters at all. This is a plan to build, and politically police, a new client class.
[To pre-empt the objection that at least it gets rid of privileged access to council accomodation to party apparatchiks and local government employees, I would point out that that form of corruption is already obsolete. Such people now get subsidised equity as often as subsidised rent, and get to live with others like themselves, not among the lumpenproletariat on council estates, because they have a claim as key workers. Key workers (who are largely middle-class and paid above average, even including town planners and Connexions advisers) constitute another client class of the state that has been silently established this last decade. Welcome to nomenklatura UK.]
Nice opportunity for a bit of social engineering,ethnic cleansing even,because there is one sector of the community that they dare not try this on.
I guarantee that this bullshit legislation will never be enacted, and, if enacted, never enforced. This government is absolutley clueless, it has reached the end of its life, and the proof is to be found in nasty pieces of would-be social engineering such as this. For a Labour Government, a Labour Government (as Neil Kinnock might have said) to be seeking to enforce the status of council house tenants as an eternal second class lumpen-nonproletariat shows just how bankrupt, brain dead and pointlessly authoritarian the whole Projekt has become. Get the buggers out!
I suspect that buying and using and building freely, isn’t much of a ‘free’ market in England, if it is anything like the People’s Republik Of Massachusetts.
(Third generation builder here) . Perfectly nice homes that I labored on in the late 1960’s, and which were considered up scale at the time, are illegal now to build. Over beers all us and the tradesmen have talked about how codes are way over the top and a gut-feel-economics have doubled a house cost, all things considered.
I haven’t even touched on knee goveling needed to acquire permission from the People’s Building Beurcrateski. It used to be a half hour process. Now, everything the same, it’s a year and twenty grand. Naturally the lawyers and the environmental inspectors all like the ‘new’ process and featherbed for new regulations. The towns of course are thus understaffed and need new staff from the new rules that are politically pushed by their friends and family in the law and environmental. Thus taxes have to go up.
Thus cheap shelter becomes dear, the town must build more expensive ‘affordable’ housing, and thus taxes must go up.
One project a renter wanted to buy the property. Everything is agreed upon. But it’s been a year while various town Mandarins thrash out weither it’s to be septic or town sewerage? A million tied up on both private parties, 50K in ‘environmental’ engineering studies, three sets of lawyers, and conflicting permissions from various clerks who’s incomes come in like the tide. I’m in line to do the remodel, and in this economy could use the cash flow, and would like to hire, but maybe not. Thus the guys will go on unemployment, requiring taxes to go up.
John K: “I guarantee that this bullshit legislation will never be enacted, and, if enacted, never enforced. ”
I wish you had some power. Please take a few moments to go and read all the comments on the Times. Full of neo-fascist / socialist thinking with a few lone voices of reason. People are gagging for it.
eg (cherry picking):
“It’s about time! In my area there’s loads of retired couples living in the same 4 bed council house they received in the 60s- people like this should be made to downsize to free up home for people who need them. ”
“The post-Marxist Chinese seem to be able to not only build superb Olympic venues, new high-speed railways, and bridges galore, as well a new capital city airport on time which actually works but also to house millions of their citizens. Perhaps its time to tap into this know-how and can-do.” (FFS!)
I feel a bit of unease about the developing situation of which this is but one symptom. I am of course in principle opposed to all state provision of goods and services and when I seize power (tee he) I will engage in emergency action to sell or even give the council housing stock to the tenants.
Right now, back in the real world our govt (which rather than being “absolutely clueless” is in fact committed to an extremely dangerous ideology) won’t pass up this chance to play social engineer / cultural destruction with vast number of families living in Council Housing.
So, unlike John (who I’m /not/ attacking btw, I think he was just expressing his incredulity at the horror of the proposal), I guarantee that this legislation will be enacted and when enacted, enforced and enforced in ways you would never have expected (cf RIPA etc). I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to enumerate some nightmare scenarios of their choice.
This is not a new departure for UK social policy, of course. The 1834 Poor Law tried much the same thing. The spirit of the Victorians appears to be much in evidence these days, without the Dickensian trimmings.
In fact, the sort of debates now going on would not have surprised Bentham, Chadwick or many others of that era whatever. plus ca change…..
David:
I quite agree!
My take on this is that NuLabor are adept at announcing, reannouncing and further announcing various initiatives, policies, crackdowns and the like, but they are a bunch of never had a real job policy wonks who just don’t know how to get things done (thank God). Consider the sweeping powers to confiscate the proceeds of crime, which I seem to recall Princess Toni telling us would root out the Mr Bigs of British crime. What happened? Jack shit. They passed the law, but it has almost never been used. The Assets Recovery Agency was such a farce it was rolled up into SOCA, where presumably we won’t be able to see what a crap job it is doing, or not doing.
