This working family have been driven into homelessness.
This father felt worthless, he couldn’t provide for his family and he couldn’t put a roof over their heads.
Martin Bergin and his wife both work but they couldn’t afford to rent privately after being evicted from their flat.
On the day they were evicted, they went down to the council, as they instructed them to do, telling them, look this is the letter from the bailiffs and that they were now homeless and the council kept them waiting in there for five hours to then put them into a Bed and Breakfast which you wouldn’t put an animal in.
It was terrible and he simply collapsed into tears.
More than 120,000 children exist like this in temporary accommodation in England. 37 percent more than in 2014.
Being unable to afford private rent is the greatest cause of homelessness.
Regrettably, the lady had to sell her home but with the costs of private rent at the moment and they have a young child, they actually require a two bedroom flat. A one bedroom would do but even with a one bedroom flat, the prices were simply not affordable.
Of course, he and his wife work, his wife part time, but with the rents out there, it’s all his earnings gone.
Ministers must do more and to build affordable homes for lower income families.
Nevertheless, the government states it is putting £550 million into supporting homelessness, and still, there are millions of immigrants living in social housing who have never paid a penny into the system, whilst people born in England and have worked laboriously are being put into Bed and Breakfast and it’s sickening.
English is not the primary language of more than half a million students in Britain’s primary schools. The language spoken at home by 567,888 children aged between four and 11 could be any one of the hundreds of foreign languages presently used by migrants from across the globe who have settled in this country.
No one should be shocked by the statistic because it is a straightforward outcome of the huge volume of migration into Britain over the past decade. The more immigrants who come here to live, the more of their children will be taught in British schools and the more our schools will have to deal with students whose first language is not English or who do not speak it at all.
Nonetheless, almost everyone was stunned by the statistic, even though the Government has declared that about 190,000 migrants come to Britain every year and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has declared that Britain’s population will grow, as a consequence of migration, by seven million over the subsequent 20 years.
We’ve been told often enough that we’re going through a phase of immigration on a scale unparalleled in our history, however, the facts do not appear to have sunk in.
Part of the reason for that may be the degree to which Government ministers can appear set to propagate uncertainty about what those truths are. For example, Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, insisted at a hearing of the Commons Committee on Home Affairs that the ONS forecasts were wrong and that the number of migrants would decrease in the expected future.
It is not apparent on what evidence he had for making that claim. He unquestionably did not present any evidence for it which may demonstrate why there is practically no authority in the field who agrees with him.
It is now more or less extensively understood that the net inflow of people to Britain, the amount who come, minus the amount who leave every year is 190,000, and there is no reason to believe that number will decrease in the expected future except if the Government takes extreme action.
It implies that the inhabitants of Britain will be 70 million by 2028. Frank Field and Nicholas Soames, two MPs from the Cross-Party Group on Balanced Migration, are clear about the gravity of the situation, even if Mr Woolas is not and we are facing a population disaster.
The reason why people from developing nations want to live here is clear. Life is greater here than in the poverty-stricken countries from which they came. However, that is true of all the developed economies of Europe. All are much better places in which to live than the countries of Africa, for example, or the Indian subcontinent.
Therefore that illustrates why so many immigrants target Britain, and why there are such queues at the Sangatte centre in France to get across the Channel to England.
News has got out that Britain is more congenial to immigrants than other European nations, which it is. The legacy of empire indicates we are more used to accepting them and are more ready to integrate them.
One of the great virtues of the British people is their humanity. Our culture is much less exclusive to carpetbaggers than most nations of continental Europe. It is easier to get work here, less restrictive employment law implies it is easier to fire people, so companies are more ready to exploit migrants they can pay less in the first place.
British companies are less distrustful of immigrants than their equivalents in nations such as Italy or France.
Attach the basis that it is easier for immigrants who come here to claim benefits, get council housing and access health and education services for themselves and their children and it becomes obvious why Britain is a destination for migrants.
Understandably, countless migrants are desperate and will use any means they can to guarantee they can settle here. From 1997 to 2002, it appeared that claiming asylum, claiming that you are a fugitive fleeing oppression was the most productive way of obtaining the freedom to live here.
In 2002, 84,000 people claimed asylum. Attach their children and the amount was more than 100,000. The bulk had their cases refused, but very few of them were deported and most were permitted to stay, even if they were not given an approved recognised right to do so.
Since then, the Government has taken measures to toughen up the asylum policy, and last year fewer than 22,000 people claimed asylum in Britain. However, the balance of asylum-seekers who are deported after their application is denied remains small, therefore asylum-seekers continue to be a notable cause of migrants.
The migrants’ desire to get into Britain is only half the story of why so many are here. The other half is the explanation of why the Government chose to let so many migrants into Britain. For years, Labour has been convinced that allowing high levels of immigration should be a policy priority, and it has taken measures to guarantee that it is comparatively simple for migrants to get permanent, legally verified residency here. But why has Labour done that?
In 1997, Tony Blair and his Cabinet had various motives for wanting to expand the number of immigrants into Britain. One was that they saw an electoral advantage. The outcome of elections in a growing amount of constituencies was, and is, dictated in large part by the votes from comparatively recent immigrants.
