Today

No fewer than three Today programme items on housing. One was largely, though not entirely, a human interest story, about the demolition of the last remaining post-War prefabs. But the other two were not.

The massive increase in applications for social housing reminds us 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 characters from Shameless are now to be moved in next door to, or even in place of, the council tenants who are to lose their security of tenure for that specific purpose. The Political Class really does believe, not only that such are the only people for whom council housing is appropriate, but that such were the only people for whom council housing was initially devised.

And it is highly debateable whether or not this country's Gypsies are an ethnic group, as the Roma on the Continent certainly are. It is even more so whether or not many of those throwing up shanty towns in our countryside are Gypsies at all. But it is not debateable that, whoever and whatever they are, they must be subject to the same planning laws as the rest of us. Why didn't the last lot do this? Whatever happened to equality, not least regardless of ethnicity or class background?