Don’t get me wrong, I quite agree that they have a most authoritarian, neo-fascist worldview, but fortunately this is balanced by their utter incompetence. Long may it continue.
Maybe I’m missing something (or possibly I’m just incredibly naive), but from where I sit this seems to be a good thing. Why anyone who lucks into subsidized housing should thereby be entitled to retain it for life (as is the case with rent-controlled apartments in New York) is beyond me. However many units are built there will always be a limited number of them. What is wrong with having a periodic review of circumstances and evicting those who no longer need the help, to make room for those who actually do? And why not attach conditions (such as being actively engaged in a job search) to the right to such housing? How is this different from being kicked off the welfare rolls when you cease to qualify (which is the system in the US; I can’t speak to the UK)?
Of course the implementation of this will be “intrusive, bureaucratic and moralitarian.” It’s a government program; how could it be anything else? But don’t you want it that way? Don’t you want someone to make the determination whether a tenant remains eligible for continued subsidy? And don’t you want such person to follow some objective (or at least consistent) set of standards in making that determination?
Remember, this proposal would apply only to new tenancies; existing tenants would be grandfathered in. So if it should be implemented it would be phased in gradually, would not disrupt anyone with an “expectancy” under the current system, and would be understood and agreed to in advance by anyone going into one of these units. Seems a fair way to go about the change.
Yes, this is government we’re talking about, and yes they will probably find a way to screw it up. But doesn’t this seem to be at least at step (or at least a nod) in the right direction? Why the objection?
Laird:
Probably because we are sick of these bastards and everything they stand for. You will probably feel the same after eight years of Obama!
It might be worthwhile informing overseas commenters who are the old who need downsizing and who are those with big families needing homes. This proposal would create resentment and bitterness towards those who are already given priority for council housing because of large families,poverty and newly acquired homelessness.
Moralitarian — great word!
Ruminating further, might it not be a good idea for all (excepting, perhaps the retired) council tennants to be kicked out of their current place of residence every four years (or less)? Either you are being successful in an area and therefore should be seeking private accommodation or your skills are not appropriate for the area and you should be moving on to pastures new.
This assumes the legitimacy of council housing in the first place (for the sake of argument) of course.
Laird:
you can fix what’s fundamentally wrong with a country, or you can be shitty to poor people. The first is the better solution, but most people tend to prefer the second one, because it gives people a warm fuzzy feeling to kick people when they’re already down at the bottom of the heap.
Accomodation is ludicrously expensive due to government intervention. The economy is strangled, industry failing, our society being torn apart by progressive social engineering. Shall we fix some of that?
No, let’s kick some scruffs out of their flats. That’ll work. Yes.
We could stop pumping housing prices via credit bubbling. We could end the severe restrictions on house building. We could allow property prices to fall to their real level, and let sellers and renters sell and rent what the market wants, not what bureaucrats want. We could deregulate business and allow it to flourish, providing jobs and economic growth.
Or, we can torment poor people. Yes, let’s do that. It makes everybody feel so much better.
You guys are really confusing me. Ian B thinks this proposal is merely “being shitty to poor people” because it makes you all feel good to “kick people when they’re already down at the bottom of the heap.” He then lists all the things it would be better for government to do in order to lower housing costs for all. I won’t dispute that all those other things would probably be good, but so is this. If anyone is kicked out of subsidized housing under this provision they will not, by definition, be “at the bottom of the heap.” They will have moved up somewhat in the “heap” to the point where having their housing costs be subsidized (by the taxpayers) is no longer appropriate for them. You consider this “kicking” them? You like the idea of paying taxes so the government can subsidize people who don’t actually need it? If those were my taxes I’d want a means test for every governmental handout and subsidy, and I’d want it at least annually.
I sort of understand the resentment argument, but don’t you have that already? With a huge waiting list for subsidized housing, if I were in that queue and in great financial distress I’d certainly feel resentment toward undeserving spongers who previously won the housing “lottery” but now won’t pay their own way even though they could. If anything, this policy should help reduce such resentment, not exacerbate it.
Again, I may be missing something here, but it certainly seems to me that you so hate your government that you’re reflexively critical of it even when it does something approaching the sensible. I can just about see the spittle flecks on the computer screen. How about you all stop hyperventilating, calm down, and take a look at this a bit more rationally? This might be one of those twice-a-day times a stopped clock is actually right.
