Playing Two-Dimensional Chess

Am I the only one experiencing a Rachel Reeves-shaped double dose of deja vu? On the one hand, there is her copying Gordon Brown's "prudent" management of public finances which, in the first two years of the New Labour government, saw him stick to Tory spending plans. And then there is Tuesday night's briefing to the Graun. We are warned that her Autumn statement will include tax rises and public sector cuts. Stuff that she has already said. I suppose plagiarising one's self is a step up from ripping off others.

What does the piece say? Despite the economy puttering along better than expected, state borrowing for July had doubled compared to this time last year. Because it's £3bn over target, "tough decisions" are called for. I thought economic growth was supposed to be our magical cure-all? There are four measures that are being trailed. Raising capital gains and inheritance tax, and keeping to the letter of no new taxes on "working people". Going for a 1% increase in public spending, while expecting some departments to find savings. The child benefit cap is staying in place because the point of hard choices is to look tough and uncaring. And finally, the Bank of England will be excluded from state debt figures.

The last is the most wonkish, but is politically interesting. As we know, taxes are paid into the consolidated fund, which is effectively the government's current account with the Bank. It suits Labour and the Tories to pretend its incomings and outgoings have to be balanced, and that borrowing money from other sources is super bad. However, the money lender of first resort is always the Bank. In 2022-23, the Bank owned 25% of government bonds (gilts), effectively meaning a quarter of the state's debt is owned by the state. According to the House of Commons public finance report published this Wednesday, redefining state debt so it excludes money the state owes itself would depress debt from 99.4% to 91.9% of GDP. An accounting trick that can be presented as Labour's achievement in getting the figures down when everyone's forgot the redefinition, and allows more borrowing from the Bank off the books (as it were).

To underline the point that this means absolutely no relief for the party's base, the FT splashed on Reeves's plans to raise social rents above the rate of inflation. This means "stability" apparently, because it's a 10-year settlement that will allow housing associations and councils to plan and use monies to invest in new builds. A way of diverting housing benefit for those who qualify into the sector, while hammering those who don't. But ultimately, efforts at trying to rebuild social rents by putting costs onto tenants is undermined by Labour's retention of Right to Buy. Why invest in new housing when tenants can buy them at a discount after three years of 'permanent tenancy' status? No wonder councils have put cash in build-to-rents via "private" local authority-owned landlords. They get a return without the asset being sold from under them. And in the mean time the housing crisis worsens.

One might say Reeves is moving pieces around a chess board. Except there are no clever-clever 11-dimensional moves here. The Chancellor is narrowing the range of public debate and purposely pretending her choices are "necessities". Therefore, Labour has "no option" but to throw public money at business, can't do anything about the financial crisis in public services, and demand those at the sharpest end cough up to cover the costs of refurbishing the state. She is presenting a false, dishonest politics, and it's up to the labour movement to expose it as such and push back.

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The Class Politics of the Tory Collapse

While there is a tone of ambiguity about Labour's election triumph, there is no such doubt about what happened to the Conservative Party last Thursday. 230 Tory careers went up in smoke as its vote more than halved compared to Boris Johnson's 2019 triumph. This is their lowest seat count since the 1832 Reform Act, which gave birth to the modern Conservatives, and at 6.8m votes their lowest level of popular support since the advent of universal suffrage in 1928. Indeed, you'd have to go back to 1923 under Stanley Baldwin to find them polling lower. They suffered a calamity where anti-Tory voters of the left and right prised them apart, leaving behind a bewildered and rudderless rump. Perhaps some of this pain might have been avoided had they read my book.

There are plenty of conjunctural factors that had a role in the Tories' electoral collapse, but what how did the party's crisis of political reproduction impact its evisceration? Five years ago, Johnson's championing of Brexit allowed him to configure class politics to the Conservatives' advantage. To remind ourselves, the base of mass conservatism was based on the differences between class cohorts. Or, to be more precise, the Tories hegemonised older people and particularly the retired. This has two components. First, because social location has the biggest impact on how one views the world, formulates one's interests, and draws political conclusions about it, the experience of being a pensioner is analogous to the existence of the small business person. Overwhelmingly dependent on their own labour for an "independent" livelihood, the petit bourgeois fear being out-competed, particularly by bigger businesses that can use their clout to cartelise markets and drive out smaller competitors. They may also have employees, which bring with them wage demands, motivational issues, and varying degrees of reliability. Both present existential dangers that might drive them out of business and into poverty or, horror of horrors, having to work for someone else. Hence, as generations of Marxist activists and thinkers know, they are disproportionately attracted to authoritarian politics.

This is relevant to understanding mass conservatism in Britain because being a pensioner means having a relatively fixed income. One cannot simply re-enter the work force to make good a financial crisis, and so one is at the mercy of events. This location is close to petit bourgeois anxiety and predisposes one toward a politics of certainty and is mirrored by an antipathy toward most things that epitomise change - migration, shifts in popular culture, growing acceptance of (previously) stigmatised minorities. This is exacerbated even more if one owns property. Thatcher's Right to Buy plus the cheap credit of the 1970s and 1980s created a generation of homeowners, but one does not become conservative magically because your name is on a title deed. It individuates and disciplines: individuates because one has an individual material interest in the appreciation of an asset, and disciplined because servicing the mortgage/debt makes collective action that much more difficult. It's almost as if the Conservative Party promoted home ownership with these in mind. Therefore, fast forward to the last decade the Tories' policy platform have catered to these interests and dispositions. Protect pensioners from the immediate consequences of austerity, not building houses to protect asset price inflation (many home owning pensioners voted Tory so they would have a handsome nest egg to hand down to their children and grandchildren, who've bore the brunt of the last 14 years), cut taxes, pull at the nostalgic heart strings of an independent Britain bestriding the world stage, and lash out at trans people and immigrants who are perceived as harbingers of unwelcome, dangerous social change.

There will always be plenty of old people, but the problems the Tories had with making this the basis of their voter coalition was its time limited character. Again, for two reasons. The first is the conservatising effects of age are breaking down. The experience of being a pensioner is weaker as a right wing authoritarian disposition than owning property, and the story of Britain since the mid-1990s has been a contraction in housing supply. Fewer homes overall were built, and the diminishing of council housing has led to the huge growth of the private rented sector. With asset price inflation surging well ahead of real wages, millions were and are locked out of acquiring property until much later in the life course. It meant couples aren't starting their families until later, if at all. Therefore these props of reproducing the Conservative vote were kicked away, and this has only continued under the last five Prime Ministers. Related to this were the everyday class politics of the Tories in office. Holding down wages, defending landlords, encouraging precarity, attacking the public sector, despoiling the environment, victimising minorities, this has been the lot of working age people and young people for 14 years. Their record is unlikely to convert many of this layer into Tory voters, even if millions of them do get on the housing ladder.

And then there are values. The Tories' coalition tends toward social conservatism, whereas the younger one is the more socially liberal one is likely to be. This is not the result of lefty teachers or liberal institutions, but is itself a consequence of class cohorts. As explained on many occasions here and elsewhere, what has become increasingly dominant in advanced capitalist societies since the war has been immaterial labour and the advent of the socialised workers. Displacing the industrial worker as the hegemonic working class figure, its object is the production of care, knowledge, services, subjectivities. I.e. The production of the social relations capitalism needs to reproduce itself as a social system. Therefore, as the generations have passed through the changed character of work, the traits selected by it - tolerance, sociability, networking, care - have come to the fore of popular consciousness. It has now become the spontaneous disposition for the majority of working age people, hence not only is the Conservative party's base in long-term decline, so is the basis for social conservatism. It follows that when the Tories victimise people, make draconian pledges, play divide and rule, and seek to cultivate the prejudices of their base this only serves to drive a wedge between themselves and the bulk of the population.

