As with many other areas of policy the Labour government is in a muddle. This time it is about housing.
It was not many months ago the government was intending to scale down the right-to-buy, introduced by the Conservatives all those years ago. Now there is total confusion.
First Labour wants to destroy the right-to-buy, then produces its own half-baked scheme which will apparently give tenants the right to buy a piece of their house.
Eventually—presumably if they are good and pay their ever-spiralling taxes—they may even be able to buy the whole house. But—unlike other homeowners—they will only be able to resell to the housing association from which they bought in the first place.
That does not seem much of a deal to me, with the government seemingly intent on creating some kind of second-class of home ownership. Which of course fits in nicely with the Labour ideal of controlling everything we do.
Housing currently obsesses Labour. As if it were not bad enough that we will have to endure massive housing allocations in Medway up to 2016, the government now looks beyond that date to a time when we will be required to build on more and more of our green fields.
Campaigners did not fight to save the Hoo Peninsula so the government could cover it in houses instead. But after the PM‘s recent admission that the airport was one big confidence trick perhaps housing was the real aim all along!