This is the third part of Dan Morley’s study of the UK housing crisis.
Right to Buy
The situation with Right to Buy
(RTB) is not much different. Just as government siphons off rents and does not
reinvest them, so it siphons off the capital receipts (which have been hugely
subsidised by government for decades in a crude attempt to bribe tenants into
buying their homes, doing unknown amounts of unnecessary damage to government
finances) from ‘right to buy’ sales. Councils have lost literally millions of
homes to the market, at knock down prices, and haven’t even seen any of this
admittedly limited amount of money! This policy has now been finally
overturned, but only after almost 30 years of hidden damage.
Of course RTB is dressed up as the
liberation of the working class, signaling their emergence into the amorphous
middle classes. We are also told that it was an extremely clever tactic of
Thatcher, because she managed to create a large pool of middle class aspiring
workers now ready to vote Tory. People who say this have bought into the myth
that wealth is created by individuals speculating on the rising ‘value’ of
their home.
There is little or no evidence
that significant numbers of these people started voting Tory. In the 1980s
Terry Fields, the Militant Labour MP, was elected in a constituency with a
particularly high number of RTB leaseholders. Just before the miners strike,
the Guardian claimed that miners would not strike because so many of them had
mortgages! Of course, having a debt burden where there wasn’t one before does
to an extent have a ‘disciplining’ effect on workers, just like student loans
do for students. In that sense it is a setback for the working class.
Thatcher was never elected by the
working class, but at best by their abstention from voting Labour. And the
general effect of RTB has been to depress the working class and the Labour
movement, especially the tenants’ movement, because it was recognized as a
defeat for the working class. The defeat of the miners in 1985 has not ended
the labour movement, nor did it herald an era of triumphant middle class
individualism. No – it depressed the labour movement and handed the ideological
initiative to the bourgeoisie, who have merely been declaring the rise
of universal middle class individualism. Of course, an individual may apply for
RTB and make a quick buck or two, and be quite pleased with themselves. But
they remain working class, and nevertheless this is not the general picture,
which has instead been the crippling of council housing for the working class.
Mostly those who carry out a RTB
are acting for short term gain that does not take them out of their conditions
or give them the ability to realise any aspiration for middle class status.
They are often conned by property companies, who have also used the law for
their benefit, as Polly Toynbee points out:
"One
evening a leaflet came through the door from an estate agency/finance house.”Are
you a council tenant? Have you ever considered giving up your tenancy? If so
you could earn between £6,000-£26,000." I called them up, pretending to be
a long-term resident and said I was considering moving out. "It would be
silly to give up your tenancy for free when you could make money instead,
wouldn’t it?" said a silky voice. He explained the deal: I would apply for
the right to buy, his company would put up the cash and by law I would be able
to sell it to them in three years time. Until then for the next three years I
would assign them a lease and they would let it out, (for £180 a week, instead
of my £59 a week rent.)
How
much is the flat worth, I asked? £83,000 he said, but the council was presently
only valuing them at £78,000. Because of the generous discount, it would only
cost me £39,000 to buy. A fantastic bargain: you couldn’t buy a garden shed in
the area for that. So, I asked, how much would I make out of this deal? £7,000
said the silken voice. For giving up a lifetime’s right to a flat in London,
that was a scandalous offer. But it is the offer thousands of hard-pressed
tenants are accepting. Either they don’t know any better or else they are in
such desperate debt that £7,000 seems like an answer to their prayer – though
they will never, ever get another council flat. All this is totally legal.
Housing officers report thousands of people cheated shamelessly out of their
homes, their rights and a lot of money this way. I discovered the true worth of
the flat was in fact £150,000, which I would be relinquishing for a mere
£7,000. Right to buy may often be a leg-up for the upwardly mobile, but it is
often a crash down into homelessness for the most vulnerable and gullible.
Lambeth alone lost 800 properties last year through right to buy, and has
already sold another 800 this year."
This also shows how any backdoor
privatisation always corrodes the principle of social provision. And government
subsidies to lubricate the wheels of privatisation, which is what RTB really
is, simply lead to inflation. Because instead of building new council homes and
in the process creating new value, money is effectively handed to property
companies to simply take over and sell on already existing (and deteriorating)
housing.
Today our country has enormous
visible scars in the form of deteriorating and scarce housing and unemployment.
Massive regional inequalities in wealth, jobs, health and education stalk the
land. Although this marks the impasse of British capitalism, it is to the
benefit of capitalists. In this respect, RTB and the principle of working class
‘home ownership’ has had a large role to play. Because home ownership atomizes
the working class it also ties workers down ‘to the land’, thus weakening
bargaining power as jobs leave but workers stay. Of course, the only real
solution to this is to plan production and employment, breaking down regional
tensions and inequalities. But tying workers to one place with artificially atomized
home ownership in the midst of council estates weakens bargaining power,
driving down wages and leading to the constant and gradual deterioration of
whole regions.
We are sold the myth that council
tenants are ‘dependent’. But the power of the working class and its ability to
take society forwards is in its mutual interdependence. Contrary to what the
Thatcherites assert, society does exist to the point that we can study its laws
of development and predict its future – as the demographic studies we saw
earlier so clearly show. The bourgeoisie wrongly imagines that independence
means the freedom of the individual to, say, buy their council house. But
genuine independence means to understand the laws of society, so that we can
understand what really is possible, instead of blindly succumbing to necessity.
When an individual is compelled through external circumstances not under their
control to buy their home to make a quick buck, whilst at the same time we know
that the only affect of this is to cripple social housing and inflate house
prices, we can definitely say that both the individual and society are not free
or independent, but that we remain thoroughly dependent, helpless and blind to
social laws. But it has not always and need not be this way.
Workers have fought for council
housing. The first housing law and plan of council housing in the 1920s was
described as a measure ‘against bolshevism’ by ministers at the time. They had
to grant it because workers demanded it. And it marked an enormous step
forward, often giving workers running hot water and indoor bathrooms, as well
as security of tenure, for the first time. In the 70s the tenants’ movement
successfully defeated Tory rent hikes. Today council tenants vote against stock
transfer and according to Shelter most people list affordability and security
of tenure ahead of the aspiration to own a home as their priorities. The
looming housing disaster (in truth it is already with us) and its disastrous
affects on poverty, health, education, employment and racism demands a plan of
socialised housing as part of a more general plan for the economy.