Bearing these processes in mind, in the book - the bulk of which was written when Johnson was at the height of his powers - suggested that if nothing went wrong, the Tories would be competitive in the 2024 election but that afterwards, from the late 2020s onwards, unless they underwent root and branch change winning an election would only get more difficult. Party Gate was not an inevitably, nor was the Liz Truss debacle, nor for that matter was the complacent negligence of Rishi Sunaks year-and-a-half at the helm. But what they did was solidify support for the broad left of centre among working age people, driving Tory numbers there to historic lows, and alienated a swathe of its softer support among the coalition built by Theresa May and Johnson. Who knew that cuts to public provision the elderly are disproportionately dependent on and continued attacks on their younger family members would undo the fealty of millions of them? Tory accelerationism ensured the consequences of their party's decline bit earlier than it had to.

Does the rise of Reform bother this picture much? Standing against them everywhere it could was always going to cause the Tories trouble, but Nigel Farage's entry into the election fray made them much more potent than would have been the case. Of the 230 seats gone, the Reform's was greater than the difference between the Tory vote and that of their victorious opponent in 170 of them. It wasn't Morgan McSweeney that won Labour its famous victory. Arguably it was Messrs Farage, Tice, and Anderson. Ditto for the Liberal Democrats' triumphant comeback and for the Greens taking the two Tory-held seats they targeted. Finally winning his place in the Commons, Farage has vowed that he's "coming for Labour next". In reality, while one should not be complacent about the poisoning effect their breakthrough could have on political discourse, especially considering they came second in 98 Labour seats and provide a handy excuse for Keir Starmer to go with "socially conservative" authoritarian politics on immigration. But electorally, Reform has probably maxed out their reach and is only capable of making inroads into Labour held seats in a smattering of places. Their vote is less than what UKIP polled in 2015, despite all the advantages of tacit press backing. And you can forget the ridiculous hype about Farage finding an echo among young people. Their numbers here show the same incredibly low levels of support as per the Tories, and like the Tories their voter coalition is of broadly the same sociological character and are on a declinist trajectory.

This is the problem the Conservatives have got. The recriminations and excuses have started to come forward, but it's not the case the cataclysm has hit and now is the moment to rebuild. The dynamics of long-term Tory decline have not abated. The antipathy of rising generations is not vanishing, nor will it. The Tories and Reform rest on a set of values opposed to the majority of the population, and articulate interests seriously at odds with it. On the basis of the politics both are proffering there are no new people to be won over. If they decide to stick with their current platforms, which Reform are bound to, then some sort of alliance between the two might make them competitive at the next election. Especially as Labour aren't likely to put on support after four or five years of government, and whose campaign will probably have to take on the appearance of 412 by-elections. But time is against both parties. If the Tories want to recover and become a party of government again, they're going to have to completely renovate their politics and reforge a mass conservatism that intersects with the socially liberal default that is already here and is only getting stronger. But also this conservatism cannot be as brutally and as sectionally divisive as it has been these last 45 years. The basis for a two-nation Toryism is receding with the generation that voted for it.

At the end of the first edition of the book, I laid out the challenge facing the party and observed that no matter their difficulties, "no one got rich betting against the Tories." Fewer then five years on from a victory that was supposed to see the Tories dominate this decade, their party is broken, their coalition eviscerated and split, and the way back is not obvious to anyone in their ranks. There hasn't been a worse time to be a Conservative, and long may it remain so.

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The Anatomy of Tory Tax and Mortgage Bribes

Want a reason to vote Conservative? As the party slides in the polls toward Liz Truss territory, Rishi Sunak has rustled up a pair of buckeroos Tory high command thinks everyone would like to climb on. Number one: even more tax cuts. Number two: government subsidised 99% mortgages. That might explain why the Tory Sunday papers were so chipper in the face of their party's appalling polling.

What do we have on offer? In the Mail on Sunday, Jeremy Hunt speaks highly of the late Nigel Lawson and, emulating his hero, would like his stewardship of the Treasury put money in people's pockets. Just don't talk about how much of this money was thanks to cheap credit that evaporated in the late 80s property bust. Hunt thinks (unspecified) tax cuts can happen because, apparently, "technology". With the National Insurance cut taking effect from this month, Numbers 10 and 11 are hoping a few extra hundred quid in the pocket will cause millions of working Britons to look afresh at their party. Especially those who are better off because, true to form, the higher the income the more someone will save.

Hold the front page, the Tories want to defund public services for marginal income gains. The 99% mortgage offering is more of an eye-catcher. Effectively handing out housing deposits like confetti would (theoretically) help millions move out of renting and into buying their own home, kickstarting a new housebuilding boom and addressing the property shortage. Not at all coincidentally, turning young people into mortgage holders might boost the conservatising effects of ownership - those very effects that have powered Tory partisanship for more than a generation and have been systematically undermined by ... the Tories.

Scientific accuracy is a virtue in political commentary, so we should call these bribes what they are: wheezes. More tax cuts for most working age people disproportionately benefit the affluent and count for little when wages have been battered by inflation. And those who are better off end, the would-be natural Tory voters, are well aware that what they gain from NI cuts disappears because of frozen higher rate tax thresholds. And the mortgages? Any hope 99% mortgages would put rocket boosters under Britain's construction industry is forlorn. House builders have a vested interest in making sure completions lag behind demand so they benefit from asset price inflation and guaranteeing healthy profits. Creating a government-backed scheme is only going to generate more demand and stoke the property bubble some more. And that might be the point. Getting those vaulting values jumping upwards are what Tory opinion formers and the party's base loves to see.

Taking all this on board, could they do the job of reaching out to wider layers and avoid ballot box carnage? It's doubtful. If the Tories were serious about housing, they could have introduced this scheme much earlier. Indeed, had they done so their political position would not be as precarious. Hindsight, eh? And because the Tories have spent the last 14 years hammering working age people, a gift wrapped mortgage is not going to shift the deep antipathy. There's a reason why the Tories are on 10% among the under 50s. No, the mortgage scheme, like tax cuts, is an exercise in vibes. Its main audiences are not those who would ostensibly benefit from tax cutting and deposit largesse, but their elderly parents and grand parents.

Central to Tory politics of divide and rule between the retired and the rest is endless propaganda that their children and grandchildren are pampered, lead easy indolent lives, and have never had a diploma from the school of hard knocks. The war on woke and similar cynical rubbish makes out the younger one is, the more entitled, fay, and decadent they are. And so Tory policy and its presentation in their media, which the base disproportionately depends on for news, gives this rising generations of bums and ingrates the kinds of kicks that never did them any harm. It instructs young 'uns about the real way of the world, and if they respond positively by working hard and getting on they will be rewarded. With things like lower taxes and mortgage subsidies. The Tories are trying their best to help them along, and if they don't take a bite out of the carrots offered then the stick it is.

As the general election approaches we can expect more "generous" policies, but none of them are designed to win over swing voters. The Tories know the wipe out is coming and nothing can stop it. The best they can do is anticipate defeat and keep banging away at policies they think will cohere the base. That way the party will be fighting fit to spring back once the public get disillusioned with one term of a Labour government. In all likelihood, it's not going to turn out like that, but even the Tories can't help but find a flash of hope in the black of the abyss.

