Extending right to buy is the Tories’ zombie Thatcherism at its worst
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Version 0 of 1. Bring on the right to buy someone else’s grandmother. Sorry, I wasn’t actually paying that much attention to the list of bribes that currently parade as manifestos, but I did hear the words “right to buy” in the Tory one. Right to buy what? A pig, a poke? Just a poke? It doesn’t really matter. Related: Election 2015 live: Cameron promises to double free childcare and revive right to buy Not the right to a decent education. Not the right to earn enough to live or the right to a home that feels secure. Not the right to stop being anxious about food and shelter. No. It’s the right to buy. Stuff. Big stuff. Houses. And it’s the right to hoard wealth without contributing to anyone else. It is the right to steal and call it speculation or even, bizarrely, wealth creation. Hurrah for the right to know you are all right, Dave! Pity those whose rights were never enacted because they simply did not or could not buy. What kind of people are they? These hardworking people who are tenants? The extension of the right to buy from council houses to housing associations, an attempt to arouse those memories of the ultimate climax of Thatcherism, is shameless. Utterly feckless. It is not even clear to me how the stock of housing associations belongs to the Tories to sell in the first place. They are supposed to be independent. Housing is undoubtedly a key issue in this election, and a cross-generational one. Council houses, as we know, have been sold off at a phenomenal rate and not replaced (since 2012 alone, 22,900 council houses have been sold and just 4,800 new ones have been “started”). Much council stock has been sold off to private landlords. Those who run housing associations also know more new homes need to be built. Urgently. Tenants with protected rents in housing association properties are better off than anyone who enters the private sector. Having moved through this patchwork myself, from squatting, to council housing, to a shared ownership scheme with a housing association, I am now in an extremely privileged position. I have lived the dream: I have my own home. Bully for me, right? Well, it would be if I never entered into any social relationship with anyone else at all, ever. Or had not had children. My two eldest are renting. Lettings agencies are the pits; we all know that. There is no real security, no fixed rent, no guarantee of even basic repairs. There is no possibility of them buying in the place they grew up in. Never mind the vast loans many young people have to take out just to go to college – they don’t even have the full-on student experience now, because so many have to stay at home during those years; they can’t afford to leave. This latest wheeze to take more housing stock into the private sector is not an attempt to address the housing problem in any way at all, except, if it’s imaginable, to actually make it worse. If home ownership is the only way to wealth, or even just a basic feeling of security, we now all inhabit a nation where increasing numbers of people – people who of course congregate where the work is – are permanently locked out of this possibility. They are to live in the ghetto of never-ending insecurity. For the flipside of the home-owning dream is the nightmare of the private rental sector. The modernised version of a nation of shopkeepers is a nation of landlords who will charge extortionate fees to change a light bulb. The ransacking of social housing – the transfer of the national housing stock into the hands of private landlords that the Tories boast of – is responsible for so many of our current problems. The refusal of successive governments of both main parties to build more houses has certainly made it worse. But the fundamental mindset that was introduced, that means housing is no longer about homes but about asset management, property speculation, investment – the mindset, in other words, of the already wealthy – has indeed trickled down, so that everyone who could just about manage it, scrabbled for mortgages. Now it is virtually impossible in many of our cities for those on an average wage to even attempt such a thing. The right to security, to tenancies that last, to rents that don’t suddenly zoom up, the right to live somewhere warm and free of damp, who will address that? Not, I imagine, this party of landlords and property dealers, this protectionist club. This revamped and nonsensical extension of the right to buy is actually desperate gibbering. That it is the pillow talk of the hollowed-out zombie Thatcherism of today’s Tories shows how little Cameron actually has to offer. |