People who have travelled here from, say, the Indian subcontinent naturally resented the rules that stopped their families joining them in Britain.
The most onerous of those rules was known as the primary purpose rule, which was imposed by the Conservatives in 1993. It required that someone wanting to follow his or her spouse into Britain to show that the marriage was not entered into primarily to gain access to the United Kingdom.
Establishing a negative, as the rule forced the applicant to do, was very hard, and a lot of spouses were denied admission into Britain as a consequence.
Labour ended that practice shortly following the election in 1997. The move was very attractive in immigrant communities because it made it considerably simpler for families to move here. Immigration by spouses into Britain has grown by 50 per cent since the primary purpose rule was eliminated.
More than 40,000 people were given citizenship here on the grounds of marriage in 2008 alone.
Equally significant indeed, possibly more important in convincing Labour to adopt a much more carefree immigration policy was the idea amongst many ministers and advisers that Britain’s economy would grow if only there were to be large-scale immigration here.
When he was Home Secretary, David Blunkett announced there was no natural limit to a number of migrants that Britain could absorb. Plus his replacement, Charles Clarke, was similarly blunt about his hunger for more immigrants.
Government statements and press announcements trumpeted the wondrous financial advantages of immigration. High levels of immigration would expand prosperity rather significantly by boosting Britain’s gross domestic product, the volume of how much the country produces each year, it would guarantee an end to labour and skills deficiencies, it would allow the NHS and additional public services to develop at a quicker speed by utilizing low-cost immigrant employees, and it would help Britain to evade the pensions time-bomb created by an ageing society by combining an entirely new tier of young and energetic workers.
That is why Labour drastically increased the number of work permits it issued to migrants wanting to come to Britain. In 1997, 40,000 work permits were issued. More than 130,000, or over three times as many, were circulated in 2008.
The consensus that migration offers substantial financial advantages to Britain has demonstrated to be untrue on every point. A committee of the House of Lords, made up of economists and ex-finance ministers, published a comprehensive investigation into the matter on April 1, 2008.
The report, The Economic Impact of Migration, asserted bluntly that overall Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which the Government has persistently emphasised, is an irrelevant and misleading basis for evaluating the financial impacts of immigration on the United Kingdom.
The total size of an economy is not an indication of prosperity. The focus of investigation should be on the outcomes of immigration on revenue per head of the resident population. Both theory and the accessible observational data show that these are small.
The added revenue created by immigrants is not much higher and may, in fact, be less than a number of people they have appended to the UK’s population, so they do not expand prosperity to any meaningful level.
The Lords’ report went through the other claims made for the financial advantages for immigration and demolished them one by one. Immigration is unlikely to be an adequate instrument for subduing labour and skill deficits, rendering extensive testimony for its claim.
It emphasised that immigrants, even though they played an essential part within public services such as the NHS, were not, in fact, essential to the functioning of those services and local British workers could have, and still could, achieve the equivalent function.
The report pointed out that immigration cannot defuse the pensions time-bomb because immigrants themselves become elderly and require pensions. Also, it concluded that there was no proof for the argument made by the Government that immigration creates important financial profits for the present UK population.
In fact, there is some indication that immigration indicates that the least-educated part of the workforce is less well-off because immigration provides a competing amount of labour prepared to do the least attractive and worst-paid professions for even less pay.
Labour ministers appear to have given precious little care to other, noneconomic consequences of large-scale immigration. The burden on schools, the NHS and additional public services.
The heightened demand for housing, especially council housing, has been an immense reservoir of anger for native-born Britons who believed they were in line for a council house, simply to be circumvented in support of new immigrants, because the officials earmarking council houses ruled that those immigrants had higher requirements, they had infinitely more children.
There hasn’t been an in-depth investigation of the impact of immigration on council housing, however, the impact on the availability of council houses to indigenous, working-class Britons has surely been seen by that assembly to be urgent.
These are really difficult to assess because they are difficult to measure. But one result familiar from research into communities in the United States that have experienced an unexpected penetration of huge amounts of immigrants has been a diminution of trust.
Immigrant populations tend not to blend, either with other immigrants or with citizens of the host nation. The effect is a potpourri of tightly connected groups that do not mix with each other and do not trust each other.
The idea that the nation is a community based on reciprocal obligation suffers.
The composition of communities changes. Some people like those changes. Others do not. The changes are not restricted to the presence of ethnic restaurants or men and women who wear different clothes.
An inrush of people who are fundamentalist about their faith, for instance, can indicate that some of them do not accept doctrines that mainstream Britain takes for granted. The supremacy of secular over religious doctrine, the equality of women with men, and the importance of liberty to alter your faith without oppression.
How to guarantee that immigrants embrace British values is a dilemma the Government has considered long and hard about but has not solved.
The Government seems to be in the process of acknowledging that a continued penetration of migrants at the speed of 190,000 every year for the indefinite future is not going to be advantageous to Britain. Ministers have started a points method for the granting of work permits.
The problem with that method is that it will only decrease the number of migrants by 5 percent a year and if the Government wants to end Britain’s population from reaching 70 million in the following 20 years, it will have to decrease the number of migrants by 75 percent.