Divisions Among the Tory Base

As a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day, sometimes even the Daily Telegraph prints the truth. I'd extend that observation to 'interesting', because on Sunday it ran a piece fretting about divisions between two groups of traditional Tory voters: mortgage holders and homeowners. Economics editor Szu Ping Chan writes that the Tories are on the horns of a terrible dilemma. Reduce interest rates to keep down mortgages and homeowners lose out on savings' interest. Appease them by pushing them upwards, and payments to the bank go up with consequences for consumer spending. It's a zero sum game that cannot be triangulated. Votes are lost whatever the government does. And if anything, the problems will become more acute as the years wear on.

If we consider mortgage holders natural Tory supporters, that hasn't been true since at least the 2017 election. Considering the details from the last YouGov poll, we see the Tories trail badly among every age group who are working age. Even among the 50-64s, there's a 15-point deficit. Among the 25s-49s it's a 45-point difference. This is where most of the country's 7.4m mortgage holders are, and if Chan thinks this group can be won back by Jeremy Hunt instructing the Bank of England to cut interest rates before the next election, he's going to be disappointed.

The reasons why are obvious. As the article acknowledges, Liz Truss's blowing up of the economy terrified mortgage holders up and down the land. That, combined with stoking inflation has irreparably crashed the Tories' reputation for economic management, and no amount of briefcase burnishing or divide-and-rule can turn the situation around. People have memories. Additionally, for a good chunk of mortgage holders the Tory record in government have made life needlessly difficult, especially where a mortgage holder happens to be employed in the public sector. Millions of these people are never going to vote Tory, and it will be an antipathy they carry with them when they become owner occupiers and later retire. Assuming there will be such a thing as a retirement age when younger cohorts get there.

Having to choose between these and older voters shouldn't be too difficult for the Tories, because they've already lost this prop of mass conservatism. But what of the layers of owner occupiers? The advantage for the Tories resolves itself clearly among older people where concerns other than a percentage point on savings might be expected to predominate. Most notably, the NHS. It's in crisis don't you know, not that Rishi Sunak would ever admit it. And yet what do we see in the polls? Among the over 65s the Tories don't just retain a lead, but a 19-point lead. Admittedly, this is a sub-sample of a sample (397 out of 1,691) but is consistent with poll findings time after time. With the elderly uniquely exposed, why are they clinging on when everyone else has given the Tories the heave ho?

19 points might seem a lot, but it's nothing compared to what the Tories enjoyed one, two, three years ago. Some of the fall, at least according to YouGov, is thanks to the phantom threat of Reform UK. Others, it seems, either by direct experience of Tory chaos in public services or listening to their children, have fallen away. Enough, when combined with working age people, to administer an electoral massacre in the near future. Explaining why most of the elderly are proving to be outliers is partly thanks to an argument advanced by Chan. That, dependent on pension income, they are relatively shielded from the vicissitudes of the economy. Tory energy price inaction and dynamiting the British economy have seen prices rise, but - aided by the disproportionate influence of the right wing press - these are viewed fatalistically, as either matters out of the government's control, or because of the war in Ukraine. Truss might have been mistaken, but she was trying to do the right thing.

This shielding certainly helps, but what's missing is the appreciation of how 'pensioner' works as a structural location. As argued here previously as well as in the book, being retired and living off a fixed income, plus (where applicable) modest savings, shares and, in some cases, rents renders them analogous to the petit bourgeois in class terms. It individuates, privatises, and inculcates a certain anxiety. If something goes wrong, they can't seek extra hours, go out and work again, or easily get loans to cover emergency expenses. Being shielded against economic head winds does nothing to mollify an inchoate angst, and therefore just as the petit bourgeois have historically been the backbone of reactionary and populist movements, so the armies of the retired are the voting fodder for the Tories. Especially when led by someone like Boris Johnson, whose authoritarianism and nationalist/war-on-woke rhetoric offered an illusion of stability, a political salve to the itch of structural anxiety.

Yet the Tories and the NHS, why have the elderly refused to punish them politically for the public service they're most dependent on? It's because of decades of depoliticising the NHS as an issue. That it's always been in crisis since the Tories took over is true, but the pandemic and health service strikes has repoliticised it as far as the public imagination are concerned. But still, years of blaming hypochondriacs, health tourists, immigrants, self-inflicted illness, as well as immense amounts of waste arising from mismanagement have taken the sting out of how the Tories have handled the service. Their entirely conscious decision to not match funding to demand makes it appear as if the NHS is swamped and that there are too many demands on it. So right now, with A&E's bursting with Covid and flu, ambulances languishing around hospital entrances, it's just an unfortunate series of events. Okay, so my hip op or appointment with the specialist is delayed, but at best it's bad luck and at worst those grasping nurses are to blame. Unless the Tory press round on Sunak for what his mob are doing, it's unlikely his party's core support are going to see things any different.

What this means when it comes to the Tory base is one has pretty much gone, and the other has shrunk a bit but what remains shows no sign of abandoning a party that is helping many of them into an early grave. The Tories can't bring them back together, that ship has sailed. Instead we see our Prime Minister following through with a core vote strategy, presumably hoping enough of the blasted ship will weather the coming storm so it can set sail to new horizons of electoral victories in relatively short order. Given the long-term decline of the Tory base, it doesn't seem like a realistic hope. But in the mean time, having decided to carry on as they are, a lot more pain, damage, and unnecessary suffering is in our future, including where not a few elderly Tory voters are concerned.

The Tories' Housing Crisis

If you wait by the river long enough, so goes the old Chinese proverb, the bodies of your enemies will float past. These last few weeks, I've found myself in this enviable position. Having banged on about the long-term decline of the Tories for a decade, mainstream politics has finally flowed in my direction. One can't move for Tory scribblers, politicians, and wonks despairing over the fate of their party. Ryan Shorthouse, the founder of the "modernising" think tank Brght Blue announced he was stepping down from leading the outfit. His party's betrayal of younger people has proven too much. Three young(ish) MPs - Dehenna Davison, Chloe Smith, and William Wragg have announced they're standing down at the next election. And even the Telegraph, the nearest organ to what passes for the Tories' collective brain, have a bad case of the jitters. As much as I'd like to think it's because the book is getting traction, in reality what I identified as a political fact of life has now become so obvious it cannot be ignored.

A core argument of my Tory decline thesis is their party is a barrier to aspiration. One does not become more conservative with age because aching bones and life experience spontaneously generates conservative attitudes. Instead it rests on the acquisition and ownership of property, and this is something the Tories used to understand. Margaret Thatcher, for example, sold off council housing on the cheap because she bet on it creating a millions-strong layer of mortgage holders. The disciplining consequence of debt, i.e. the need to keep up payments and making a generation of homeowners the beneficiaries of asset price inflation can and does have individuating, atomising, and conservatising effects. A look at historic data showing the relationship between owner occupation and the likelihood of supporting the Tories is known to any student of voting behaviour. But if property acquisition is disrupted, what then? Nothing good for the Tories. It means younger people are acquiring property later in life, if at all, and therefore it does not get the chance to exercise its rightist pull over time - as it has with large numbers of existing retirees.

The seemingly endless rise of house prices has had two consequences. One is a relatively numerous caste of petty landlords, who in turn are more or less solidly Tory in their politics. And then there is generation rent. Correctly, renters view the Tories as the party of those laying an unearned claim to their income just so they can put a roof over their heads. They are more numerous than the landlords and have the propensity to vote anyone but Tory. But since coming to power in 2010, the Tories temporarily off-setted their numbers deficit by relying on the older people who benefited from Thatcher's council house giveaway and the cheap mortgages of the 1980s. Older people turn out to vote, and younger people disproportionately do not. But this cannot last forever if an electoral coalition dependent on the old isn't reproducing itself. And it's not. The breakdown of property acquisition spells Tory doom.

