OPINION: Call it what it is – Class War
Robin Holtom gives a personal view of our current housing crisis
The housing crisis that Louise Hester exposed so vividly in HIP 210 is no accident. And nothing this government plans will do anything but aggravate it further. Liz Truss likes to present herself as a clone of Mrs Thatcher. This is an alarming prospect. Their shared fairy tale of ‘trickle down’ economics masks the fact that their policies deliberately make the rich richer at the expense of the poor. Welcome to the world of ‘trickle up.’
The undeclared class war Thatcher instigated has carried on almost relentlessly since 1979, nd without any of the patrician restraint we associate with ‘one nation’ Toryism. Harold MacMillan, probably the last caring Conservative leader, boasted about how many council houses his government had built. By contrast, Thatcher sold them off. The housing policies of Mrs Thatcher have particular consequences in Hastings today. In effect, she laid the foundations of our current housing crisis. Now, precisely those people who have added value to the property market by working in hospitality, creative industries and so on – the people who help make Hastings a brilliant place to be – are the people who cannot afford a home.
When I acquired my first mortgage in the 1970s it was only possible to borrow money for home purchase through a mutual Building Society. Banks were not allowed to lend money on domestic property. Banks lent their money to industry and businesses. Building societies were obliged to look after the interests of their members and savers and so made it their business to ensure that house prices were in lockstep with wages. As a result, it was not possible to get a mortgage for more than two and a half times one’s annual salary. How has it changed?
When Mrs Thatcher enabled the banks to take over the work of the building societies and give domestic mortgages she was, in effect, giving the gamekeeper’s job to the poachers. Banks are businesses operating in the interests of their shareholders, rather than their members or the people they lend to. Their job is to make a profit. Suddenly, homes, which were protected to some extent from profiteering by building societies, were no longer protected. Homes became commodities to be traded like cars or fridges. This vicious political manoeuvre was skilfully mystified by Mrs Thatcher when she simultaneously gave council tenants the so-called ‘right to buy.’ The political spin said this was not a divisive escalation of the class war, but instead of the creation of a ‘property owning democracy.’
What has it all led to?
The average house price in the UK this year is £281,000. If mortgages were limited today in the way that Building Societies used to practise, the required annual salary for a mortgage a person would need to earn is £112,400. Or, put in another way, the present average annual salary of £24,600 would now only buy a house costing £60,000. Which, of course, buys precisely nothing in Hastings today. How is it that we have submitted to this divisiveness so blindly? Perhaps it is a peculiarly British behaviour. Are we still hypnotised by the fantasy that ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’? As if the ‘property ladder,’ in the British imagination, morphed into a ‘stairway to heaven’?
Our Prime Minister seems determined to accentuate the divisions that her heroine began. How could Hastings Borough Council resist this? A simple way to release more housing is surely to restrict the use of Airbnb and increase the council tax on second homes. It has been estimated that the number of empty homes in Hastings is about the same number as there are homeless or inadequately housed people. Increasing local tax on unused or little-used homes would also discourage the investment in homes as commodities and make homes what they should be: an affordable place for normal people to live. This would be, at least, a start.
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An excellent piece. Punchy and informative.
You are absolutely right. It is class war. As they say ‘homelessness is a policy choice’. Living in insecure housing is a nightmare.