Financial Privilege

What an apt term by which to refer to this Government.

Convinced beyond argument that any public provision can only be for the very poor, it is preparing, both to kick people out of their council houses if they are deemed to be earning too much, and to withdraw Housing Benefit from anyone with a spare bedroom. So much for getting on. And have a maiden aunt over for the Christmas season? Who do you think you are, and who does she think she is? Has she no telly?

Presumably, David Laws is to be evicted from the house for which he made large, fraudulent withdrawals from the public purse, and David Cameron is to be evicted from the spacious and well-appointed abode that he, too, charged to the community at large despite the fact he had a purely inherited fortune of 30 million pounds even then, before his father had died. It must be at least double that now, and is quite possibly in the hundred million area. Yet we are paying the mortgage on his third house. What's that about?

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, 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.

I am a good Chestertonian in this as in most, though not quite all, matters. I would dearly love every household to have a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. But within the practicalities of these things, there is also a very strong case that each locality should have a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty centre.

Already, under New Labour, the powers that be apparently could not distinguish between the respectable working class and the characters from Shameless. So council and housing association tenants were to lose security of tenure so that Shameless characters could be moved in next door to them, or even in place of them. And now, Conservative-voting landlords, the sort of people who become councillors for that party, are preparing to go bankrupt because of the cuts in Housing Benefit. There could be no more perfect illustration of the fallacy of a private sector independent of State action except to the extent of paying for it.

Nor could the effects of those impending cuts in driving bartenders, waiters, taxi drivers and so forth out of city centres and out of the entire South East be surpassed for illustrating the folly of having a Government composed exclusively of people who believe, if they think about it at all, that such workers and the services that they provide are somehow "just there". Financial privilege, indeed.

Disability campaigners are now in such despair over the Welfare Reform Bill that some of them are even petitioning for the first refusal of Royal Assent since 1708. But it is only by convention that the Lords obey financial privilege, the same convention being that the Commons invoke it only "sparingly". One House is in flagrant breach of the deal. The other retains the power to reject this Bill outright, officially delaying it for a year, but effectively killing it off. That ought now to happen.