Laird,
I share your confusion. There is something to this topic that you and I are both missing entirely. I think Ian might have touched on it but I need it laid out in pieces for me to understand.
Okay, my point, or one of them, is that this kind of thing is a terrible waste of mental effort and distraction for libertarians. Effectively, it is we, the population, set to fight amongst ourselves. While we’re ganging up on welfare dodgers, or scroungers, or any other population group who’ve been pointed at by our masters, we’re not looking at the real enemy, which is the Enemy Class; the political class. They are the ones that need sorting out. If we can do that, all the other problems start solving themselves. If we can’t sort the Enemy out, everything else is meaningless.
It may seem sometimes that they present a policy that looks as if it’s going “our way”, but it isn’t. It isn’t even a slowdown in their project, or some sort of gradualist gain. It’s all part of their project; in this case as Guy pointed out, greater social control and social engineering capacity. By joining in with them we strengthen them. Everything they do works against us, even if it might look like it doesn’t.
The non-left are good at this patsyism. Much of their success has come from policies which appeal to social conservatives, or economic libertarians, but which really tighten their grip. And meanwhile, we’re not looking at them; hell, we might even be stupid enough to like them a bit. “Well, I don’t normally like Gordon Brown, but when he kicked that chav in the face, he went up in my estimation”. Kind of thing.
Yes, there are people living off the state. Many of them are the lumpenproleteriat who even Marx dismissed as a lost cause. They’ll always be with us. But the primary sponging class aren’t drawing dole and living in a council flat, they’re drawing great largesse from the massive State, and causing us all immense harm not just by their parasitism but by their active assaults on our liberties. Their cost in monetary terms and social terms far outstrips that of some old dear living in a council flat. It’s the oligarchy, in their bureaucracies, their agencies and think tanks and NGOs, it’s those growing fat on government contracts, it’s that class who deserve all our attention. We must resist their goading us into attacking each other, because it makes them smile. We’re not going to get any closer to liberty by supporting government measures like this. Not a single step.
A few pointers for our American cousins.
Property is impossible to buy or rent in some parts of the country.
Large numbers of council house tenants can not get a mortgage or afford commercial rents.
Councils have an obligation to house the homeless,this prioritised according to a points system of need.
There is a shortage of affordable housing. Many north of Watford Gap could never be able to move South to find work,and anyway unemployment is rising.
Take for example the idea, mooted recently, that old people should move out of their house,in which they have lived and probably raise families.Probably close to children and relative.They should move to the country and vacate homes for those with families.
Unfortunately the rural Britain imagined does not exist anymore.Desirable areas have been taken over by the urban middle classes,often as holiday homes.
The village shop has gone,along with the pub and the post office,bus services have been axed.
We would be left with is a transient population shifting from one council estate to another.
Take the points system.You move elderly Mrs Sprocket out of the house she has lived in all her life and give it to whom exactly? Bear in mind we have uncontrolled immigration.
Which brings me to the “huge waiting list”,Young people cannot get houses,the points system militates against childless couples just getting married for example. In fact it encourages the very feckless the government wants to move.
Kick them out.but then there is the legal obligation to house them.
Lastly,any evictions on some of the lawless estates would require riot police.
Ain’t going to work.
I agree entirely with Ian B. An awful lot of pseudo-libertarian rhetoric is just conventional reactionary spite in ill-fitting anarchocapitalist masquerade. It doesn’t help. In fact it damages our cause.
If libertarianism has a distinguishing feature from other political tendencies, it is surely not ‘I’m all right, Jack’, which is a widespread feature of political beggar-thy-neighbour knavery, but a universal ‘You’re all right, Jack.” That is, libertarians proclaim themselves happy for other people to live as those other people choose because we deem them the best judges of their own interests. It is not, or should not be, a creed that supports punishing people for their lifestyle or for doing what they can for themselves in their own situation.
Meanwhile the niggles and resentments of man against man are being ceaselessly exploited by the power-mongers to increase their own power. That is what politics is. If you think politics is about rationally convincing people of their self-interest, or about fighting for particular policy outcomes, or changing society for its own sake, then you have not understood the first thing about it.
What really annoys me about this so-called policy is that it will cement council housing as the refuge for no-hopers, scroungers and dole bludgers, which is not what it was ever meant to be.
