There are limits to what can be controlled democratically

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If Knut had been Swiss rather than Danish, he could have called a referendum instead of having his courtiers carry his throne to the water’s edge. It wouldn’t have made any difference to the outcome, but at least he wouldn’t have got his feet wet demonstrating the limits of his authority. Some things are susceptible to human control, others less so; the difference isn’t always clear, especially when it comes to politics. On Sunday, the Swiss voted on a proposal to cap the country’s population at 10 million, a proposition which was defeated, but with a surprisingly high level of support (the result was 45%-55% on a 60% turnout). The proposition had nothing to do with the reproductive practices of the Swiss people, of course: it was really about immigration. Had the proposal been passed, the government would have found itself obliged to comply, primarily by limiting immigration. What they would have had to do if the Swiss started breeding at a rate which took the Swiss population not counting foreigners over the limit seems not to have been determined, although King Herod’s approach is the historical example which leaps to mind. Too unlikely a scenario to worry about, perhaps.

The figure of 10 million is entirely arbitrary, but the proposition was based on a fear that population growth would increase the pressure on housing etc. It’s a familiar refrain. When it comes to issues like housing, it’s inevitable that a larger population requires greater provision, and that’s true whether the growth is ‘natural’ or the result of immigration. The logical response to an increased demand for housing as a result of a growing population is to increase the housing stock. However, it seems that there are some who would prefer to evict ‘foreigners’ and deport them in order to allocate their homes to ‘natives’, even if they don’t always put it in those terms.

But ‘not always’ isn’t the same as ‘never’, and that brings us to Farage, who, at the weekend, announced his company’s new policy of evicting all foreign nationals from social housing, and deporting them if they can’t find private accommodation within three months. Evicting the unwanted from their homes and re-allocating those homes to others is not without historical precedent, as I’m sure Farage will be aware, although whether deportation is better or worse than being forced into formally demarcated ghettos is a question one might have hoped that we never had to debate. It was ‘interesting’ that, in his rant posing as an essay, Farage chose to make a simplistic distinction between ‘white British’ and ‘foreigners’. The implicit racism is both casual and revealing, and something which the use of language seeks to normalise.

Whether the UK has enough housing overall to serve all its population is a question which isn’t easy to answer; what is certain, though, is that there is a significant mismatch between the available type, location, and price of housing on the one hand and the needs of the current population on the other. I suspect the same is true in Switzerland. In either case, there’s something deeply irrational about setting out to adjust the demand (by controlling population numbers) rather than the supply (by building more homes). But then, rationality and racism have never made for good bedfellows.

Bribes and transactionalism

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Those clever Tories have noticed that they didn’t do very well at attracting the votes of young people in the election, so they’ve decided to do something about it.  In this case, ‘doing something’ means offering changes on issues such as tuition fees and housing.  And they’re being utterly shameless about it; they’re not even attempting to say that there’s anything wrong with the way things are at present – indeed, they give every indication of believing that current policies are the right ones.  They are making no attempt to explain why the changes they propose will be better for the country as a whole, or how they fit with their other objectives – I suspect that they are not really convinced themselves.

No, this is all about targeting a specific section of the electorate (not even all young people in fact) and offering direct bribes to persuade them to change their voting patterns.  Will it work?  I really don’t know, but I suspect that it’s just too obvious and blatant to have quite the effect that they want.  Confirmation bias is as likely to make people believe that they could have done these things all along if they’d really wanted to, so that all that guff about austerity was the lie that many knew it to be all along.

But I shouldn’t really be that surprised at the nature of the pitch they are making.  It is, after all, axiomatic to them that individuals will always act in their own best financial interests rather than thinking about any wider issues.  From that perspective, all they need to do is to explain to the target audience why voting Tory will make them as individuals better off, and turn it into a simple monetary transaction.  They’ve become so blinded by that belief that they really can’t see anything wrong with that approach.  Perhaps it’s another form of what someone said about the existing order containing the seeds of its own destruction.  Self-destruction certainly seems to be working its way up the Tory agenda these days.

Perhaps they just haven't noticed...

Tweet I was a member of the housing committee of what was at the time the Vale of Glamorgan Borough Council when the Thatcher government introduced the so-called “right to buy” legislation.  It was a piece of legislation about which I have always been rather ambivalent.

On the one hand, it was clear from the outset that what was a popular and populist policy in the short term would lead to a shortage of affordable houses to rent in the longer term – an outcome exacerbated both by the generous discounts on offer and the rule that the capital receipts could not be used to build new houses.  And one of the motives behind the policy was always to take the state – even the local state in the form of local councils – out of housing completely.  It was a piece of dogma more than anything else.