Why don't the Tories do something about it? Social trends are not iron laws, after all. Belatedly, some in government have started waking up. Boris Johnson's so-called levelling up agenda partly addressed itself to the housing shortage. But this plan was fatally compromised because it was challenged from within the Treasury and Cabinet itself. We can't well have people expecting the state to do something that might benefit them, an orientation Rishi Sunak has been very happy to carry on with. Having put together a coalition dominated by the elderly and the propertied, doing nothing suits them while doing something opens the door to severe political difficulties.

Consider the putative rebellion by Tory MPs over housing targets this week. The rebel leader, former environment secretary Theresa Villiers, wrote earlier this month that she objected to "inappropriate" housing in her Chipping Barnet constituency. Building on the green belt was bad, and won't someone think of the environmental destruction this entails? Just don't talk about her voting record on climate change mitigation and low carbon energy generation. While there might be good reasons for some criticisms of top-down housing targets, appearances matter in politics and for millions this underlines their contempt they have for the Tories.

This might seem like NIMBYism on Villiers's part, but the reasons she and her 40-strong band of fellow rebels fielded were puff. They demonstrate the unbridgeable gulf between what the Tories need to do and what they can do. Political necessity requires they pander to the voter coalition they've built up since the New Labour years, and that chiefly means limiting the housing supply. Whether it helps maintain property values now prices are subject to downward pressures, or a "buoyant" rental market of too many renters chasing too few (expensive) lets, the consequences are the same. No excessive supply of new houses means their existing coalition benefits, and the crisis of Tory political reproduction plays out.

Because the Tories are stuck, they can write off the next two elections - unless Labour are the victims of catastrophes as stupid and as self-inflicted as Johnson's and Liz Truss's. But even then, the odds are not in the Conservative Party's favour. Memories last a long time and it's difficult to divine how the Tories could shake off their toxic housing legacy - as well as the myriad other ways they've made life worse for young and working age people. We're in existential crisis territory. Tory commentators are right to be concerned. The current occupant of Number 10 could be their last Prime Minister for quite some time.

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Boris Johnson's Housing Counterrevolution

"PM wants benefits claimants to be able to buy homes." At last, a positive BBC news website headline for Boris Johnson and one not about PartyGate, the no confidence vote, and circling backbenchers. With the lack of detail customary to his style, Johnson's new property policy would allow Universal Credit recipients the option of paying it into a mortgage fund instead of handing over rent. Either Johnson thinks rents are something renters pay if they feel like it, or the government are going to step in and cover the cost. We don't know because chances are the government don't know themselves yet. The second element of what can only be loosely termed a plan for want of another word, is to force right to buy on housing associations with a pledge that every home sold off would be replaced like-for-like.

Superficially the politics of Johnson's new right to buy gets his blighted government out of several holes. He has given his levelling up agenda the appearance of forward momentum when it's still on the starting blocks and is likely to remain there. It gives a hand up for people locked out of property ownership, and so ticks the one nation box. And for Tories who think in the longer term, turning social renters into home owners has conservatising effects that their party will reap the electoral benefit from further down the road. And lastly, it helps out the Tory landlord base by eating into the social housing sector and removing lower rent competition. A nice bit of triangulation that keeps its traditional backers happy and is pregnant with the possibility of creating new Tories, right?

Unfortunately for Johnson, implementing it comes with the sorts of difficulties he'd soon get bored of before moving on to something else. Taking property from one arm of the state and selling it off, as Margaret Thatcher did with her famous right to buy scheme, is one thing. But quite another to expropriate the private property of independently incorporated organisations and flog them at a discount. It's a legal minefield and one sure to keep the lawyers happy, especially if the forthcoming legislation is sloppy and leaves the government open to court challenge. Johnson's pledge to work with the sector to find the best way of dismembering it is a recipe for a veritable dog's dinner. Then there is the diminishing of social housing stock. Selling one house doesn't mean another can be whipped up in short order. New builds take time, and housing associations will require new plots to build them on. If the government returns to them the value of the expropriated house, are they going to assist with land purchases too? And if their existing stock is vulnerable to sell offs, it becomes more difficult for associations to access finance for new construction. On these crucial, practical issues, Johnson expended not a single utterance.

Then there are problems with getting people on social security on the housing ladder: doing so requires serious reform of how UC and mortgage financing works. As Andrew Fisher rightly notes, banks typically require a 10% deposit for a house. Average prices are hovering around the £280k mark, but most forms of UC won't pay out if a recipient has savings of £16k an over. And so there's one gaping hole in the mooted scheme. Either the savings roof is abolished or significantly raised, the government massively subsidises prices so they're in reach, or they legislate against the banks to force them to drop the deposit threshold. Whichever way you look at it, the policy can mean handing money over to people the Tories have spent the last 12 years attacking and defaming, or they significantly intervene in the housing market. Thinking about the febrile state of the parliamentary party, it's going to cause jitters among the ruling class warriors and the hard neoliberals alike. Parliamentary rebellions can't be ruled out.

This is Johnson's idea of getting on with the job. Almost three years as Prime Minister and there's still nothing to show of his pledge to regenerate and rebalance the British economy. The housing shortage remains as prices and rents climb ever higher, there's no action on the cost of living, and destitution stalks the land with greater swagger than it ever did during the Tories' austerity years. The impact of Johnson's scheme will benefit a handful of people and shrink the capacity of social providers to build. Meanwhile there's no relief for anyone else. If anything, it retrenches the the dysfunctions in the provision of housing. Johnson billed this a "revolution". No, but it certainly looks like a counterrevolution.

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Rishi Sunak's Two-Nation Toryism

I'm quite fond of contemptuously referring to "Dishy Rishi", but from time to time the broadcast institutions of the British state consciously, and without a shread of shame, push this framing. Consider the grotesque propaganda put out before the budget by the BBC. Decorated with friendly columnists who talk about how clever, nice and savvy the chancellor is, it resembles a Xinhua-style portrait of a rising princeling ascending the party hierarchy. So much for good old-fashioned British reserve.

Let's try and absent the politics from Sunak's budget for a moment and narrow our imagination down to wonkish dimensions. The extension of the Job Retention Scheme until September is good (but with limitations). Ensuring the £20 uplift remains until at least then is also welcome (though, of course, it should be permanent and be more). New mortgages requiring a five per cent deposit will be introduced from April, and should help a layer of younger people trying to buy a house. And green bonds are to be introduced over the summer, sounding a bit like recovery bonds that, coincidentally, were trailed recently. And then there is the big ticket item. Corporation Tax is set to rise but will not come into force until 2023 and, admittedly sensibly, introduces progressive taxation on profits with businesses operating at £50k or below staying on 19% followed by a tiered system up to a maximum of 25%. And so the eager burning of political capital to look pro-business we saw this week was effortlessly sidestepped by the Tories.

Back to the politics. Huge sums were sprayed here and there, but this was not a Labour budget, nor a centrist affair happened to be fronted by a Conservative chancellor. This was every inch a Tory budget. Remember, right wing statecraft is not beholden to principle. Its aim is the preservation of Conservative political dominance as a means of defending the class relations they stand on, and if this requires confounding small statist expectations and sinning against the collected works of Milton Friedman they will merrily trample his screeds into pulp. Consider the evidence. Support for the self-employed continues, but those who don't qualify for the scheme still receive nothing - people who, as it happens, disproportionately fall into the creative sector. The suspension of stamp duty extends into the summer, helping the loyal Tory strata of private landlords. Business rate relief was handed another three months, and VAT on food and drink for pubs, bars, and restaurants is cut to five per cent until September before rising to 12.5% for a further six months. More grants and cheap loans are available to start ups and small business. And to induce capitalists to pony up capital for investment, Sunak also announced a sweetener where businesses can reduce their tax bill by 130%(!) of the costs incurred. Last, but by no means least, buried in the small print is a further reduction to departmental budgets. In other words, a generous splash for businesses, help for the Tory coalition, but continued cuts to the public sector.