What could be done? Parliament’s Cross-Party Group on Balanced Migration suggests that economic migration should be explicitly separated from the settlement. At the moment, following five years of working in Britain, you have the freedom to live here permanently.
The Cross-Party Group recommends removing that right, which would have a significant influence on numbers.
Three other policies that would have an impact would be introducing some version of the primary purpose rule to decrease the amount of spouses coming to Britain, expanding the amount of failed asylum-seekers that are deported, and strengthening the checks and controls on our borders.
None of these methods will be easy to achieve, and all of them will have some pretty severe outcomes for would-be migrants to Britain, their spouses and their children. But the party that embraces them will obtain electoral support.
The evidence is that the British people are very concerned about the present levels of immigration and want to see them drastically reduced.
What this country screams out for is a government with the stomach to stop the insanity this country has had to suffer. Unchecked immigration has brought this country to its knees and those who find it hard to get to grips with that reality must have their heads buried in the sand.
Over 75 percent of the people in a recent survey want immigration stopped altogether. If this were to happen now, the population of Britain will still go over 70 million because of the huge birth flow amongst immigrant families.
In August 1980 Margaret Thatcher’s first government, just a year old but already very disliked and bogged down by difficulties, created a Housing Act. Even more than most legislation it was wordy and repetitious, but its clear purpose stood out, to give the right to buy their homes to residents of local authorities.
It envisioned a revolution in how a large minority of Britons lived.
That change which David Cameron’s government controversially hoped to revive by extending the right to buy to housing association tenants had been an extremely long time coming. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, expertly propagated by the Conservatives in 1980 and doggedly developed by right-wing Britain ever since, selling off council homes was not a sudden stroke of brilliance by the Thatcher government.
The design was as old as council housing itself.
Nineteenth-century housing law demanded that council-built homes in redevelopment zones should be sold inside 10 years of completion. Throughout the 1920s council homes were sold on a small scale. Throughout the 50s sales expedited.
5,825 in May 1956 alone. By 1972 even a distinctly leftish Tory environment secretary, Peter Walker, could declare to his party conference that the ability of council tenants to purchase their homes was a pretty fundamental freedom and that they should be granted a 20 percent reduction on the market price.
Later in the 1970s, now a backbencher, Walker went further, proposing that community homes should just be given to their residents. Michael Heseltine, the Conservative shadow environment secretary from 1976, who was close to Walker and like him had a populist side, agreed.
Labour councils, reacting to the squalor and congestion of Victorian and Edwardian towns, and the visible failure of private landlords and developers to deal with it certainly the mirth with which some of them abused it had created much of Britain’s early corporate housing in the 1900s.
Labour councils and governments carried on building it in great volumes for the next seven decades. By the early 70s, some Labour local authorities were even buying up entire streets of crumbling inner-city homes from private landlords, and turning them into council homes a tangible and powerful display of state authority making up for market failure.
By 1980 the balance of all British housing in state hands was large by international standards, nearly one in three homes. Most Labour politicians thought there were several reasons, electoral or moral, to chance to unravel the housing safety net that made an overcrowded country livable for tens of millions.
However from the mid-70s some important Labour people, such as Harold Wilson’s press secretary Joe Haines and Jim Callaghan’s economic adviser Gavyn Davies, started to question whether renting from the council, usually for life, was a gratifying way for such Britons to be living, and further whether governments could afford to keep developing the essential properties.
By the late 70s, the Wilson and then the Callaghan administrations were frequently short of cash, and their more forward-thinking members were frequently interested in the growth of consumerism and private property, and how Labour might conform to it before the other parties could take full advantage.
Both Labour governments built progressively fewer council homes. In 1977 a high-profile housing study by the Callaghan government believed that for most people, owning one’s house is a fundamental and common desire.
The language adopted by Labour and the Conservatives to speak about the problem was starting to converge.
At the 1979 general election, council-home sales highlighted prominently in the Conservative manifesto. In this slender pamphlet, the right to buy was given as much space as enormous issues such as education and health and explained right down to the precise concessions to be granted to residents.
These were to commence at 33 percent off their home’s market value and were to increase, according to how long they had rented it, to a peak of 50 percent for residents of 20 years’ standing or longer. They further guaranteed the promise that 100 percent mortgages were available.
For any buyer, and expressly for people in late middle age or older, the British age group most inclined to vote Conservative, these were remarkably generous words and you were mad if you didn’t buy.
Whether these terms represented a good opportunity for the state, which had after all created these homes and would lose the rental revenue from them, was not something the manifesto examined. Neither were related even more crucial issues.
Would the country be left with enough affordable homes following the sell-off? Plus would the plan rebound if the population, and therefore the demand for housing, increased? Given that the United Kingdom was part of the EU, and further connected by additional busy immigration routes to its enormous former empire, and to the United States, a stable or declining population, as had existed during the 1970s a time of recognized British slump that Thatcher had noisily agreed to change could hardly be considered.
But effectively it was. The Right to Buy was started at a time of some complacency in British housing policy. For the first time in over a century, there was not a deficit.