When my grandfather came back from the war he got his family a council house, a really decent three bedroom house where he could raise his family. Everyone on the estate worked, it was a respectable and decent place to live. Now, sadly, it is mostly notorious for crime of all sorts. If you actually force the decent people who work out of an area, then you are simply creating a ghetto. This is obviously too complicated for our politicos to work out, but it seems pretty clear to me. This policy is wrong in so many ways I simply can’t believe that this government, which would need hundreds of civil servants and a budget of millions to organise a piss up in a brewery, will ever be able to put it in into practice. All it does is remind us yet again what a small minded bunch of authoritarian control freaks they really are, and I wish a pox on all of them.
I’m with Ian B, Guy and John K here.
The original intention of Council Housing was to give the working poor a decent place to live. It was thought morally offensive to have fellow human beings living in squalor and disease ridden slums just because they were poor.
During the First World War it was noted with horror, the extremely poor health of many of the recruits, so after the war, a Homes fit for Heroes movement grew up to provide a decent place to live for those who had risked their all , and their families, for the good of the country.
Council housing took off after that.
After the Second World war, we having lost about 4 million homes, new comfortable family dwellings were urgently needed and led to the building of huge council estates. These were originally populated by good honest working class families, and if they tended to vote Labour out of gratitude, well Labour didn’t mind(little bit of politics there!)
What has happened since is that such estates have become dumping grounds for the dissolute, entirely but every Brit knows what I mean.
It has spiralled out of control, like the Welfare state itself, which was supposed to be a safety net, not a subsistance payment for life. And given the destruction of the Education system, that ensures that the poor never get a chance at a better paid job, millions are consigned to bare survival for life.
Oh there are plenty of people taking the piss and milking the system, but they are the minority.
This smacks of the politics of spite (just read the comments thread under the article). A return to Means Testing, which anyone of my parents generation will tell you, was totally humiliating.
The good news is that it will never happen, because as has been pointed out Nulab couldn’t run the proverbial piss up. The manpower needed to oversee such a scheme (given that Council housing consists of 20% of the housing stock in Britain) would be vast. Some Councils cant even manage to collect the rent on their housing now, let alone micro manage stuff like this.
It is also the thin end of the wedge. Next they will be telling us Freeholders that our houses are to big for us, comandering them and moving us to something “more appropriate”.
There are approx 180,000 council owned properties empty. Fix ’em up and move people in.
Well, it’s your country, and your welfare system, so do what you like. I still find it odd to be reading, on this site of all places, support for the government owning a substantial portion of the housing stock (whatever the historical justification), approval of taxpayer subsidization of middle-class working people who have no real need of it, and opposition to means-testing for welfare recipients. (“Humiliating”? Receiving welfare should be humiliating to any self-respecting person; he should be doing everything possible to get off the dole.)
None of those are libertarian positions. It seems that the socialist meme has infected you more deeply than I realized.
If markets in real estate were allowed to actually work, there would be little need for council houses. After the Luftwaffe got through with us, I can see how tax funded emergency housing made sense, but the war ended in 1945.
IanB writes:
“While we’re ganging up on welfare dodgers, or scroungers, or any other population group who’ve been pointed at by our masters, we’re not looking at the real enemy, which is the Enemy Class; the political class.”
Much of the “scroungers” now include such well-known wandering mendicants as Lloyds TSB, AIG, Wall Street banks, Fortis, Dexia, UBS, automakers such as GM, most of the developed world’s agriculture…….
I don’t agree, however, that attacking the idea of living off state aid per se is a “waste” of our time. We need to attack at root the idea that a person’s need – such as say, for housing – legitimises the looting of other folk to pay for whatever a person happens to be in need of. In short, as well as attacking the “enemy class”, we also must attack the morality that gives cover the notion that Paul’s need justifies grabbing Peter’s wallet.
In my area in Leeds (woodhouse) the benelvent council knocked down thousands of ‘slum’ houses in the 50s.
A few Streets were saved, these rather than being knocked down were eventually remodlled with an attic conversion and toilet inthe old second bedroom.
These are on the market for considerbly more than the jerry built prefab concrete housing that replaced much of the area.
In fact i was speaking to a long term resident who remebers them being built and the first 2 falling down before anyone moved in!
Laird, you’ve missed the point that other commenters have already made. Council housing isn’t “welfare” housing as such. The system was set up to provide decent quality housing that ordinary people could afford; ordinary working people. It’s not an emergency stopgap roof over your head for the unemployed/destitute.
