Without the state

How could you, Bolsover?

I can’t deny that the outcome of the election is a huge disappointment and also a huge worry. With the most right wing government in years, Brexit now inevitable and the consequences of climate change looming over us, we are faced with existential risks to the right to dissent, to the UK economy and most seriously to our capacity to survive as a species.

What’s done is done. We need to move on. In particular we need to exert unrelenting pressure on National government to address the consequences of climate change, despite the heel dragging of the US and now Brazil. The opposition needs also to start rebuilding, to develop a coherent policy framework for the next election including tactics to counteract the inevitable demonization of the opposition by the print press. The BBC is a spent force as shown by this election, too willing to fold under pressure from the government of the day and already under threat in terms of the license fee.

What I want to do here – and via social media is to bring forward my own thoughts on policies for #thenextfiveyears. Some are already here in the bowels of this blog and will be brought out, dusted off and represented in the new context. Others will require new ideas and new thinking.

Let’s get started…

The state we're in.

It isn't undemocratic to oppose government policy. That includes the policy of leaving the EU and it certainly includes the terms on which we leave. Despite the garbage like 'Brexit means Brexit' or the shouty 'you lost, get over it' mantra from too many people who should know better, there is no clear way forward. Cameron created this mess for party political ends, but screwed it up by his incompetence. May's incompetence has deepened the divide in this country while simultaneously making it even harder to reach an agreement with the EU. Now we are expected to believe that one or other of the challengers for the leadership and hence to be PM will be able to to break through all that with a sprinkle of fairy dust, magically creating unity at home and miraculously changing the policy of EU negotiators. That would be, to say the least, unlikely but when the person leading it all is likely to be Johnson? Johnson? It would be intolerable if he was the bumbling buffoon he pretends to be, but given the number of recent reports of just how calculated that public persona really is (Andrew Marr) and generally how nasty and unpleasant he is (Max Hastings) I think the next couple of years are likely to be painful. If Ken Clarke is correct and there are enough Tories willing to put country before party then we might be lucky and get a General Election fairly quickly. That won't solve anything, but it gives us an opportunity to catch our breath and retreat from the insanity. If he's wrong, then it's looking more and more like the opening of Years and Years. But then, for a significant portion of the Tory Party that's the utopian scenario anyway. Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride!

And so it drags on...

If the sort of chaos we've seen in the Commons and in Government over the past months had been reported as happening anywhere else in the world, you can be sure that Messrs Gove, Johnson and Farage would have wasted no time in sneering, if not in so many words, about incompetent foreigners. Yet, after almost three years of needless confusion and division we still don't know what will happen come April.

That's bad enough but we see fabricated stories everywhere accusing Corbyn personally of being anti-semitic as well as the wider party, despite the damaging claims from Baroness Warsi about anti-Islamic behaviour in the Tory party, the latest singling out Gove again as someone we should all be concerned about if he became Tory leader.

Calls for a third (yes third!) referendum are dismissed as undemocratic despite the fact that there have been three votes on the Withdrawal Agreement - without any part of it having been discussed at the time of the referendum - and despite the fact that some of the most ardent Brexiteers have been campaigning against our membership from day 1 of joining without drawing breath.  Almost 6m people have signed the petition to revoke Article 50, 16m voted to Remain, but these are dismissed as irrelevant compared to a fraudulent vote on an incompetently designed Referendum, called by an equally incompetent politician trying to defend his position as leader and his party's control of the country. But no - asking to confirm the outcome of hree years of further incompetence is undemocratic and only an attempt to reverse the outcome of the referendum.

Well in part yes, of course it is an attempt to reverse the outcome.That's how democracies work. Discussion and debate leading to a decision. It doesn't stop. If arguing against something already enacted is undemocratic then no laws would ever change.

Having another referendum is supposed also to lead to division on the country. Have you looked away from your office in No 10 lately Prime Minister? Have you seen the mess you and your predecessor have landed us in? Have you seen the violent language and violent behaviour directed at foreigners every day. Of course that probably doesn't bother you does it. One of your own party members - OK former party members - says you have a problem with immigrants and you did nothing when Home Secretary to make me doubt that. I've already mentioned the rampant anti-Islamic behaviour that appears commonplace but anti-semitism seems to be a problem too.

What's the prospect for the future? Nothing good.