On gaining leadership, Margaret Thatcher made the powerful Heseltine environment secretary. She and the Treasury immediately flattened his idea about giving away council homes. The cash-strapped Treasury needed the cash from selling.
The Prime Minister, with her intense sensitivity and support to Tory-inclined social groups, believed, seemingly with much understanding, that a giveaway would infuriate homeowners who had painstakingly accumulated for deposits and paid off mortgages.
Instead, inside a fortnight of taking up his appointment, Heseltine issued official circular recommending council-home sales. To his disappointment, the bill took nearly 18 months to draft and push through, with stubborn opposition coming from Labour councils and the House of Lords.
However, by August 1980 the bill was passed. Margaret Thatcher herself started the policy in a special television broadcast and said that if someone had been a council tenant for at least three years, she started, sounding her words even more deliberately and precisely than normal, as if speaking to a somewhat dim child, that they would have the right, by law, to buy their house.
The right to buy was a smart trade-mark, clear, quick to say, simple to memorise, and combining two of contemporary Britain’s popular preoccupations, personal liberty and purchasing, while further encapsulating the more alluring side of what the Thatcher government was giving the country.
Her application of the term house in the broadcast, when millions of council tenants really lived in flats, was similarly important. It gave the design an aspirational feeling, reassuringly rural rather than humble and municipal.
The Right to Buy TV commercial that shortly ensued gave further, less detailed hints that the government’s proposed housing transformation would strengthen rather than upset the present social regime.
In a generous, orderly semi without a tower block in view, like the setting for a middle-class sitcom, an envelope containing a Right to Buy circular dropped on to the doormat. A tiny unkempt boy, wearing dungarees, white-skinned, picked it up.
He rushed enthusiastically to the breakfast table. There, his mother, in her mid-30s, decorated in an immaculate white blouse, and with a Lady Diana-like hairstyle, was reading a newspaper and drinking from a genteel white cup.
The old-fashioned suggestion appeared to be that father was out at work. The camera shifted closer to the table, showing that mother was poring over a print advertisement headlined “How to go about buying your council house”.
When a voice-over started in a chirpy cockney dialect, the ad’s one acknowledgement to the existence of working class, notifying spectators that “There are nearly 5 million council tenants in England and Wales, many families like yours. You can decide whether to turn your home into your house.”
Sales began gradually. Through the remaining four months of 1980, 55 council homes were purchased in England under the new law. Some Labour local authorities were intentionally slow in dealing with would‑be buyers.
In the London borough of Greenwich, council workers declined to give out application forms and sometimes dismissed that a Right to Buy existed at all. However, Heseltine empowered almost without limit by the 1980 Housing Act, hammered his municipal antagonists in court.
Then came the sales rush, in 1981, 66,321 English Right to Buy purchases, in 1982, 174,697, a sales summit that would be repeatedly approached throughout the remainder of the 1980s but never surpassed.
In Wales, too, sales climaxed early, in 1982. In Scotland, people were warier, the largest yearly sum did not reach until 1989. There were also regional disparities. In England, sales were fastest in London, the south-east and the south-west, and slowest in the manufacturing, or increasingly ex‑industrial, north.
However specific patterns were universal. Semis marketed better than terraces. Houses marketed better than flats at first by about 50 to one. Low-rise flats marketed better than high-rise ones. Properties with gardens or garages were greatly in demand.
Rural and suburban homes marketed better than city ones. Homes on small estates marketed better than homes on large ones. Homes with non-council neighbours were the most sought after of all.
Similar subtle and not so subtle social gradations determined the buyers. A thorough, politically neutral national consensus conducted by the Department of the Environment in 1985–6 and issued in 1988, staring back at the first five years of the Right to Buy, determined that buyers were an extremely distinct group but definitely not typical of council tenants as a whole.
Buyers were disproportionately drawn from the middle-aged and the better-off, many with grown-up children sharing the home and the expenses. Most were in full-time employment, usually manual proficient or white-collar professions, and with more than one wage-earner in the home.
Buyer earnings were on average nearly double tenant incomes.
Buyers were 10 times less expected to be jobless than nonbuyers. Furthermore, they were twice as likely to know existing homeowners. In fact, two-thirds of buyers stated that all or most of their family or friends were owner-occupiers.
In all these respects, the poll simply concluded, council-home buyers in the first half of the 1980s showed a marked continuation with those who had purchased Council homes throughout the decades before the Right to Buy became law.
Thatcherism, in some ways, was an extremely accomplished performance in false egalitarianism, as indeed is capitalism itself. The Right to Buy, for all its appealingly inclusive rhetoric, was not a right accessible to all.
Those who could not afford to exercise it tended to be lone parents, younger residents, people living on their own, or Thatcherism’s financial fallen, the jobless or low-skilled.
There were also emotional difficulties. Non-buyers tended to be cautious of mortgage debt, or of taking responsibility for repairs. Or they didn’t believe property purchase was for the likes of them. Or they really didn’t like their home enough to purchase it.