Now that’s socialist, I agree. And libertarians wouldn’t set up such a nationalised housing system, that is true. But it was set up to answer a particular need, not as “welfare”. And as I said, the problems lie elsewhere. The strangulated, government mangled and regulated housing market is priced beyond the means of most ordinary folks. Some of them manage to take out absurdly usurous loans to buy houses, and then the entire banking system collapses because they couldn’t actually afford the loans. So, let’s worry about government interference in that first. Let us have the government stop pandering to property owners by restricting building and pumping prices, and let us stop the government flooding the credit market to keep property buyers addicted to the mortgage system. Everyone’s getting something from the government, and everyone’s losing.
When libertarians say “we will take away welfare” or “we will make the unemployed scrub the streets with toothbushes for their dole” it is a vast political miscalculation. It just looks spiteful, because basically it is. I shudder at remembering reading Rothbard in full flow eulogising the workhouse system for instance. When people say “what will you do about welfare?” our answer should be along the lines of “we will free people from the need for it”. Let’s have the freed market first, then we’ll talk about booting granny out of her council flat. Because then she’ll be able to afford somewhere else to live.
Question:
Has anybody here built houses in BOTH the US and UK markets?
I think a comparison of the tax, regulatory, zoning, and other bureaucratic obstructions, from someone with first-hand information, would be illuminating.
I have built a single-family home in the US. My older brother has built a single-family home in the UK.
My impression is that the regulatory burdens that I faced in the US, while they drove me up the wall in frustration, were as nothing compared with the struggles my brother and his wife had to go through.
The regulatory hoops we had to jump through in the US did seem, for the most part, to have at least some tangetial connection with reasonable state goals, such as ensuring safety and durable construction, preventing negative impacts such as pollution or wetlands damage, and a hat-tip to societal demands – that we not build something that would have negative impacts on our neighbours. The mortgage lender probabaly exercised more control over our project than any agency of state or local government.
By contrast, all of the hoops my brother had to jump through seemed to have nothing at all to do with building a home, and much more to do with all sorts of social and political issues. It was quite obvious, from all I saw and heard, that the goal was state planning of every single aspect of home construction, from the location of the home to the colour of the shingles. And the real goal, as it appeared to me, was to discourage new home building, by any means possible. Much of what I heard about seemed to me to be more-or-less completely arbitrary and capricious – at least, in the US, if an inspector or an assessor made some demand, they could refer to the statutory authority under which they made it. In the UK, it seems, this process is a lot more subjective.
This may be why, as I observe, what new home building there is in the UK consists in the main of completely-conventional cookie-cutter homes in completely-conventional cookie-cutter developments, built by completely-conventional developers to a rigid formula – I get the impression that the obstacles (both regulatory and financial) to the individual who wants to build his or her own home are just too great for most people to surmount.
In the US, it’s not in the slightest bit unusual for people to build their own homes, either with their own hands, as their own GC, or by contracting a builder to do it for them. Within fairly-broad limitations, you can pretty-much build what you like, where you like. It’s my strong impression that that is virtually-impossible in the UK.
llater,
llamas
My brother and sister-in-law wanted to add a bedroom-bathroom-playroom suite to their existing home, so that they could foster 2 more children, now that theirs are grown and gone. The process of ‘planning permission’ for this entirely-conventional enterprise took 2 years, the building process took almost a year.
Oh come off it, Ian. If the governments after the war really had wanted to house people, why not leave it to the market. In reality, council housing robbed people of the sense that they could and should be responsible for looking after their own homes. The old “list” system whereby people had to take certain steps to get a council house hardly fits with the sort of market order that I favour. The idea that housing a large percentage of the population in houses built and run by the state is part of our worldview is nonsense.
Laird. Please dont get me wrong. I am as much an enemy of the Welfare State as anyone here. perhaps I expressed myself badly. I did rather bang that last post out at high speed.
As Ian B has more succinctly put it, the idea of Council housing was to provide affordable housing for the workers.But it was also supposed to be economic, not a handout. Very few were on Benefits in the past. They had real jobs.
Now let me talk of just how Humiliating The Means Test was. I have an anecdote for most things, and this is no exception.
When my father in law was a boy, it was the height of the Depression. The Valleys of South Wales had just one source of employment. The coal mines. So because of the Depression, the mines were on short time and many many miners laid off. There were just no other jobs to be had. His father had no choice but to sign on the Dole with a young family to keep.
What used to happen was that an Inspector would come round and basically take inventory of every thing you owned. Woe betide you if you owned a luxury like a radio, bought in the good times. You would be told to sell it, and anything else that the prod nosed jobsworth thought you didn’t need.