Coping with climate change

Back in 2016, I argued that we needed to tackle reducing the demand for energy as if it was a major infrastructure project. Now the Independent Committee on Climate change have reached a similar conclusion. Of course, translating that report into practice will no doubt take more time, but each year we delay, means a continuing waste of resources.

Obsessed as government is with Brexit, I'm not optimistic that the policy changes we need will be implemented. The recent viral video from the US shows how hard it will be to get politicians to give up their entrenched positions.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’ve been doing,”

https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1099075460649107458/video/1

As Bill McKibben, puts it in the New Yorker

The irony is that, when Feinstein said she’s been “doing this for thirty years,” she described the precise time period during which we could have acted. James Hansen brought the climate question to widespread attention with his congressional testimony in 1988. If we’d moved thirty years ago, moderate steps of the kind that Feinstein proposes would have been enough to change our trajectory. But that didn’t get done, in large part because oil and gas companies that have successfully gamed our political system didn’t want it to get done. And the legislators didn’t do anywhere near enough to fight them. So now we’re on the precipice. Indeed, we’re over it. The fires that raged in California last fall were the fires of a hell on earth.

 

 

 

A vision for social housing

The graph above is taken from the recently published report by Shelter. It shows the parlous state of social house building since 1923. I've written quite a lot about housing on this blog but this report makes it clear that things are as bad as ever.

From the Second World War up to 1980, we were building an average of around 126,000 social homes every year. Last year, there were only 6,463 new social homes.

...

If we continue as we are, only half of today’s young people are likely to ever own their own home – and a generation of younger people and many who are retired will spend their lives struggling with insecure, expensive renting. Over the next twenty years, hundreds of thousands more people will be forced into homelessness by insecure tenancies and sky-high housing costs.

We can't afford to continue as we are. The collapse of social housing began with the Right to Buy enshrined in the 1980 Housing Act but has continued through successive governments of both main parties and during the coalition period. The ballooning welfare bill is not down to the recipients of housing benefit, Universal Credit or any of the other myriad forms of support available, in theory anyway, to those who can navigate the bureaucracy. It is because those successive governments have simply ignored the problem, the Tories giving way to nimbyism while Labour targeted Tory voters by shifting right and embracing Thatcherism.

According to the background research for the report (pdf):

• We estimate that public expenditure on housing in England was £26.8 billion pounds in 2016-17.
• Public spending on housing has lagged behind expenditure on other public services over the past twenty years and the focus of spending has increasingly been on housing benefits rather than investment in new social or affordable housing.
• Real terms housing benefits payments in England have been on a long-term upwards trend, more than doubling since the start of the 1990s. The increase is mainly due to rising housing benefit payments per caseload as real terms rents for all tenures have increased. However, an increased reliance on private rented sector tenures has also raised the housing benefit bill and the cost in rents to tenants.
• Reduced investment has lowered the number of additional social rent homes being delivered each year. Social rent housing additions have fallen by 79 per cent since the first half of the 1990s.
• Grant funding for social housing has been limited since 2011. Instead, the focus has predominantly been on making funds available for affordable rent homes or the Help to Buy equity loan scheme.

In another background paper, Shelter provides estimates of existing unmet need for housing:

Homeless in temporary accommodation	79,900
Rough sleeping and hidden homelessness	128,000
Overcrowded	240,000
Living with poor conditions in the PRS	631,000
Ill health/disability	194,000
TOTAL	1,272,900

On top of that they estimate a need for a further 1.2 million homes to address the anticipated increase in existing and newly forming lower income young households who are not expected to be able to afford home ownership in their lifetimes and some 690,000 homes for older (aged 55 and over) households on lower incomes currently in the private rented sector (PRS).

According to Shelter, this 20-year programme will provide a return on investment in 39 years, and would cost £10.7bn a year on average. However by reducing the demand for housing and other benefits by reducing housing costs this would be reduced to £3.8bn a year. It isn't a part of the Shelter proposals but these savings would be significantly enhanced if these new homes were built to the zero energy standard described in this earlier post

We are now ten years on from the financial crisis, and a worsening housing crisis is affecting more and more people. Adding this to the social polarisation triggered by Brexit it is clear that we need a new political consensus. Building such a consensus around an ambitious commitment to improve social housing offers a way out of that divide.