During the 70s, more vulnerable residents had become more concentrated in the poorest council estates. Frequently, non-buyers were just too bewildered by the rest of their lives. Even following five years of the Right to Buy, the 1988 report observed, nearly a tenth of council tenants were totally oblivious of the scheme at all.
Amongst the surviving nine-tenths, the large preponderance of whom qualified for it, knowledge of the Right to Buy was seen to be meagre and usually incorrect.
The government and its press associates presented the Right to Buy as a victory regardless. Either way, the scheme did win in changing how numerous Britons thought. The 1988 poll asked 1,230 buyers why they had purchased their homes and got hard-headed, individualistic, essentially Thatcherite answers.
Great monetary investment, the bargain which discounts on purchases presented. The feeling of security, of self-esteem, the right to repair or upgrade. The desire to have something to give the family and to move up the housing ladder and to improve mobility.
Two-thirds of those questioned stated they had not anticipated becoming homeowners until the Right to Buy legislation. As in all thriving capitalism, a new market had been formed and then satisfied.
The cuts were crucial to the means. The official figures of the state assets being sold off were respectably huge. In southern England, in 1981 the normal estimate of a right to buy property was £19,557, a tenth higher than the normal price given for a private-sector home by an English first-time buyer.
Yet most Right to Buy buyers actually paid much closer to £10,000: The normal discount obtained nationwide, reported the 1988 poll, was 44 percent. Buyers typically acquired nearly the whole value of their property.
Meanwhile, the government gained a financial windfall, not as exciting as North Sea oil, but plentiful. £692 million from council-home sales in 1980–1, £1.394 billion in 1981–2, £1.981 billion in 1982–3.
Thatcherism chose to manifest itself as a rejection of the postwar, state-driven, more profligate way of doing things. However, in housing, her administration was really the postwar state’s successor, selling off the assets it had built up.
A similar dependency law, virtually never recognized, behind her social and economic changes generally. Her autonomy to make Britain more risk-taking and individualistic in some ways simply endured because the country she had obtained, for all its defects and stresses, was a comparatively steady, consolidated place underneath.
More similar in the late 70s than it had ever been, yet filtered by shared class opinions and mainly at peace, there had been few protests in Callaghan’s Britain. Her government, apparently powerful and new, in fact somewhat lived off this social capital that dull old social capitalism had created.
What would happen when social resources started to run out, like what would happen when Britain ran out of affordable housing, was, in the early 1980s, a subject for another day.
Oddly amongst Thatcher’s ministers, Heseltine had some feeling of the broader importance of the housing of Right to Buy. He strongly asserted that councils should be permitted to retain three-quarters of the income from sales, in order to reconstruct the homes sold.
Contrary to the Right to Buy a small but increasing amount of critics since the 80s, the plan did not kill Council home-building overnight. More than 250,000 state-owned homes were built between 1980 and 1985.
But the speed of construction did slow, year by year. The percentage of the revenue from purchases that went to councils was steadily disintegrated, against Heseltine’s wishes. In 1983 Margaret Thatcher moved him to the Ministry of Defence, in large part to use his bulldozing charm against The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the ladies of Greenham Common.
In the meantime, rents for remaining Council residents increased with a new quickness. By 1991 they were 55 percent higher, pertinent to normal earnings than they had been 10 years earlier. If it were not for the Right to Buy, the council housing division as a mass would have created immense excesses from rental income and the growth in actual rents would not have been needed.
Or to put it more directly, home ownership was made desirable for more affluent Council residents by reductions compensated for by their lesser neighbours.
Yet in the early 1980s, the full cost of the Right to Buy was less visible than the new front doors, new kitchens and bathrooms, new paint jobs and fireplaces, new pebbledash and stone cladding, new garden balustrades and double glazing, new porches, conservatories and mock-Tudor panels that started to emerge across the earlier benumbed and communal panorama of British municipal housing.
The Prime Minister posed frequently with new purchasers, in their thoughtfully planned kitchens, on their swept-clean doorsteps, in their trimmed front gardens. The owners usually a little younger than the normal buyer, and dressed up for the event, with photogenic kids at hand.
Margaret Thatcher herself seemed genuinely excited and thrilled, sometimes even resting on a garden wall, winning one of her contests to reshape the country, for once. Until the spring of 1982, and the remote salvation of her character and notoriety by the Falklands war, it did not appear possible that she would gain much more.
However, it was a financial turn around in some sectors of the United Kingdom which was as essential to Margaret Thatcher’s ballot rating improving as the Falklands.
What is frequently overlooked is that at the time banks were a complete beast to get loans from. Mortgages were nearly as easy. Presently, the financial services are the biggest damned cancer in the advanced system, handling buyers like faeces and infringing the law as policy.
The fact that the offspring of Margaret Thatcher’s previous housing minister now owns more than 40 council houses exposes this for what it was, a naked grasp for resources by members of the government. If we observed this kind of thing in a central African country we would scoff at their depravity. Such things don’t happen in England, right?
Margaret Thatcher might not have imagined the mass purchase of Council homes by future nefarious generations. Nevertheless, you don’t require too much understanding to understand that if you’re selling off Council homes to residents at a lowered price, then everybody is going to be on that bandwagon.