You never knew when these bastards would turn up.
Well this one day FIL was sent out to buy fish and chips for the family of five. His parents had saved up for this as a treat. They couldn’t afford to do it more than maybe once a month.
Just as he had left the Inspector turned up to turn over their Gaff with his little clipboard.
He was still going through the place when FIL returned with the food.
Oh so you can afford fish and chips can you? said the Inspector,Not really that hard up then are you? and immediately knocked off, let’s say ten bob, but a hefty chunk of the weekly Dole money on the spot.
My father in law never forgot the sheer humiliation and injustice of that, yes “spiteful” act.
Nor did a good many people. There are old people in this country right now in dire straits, who could rightfully claim Benefits that would help them tremendously, but will never go near a Benefits office, because the memory of those times is still sharp.
So yes, I agree, you should always be looking for work and not a handout. But sometime there just are no jobs.
I also agree with Perry. We love to talk about free markets on this site, but there is no such thing as a free market, is there?
I would love to see the Welfare State dead and gone.
But it has become so massive and bloated, where to start?
I’d start with Invalidity benefit, but not with this unworkable and spiteful scheme.
That’s as maybe Johnathan, and I agree. But the point I was making was an attempt to draw a distinction from “welfare” particularly for an American correspondent, which implies strongly something the state gives in response to a person’s potential destitution, if you see what I mean. The intended purpose of council housing wasn’t welfare in that sense. Welfare is, say, housing benefit in which the unemployed’s rent is paid for them. Council housing was always intended as somewhere somebody could live in indefinitely regardless of e.g. their working status.
I entirely agree that that’s not “part of the libertarian worldview” but dash it Johnathan we don’t live in an even vaguely libertarian society; not a single bit. I like all libertarians have a vision of where I’d like to get to, and that wouldn’t include council housing, no, but I’m far more interested right now in how to get there, and in what order one might make the transition. I don’t agree with the NHS either, but I also recognise that you can’t get to an NHS-less Britain just by pushing a big red “nuke the NHS” button.
So my point is that we need to focus on positive steps towards a freer society. Libertarianism is noteworthy for being entirely unsuccessful as a movement, and I believe that part of that reason is a conflation of it in people’s minds with “nasty” policies. We are seen as selfish assholes who would just abolish welfare and fling the destitute into the streets like a horde of little Rothbards and Rands. People who we need to engage and convert just see us as a brand of nasty extremist conservatism. Well we need to do better than that. We need positive messages and images and we need to be unscary, if such a word exists. Our programme must not start with takings away, but with freeings up. We should leave the spitey corporate state backbiting to the progressives and conservatives and concentrate on showing why they’re both wrong. We’d do far far better opposing this measure as inexcusable state intrusion than standing around all pompously saying “well, it’s your own fault for living in a council flat, you sponging lower class oik”.
Great stuff Ian B.
We must build a warm, positive message and give up the “Yes, yes I would let children starve in the streets – I owe a duty to none other than myself”. The quoted fragment may be true in some sense (I dunno, I never bought Rand, Rothbard or the natural rights, moral calculus stuff) but it’s far from why I’m in favour of freedom and free markets.
“In my area in Leeds (woodhouse) the benelvent council knocked down thousands of ‘slum’ houses in the 50s.”
Also,Fat Herman’s finest demolished much of the housing stock in many large cities.I remember prefabs being built as a temporary measure to house those whose homes had been bombed.
Next you have to urban planning craze which saw the demolition of the inner cities and the wholesale transplanting of the populations to large estate outside the city boundaries.This was done with the misguided aim of providing a healthier environment,more green spaces in cities,people living in the country. I believe one eye was also on the expansion of cities,moving labour voters to rural areas and to free up valuable urban land for redevelopment.
It has to be remembered that this was begun in a post war command economy.A situation the present government obviously pines for.
If council housing was/is not ‘welfare’, why are the rents always set well-below prevailing market rates?
Why were councils subsidized by central government to build council housing?
Why is council housing assigned on the basis of ‘need’?
Oh, wait – I guess it is welfare, after all.