And so no help for renters. No help with living costs for workers in th reduced circumtances of furlough. No let up on lashing civil servants, public services, and local government. There was no money for the NHS beyond £1.6bn for the vaccine rollout, nothing for education, nothing for emergency services, nothing for adult social care, nothing for the court system. The tax cut due from April as the thresholds rise will get gobbled up by the five per cent council tax increase thanks to the government's (intentional) failure to fund local authorities properly. This isn't just Toryism, it's two-nation Toryism.

More than 18 months into "Johnsonism", the contours are now obvious to everyone who looks for them. The state is back in a big way and is being used above board and below desk to lubricate the gears of British capital, and offer inducements to bits and pieces of their voter coalition. Meanwhile our class qualifies for no such largesse, helping ensure that when a semblance of normality returns (vaccine resistant variants permitting) there will be a large pool of labour desperate to take anything the reopening economy offers. And, the Tories hope, continued restraint on the part of de-furloughing workers grateful to still have a job and keen to crack on. At every step the Tories' political management of the Covid crisis is something of a master class. Not only have they avoided the blame for an unnecessarily high death toll, they have successfully headed off hops thing might get better after Covid, beyond bosses making some concessions over homeworking. If this is all the government and their system have to concede, British capitalism can easily live with it.

Rishi Sunak's budget therefore marks crowns the Tory triumph in the politics if the virus. A victory lap after a struggle that saw them afforded every advantage, including an opposition responsible enough to not offer opposition. The blizzard of bank notes is so much snow blindness for those who refuse to see what this budget was about. Boris Johnson defined "the war" against the pandemic, and now his party gets to define the peace. This is Toryism for the 2020s: a creed and a settlement, as it always was, for the bourgeois interest at the expense of everyone else.

The Economics of Polarisation

There are other things I want to say about the polarisation of British politics, and as this builds on arguments made in an earlier post I recommend reading it first. Okay, so we know the situation. We have a car crash of a government that makes the Major years at their worst look like a model of good governance. All kinds of awful has happened since the botched election in June, not least of which is permanent chaos. The vile episode that saw Johnson and Gove ignorantly impugn the innocence of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, risking her an extra five years in prison being the lowest depths to which they and this government have crawled. And yet the Tories persistently knock about the polls in the 38-41% range. How to explain this situation?

As we saw previously, the Tories assembled an otherwise formidable electoral coalition by polling day in June. They are in along-term decline, being as they are comprised of declining constituencies of mainly older voters, but they're sticking with the Tories. There's no breaking away or leakage beyond an almost imperceptible trickle. What would do the business? Given the electoral collapse of UKIP during the campaign with about two thirds of its vote flowing to the Tories, it's probably fair to say a Brexit betrayal would excite them all again and see them spin back to kippery. Hence why the silly games playing with the exact date and time of Brexit, and Gove and Johnson issuing transitional deal ultimatums. Yet there is another, more powerful force helping keep the base of the coalition solid: the economics.

This only makes sense if you dispense with the received technical definition of economics. They are numbers on a spreadsheet, but these are representations of so much more. Economics are social relationships, whether face-to-face or at a distance, fleeting or sustained. They are the dispensing and hoarding of property, the exchanges of equivalences, the maskings of exploitation, the confluence, conflict and antagonism of interests, and much else. Historically it is an expansive understanding of economics the Tories have proved masters at selling to coalitions of voters and what made them the most successful party of all the established liberal democracies. They did so by combining the selfish with the selfless, or what is known as egotropic and sociotropic voting. As you might guess from the terms, the former refers to self-interest and the latter the wider interest - usually filtered in terms of how well the British economy is doing as measured by GDP, employment, inflation and so on. The Tories strike a balance by combining this with promises and dire warnings.

Take Thatcherism, as Stuart Hall noted in his masterful The Hard Road to Renewal collection, the ground for what happened in the 1980s was prepared by networks of authoritarian and reactionary movements, an ideological softening up by the press and their narrative of national decline, and as ever, a scapegoating of immigrants and minorities. Plus ca change. Thatcher was able to cloak her programme of class war in the red, white and blue of national renaissance. Closing state-run industries was a matter of shutting lame ducks, shrinking the public sector and allowing more scope for tax cuts. That the rich primarily benefited was hidden by made-up absurdities like the Laffer Curve and trickle down, that giving them more cash would see them spread the wealth through entrepreneurial activity. Privatisation wasn't sold as the looting of the public realm for the well-heeled, but introducing millions of small investors to the joys of share ownership. Selling off the council houses to tenants was all about creating a bedrock of owner occupiers who'd gratefully turn out for Maggie. All the time, this programme was positioned as the natural expression of individuality, and it solidified a coalition that saw three consecutively successful Tory defences of their Parliamentary majority. Forward to 2010 and 2015, Dave brazenly went for the carrot and stick approach, promising a land of milk and honey if he was allowed an axe to swing at public spending (which would, miraculously, repair the damage left by the 2008 crash) - the trick was to not let Labour wreck it with their coalition of chaos with the SNP and sundries. Dave's programme was relentlessly negative, but understood that insulating older voters from austerity, at least where their income was concerned, was key. This was a lesson lost on May, but her talk of one-nationism very briefly opened up the possibility of new hegemonic project that recuperated austerity weariness, allied to economic competence with Ed Milibandish characteristics. Each of these phases of modern Toryism were first and foremost about protecting the interests they've always protected, but also speaking to and acting as responsible custodians of the economy in the eyes of the Tory-inclined.

What does economic competence look like right now? The keeping down of prices, the freezing of taxes, the protection of pensions, the stoking of an over-heated housing market on the egotropic side. For the "selfless" side it has to be economic growth, growing employment (never mind these are quarter or half jobs arrived at by carving up full-time roles), and a sense everything is chugging along. It means an absence of danger. This is exactly what a Jez government represents. Labour would undo everything, not least the Tory consensus on taxes and property, and sell out mighty Britannia to the Bolshevist bureaucrats across the Channel. This demonstrates the clever move of Toryism: their politics simultaneously sells security and insecurity. Their carrot is a better future for you and your family, a life of work and self-reliance rewarded with rising living standards. But all this can be taken away by personal failure or by Labour governments. In this context, the Tory approach to employment and how it systematically produces and reproduces economic insecurity makes a lot of sense. Bootstraps self-reliance in austere circumstances are recipes for atomisation and, if they think they have something to lose, anxiety. As always, it's worth noting it's not the poor who feel this most acutely. The Tories, despite being the authors of policies that exacerbate economic ill-feeling are able to rally some of it as support for certainties, like flags, the nation, and authoritarian leaders. Theresa May single-mindedly went with strong and stable for a reason.