Margaret Thatcher was potentially unethical and blinkered to the result of her methods, but financially astute members of her government could recognise the opportunity of getting even richer.
Nevertheless, regarding the market improving in some regions, it may have played a tiny part, but the majority of the reason for her re-election was the Falkland Factor and the creation of the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP).
However, her government was quite mild opposed to the lot that is in now, who are simply plain asset strippers.
It was not about enabling residents to purchase their own homes, it was an assault on the notion of social housing. They were to be traded off at a minimum reduction of 32 percent of the market price for a house or 44 percent for a flat.
Councils were not authorised to use the, somewhat minimised, receipts to create new council homes. That’s one reason out of many that we are in the dangerous situation we are to day. Individual desire alone does not point to the greatest satisfaction for the highest number.
The actual amounts of housing stock were the same, whether marketed or not, i.e, continued to be for rent. The major thing is, that those marketing, were not compensated by housing stock for rent, therefore, the poorer families in British society saw themselves squeezed-out of being able to get proper rental accommodation at inexpensive rents.
It might be worth pointing out that Council tenants didn’t somehow inherit their homes.
Most parents who until the 1950’s had shared a two up two down privately rented terraced home with possibly aunts and uncles and so forth. Eventually to realise their vision, a council maisonette on a newly built estate someplace.
Most people were World War II veterans or industry operators throughout the war, and they were all hard working people, in a way people who adopt that expression today seemingly wouldn’t understand.
Nevertheless, in the 1950’s, there they were, breathing cleanish air for once, enclosed by open areas on an estate developed for them, in appreciation of the disparities and atonement they’d endured through decades of hardship, exploitation and conflict.
At no time did these people ever see their Council housing as a money-making tool. They recognised it as a crucial component of creating and giving to a community. Furthermore, they were sold out, not only financially by governments after the 1980’s but by the whole Right to Buy scheme.
A system conceived by people who simply never noticed the short-term gains of money-dealing and didn’t remotely know the histories or requirements, or also the tolerance of people who aren’t like them.
Housing estates eventually became a three strike and you’re out the place because it had become a dumping area for the most unsuitable housing residents and those that had purchased their homes through the Right to Buy scheme had become discouraged because they had purchased their homes and now couldn’t sell them.
It wasn’t their fault, the place had once been lively throughout the 1970’s and it was presently something of a wasteland, and like so much of this country these days.
There was formerly the normal lives or everyday person who strive every day, who were content to go on holiday to the English seashore and while away the hours with their family. Now, all we have is this huge cultural sporting events, that are hyped and sold to intoxicated punters.
And we have these big time performances, consumerist festivals, but for the real lives of everyday people, they’re not part of that culture. The culture that we once knew is no longer ours, it belongs to the new culture, along with our Council houses.
Margaret Thatcher was a cold hearted Tory excretion of the highest dimensions, and her legacy has enabled even more outrageously greedy, self-aggrandizing poop into government. She knew precisely what their big bang would do for the markets, and she knew precisely what allowing Right to Buy whilst all but stopping district councils to renew their stock would do, medium to long term.
Letting wealthy landowners purchase Council housing in volume is what we are speaking about. The difficulty with the Right to Buy is a portion of it has ended up in the hands of the affluent middle and upper middle-class rather than working people who are now left impaled and renting from deceptive landlords.
The Right to Buy should have made it unlawful to rent out ex-council properties, they should be homes, not investment opportunities.
The most visible distinction is that money that was once paid to the state, which could have been salvaged into creating a new property, is now going into private hands, where it is typically utilised to purchase other current stock in an unwanted feedback circuit.
The city has the capability to manage an organised strategy of developing new homes with rents from existing property. Private residents do not, and will simply purchase whatever’s on Rightmove.
To add insult to injury, the state is presently giving taxpayers’ funds to private landlords to house numerous people on low earnings. This is a horrible state of affairs for everyone other than the private landlords.
Plus whilst the state is permitted to sell off its own property, it is not permitted to sell off other people’s property.
There’s a huge distinction between someone who pursues route A because they think it’s the right one for the well-being of the majority, even if they’re entirely incorrect about that and someone who pursues A because they believe it will serve themselves, their family and their friends even if it screws the majority over.
I believe Thatcher pitched firmly into the first tent. Even if she was deluded, she believed she was serving the working people of Great Britain. I doubt that David Cameron ever believed that he was serving the working people of England.
Yet, like all parties, you don’t actually require much proof to understand that they’re a sly, self-serving wedge of corruption. None of them gives a crap about the people of Great Britain and they barely care about the people who vote for them.
Every other sucker was wrong, as far as she was concerned and she stretched that idea to her own government, although if you’re of a specific age, you should know that.
If you look back and see all those mental hours that people spent slaving to become homeowners. They worked every hour to get a house of their own, and that’s when homes were worth something, something you could pass along to your children.
Now all the government has created, it has produced a nation of self-employed workers with zero hours who are beholden by the stress of an ouster and have to put up with nefarious gang men that call themselves bailiffs, this is what the government has done to us.
It was totally the wrong thing to do and more importantly, it was done for corrupt purposes. It was done to obtain votes and it warped the housing market.