Council housing was born of the post-WW2 Attlee Labour government and its successors, who managed to impose their socialist command-and-control model of government ontio a population uniquely primed to welcome it. It was deliberately, consciously planned and intended as a major tool of social change and modification and wealth redistribution. In the 40s and the 50s, before the insidious rot of Le Corbusier’s stupid ideas and Parker-Morris standards b*ggered up the actual housing, there was a shedload of very nice council housing stock built. When you strip away the complete cross-bollixing that came later, you see council housing for what it was originally planned and intended to be – high-quality, modern housing, built out of the pockets of the rich and rented to the poor at peppercorn rates, with guaranteed tenancy for life. A quicker and better tool for redistributing wealth, while simultaneously ensuring a vast pool of permanently-enthralled voters, it would be hard to imagine. The lawmakers who put in place did so at a perhaps-unique intersection of political and social forces that lasted perhaps only a year or two, and which we may never see again. In that period, they managed to strip landowners of their fundamental property rights, to simply lay claim to and take vast swathes of private property, to transfer billions of pounds from the pockets of the rich inot the pockets of the poor, and to instill the idea that a nice home at a paltry rent was a right and the State was obliged to provide it. It may be one of the most egregious exmaples of a majority voting themselves the property of the minority that we have ever seen. Say what you will about those lawmakers, they were masterful in what they did.
llater,
llamas
Thank you one and all. I now have a much better understanding of your “council estate” system, which appears to be a relic of the Luftwaffe. If that housing was not intended as “welfare” in the US sense of that term (which is what Ian B asserts), but rather as a form of affordable housing for lower-middle-class working families, I can see how they would have an “expectancy” interest in retaining it regardless of any change in their economic circumstances. (Again, it’s very much like rent-controlled apartments in New York City, also an artifact of World War II, in which long-term tenants are “grandfathered.”)
Still (you knew there was a “still” or a “but” coming, right?), if I read the article correctly, what is being proposed is not dispossessing the current residents, but changing the rules in the future so that new occupants will be subject to a means test. In other words, they’re trying to change the perception (which most posters here apparently share) that this is not welfare, into a clear understanding by everyone involved that in fact it is. (And make no mistake, it is welfare, Ian B’s protestations to the contrary notwithsdanding; if it’s “affordable” housing, by definition the rent is below market rates, and that can only be because the government which owns the structures is accepting a below-market rate of return on its investment of your tax money.) No current “expectancies” will be disturbed, but no new ones will be created either.
In fact, the only objection which makes much sense to me is the one advanced by Ron Brick (I believe) to the effect that this will lead to the eventual degradation of these “estates” from simple lower-class housing into total welfare slums (like the old Cabrini-Green project in Chicago, which eventually got so bad they just tore it down). There is an argument to be made for keeping a “better” class of tenants in the buildings, if only to ensure that they remain relatively safe and are reasonably maintained. However, that still doesn’t answer the fundamental question: is that an appropriate use of money extorted (via taxation) from the productive members of society? And in any event, what do you then do with the true “welfare” cases? Build separate slums for them?
(One more observation: Objection was raised to the requirement of being employed or actively looking for work. But if this isn’t welfare housing, but rather affordable housing for the working poor, how can someone be considered “working poor” if he isn’t actually “working”? Is there some special British definition of “working” of which I’m not aware?)
Anyway, I seemed to have stirred up a lively debate here (even if I’m clearly on the minority end of it). That’s always fun.
Cheers!
Laird, I wasn’t “protestating” anything; I was drawing a distinction between welfare in the traditional meaning of the word “emergency assistance” and welfare in the generalised (perjorative) sense, of anything the government does or subsidises (e.g. corporate “welfare”), just to draw a useful distinction to illustrate how this policy changes the basis of council housing provision. If we include welfare to mean all government intervention and price fixing, we lead to my more general point that the entire housing market is predicated on that. Many people who would proudly declare themselves self made rugged individualists who’ve never had a penny from the government are the same people who demand that the government must prevent “negative equity” by keeping the mortgage merry-go-round spinning and not letting new houses be built near their “investment”. That welfare to property owners is a rent (literally) extracted from others. In the modern state, we’re all on some form of welfare.
Well, no, we’re all agreed on that here. My argument is when looking at getting from where we are to where we’d like to be, this is not a good place to start. Let me be constructively spiteful for a moment; virtually our entire Government have never done a day’s productive work in their lives; but they all own nice houses paid for by my taxes. I’d like to see them suffer first, before we start on people lower down the societal ladder.
Well indeed it is true, Ian, that we are talking more about “how to get from A to B” rather than the specifics of whether it is right to subsidise Peter from Paul; that said, I think that any effort to reverse the statist world in which we inhabit must not just involve bashing the “enemy class” via a sort of populist approach – which I think has some merit – but by also continuing to hammer away at what Rand called the “altruist” fallacy: the idea that because folk need X or Y, that it is okay for the state to loot whoever happens to be looking reasonably prosperous at the time.