On the other hand, as someone who was also at the time living in a council house with his parents I also understood why so many tenants wanted to be able to buy their homes.  Thatcher, for all her faults, seemed to understand the difference between houses and homes in a way that many others in her own party – to say nothing of those in other parties – did not.

It was never simply about becoming a property owner or getting a foot on the housing ladder; it was about enjoying the use of the home without the restrictions which council tenancies often included.  People tend to forget how paternalistic the attitude of many councils was at that time towards their tenants.

The suggestion recently by the Tories in Wales that they would enable councils once again to build significant numbers of council homes, and would also amend the right to buy legislation in such a way as to ensure that a new home was built for every one sold, is something of a welcome conversion.  There is no sign however that they have really thought through the implications.

It’s an eye-catching headline policy, but I haven’t seen the financial detail which explains how you bridge the gap between the reduced price at which an existing house is sold and the higher price at which a new one would be built.  Nor am I entirely convinced that there is not still an ideological aversion to council ownership of homes amongst the party’s leaders, even if the Welsh branch is saying something different (or perhaps Andrew RT Davies’ bosses simply haven’t noticed his statement yet).  But since, in practice, the probability that they will ever be in a position to implement this policy in Wales is so remote, I guess it’s not something we need particularly to worry about.

Pickles has a point, even if he's missed it

Tweet The little spat between Cardiff and London last week over changes to building regulations in Wales highlighted yet again the loose way in which politicians use the words ‘red tape’.  Eric Pickles claimed that the new law on installing sprinkler systems, and the rules requiring higher carbon emissions standards for housing, are examples of ‘red tape’ which should be abolished; as ever, one man’s ‘red tape’ is another’s environmental protection or improved safety.  And it’s not as if the UK Government can really claim that they’re against regulation anyway – the recent Queen’s speech proposed extra regulation around employment and housing for immigrants as I recall.  It’s only some ‘red tape’ that they’re against.

Pickles’ rationale was based on the potential damage to the house-building industry in Wales, highlighted by some builders suggesting that they’d now prefer to build new homes in England where they don’t have to comply with such standards than in Wales where they do.  It’s the normal capitalist response to changes in the market conditions – existing capitalists must be protected from such changes, preferably by not making them.  (Although the economic purists would argue that change promotes innovation, and that the companies which manage to find the best and cheapest ways of complying will grow whilst the dinosaurs die.  It’s just that capitalist dinosaurs never die quietly.)

He does have a point, though, at a purely economic level.  There is surely no doubt that the changes made in Wales will increase the capital cost of building new homes, in the short term at least; and even in the long term, the capital cost of building a new house in Wales is likely to remain higher than the capital cost of building a new house in England.  With no increase in earnings on the Welsh side of the border, that will put a squeeze on housebuilders’ profits, which is why they are protesting so much (although it is precisely that squeeze which is supposed to drive innovation, isn’t it?).

Forgetting the housebuilders for a moment, the people likely to lose out here are those families in Wales who want to buy a new house.  Prices are already high compared to wages; a further increase in prices with no change to wages simply prices even more people out of the market.  There is a danger that the main beneficiaries will be another group of capitalists – those who operate the burgeoning market for private rented housing.  The Welsh government’s response is hopelessly inadequate – it’s as though they believe, or pretend, that there isn’t a problem at all.  Or at least, if there is, it isn’t their problem.  But there is a problem, and it’s a very real one.

However, the fact that there is a problem doesn’t mean that Pickles is right to call for the abandonment of changes which will, undoubtedly, improve safety and reduce environmental impact.  That’s simply throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The essence of the problem is this: improving the environmental performance, and the safety, of new housing will reduce the lifetime cost of home ownership, but at the cost of increasing the initial purchase price.  Long term revenue costs are reduced in exchange for an immediate increase in the capital cost.  But the financing structures for home purchase – the mortgage market – aren’t changing to reflect that.  Purchasers and mortgagors see only the increased capital cost; the reduced revenue costs aren’t taken into account in assessing affordability of mortgages.  So what we need isn’t to scrap the changes, but to look at how we can reflect that front-loading of cost in financial arrangements.  And that’s something which neither government seems to be willing to tackle.

Is it all just a game?

