Will Boris Johnson admit that the sale of council housing compelled the State to make gifts of significant capital assets to people who were thus enabled to enter the property market ahead of private tenants who had saved for their deposits? And that, as part of Thatcher's invention of mass benefit dependency, it created the Housing Benefit racket, which is vastly more expensive than the maintenance of a stock of council housing?
The explosion in house prices has meant that most younger middle or upper-working-class people stand no chance of living out the middle-aged peak of their powers in properties remotely resembling the ones in which they grew up. "Bricks and mortar" do not, at least ordinarily, constitute an "investment". They constitute a place to live.
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I've always felt that as housing is a basic human need it should be protected in some way from the vagaries of 'the market'. Perhaps a punitive tax on any profit might go a long way.
ReplyDeleteI agree. No more using your house as an ATM machine and taking on more and more debt to keep afloat. Instead, let us have proper family incomes so people don't feel tempted or forced to do so. Yes to unions, no to usury.
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