Monday 9 August 2010

Settled and Well-Mixed

Turn the page after Nadine Dorries has explained how David Cameron would have evicted her family from their home once her mother had retrained as a teacher, and Peter Hitchens writes:

David Cameron, let us not forget, has a heavily subsidised and rather large country home in Oxfordshire. We all helped pay for it. I doubt if anyone will be able to winkle him out of it to make way for someone more needy when his children have left the nest.

So he is not well-placed to offer lectures to council-house dwellers about how their tenure is too secure.

In fact, if he really had any big ideas, it might cross his mind that the great sale of council houses wasn’t in fact the mighty success that Tories (who have generally never been further inside a council house than the doorstep) still imagine it was.

It broke up many settled and well-mixed communities. It hugely inflated the national housing market. It made it virtually compulsory for young couples to go into debt if they wanted a home.

And it created the vast, unfair corrupt morass of housing benefit, one of the costliest mistakes ever made by a British Government.

Instead of prating meaninglessly about a Big Society, a serious Government concerned for the British people would be thinking of ways to bring back council housing: proper houses with gardens for young families, priority given to those with roots in a town or village, offered at reasonable rents to tenants willing to look after their homes and behave decently to their neighbours.

The new Left-Right alliance is certainly taking shape. Roll on electoral reform.

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