Tweet The story about London councils preparing to move “thousands of London’s homeless families” to Wales has provoked an entirely unsurprising response of outrage in Wales – and probably also in those areas of England which the London councils have singled out for similar attention.  I found myself wondering, though, whether the story has been over-hyped somewhat.

Partly, that’s simply because I find it hard to believe that any part of the UK state could really, in the twenty first century, be planning to uproot families and move them hundreds of miles into areas where it is highly unlikely that they will stand any chance of finding the employment which is ultimately the only way of improving their situation. 

I can’t think of many parallels for such a forced movement of people in any democratic state.  Families have been forcibly moved en mass for projects such as slum clearance, but have almost always been rehoused either close by or else in the new homes constructed on the site.  Children were evacuated from London during the second world war; but it was done for their safety, and was always understood to be a temporary measure.

But thousands of families given the choice of homelessness where they are or moved hundreds of miles to the cheapest housing which can be purchased, purely on economic grounds?  I can’t think of a parallel in recent times which comes close.

Then I wondered whether this might not be more of a political game than a real prospect, and from two different aspects.  The first is that it’s far from unheard of, sadly, for local authorities to propose something outrageous, either to attract such opposition as to persuade the central government to back down on some policy or other, or else to enable it later to propose something not quite so outrageous so that people accept the lesser of two evils.  Either seems possible in this case.

The second is, of course, that offering a London family a house in somewhere like Merthyr might well lead to a refusal; and people who refuse the offer of ‘suitable’ accommodation can then be deleted from the waiting list.  And that’s just another way of making homelessness someone else’s problem, even though some of us might think that there’s rather more to the definition of ‘suitable’ than having four walls and a roof.

I’m not sure which is worst – seriously proposing such a policy, or unseriously suggesting it in order to achieve other aims.  In either case, they’re treating those families unfortunate enough to be homeless in London in an utterly shameful fashion; more as commodities or problems than as people with human needs. 

Reward and Punishment

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There was an interesting juxtaposition, time wise, of two stories around the New Year, which highlighted for me the different standards applied to different groups and interests in society.

The first story was about the plans of the UK Coalition to crack down on council tenants who sublet their houses, by making it a criminal offence.  The detail was a bit hazy – I can’t see what’s wrong with taking in a lodger, for instance – but I think that they were really targeting people who move out of their council houses into alternative accommodation and then rent out the council house at a profit.  It’s a way of using someone else’s property to make a profit.  ‘Our’ property, in a sense, because the houses are publicly owned.

It was accompanied, of course, by a lot of guff about how council rents were subsidised by the rest of us (not really true these days), and how council houses were really only ever intended for those who could not afford their own homes (again, something of a re-writing of history).  It will have struck a chord, however, with those not entirely familiar with the details of the financing of social housing, and striking a chord is what such announcements are all about.

The second story was about the New Year Honours list, and more specifically about the honour given to the head of a hedge fund who had donated large sums to the Conservative Party.  He’d made large sums of money by betting that Northern Rock would collapse.  The techniques used by hedge funds, though, are a little more nuanced than gambling – this is the sort of gambling where the act of betting influences the outcome, if only you can bet enough money.

And, of course, the short sellers didn’t have enough money or shares to cause a collapse themselves, so they borrowed other people’s, and bought and sold things that they didn’t own.  Some might see that as using other people’s property to make a profit.  ‘Our’ property in a sense, because many of the shares ‘borrowed’ for the casino were owned by pension funds and other large financial institutions, usually on behalf of many of us.

But here’s the point.  In principle, the two actions seem to me to be quite similar, and there is no obvious argument that one is somehow more moral than the other.  So why do we criminalise the small scale abuse but honour and reward the large-scale abuse?  Which one causes the greatest misery for the greatest number?

Houses and Homes

Tweet The announcement by Cameron that council tenancies will be of limited duration in future rather than for life seems to have ruffled a few feathers amongst his coalition partners. It is, though, a natural continuation of the basic hostility to council housing which Thatcher displayed with her 'Right to Buy' legislation, but without the underlying understanding of people.

I was always a bit ambivalent about the 'Right to Buy' legislation, to be honest. On the one hand, as a member for part of the 1980s of the Housing Committee of the Vale of Glamorgan Council, I could see at first hand the effect that it was going to have on our ability to house people. But on the other, I also understood very well how appealing the idea was to a large number of the tenants on the two small council estates where I grew up.