Thousands of ex-council homes are now controlled by Private Landlords and Councils are having to rent back homes they earlier controlled from these Private Landlords to home homeless people on their lists.
Margaret Thatcher, some would say was downright wicked, who should have been judged for deception against the British People for further selling us all down the river of Privatisation. Gas, Electricity and Water Bills, with profits going to wealthy Tories with their acquired wealth, whilst the poor fight to keep warm.
If there is ever another World War I, do you actually want to defeat Great Britain, defeat what? A better Britain, are you joking.
Even though some might acknowledge that selling off state housing stock wholesale was ill-thought through, and Britain at least, which is preoccupied with the idea of house ownership encouraging people to obtain a little security in the structure of bricks and mortar is debatably a great idea, but Margaret Thatcher rather overreached the line.
However, where we should take issue with this piece is in seeking to build a direct association between a strategy was established more than 30 years ago with today’s housing crisis. Too much has happened in the said field for that system to be forced to carry all or even most of the liability.
Not least the dwindling abundance of meagre, local builders and the majority of the national building organisations and an affiliated transit away from hiring a continual workforce of tradesmen in support of contracting self-employed tradesmen has paralysed house-building.
Another consequence is that a number of apprentices in the different building trades have dropped off drastically, pointing to a deficiency of such tradesmen.
Homes are constructed for profit not need. Under the post war governments, Council and then Housing Association homes were constructed for need. Councils have been stopped by Government policy both Tory and Labour from creating more homes and investing the funds from sell offs in home building.
At least Jeremy Corbyn was discussing the end of this situation, the new homes must continue to be publically maintained. Steps should be further contemplated to take vacant homes into public possession.
The Right to Buy could give our family the promise to subsequently get on the property ladder, but then again socialists want to keep us in our place.
The saddest and most significant symbol of Thatcher’s ploy was not to make privately owned homes the equivalent as Council owned homes, therefore guaranteeing that anyone who’s rent was clear and had lived someplace for long enough they would get a guaranteed mortgage on a reduced obtained home.
It wasn’t ever Thatcher’s aim to give people an investment in their home and it was yet another platform of privatisation, in other words, the elimination of public sector expenditure. Had she well intentioned rather of the ideologically that supported the Housing bill, it would never have seen the light of day.
Furthermore, she got the concept from one Milton Friedman who she portrayed as a most talented economist. Some years later we know better but there were still lots of economists who maintained Thatcher’s efforts were a delusion.
Margaret Thatcher was the first Tory to be ideologically motivated. Former Tory governments were broadly realistic, essentially managerial. You might agree or disagree with that strategy. If an administration has a fair social system, and I don’t believe Thatcher had one, I would prefer my government to do its best with the importance of the entire country in mind.
Yes, there will be losers, but my beef with the Tories is that too many of the losers are at the bottom end of the socio-economic system and too few higher up and that isn’t how it should operate.
I hate ideologies which I think, whatever the ideology, just twists everything, with what’s occurring being defined and normally warped to suit an ideology. Margaret Thatcher had a small-town mentality and perceived things simplistically.
Labour, on the other hand, made up of a mixture of old socialist and social-democratic beliefs influenced with what they regard as a duty to Satisfy the City are and have been, even Tony Blair, shapeless. David Cameron, who for me was something of a loose cannon, at least is logical, whether or not you agree with the solutions he came up with.
For me, all parties should be one-nation parties. The problem is all parties just pay lip service to that idea.
It was one of Margaret Thatcher’s and the current Tories more deranged policies. Home purchase does make sense for a number of people, but we further demand options, with Housing Associations ready to play a role.
The concept of simply selling off socially-owned housing cheap to those fortunate enough to be living in them, it is insane, and the Buy to Let (BTL) really doesn’t appear to work for anyone but the lucky few.
Margaret Thatcher left office a quarter of a century ago and it isn’t her accountability, that after that we have let in a number of immigrants and allowed fools to hinder new homes being created where people want to live and where builders are keen to develop them.
If a Council house is sold, it should be sold at the market price and the funds accumulated from the purchase of it restored back into the Council housing stock. Margerate Thatcher has been out of office for a really long time now, may she Rest in Peace, but what has any government done since to attempt to rectify the balance?
The discount was a simple bait for votes, and whether by a loss of foreknowledge or intentionally spiteful purposes, it surely resulted in Council house property being run down, a stain being attached to still being a tenant, and profiteering by selling on to landlords who then commissioned greater rents than the Council would have done.
It’s a broken strategy and one which it’s disgusting Labour didn’t get rid of.
I won’t mince my words, selling off Council housing, simply schtup the issue entirely. The character of the neighbourhood transformed gradually from one of the people living in a community, where people helped one another and where our children could play safely, to one where putting your own front door on to show they actually owned your home and to raising the pickets, which were more significant.
Margaret Thatcher’s servile loyalty to the Milton Friedman playbook, in which you privatised everything you could, whilst creating subdued mortgage serfs as promptly as she could, and it started to scatter the seeds of the divide in this country, that we’ve actually never recovered from.
