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Brown’s policies are an echo of Tory failures
GORDON Brown, eager to win plaudits, has been making one promise after another this week.
Among them is a pledge to put housing at the top of his agenda.
Taken at its face value, young people, desperate to set up home, may have taken heart at hearing this.
But when you look at the detail, Brown, apparently, intends to carry on as usual. In short, he is sticking to the failed Thatcherite policies that, from the 80s, spawned the worst housing crisis since the end of the 40s when parts of Britain lay devastated by the Blitz.
What is Brown’s medicine for the housing market?
To emulate the successful housing programme of the Tory governments of the 50s when 300,000 homes were built annually by local authorities?
To emulate the Old Labour programme of the 60s and 70s when, again, council homes in their hundreds of thousands went up?
No, Brown believes he will be able to put up enough homes a year by building them for sale.
But all the evidence points to the fact that this policy signally fails because of the crude laws of supply and demand House prices are so high in London today that very few young people can afford to buy even a one-bedroom flat costing £250,000. Four years ago it would have gone for less than half of that.
Politically, Brown won’t bite the bullet. He is infatuated by the private market. To him, the very idea that local authorities should be allowed to build houses – as they successfully did from the 50s onwards – is utter anathema.
He makes speeches about a housing ‘problem’ that has got to be dealt with and then imagines a vision of Britain as a ‘home-owning, asset-owning wealth-own democracy’.
Where did we hear this sort of thing before? In the speeches of Mrs Thatcher and later Tony Blair. And where did this policy lead? To today’s housing crisis.
Battling against his opponents in the Labour party, Brown warns that he will not go back to the’failed policies’ of 20 years ago.
Twenty years ago before Tony Blair captured the Labour party, Old Labourites had one important article of faith – a belief in social housing provided by local government.
If that policy had been followed by the Tory governments of the 80s and 90s, and later by Tony Blair, today’s housing crisis wouldn’t exist.
Fighting old party battles, he has allowed himself to become wilfully blind to those Old Labour policies that have proved successful.
Ironically, they had been pioneered by One-Nation Tories in the 50s.
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