This is now likely to become a serious problem across a whole range of economic and social issues.
Johnathan, my focus in this comments isn’t to disagree with the altruist fallacy- we’re all libertarians here. What I’m arguing is that we need to attack the authoritarian principle that “if you’re getting it from the state, the state can make you its bitch”. I wrote a comment here at the LPUK blog describing my view of what socialism we’re up against. I won’t cut’n’paste the whole lot but, pompously quoting myself-
A theoretical “communist” redistributes out of a kind of Robin Hood principle- “the poor have no bread, we must take bread from the rich”. Progressives redistribute in order to gain social control- they want to control what bread the poor are allowed to eat. They gain justification to do so on the basis that “we are giving them free bread” and conservatives fall into the trap of agreeing with this, and many libertarians do too. Many libertarians sit up and clap like seals when a socialist government makes life hard for its clients, on the silly principle that this will be some kind of disincentive to welfare recipients. But the socialists work day and night to get as much of teh population on some form of welfare and we all are to some degree. Look at the millions of poor people working at perfectly legit jobs who are forced to pay taxes then claim them back as “credits” via labyrinthine bureaucracy. So, if we look at the progressive strategy as-
(1) Get the bastards on welfare
(2) Control the bastards
it’s sheer madness for libertarians to actively support step 2. Every time they enact step 2, they further the idea that the state can control its subjects. You get “free” healthcare, you must live according to our health crankery, and so on.
We’re already living in Port Sunlight. Let’s get that pub built. The battle now is one for social and personal freedoms, and those are what we need to concentrate on.
I wrote a great deal, but didn’t properly get my point across 🙁
The heart of progressive, third way, New Labour socialism is “rights require duties”; Tone said so all the way back with the replacement for Clause IV-
“The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect.”
Now the point is we’re all getting stuff from the state- even a libertarian Britain would probably have state courts, police, defence, etc- and I’m saying that if we support the idea that welfare recipients, welfare in all its manifold forms- can be treated however the state feels like, we are accepting this mantra of rights being entrained with “duties”. And then we lose the argument.
Ian B, you are conflating “rights” with “benefits”. It’s an old saw, but nonetheless true, that “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” And that’s precisely as it should be. You take benefits (not “rights”) from the State, you should expect to have to dance for them. And we should be celebrating this; the more intrusive and irrational the State becomes the more people will (or at least should) re-examine whether it’s worth turning over the minutae of their daily lives to the bureaucrats. Perhaps someday we’ll reach a tipping point.
No, no, no Laird. We should not be celebrating this. It’s simply wrong-headed and politically disastrous. Everybody- everybody gets benefits from the state; police, the law itself, “consumer protections”, workplace regulations, all manner of things. If you clap people having to dance for them, you’re applauding the “Port Sunlight State”.
People won’t all suddenly turn into libertarians as the intrusion gets worse. They will just get browbeaten and beaten down. It doesn’t make people rebel; it makes them dully conform and accept this state. Basically what you’re advocating is a kind of tough love policy- if people suffer they’ll grow a backbone, kind of thing, and this disastrously misunderstands human nature. The more the state kicks them around, the more they’ll accept getting kicked around by the state as a natural part of life. It encourages their sense of hopeless dependence. Think “Stockholm Syndrome” if you like, or the battered wife who can’t comprehend leaving the abusive relationship because the independence has been literally beaten out of her.
Our only tactic that makes sense is to oppose all state intrusion, to oppose their every attempt at social engineering. The state does not have the right to demand duties from anybody regardless of whether it is “giving them something” or not; that should be how we approach it. “We’re giving them stuff, so we can tell them how to live”; that is the dire pit of progressive social engineer thinking. We must avoid it. Applauding it just strengthens our enemies. It will hasten the creation of a race of beaten slaves, not a race of spontaneous libertarians.
To come back to this rancid policy, I would just make these points:
1. If enacted, it would ensure that only welfare claimants lived in council housing. The reward for getting off your arse and getting a job would be to lose your house. This is clearly madness. It would transform council estates into sinkholes where only the workshy could live, and as Ian B has pointed out, they were never meant to be that, they were meant to provide decent housing for respectable working class people.
2. There is simply no way the fuckwits of the NuLabor party could get this to work even if they wanted to, and even if they actually passed a law. That’s what they do. That’s all they do. Pass another bloody law. In 1940 they would have passed a law banning a German invasion and considered World War II ended. They could not make this happen because, for all their sixth form authoritarianism, they are useless fucks who would not have a clue how.