The Tories like selling off public assets to their contributors and followers, that is the only policy that these inept kleptomaniacs have consistently adhered to. Their financial mismanagement relies upon the sustained looting of what we paid for, being sold at a knockdown rate.
How to gain votes, the pretension at the time of turning us into a Home owner Democracy. Looks pretty sick now with all the wretched Buy to Let swindlers, doesn’t it? Just another Tory trick, say one thing and then present precisely the reverse effect.
The problem is that quite substantial amounts of people cannot provide their own housing, they really can’t afford it, and most wages are consistently low for frontline workers, which makes it increasingly stressful, that is why we had Social housing in the first place.
Social housing for people who worked on the frontline and did not earn enough money to purchase their own homes and it worked surprisingly well, for a pretty long time until Margaret Thatcher became in charge and was permitted to call all the shots.
She subdued the selling value of Council houses to boost people to purchase them said homes and they were made to believe they were some variety of dignitary and the tabloids described it as something of an excellent scheme.
After all, it was simply a scheme and Council residents were the examples of that money making plan, making their homes into some sort of shrine and people were enthusiastic. Of course, there were some people that were opposed to the idea but it was like Thatcherism had taken an entire community of people and stole them.
They were encompassed by the arms of Thatcher like a clamp, but the entire theory was cloaked in a façade and you couldn’t actually whine about it because people had been fooled into thinking that by purchasing their homes they would be much better off, or at least the country would.
If you’re thinking that the Right to Buy did not cause the housing crisis, you’d be right…
People who purchased their Council home, were as one would say already a Council tenant. The dilemma was that each resident would move on eventually, whether it be because they required a smaller home or larger one or they died and did not then require one at all, or indeed, they got evicted.
If you purchased your Council home, it was then yours and not the Councils any longer, therefore they had lost that housing asset completely because it could not be rented out to another resident if it went empty.
Therefore, the funds they had earned from a purchase of housing stock was supposed to be put back into the kitty to develop more fitting homes for our ever expanding population. After all, we grow larger, not smaller in dimension for the ever growing population boom that we now call immigration.
Everyone who purchased a council home had to be a resident, normally of long standing. When they purchased they stayed, no one else lost a home, there were precisely the equivalent amount of homes and people as before.
It was simply that one less family rented and one more family owned and back in time when the Right to Buy came in, there was no actual housing deficit, not like today.
It’s not even the fact that Margaret Thatcher permitted people to buy their Council homes, but the reality that the United Kingdom is far too short of ground and we are a pretty tiny country in regard to other nations such as America or Australia, and we are gradually running out of places to create more homes for the needy.
The Right to Buy was not wrong in itself, but what was completely crazy was the refusal on councils not using the cash they got from selling houses and flats to spend in creating more housing. Along with decreasing the funds given to them by the central government to finance developing new homes.
It is that which has created the crazy and unsustainable increase in house costs, and the growth of Buy to Let landlords who take money as donations from inside government discursively by rising rental costs to residents who frequently need housing benefit to rent the things.
There could be a contention that Buy to Let landlords are themselves a little like the scroungers who are frequently scapegoated by this government, albeit indirectly.
When David Cameron first became Prime Minister in 2010 he pledged to decrease the amount spent on Housing Benefit from the absurd heights of £20 billion a year.
Next, he put the fool Iain Duncan Smith in charge and allowed the bumbling simpleton George Osborne to base his entire financial plan on a nice little house price bubble.
The result was Bedroom tax, limitations on young people demanding and all kinds of nastiness and a £24 billion a year Housing benefit proposal in four years. If they were to carry on this way they would see a 50 percent rise in 10 years with £30 billion a year being claimed or millions destitute.
The Right to Buy further meant that more people would have assets in their homes that they could then be made to use when they required elderly care and presumably the Englishman’s home is his castle, and there is nothing more English than purchasing a home, seeing it go up in price, then being complacent about the reality that money has been made without putting any energy into it or using any skill.
We English are a group of idle, worthless good for nothing moronic idiots.
The compromised policy and on the outside so fair and honest, protecting the destructive truth that surfaced later once the policy was unchangeable and the harm was done. This idea extends with Iain Duncan Smith, the already, doubly failed leader wreaking destruction with his deceptive credit system.
Entirely believable but view beneath and simply inhale the reeking mass of decaying baloney that was there waiting to burst through.
Labour did not end the Right to Buy. They did end the under occupancy of privately rented social housing, funded for by Housing Benefit, however, did not implement those rules to publicly owned Social housing, that left a vulgar time bomb.
Everybody will have a varying viewpoint of this subject, but the Right to Buy would have operated remarkably well if the capital from those assets had been utilized to create new homes. The funds were supposed to have been put back into the reserve, however, most of it never was.
Combine that with our population boom and congestion and we get a formula for disaster, a genuine catastrophe. What was thought to have a positive result ends up collapsing and one which it appears we will never overcome now?
Mixed-sex wards on the NHS have been the subject of manifesto promises and political promises for over a decade. Labour pledged to remove them in 1997. Now, years later, the government has promised to do precisely the same but they have now been abolished it in Scotland.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 