Sunday 19 April 2015

Right To Buy Votes

Concurring with Peter Hitchens, Dominic Lawson and, as he writes, Fraser Nelson, John Prescott writes:

Now I know why the ­Tories’ logo is a tree. It’s a money tree.

They’re so desperate to win the election, they’re throwing around cash like a drunken sailor.

The NHS? Have £8billion a year. Fancy a tax cut? Take £10billion a year. Extend childcare? Take £1.2billion – and keep the change, old boy!

They’ll spend £25billion a year more while still pledging to make £30billion of cuts.

The worst of these uncosted commitments is their most reckless promise yet – spending £4.5billion a year to extend Right to Buy to people in housing association homes.

I remember when Thatcher ­introduced it in 1980. It caused more harm to Britain’s social housing market than the Luftwaffe ever did.

I’m not against people owning their council homes. But you must build another one for every house sold and the public shouldn’t foot the bill.

Under the Tories, though, one and a half million council homes were sold off with a huge 50 per cent discount.

While it might have helped tenants get on the property ladder, the effects were devastating.

The councils forced to sell them were stopped by the Tories from using the money from the sales to build new homes.

Instead they had to keep the money locked away to pay down the ­government’s debts.

It took two million council homes out of supply for ever. No wonder homelessness trebled between 1980 and 1990.

In London, more than one in three ended up in the hands of private landlords who then charged hard-up tenants inflated rents.

So the Tories spent billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to flog homes off on the cheap then billions more in increased housing benefit.

When I was in charge of housing, the first thing I did was slash the discount on Right to Buy, which vastly reduced the number of council houses being sold off.

We also increased shared ownership and pioneered homes on brownfield sites that cost just £60,000 to build.

But when Thatcher’s children got in, one of their first acts was to bring back the Right to Buy discount. For every 100 council houses sold, only eight new ones have been built.

Now, with five million people on the council housing waiting list, they want to extend it to housing ­association homes.

Many more flats and houses will end up in the hands of private landlords and housing association finances will be in crisis.

The Tory-leaning journalist Fraser Nelson gives an eye-opening example.

Two men work in a factory. One rents privately, the other from a housing association.

The private renter, who can’t afford to raise a deposit to buy a home, ends up subsidising his ­workmate by up to £102,700 to get on the property ladder.

Extending Right to Buy is not just deeply unfair, it’s economic madness too.

The £4.5billion a year earmarked would only help up to 58,000 households at best.

And the National Housing Federation has said it could cost up to £5.8billion to compensate the housing associations forced to sell up on the cheap.

On top of that, it could increase housing benefit payments by £4billion.

For £5.8billion we could use publicly owned brownfield sites to build 60,000 council houses a year and increase supply, not decrease it.

Right to Buy isn’t about getting people on the property ladder.

It’s about getting their votes at the expense of others.

This is a Right to Buy votes – another Tory con trick where we all get done.

5 comments:

  1. As if the Tories are the first party to try and buy votes. From the ex Deputy PM of a party that created 800,000 extra public sector jobs just to buy votes.

    Oh dear, Prescott. Go back to taking secretaries over your desk...

    Meanwhile, while I of course vote UKIP here, Ted Cruz, (a fiercely anti drug, pro-life pro-marriage Christian and Global Warming sceptic) is clearly now the best Presidential candidate in America. Even better he could beat Hillary Clinton.

    And as the first Hispanic clerk to the US Justice Department and former John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at Harvard, he has both intellectual weight to carry the country and the potential to appeal to the Latino community.

    2016 will be an old-fashioned American election; a straight fight between a radical anti-marriage, anti-life, pro gun control Democrat and a firm 'right to bear arms' supporting, pro-marriage, pro-life Republican.

    He even opposed Obama's attempted war in Syria.

    Excellent candidate.

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    Replies
    1. You need to talk to the paleocons, who regard him, and indeed the entire GOP field even including Rand Paul, as beyond a joke, to the point of tweeting "highlights" of idiocy from their speeches as a form of cheap entertainment. They are holding out for Jim Webb.

      On topic, please.

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    2. You have just caused me to revisit, and thus to retweet, the invaluable @DanielLarison, a stalwart of The American Conservative, who is currently much amused at Cruz's suggestion that war with Iran would be over within a week. Yes, Cruz really has said that.

      All of the TAC lot took to Facebook and Twitter on the day that Cruz announced, to declare that his candidacy was its own punchline and that they were falling about laughing.

      Not that their contempt is reserved for him. See also their attitude to Jeb Bush, to Marco Rubio, to Rand Paul, as of today to Mike Huckabee, and so on.

      Jim Webb is the only Presidential candidate for whom what were once the Buchanan Battalions have any time whatever.

      But, as I said, on topic, please.

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    3. You'd know I suppose, they are your mates. Drew Bowling of In Defense of Christians is a mate of yours, isn't he? Organised that conference last year when a hall full of Middle Eastern Christians booed Cruz off the stage and sent him away with his tail between his legs.

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    4. They said that he was making the Islamist extermination of Christians more likely by his pig ignorant intervention, and of course they were right.

      He is a complete Know-Nothing, because that is what the GOP has become. Much of the Democratic Party, too. But the whole of the institutional Republican Party. Just ask the paleocons.

      Cruz may be illiterate in two languages, but he is still illiterate. Like Rubio, through whose recent effusion on the history of the Near East poor Dan was obviously laughing himself silly while tweeting. Do take a look.

      Drew and Kristina are friends of mine, yes. Their work is invaluable.

      Quite when Anonymous 00:20 imagines that the Republicans have ever nominated a pro-life candidate for President, I should fascinated to hear. Kennedy and Carter have been the nearest approximations by either main party, and that is merely a relative statement, although Carter did at least sign the Hyde Amendment that a Democratic Congress had passed (whereas it had been Nixon, by Executive Order, who had first permitted abortion at federal expense), and Kennedy did at least appoint a pro-lifer to the Supreme Court, something that Reagan was to fail to do no fewer than three times.

      Now, seriously, on topic.

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