Thursday 24 May 2007

Terry Kelly and Social Housing

I've been trying to ignore TKMax recently as he has become something of an irrelevance even within the Labour group, but when he makes a statement like this:-

How about campaigning for a proper social house building programme instead of capitulating to the racists, there's a novel idea, decent socialists in the party now have to apologise for you, for god's sake go !

then I have to remind people that he campaigned against keeping Renfrewshire's housing in public ownership. He bragged about the number of council houses the Labour council had knocked down, and when challenged about the number of council houses they had built (none) and the number of homeless and the waiting lists for council houses (thousands -- see my post on 19th April 2007) he took the cowards way out, did not respond, and barred me from comment on his site.

Well it's his site, so he makes the rules, but we will have to to add hypocrisy to the previous charges of buffoonery (and he is after all McMillan's court jester), and treat his opinions accordingly

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Red Mist
I never thought that it would happen but Social/Council housing could be an important electoral issue for the first time since right to buy was introduced.

Unfortunately Social housing has got a bad reputation as many believe that it goes to the undeserving. This is because housing is allocated according to need and in some cases rewards feckless behaviour and is probably responsible for exacerbating housing waiting lists numbers as many on the list refuse to live on estates which contain problem families.

red mist said...

zz -- the real point is that social/council housing is becoming an electoral issue because rentier capital is screwing those in need of housing for all it is worth and it is starting to affect the middle classes. Financial and industrial capitalists are at odds with rentier capital because they need people to live in built up areas, but they don't want to pay the wages that makes that possible with property prices and rents in the private sector as high as they are.
The obvious answer for them is to increase the amount of affordable housing, but they don't want to pay tax to make that possible, they want property developers (rentier capital) to be forced to provide affordable social housing as a percentage of all new build.

This is an exploitable split in capital which might just mean that government, national or local, might be forced to start to provide social housing from taxation in order to spread the cost fairly. The social housing agenda is not being driven by the poor, they are the least likely to vote, but by the middle classes who want their kids on the 'housing ladder' as if housing were a competitive sport with winners at the top and losers at the bottom of the ladder. It is disgusting.

Anonymous said...

RM
Your right Housing should be about somewhere to live not financial speculation.

The social housing that must be built must be rental only.