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New Labour sells out again
THE secret side of New Labour is revealed this week (see page 2) with the news that for the first time housing associations in Britain are gearing up to dispose of their properties on the open market.
Under Margaret Thatcher’s reforms council tenants were given the right to buy their homes – at a heavily discounted rate. Now New Labour has gone one step further along the free market road by persuading several housing associations nationally – including Community Housing Association (CHA) in Camden – to pilot a scheme allowing tenants to purchase their homes on a shared-equity basis.
Mrs Thatcher’s ground-breaking reform, inevitably, cut swathes into Britain’s housing stock, reducing the number of council-owned flats by hundreds of thousands. Here in Camden, nearly 10,000 flats have been bought by tenants since the 1990s, cutting low rented flats from 30,000 to around 20,000.
Politicians ought to have foreseen that this would lead to growing homelessness as the stock of low-rented homes fell, but they didn’t. Or they did, and simply didn’t care. Either way, the poor suffered.
New Labour refused to repeal Mrs Thatcher’s reforms. And the housing shortage worsened.
Now, their plans to extend Mrs Thatcher’s reforms have surfaced through the introduction of pilot schemes for housing associations.
New Labour may have dropped a hint about this in the past year or so, but, basically, secrecy has been the word.
If this reform is implemented then the laws of supply and demand will prevail – fewer affordable homes will come onto the market, house prices will move more and more upwards.
These pilot schemes show New Labour has completely surrendered to free market economics. It no longer believes in the provision of public sector housing. Almost deceptively, it argues that by forcing private developers to provide a proportion of affordable housing in their schemes – from 15 per cent to 50 per cent – Britain’s housing crisis can be solved. This is rubbish – in logical as well as economic terms.
The number of such affordable homes built in London, for instance, wouldn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the crisis.
Last week, the radical thinker, Milton Friedman, the free-marketer who inspired Mrs Thatcher, died. He believed the free market could solve all problems. It hasn’t in Britain – in housing at least. This week, Ken Loach’s 1960s drama film Cathy Come Home, exposing the tragic life of a homeless family, was shown again.
And so it should have been. It needed to be. Similar tragedies are being experienced now. Isn’t anything ever learned by our valiant New Labour politicians?
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