Here's the clever thing. This constitution of Tory support as an economic bloc of (perceived) shared interests isn't just about the defining and aligning of shared frames, it is done so in a series of active oppositions, of locating their interests against others, of creating a constituency and perfoming as if in opposition to other constituencies and coalitions of voters. For example, the property-owning voters created by Thatcher have a direct stake in rising property values, and this depends on restricting supply. For the landlord strata, depressing the number of first-time buyers ensures a large pool of renters exist, as well as a supply of housing they get first dabs on. Conversely insecure working makes getting on the housing ladder impossible and thereby feeds into the rental market. Austerity, then as now, makes cuts and passes any savings on in terms of tax cuts. For all the trumpeting around taking the low paid out of tax, every rise of the threshold benefits middling and wealthy tax payers too - though this is sold as punishing the feckless and undeserving poor. Their sustained engagement with public services depends on industrial peace, and so the organisations of working people - unions - are justifiably kept on a leash. The health of pension pots and small investments demands governments keep their hands off corporate profits. And they are actively positioned as a constituency by repeat right wing editorialising against the generation coming up. You know the nonsense about Generation Snowflake, their obsession with celebrity (cynically cultivated by the self-same media interests), their queering approach to gender and sexuality, their free easiness with a diverse and changing Britain, their addiction to phones, their lack of patriotism and entitlement; these serve to invite comparisons with themselves, the gritty post-war generation who came up through the school of hard knocks, and are deployed to rationalise the young's much less secure existence as tough love. Crap work, low pay, poor housing, few prospects, this is the just desserts for a spoilt cohort of kids who don't even know they've been born. It's class conflict sublimated through generational conflict, of setting up a gerontocracy of haves whose privilege depends on keeping the young as have-nots. And, as always, the very wealthiest benefit primarily because it's another line of divide and conquer, albeit one in which a wider layer of people who are more likely to vote have an interest in maintaining.

What can crack this deadlock? Obviously, it would be a very public stripping of the Conservatives' economic competence, which would directly affect the real and perceived interests of the Tory-supporting strata. Stock market crashes, banking scandals, an extension of austerity to pension incomes, the application of the bedroom tax to the elderly in social housing, all would have deleterious consequences for their coalition. Provided none of this happens, even if Brexit is a calamitous mess, as long as the Tories continue insulating this (declining) mass support from the consequences of their policies, the economics of polarisation will tend toward the present situation.

The Tories and Affordable Renting

Housing is a major sticking point for the Tories. They know it, we know it, and the public know it too. On their watch, first with their LibDem friends and now alone with a majority thinner than a major donor's tax return, the bottom fell out of the house building figures. Cash strapped councils made poorer by a deliberate attempt to destroy local government services had no readies to produce social housing. The Tories curbed housing association building plans by announcing the extension of right to buy to their tenants (plans now quietly dropped). They left towns and cities across the Midlands and North scarred by cancelling Labour's housing pathfinder renewal scheme while, perversely, stumping up the cash for demolitions of "undesirable" housing stock. And have sat by while buy-to-let and second home ownership took off for the fortunate few. Indeed, their Mayor of London encouraged international capital to park its cash in property with deleterious consequences for ordinary house buyers.

This paralysis can be put at the foot of a generous reading of Tory motives. Because they believe the private economic activity is always the preferred provider for any service, allowing the state to retreat would encourage the magic market pixies to step in and make available provision instead. It's nonsense, of course. The state of the market discriminates in favour of those with piles of cash and/or easy access to equity. It responds to property investors over young people trying to get on the housing ladder, driving prices up. And this is ably assisted by limited supply. Why should developers try meeting market demand for housing when deliberate under-building ensures greater returns on investments? No, these economics are so obviously distorted and broken that the usual ideological idiocies about the market serve only to highlight the situation's absurdity.

As with all things in politics, it's the interests, stupid. Under Dave and Osborne nothing was done because the property developers, the landlords, the home owners whose assets inflated under galloping house prices were and remain key cohorts of Conservative voters. This layer of petit bourgeois owners shading into the big landlord chains benefited from low numbers of new builds and the restrictions on social housing. Likewise, under his Blessed Blairness New Labour did bugger all to stymie the degeneration of the property market in the name of aspiration, of wanting to capture the Kirstys, the Phils, and the Sarah Beenys in the nice swing seats. Unfortunately for the Tories, this situation cannot continue. Locking millions permanently out of the housing market while core supporters carry on coining it stores up social and political problems. The party that, in the 1980s won over layers of working class people by giving them a leg up into property was in danger of becoming the party that denied their kids and grand kids similar help. How then to sort the problem without going "full communist" by building 200,000 new homes a year, as per Ed Miliband, without causing average house prices to fall and hitting the investments and asset prices of its nearest and dearest supporters?

In their new white paper, Housing Minister Gavin Barwell has come up with an ingenious solution. Forget affordable housing, let's have affordable renting. What Barwell proposes is a recasting of the rental market. In a move redolent of working towards the leader, he proposes the introduction of long-term tenancies that provide stability for renters and landlords alike. A system not unlike the lengthy lets that are par the course in Germany, in fact. It reiterates the guillotining of letting agents' fees, but also hints at "government help" (i.e. bungs) for developers to build homes for "affordable" renting, something the House Builders' Association have dived on with alacrity. On all the Sunday talkies, Barwell ritualistically reiterated the commitment to building a million new homes before 2020, but it was said with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for policies destined for disposal down the memory hole.

It goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway: this policy is a load of rubbish. It does little to address the housing problem. It does next to nothing to solve the shortage in social housing stock. But, then again, one shouldn't be mean about young Gavin's efforts: he can't well be expected to solve a problem he didn't set out to tackle. Secure tenancies certainly make for touchy-feely one nation vibes, but expanding the buy-to-let market - which is what the government are signalling - provides more opportunities for landlords and developers in such a way to stymie the numbers of new builds entering onto the open market for prospective owner-occupiers and first-time buyers. Prices therefore remain largely protected. As for the problem, well, it gives the Tories the appearance of doing something, except this something, as always, is about protecting the interests of their own.

Bedroom Tax Bedroom Definition

The bedroom tax. An entirely punitive policy allegedly designed to shove “under-occupying” social housing tenants into size-appropriate properties when there is a massive shortage of one bedroom homes. Not that it matters to the Tories, of course. Very few people hammered by this policy are likely to place their cross against the blue party anyway come election time.

But there has been something of a black hole in the rules governing the bedroom tax. It boggles the mind, really. If you are creating legislation designed to punish those who do not use all the bedrooms in their house because “not enough” people live there, surely it would be common sense to include a definition of what constitutes a bedroom - even if to avoid confusion. But no, this has not been the case, potentially leaving the government open to legal challenges and the consequent waste of public funds dragging poorly-formulated legislation through the courts would entail.

Mindful of this, Stoke-on-Trent Central MP Tristram Hunt recently wrote to Lord Freud, the minister responsible for welfare reform asking that he gives the definition some, well, definition. This is what the good lord had to say in reply:

We do not define what we mean by a bedroom or what size it should be within Housing Benefit legislation. How many bedrooms a property contains will have been determined by the landlord and reflected in the level of rent being charged.

There are minimum space standards that can be used to assess statutory overcrowding. The space standard is in section 326 of the Housing Act 1985. It provides that the space standard is contravened when the number of persons sleeping in a dwelling is in excess of the permitted number having regard to the number and floor area of the rooms available as sleeping accommodation (and for this purpose a living room is counted as a bedroom).

We are not proposing to issue separate guidance on the size of rooms or their suitability for use as a bedroom. As rent levels generally reflect the number of bedrooms in the property and may take into account their size, it is in the tenant’s best interest to decide at the point of accepting the tenancy whether the rooms are of a suitable size for their needs.

The DCLG has published statutory guidance which includes advice to the effect that landlords, when allocating property, should make households aware of the implications in relation to Housing Benefit in the event of under-occupation.

What was that? “It’s got nothing to do with us, guv. It’s up to the landlords!”

This is a typical Tory move. Make some regressive changes to a public service, and then wash one's hands of all responsibility for the outcomes.

