Probably one of the most shocking things I read over the weekend was in this article in the Guardian (about 17 paragraphs down).
It is Nick Clegg talking about his time in the coalition where he describes a ‘quad meeting’ he had with himself, David Cameron, George Osborne, and Danny Alexander. where
One of them – I honestly can’t remember whom – looked genuinely nonplussed and said, ‘I don’t understand why you keep going on about the need for more social housing – it just creates Labour voters.’ They genuinely saw housing as a Petri dish for voters. It was unbelievable.
Maybe I am looking at this with the benefit of hindsight and the recent government reports on building homes and homelessness, which make it clear that we are not going to get enough housing by relying on the private sector to build it.
Maybe also at that time the housing crisis was not so bad.
Real politics
But it’s the attitude really. Maybe I am naive, vaguely bumbling along thinking that politics is about doing a bit of good for the country where here we see someone whose thinking appears to be TOTALLY skewed towards remaining in power and nothing else.
Still, it’s not a new phenomenon – here is Plato writing in about 380BC:
“. they are generally more set on acquiring new kingdoms, right or wrong, than on governing well those they possess.”
I also seem to remember (but can’t find the quote) that he said that the best rulers were going those who did not seek to rule rather than those who really wanted to (Jeremy Corbyn initially reminded me of this, although now I’m not so sure).
Creating a country in your image
It’s a fact, apparently, that people who own their own homes tend to vote Tory. So to the ‘focus on staying in power at all costs’ Tory mentality – that means encouraging home ownership to the exclusion of all else.
Which is what we have seen.
But which is also impossible. Not everyone can afford to own their own home and indeed not everyone wants to.
However, those people who don’t get to own their home didn’t really bother the Tories any. Either they stopped voting at all out of a sense of hopelessness, or they are homeless and unable to vote anyway as they can’t get on the electoral roll.
Reaping the rewards of success
Still, Cameron and Osborne didn’t last very long on their own, did they?
After blithely taking us into the referendum, without a plan for a ‘leave’ vote, solely (apparently) in order to ‘shut up’ the Eurosceptics once and for all – they found that all those people they hadn’t bothered about, mattered after all.
I just wonder – if they had shown a bit more compassion and provided more funding for social housing, enough to ease the crisis – would the referendum vote have gone the way it did?
Housing is fundamental to people’s lives. People like Cameron and Osborne, comfortably rich, probably find it hard to imagine the fear and insecurity of someone living on minimum wage at constant risk of being evicted and unable to find anywhere else to live.
They are unlikely to see their children forced to hand over 50% of their wages (if they are lucky enough to have a job) to live in a dilapidated and dangerous bedsit which ought to be condemned. But which they can’t condemn otherwise they will have nowhere to live.
Would people have been so worried about immigration if they hadn’t thought that immigrants were taking up housing that otherwise would have been used for local people.
Maybe if the Cameron government had done more to provide more genuine social housing (as opposed to ‘affordable’ housing – although even that is not being built), the great unwashed might have felt differently about things.
What about Mrs May
The $59 million dollar question is – what attitude does Mrs May have?
At this moment in time, Mrs May is a bit of a mystery. Will she feel the same way? She was, after all part of the Cameron government. For example Nick Clegg accuses her (in the same article) of distorting figures to stoke up anti-immigrant feeling.
- Was she just keeping her head down in the Home Office, biding her time, waiting until she could do things differently?
- Or does she have the same ‘only if it keeps me in power’ mentality?
On the steps of number 10 Mrs May promised to help ordinary people, and in her recent Andrew Marr interview she refers to a social program. She is after all the daughter of a cleric and one hopes that she has a social conscience.
But we will have to see.
Who wrote this article, Ben or Tessa? (I’m guessing Ben from the Lefty propaganda but maybe Tessa because of the Plato quote).
Is this the other quote you were searching for?;
“The State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.”
Distasteful as the Tory attitude is, the flip side is that it is in a Corbynesque Labour’s interest to have more people renting than homeowners, preferably in state controlled housing.
Is that any better? I know which I prefer.
It was I. I have my lefty moments.
I resent the implication though that it was propaganda (which the internet tells me is “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.”.)
I am not promoting any political cause. I am just concerned about housing issues and the problems that we have right now. I don’t care whether they are solved by the Tories or the Labour party so long as they are sorted.
And if course I, HBW being a committed lefty…..nay Social Anarchist in actual fact, am too thick to quote Plato haha.
It is a sad fact of life that both the far left and the far right ridicule each other as being bereft of intelligence or a realistic approach.
For my part I have fought for many years to try and find a way of uniting the interests of landlords and tenants, knowing many fine landlords and many nightmare tenants but as time goes by and I encounter the blinkered views of many in the landlord community intent on destroying any argument whatsoever that might damage their income stream i am starting to side with a growing view that PRS landlords are actually part of the problem rather than the solution.
It depresses me to say so because I have always aimed at a balanced view, despite insults, argument to the contrary from both landlord and tenant groups. In attempting to espouse a balanced view I am often vilified for not taking a clear stand point.
The arrogance of much of the PRS landlord community is sorely testing my patience and your cursory comment is but another nail in the coffin of my sympathy
Re read the article and ask yourself does the information have a left wing bias, a right wing bias or is it balanced?
I’d prefer a blog on landlord law to be apolitical but it is clearly up to Tessa to decide- nice to see critical views allowed.
Regarding who is the author of the article, I sometimes get confused as they are all credited like this;
“Ben Reeve Lewis Friday Newsround #265
SEPTEMBER 2, 2016 BY TESSA SHEPPERSON”
The author is usually obvious but the above article has the content of Ben with the style of Tessa, nothing to do with being thick or not.
That’s my fault, I sometimes forget to click to show it is Ben’s article, Mea culpa.
That I am proudly and avowedly left of left (Corbyn being a Pinko liberal in my book) is not denied by me HB and I do think of myself as being fairly intelligent, although I recently discovered that the book I was reading about the life of the violinist Paganini turned out to be a mistake, as I was actually just reading ‘Page Nine’ haha
I do think any blog would be incredibly boring if it was impartial and I dont believe in the notion that there is ever any such thing as an objective view. I think its impossible not to let personal views have their day. Thats the beauty of blogs.
What I love about Landlord Law Blog and why I first approached Tessa asking if I could write for it, was that it was a healthy mix of legal information and views.
Tessa has never censored me or sent me private emails saying “Can you not say that?” , I’m a left wing enforcement officer who prosecutes landlords for harassment and illegal eviction. I see the worst of the worst of landlord behaviour and I see some god awful tenants deliberately ripping off decent landlords and I try to write from those twin perspectives.
There are always 2 sides to each story and very often 5.
Individuals aside do I have a problem with the system of renting in the UK? abso-bloody-lutely but I hope I dont give the impression I am down on individuals. I am a beneficiary of the right to buy scheme and having been a landlord and even a letting agent myself, albeit for a very short period of time, I wouldnt do either again if I was offered all the Tequila in Mexico…too much hassle
Landlord Law Blog is a unique brand of its own. Where property Tribes and Property 118 plow their own furrow of landlord interests Tessa’s blog has a wider remit, including the airing of human viewpoints. Thats why it is doing so well after all these years.
The idea that ‘focus on staying in power at all costs’ is a Tory mentality is just silly. Anyone who remembers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown should know that it is common to most politicians, one they are in power.