HOMES NOT HOLDING PENS


I was brought up on a council estate, a council estate in which we had a comparatively large garden, in which the streets were lined with wide grass verges and trees, across the road at the centre of the estate was the church hall. It was a place in which people knew one another, where the kids mixed and played football, either on the grass verges, the concrete area around the garages or on the local playing field, our goalkeeper incidentally was a girl.
It was an estate in which neighbours talked to one another, knew one another’s business and eventually watched and waved as the wedding parties departed and occasionally the funeral corteges moved off toward the nearby crematorium. In short it was a place in which people lived their lives and who, in the privacy of their own homes, digested the large disappointments and small successes that go to make up a life.
There are many unpleasant and even sinister elements in Tory ideology but few more unpleasant and indeed sinister than the attitude to social housing. For your average Tory a home is not a home until you ‘own’ it, (i.e. are in debt to the tune of thousands of pounds to a bank or building society). This fetish of home ownership is incidentally not shared on the continent or indeed in rabidly capitalist Japan. Social housing in this worldview is reserved for the inadequates unable to access the property ladder* or worse the Untermenschen of the underclass. Most importantly social housing is primarily for short term emergency provision, the idea of such accommodation representing ‘homes’ disappears off the event horizon.
The undermining of social housing has been a long, slow and sometimes subtle, at other times extremely unsubtle process involving such developments as the creation of Assured as opposed to Secure tenancies and the mass sell off of good quality council housing stock, the latter effectively breaking up council house communities now divided between renters and ‘owner occupiers.’ Now the government is proposing a 50% discount to shift the remainder of the stock. Why incidentally does your house suddenly become more legitimately occupied by the stroke of a pen that places you in hock to some faceless money lender?
Now we have the spectre being floated of tenancies being purely related to the contingencies of income and social functioning, you can be turfed out at any moment should your circumstances improve. What possible incentive would anyone have for establishing such a residence as their ‘home?’ Of course this is the very intention of the exercise, residential units now holding pens for the temporarily distressed.
This steady assault on social housing has shamefully been a bipartisan affair with Labour’s record equally antagonistic, in all of its years in power demonstrating no commitment to the building of good quality social housing. Indeed it was under labour that the idea was floated of linking the right to tenure with good behaviour and commitment to society. The Orwellian implications of this policy can barely escape even the least perceptive. I am arrested on an anti-capitalist demonstration and charged with public order offences the state now steps in to deprive me of my home.
Now in arguing for quality social housing I fear I may be swimming against the current, even though the current economic situation coupled with the cost of housing, particularly in London, makes nonsense of the notion of ‘everyone a home owner.’

Now I have, as the Americans say, a dog in this fight, I live in social housing, a housing association flat to be precise. I have lived here since 1986; it is my home not a holding pen until something better comes along. Circumstances permitting I fully intend to reside here until I am paid a visit by a hooded man carrying a scythe. When I do go I will have some regrets but amongst them will not be the fact that I paid rent rather than ‘owned’ this space I call my home.

*And what a giveaway this analogy is with its portrait of a grotesque rat race, everyone scrambling to get above the person next to them, all looking down smugly on the poor sods at the bottom of the ladder.





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