Boris, Polly and Housing Benefit
Both these two have caused a big stir with dramatic words. Polly Toynbee regrets talking about a final solution for the poor, but Boris was less forthcoming about his jibe of Kosovo style cleansing. Whatever the sensitivities of these words, and they are real and many, Boris and Polly have done a great deal of good. What they have done is show us that in a complex society, simplistic solutions may not work.
What has happened is, as I have posted already, housing values have gone off the rails. All governments are responsible for this equally. The Tories began it in the eighties but New Labour did nothing to halt the the rise, indeed it stoked it. Add to this the lack of council house building and the disintegration of estates once thought of as a bright new dawn following post war slum clearance, and you have a complete structural imbalance. Where do nurses, firemen and every other kind of less well paid worker, upon whose low pay and hard labour the whole of the rest of functioning society depend, live, if there is no sensibly priced housing available? The answer is on the street or too far from their work to be able to do it and maintain the welfare of a family.
Thus they need housing support in the form of a subsidy from the taxpayer(most of them pay tax themselves) in order to be able to function and society has an obligation to pay. Allowing this to happen is as feckless as allowing food prices to rise by such dimensions that the taxpayer is forced to subsidise groceries and the contents of the fridge are the most valuable assets in the wealth of the nation. It illustrates what a dreadful, unbalanced financial mess has developed in the post Thatcherite era, which laid the foundations in the belief that there was no such thing as society. Without society there is no civilisation and in the end no survival.
It will take a very long time to put this right and the government is right to make a start. But the plan, as set out, cannot stand. There will have to be a special premium for the most expensive areas, mostly cities and most of that in London. As Boris put it, no social cleansing on his watch. He is right. We want our towns and villages to retain the essential character of our country where all income groups live happily side by side. The outspoken declarations of two national figures, one a Tory, the other Labour, has changed my mind. I am not alone. The majority of all parties and people in the country, on this detail (not the policy in principle to curb housing benefit) back Boris and Polly. This is not about workshy people living the life of Reilly. It is about working families upon whom we all depend, the elderly and the vulnerable being forced to migrate. We no longer do that here.