The bedroom tax comes with a hefty dose of political cynicism. The bedroom tax will hit those local authorities that tend to have concentrations of the low paid, the long-term sick, and the unemployed. Those are usually city or metropolitan councils, almost all of whom are Labour. And, of course, when it comes to elections people who fall into these categories are more likely to support Labour than any other party. So what the Tories have done is cut the help Labour-run authorities can give to its poorest people, make them lord and master over what constitutes a bedroom, and therefore open them up to the financial cost of appeals and court cases, as well as making them pay a political price for hitting their core support.

I suppose you could argue in response that councils (and housing associations) simply redefine their two and three bed properties as something else. This might be possible in a handful of cases where, for example, a "spare" bedroom is used for some vital function, such as storage for essential medical equipment. But a local council reclassifying hundreds of properties would give the finance officer kittens. I understand a wholesale reclassification would devalue housing stock, impact on the value of assets it holds, and badly knock on its capacity to borrow money. There could also be problems with existing loans as, suddenly, the balance sheet would look less healthy to a creditor than it did before the reclassification and may spark rounds of loan renegotiations to the detriment of the local authority. And there is also the small matter of the Department for Communities and Local Government threatening to punitively cut the local government grant in the next round if a council is seen to be avoiding implementing the bedroom tax.

The words 'over' and 'barrel' come to mind.

The War on the Poor

April 1st is usually the time for a bit of a knockabout. Indeed, you can expect bouts of the usual silliness tomorrow. David Cameron and Nick Clegg to record Especially For You for charidee? Brilliant. Harry Cole taken on as Number 10 press officer? What a hoot. Boris Johnson to go for Prime Minister? Chortle. But while Tory ministers are chuckling over their cold meats and croissants, few of them will be sparing a thought for the hammer they're smashing down on our poorest and most vulnerable households. For April Fools' Day this year will live in infamy as hundreds of thousands of low paid, unemployed and disabled people will get mugged by a combination of cuts to tax credits, the bedroom tax, council tax rises, social security cap, and abolition of the Social Fund. And to top it all, this denial of resource to the poor is to directly fill the pockets of the rich with their millionaires' tax cut. Redistributive policies are alive and well in Tory Britain, it would seem.

According to The Sun(!), 2.4m families will have to find an extra £138 to pay their Council Tax, while some 660,000 households in social housing will have to find between £14 and £25/week if they are found to be "under-occupying" under the government's despicable criteria. The Indy paints an even worse picture - the cumulative changes (which the government has refused to assess) could see some households lose £93/week. And on top of that, one week later disabled people in receipt of Disability Living Allowance will be clobbered by the introduction of Personal Independence Payments, which is governed by a series of tougher criteria driven by budgetary savings as opposed to the actual needs of those forced to subsist on it.

And what have the government got to say about it all? Danny Alexander rants about so-called 'bedroom blockers'. This is ostensibly directed at the likes of Bob Crow and Frank Dobson who, as well-to-do current and former council housing tenants respectively, should not occupy social housing. So much for the vision of building for mixed and cohesive communities that drove post-war town planners, this grubby rhetoric is trying to turn tenant against tenant and reinforce the right-wing view that social housing should be ghettoes for the poor. And how long before 'bedroom blocker' is extended to label each and every under-occupier? With Alexander it's very much the case of looking from Tory to LibDem, and from LibDem to Tory ...

Unbelievably, this isn't today's most crass offering from the front bench. In a puff-piece in The Mail, Esther McVey, the Minister for the Disabled is quoted as saying, "Only three per cent of people are born with a disability, the rest acquire it through accident or illness, but people come out of it. Thanks to medical advances, bodies heal." Next time I deal with someone coughing up their lungs with asbestosis, I'll be sure to ask what their plans are after they get better.

If how a society treats its poorest and most vulnerable is a measure of how civilised it is, we're on the slippery slope to barbarism. Not even a ghost of patrician responsibility is left. That value was long ago exorcised from this neoliberal Tory party of overt class war. As this report argues, the media and politicians have consistently pushed six myths about the poor: they are lazy, they're drug and drink-addled, they're not really poor, they milk social security, they lead an easy life, and are responsible for the deficit. It's pernicious, dehumanising, scapegoating stuff, and - unfortunately - there's always been a constituency who readily lap it up.

Is there more to it than social Darwinism, headline-chasing, and vote-grubbing? Yes. There's always more.

This Liberal Democrat-supported Conservative government is ideological to its core. And by ideology, I mean in the sense of being driven by a set of discredited ideas that fly in the face of reality. As a party/movement undergoing decomposition and terminal decline. As the long-term tendency is showing no sign of abating, this parliamentary term is the one shot they've got at shaping the kind of Britain they want. Dehumanising the poor is integral to it. They understand tilting cultural change and common sense goes some way to rendering their pitifully but purposely inadequate social security support system permanent, and make it easy for them to leverage further policy influence when they're back on the opposition benches. It's not entirely accidental that Michael Gove is fond of quoting Gramsci.

Their project must be countered by our own. Policy and vision have to be tied around a radically different view of the good life and the good society. Quoting stats is not enough; they will never rip away the right's veil of lies. The fear and despair milked by the Tories, the LibDems and UKIP can only be properly challenged and defeated by the promise of something better. In short, Labour and the labour movement have the responsibility to develop that politics of hope to make good the damage the Tories have done, and lay the groundwork for a society fit for living in.

The Real Cost of the Bedroom Tax

When it comes to listing the despicable things our LibDem-supported Tory government are doing, their bedroom tax has to be near the top of the list. The story below is reproduced with permission to show how punitive, damaging and entirely counter-productive the Tory attack on housing benefit is. John's story has been anonymised.

I’m a 50 year old devoted father of a nine year old son, who is disabled and is wheelchair bound. He suffers with Intraventricular Haemorrhage, Hydrocephalus, Cerebral Palsy (Spastic Quadriplegia), Epilepsy, and learning difficulties. His mother and I split up eight years ago and I moved into a two-bed flat on the third floor. As my son got older the council helped me move into a ground floor maisonette in 2011.

Now I’m unemployed and struggling to make day-to day-living as I don’t get any help for looking after my son. My son stays three nights a week and frequently longer. His mum, who is considered the primary care giver, goes away for about three weeks a year as respite. Sometimes, when he is on midterm or holidays from school I can have him for around 80+ hours per week. For this care I expect and receive nothing from the state.

Thanks to the new rules that will govern housing benefit, his bedroom will be classed as a spare. But this room is his. It has his bed, his clothes, his toys, and his school paintings.

The council originally moved us from the third floor to the ground floor maisonette on the advice of my son's specialists, and for health and safety reasons. And now the government want us to share a room. Never mind the noise my Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Machine causes. Is that fair on a disabled child? How can I sleep in the same bedroom as my son?

I know I am not the only one, as there will be many fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters affected by this but why is the government taking from the poor , the vulnerable, the disabled and making our lives HELL?

Then there's the problem of actually downsizing. How can I when so few one bed properties are being chased by hundreds of people struggling to escape the bedroom tax?

It's a joke. My rent for my council-owned flat is £64.34/week. If I downsize like the government wants, the average one-bed property here costs £75/week. This will cost the taxpayer £10.66 MORE in Housing Benefit every single week, and I don't lose any Housing benefit!

Where’s the saving?

This statement has been taken from the 'Families, Children and Young people strategy' on the Conservative Party's site:

"We are committed to encouraging shared parenting and firmly believe that children should have meaningful relationships with both parents after separation."

They have a funny way of showing their support.

Bedroom Tax: No Answers

Some lowlights from yesterday's DWP session in the Commons. Dignifying Ministers' replies with the appellation 'answers' is to duff up the English language. I've focused on the landlords' subsidy and the bedroom tax for this sorry selection from Hansard. Studious straight-answer avoidance and whataboutery rules the roost. They treat it like a game because, for the government, it is. I guess you can expect this from a snake oil merchant like IDS but Steve Webb (pictured), the LibDem minister for pensions, is supposed to be some kind of "lefty". Oh really? Then I'm a hatstand.

Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab): Last week in Westminster Hall Ministers made great play of the savings that the Government might expect from the bedroom tax. In Wales there is a chronic shortage of smaller houses, so why will the Secretary of State not admit that those who are hit by this cruel policy in Wales will have to go into the insecure private sector where rents will be higher and local housing allowance rates will cost more?

Mr Duncan Smith: What the hon. Lady and her party presided over when they were in power was a complete mess in housing—[Interruption.] It is all very well for Opposition Members to shout like a bunch of discombobulated monkeys bouncing up and down on the Benches; the reality is that their housing benefit record left many thousands of families unable to find housing because they were in a queue, while others occupied housing that had far too many rooms. We have to put that right, and that is what we are doing. The Labour party never did that when it was in government.

Mr Stephen Hepburn (Jarrow) (Lab): What assessment he has made of the potential effect on low-income families of planned changes to housing benefit eligibility in respect of under-occupancy in the social rented sector. [139395]

The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb): Our impact assessment shows that of the 3.4 million social sector tenants receiving housing benefit, up to 660,000 could potentially be affected by this measure.

Mr Hepburn: Do this Government ever get fed up of hammering the poor of this country? Punishing the poor seems to be the mandate that is running this Government. In my constituency, 2,000 households will lose anything up to 25% because of this bedroom tax. Will the Minister change this callous measure now, or will he wait until it becomes this Government’s poll tax and comes back to haunt them?

Steve Webb: If we leave aside the issue of people in his constituency who are living in over-crowded accommodation, who would very much like the opportunity to live in one of these houses, the hon. Gentleman will be aware that for many years under Labour people who rented in the private rented sector were not allowed a spare bedroom. Why is it fair not to allow private renters a spare bedroom, but to allow social tenants a spare bedroom?

David Wright (Telford) (Lab): The bedroom tax will have an impact on thousands of people in Telford. Many might want to move to smaller accommodation, but it is not available and the Government know it is not available. The policy is designed to penalise people—it is nothing to do with the housing market.

Steve Webb: There is a danger that this is viewed in a very static way. Many of the best housing associations are looking at groups of constituents, some of whom are over-occupying and are overcrowded, and are moving people around to create space. In the longer term, we need a housing stock that better meets the needs of people on the waiting list, and it is time that successive Governments addressed that.

Mr John Leech (Manchester, Withington) (LD): Because of the shameful under-investment in social housing by the previous Government, there are simply not enough properties for people to downsize to. What assessment has my hon. Friend made of the number of families who will end up moving to smaller, more expensive accommodation and end up receiving more in housing benefit?

Steve Webb: My hon. Friend is right: successive Governments have failed to build enough affordable housing. It is worth stressing that moving is one option, but only one option, for those in work. Just two or three extra hours on the minimum wage would cover this deduction. There are a range of options—going into work, taking in a lodger or sub-letting—and good housing associations are working with their tenants to achieve best outcomes.

Housing Benefit Cuts and Social Engineering

This is a familiar story. Yesterday, Stoke's Sentinel reported that the City Council is having problems getting its tenants to "downsize" ahead of housing benefit cuts. For readers unfamiliar with the new rules due to come in, if you are, for example, a single person renting a two bed terrace, or a family living in a three bedroom house with a boy and a girl under the age of 10, you will be deemed to be "under-occupying" the property and get your housing benefit cut - hence it's being dubbed the "bedroom tax". As the Sentinel notes, there are significant difficulties because only 91 of the Council's 4,331 single bed and just 108 of the 7,446 two bedroom properties are currently vacant. There are 2,300 council tenants who fulfill the under-occupying criteria. The overwhelming majority of them will have to make good the cut themselves.

Another change on the way is the method of housing benefit payment. Contrary to popular belief (not at all willfully encouraged by IDS and the media), it is presently paid directly to the housing provider on a set date each month. This is due to change. The (reduced) benefit will now be paid to the recipient. This might not seem such a bad thing, but in some cases where you're dealing with vulnerable people in precarious situations it's a recipe for evictions and homelessness. Councils, housing associations and social landlords are trying to get around this by having direct debits that transfer the payment on the day it is paid directly to them. This is easier said than done as the government have moved the goal posts. A set payment day will be changed to relate it to the date the benefit was applied for. This will pile extra work onto housing providers.

There is more to these changes than the typical 'bash the poor' reflex of this government. It is a deeply ideological move that goes to the very core of Conservative thinking about policy and social security.

In the comings and goings of faddish political theories, 'nudging' commanded some attention for all of a fortnight nearly five years ago. A form of paternalism, its suggested way of doing policy is creating the sorts of conditions that would facilitate desired behaviours. For example, while stripping out employment rights and handing tax cuts to the rich are barking ideas, our LibDem-supported Conservative government really believes this will magically encourage job creation. And now that more jobs are being created, correlation in all likelihood will be taken for causation.

The same is true of the Tory attacks on social security generally, though 'shoving', not 'nudging' is a more appropriate metaphor. The idea that poverty is a personal, moral failing runs like an open sewer through this government's thinking, and its changes to housing benefit are part of an attempt that will, to its own satisfaction, divide the deserving from the undeserving poor.

By taking on average £14/week away from housing benefit recipients, the emphasis is on the provider and the tenant to find more suitable housing. None available on council or housing association waiting lists? Get something through the private rental market, or move in with a friend or relative. Or, better still, get a job (because all benefit recipients are out of work) and make up the difference out of your wages. If you do not or cannot do these things, it's only fair the taxpayer does not support your irresponsible residency "choice".

Direct housing benefit payments represents a more significant act of social engineering. Obviously, by paying the money directly to the recipient the responsibility devolves on them to ensure their rent is paid. In practice, some families on extremely low incomes - if not bound by a new tenancy agreement - may use it to plug other gaps in their finances. Victims of loan sharks, for instance, could use monies to pay them off as rent arrears are far less intimidating. And who can blame them? Vulnerable people with learning difficulties or severe mental health problems could be very adversely affected if they cannot, for whatever reason, access the sort of help they need to sort out new rent arrangements. And, of course, for substance abusers this is more money to feed their addictions - but as the 'evil poor', no one cares about them anyway.

The shove works its way from tenants to landlords. Social housing providers and larger landlords are already preparing themselves for what's coming, but in any inner city area there are plenty of 'rogue' landlords. More often than not the owners of cheap, substandard and decaying housing, they do not care about their tenants, the behaviour of their tenants to their neighbours, nor the quality of the accommodation they provide. As long as the taxpayer shelled out direct to them each month, they were happy. The benefit changes mean that even the most hands-off unscrupulous landlords will take notice as rent arrears mount. On paper, they will be elbowed into taking an interest in their responsibilities. In practice, their obligations are likely only to stretch to evicting tenants who fall behind in payments, and taking on new ones with a demonstrable ability to pay. The changes will not see rogue landlords refurbish their properties to attract a new market.

And what about evictees themselves? Many will go straight into B&B's, at extra cost to the public purse. Some will end up on the streets. And most will be added to council housing waiting lists, further ensuring that local authority properties are not the recipe for mixed communities and social cohesion - as they were originally intended to be - but as housing of the last resort. In short, the poor, the vulnerable, and the substance-dependent are set to be ghettoised, and whatever is left of post-war social housing aspirations is exorcised.

So next time IDS or his apologists protest their honestly-held views, remind them the path to this particular hell will be paved with their good intentions.