Get Down, Shapp!

The Tories didn't really wait so long before showing their true colours.

Since the flawed election, which saw them seize power without a mandate, with the aid of their lackeys and lickspittles in the Liberal Democrats, a slew of hateful policies, proposals and suggestions, mainly aimed at targeting the poor, and demonising the disabled and those on benefits, has poured forth like a sewer from Central Office, or wherever their septic think tank is located these days.

As I have said elsewhere, I suspect that some of these proposals may be not entirely serious, kite-flying by some chosen mouthpiece (other orifices are available, some of them Lord Young) to test public reaction.

Their latest idea is about Social Housing, floated by Grant Shapps, and must surely fall into that category. It achieves the unique distinction of being not only gaga and unworkable, but also running counter to Tory policy as established by their patron saint, the blessed Margaret Thatcher, and her ideology.

In Mrs Thatcher's era, if you lived in a council house and you did well for yourself, and prospered materially, you might get to buy your house, thus denuding the UK's social housing stock, which many thousands did in the 1980s. Nowadays, if you live in a council house, and your material circumstances improve, under this pispotical proposal, you are likely to find yourself being evicted!

The stated aim is to end the concept of council house tenancies for life. Why? What possible good can it do, and where are the people supposed to move to? Grant Shapps is part of the Department of Communities. What has this proposal got to do with communities?

What it is about is, because the government doesn't want to build more social housing, it is making the existing stock "go further" by moving on the people who live there into the private sector, and bringing in people who are on the waiting list!

Compared, of course, to the obvious policy, of just building more social housing to start with.