Whilst Thatcher may well have been motivated primarily by reducing the quantity of local government housing, and reducing the power of local government in general, she also touched a chord amongst tenants. It is sometimes too easy for us to overlook that. It was a skilful piece of politics, which encouraged people to put their own immediate interests ahead of longer term collective interests. (And that's actually a neat summary of what 'Thatcherism' was really about – and the impact it's had on society.)

It pleased her party's right wing, of course, and I'm sure that Cameron's announcement will have done likewise. But there, the similarity ends. Thatcher saw families living in and wanting to own their homes, and offered them a large carrot. Cameron seems only to see an insufficiently mobile labour force occupying publicly owned dwelling units, and is trying to wave a large stick.

He's not only wrong – it's not even clever politics.

Unholy compromises

Tweet I'd intended to comment on the latest twist in the Housing LCO saga earlier, but time didn't permit. It honestly wasn't simply a matter of taking some time to cool down! I understand that the Assembly is due to debate the issue next Tuesday, so it's not yet quite such old news as it could have been.

I thought that the Deputy Minister for Housing, Jocelyn Davies, summed up the situation pretty well on Saturday, expressing the personal frustration which she feels, and which is widely shared in the party. Under what is laughingly described as a Welsh legislative process, we are eighteen months on, and the Assembly still doesn't have the power it needs to carry out a key policy in an agreed government programme. We don't know when they will have the power, and even when they eventually get it, there is the whole process of drafting and approving an Assembly measure to actually use the powers.

This process is a complete nonsense, and is simply unsustainable. And if we have these problems now, when the governments in both Cardiff and Westminster are led by the same party working in smooth partnership (allegedly), where on earth will that leave us if we ever have governments of two different parties?

I know that I'm not alone in feeling deeply unhappy that the only way out of the situation has been to pass a veto to the Secretary of State for Wales – a wholly new constitutional principle never envisaged by any of those involved in drafting the Government of Wales Act. And under a Conservative government, based on past experience, there is every prospect that the person holding that job wouldn't even be representing a Welsh constituency.

But what else should we have done? Our people and communities need action on housing now. It's already taken the best part of two years to get to this point; are we supposed to continue delaying taking any action because LabourTory MPs want to play silly games? Should we be walking out of a coalition on the basis that MPs won't allow us to do something we never wanted to do in the first place? I don't like the compromise which has been reached one iota; but in the interests of implementing the One Wales programme, there seems to have been very little choice. The real question is what it means for the future.

Peter Black seems to suggest that we have not done enough to "push at the boundaries of what can be done". Actually, I don't entirely disagree with him; but in terms of delivering for the people of Wales, I happen to think that getting the powers to do what we want now is more in the interests of Wales than holding out for the power to do something we don't want to do at present. It's a classic case of having to decide between a compromise which enables us to start delivering sometime soon, and a more purist approach which maximises the long term potential. I would very much prefer that Labour MPs had not put us in the position where we have to make such choices; but I really don't think that the people of Wales would thank us for spending the whole of the four year term of government arguing with London rather than trying to get on with the job of delivering now, in spite of the MPs' opposition.

In itself, this compromise over the LCO is not a coalition-threatening issue, largely because the veto applies only to an area of hypothetical future policy which is not in the One Wales programme in the first place. But if it were allowed to become a precedent for other LCOs in the future, in a way which prevents the government from implementing agreed policies, that assessment could change. The overwhelming principle, surely, is that an elected government in the Assembly should be allowed the powers it needs to implement the policies for which the Welsh electorate voted. For one of the parties in any coalition arrangement to use, or even simply allow, their London wing to obstruct that principle must inevitably at some point raise serious questions about the viability of such a coalition.

In the aftermath of the 2007 Assembly election, it seemed as though the Conservatives in the Assembly had travelled a long way. Their willingness to sign up to the All-Wales Accord marked a number of radical policy changes. I was sceptical about that at the time, and it really does look as though, with a few honourable exceptions, (although I disagree with what both of them have said on this particular issue) they have reverted to type. Their London branch seems determined to take every opportunity to wreck the devolution settlement by obstructing the will of the Assembly.

(I note that Nick Bourne has claimed today that he will be talking to Plaid and the Lib Dems about possible arrangements after the next Assembly elections in 2011 - the chance of any such arrangement looks diminishingly small to me given that his influence on his party's MPs seems to be even less than Rhodri Morgan's over Labour MPs. I feel pretty confident that, in any future coalition negotiations, delivering the support of each party's MPs for the granting of the powers necessary to implement the government programme is likely to be a key issue – maybe even a sticking point. Once bitten, twice shy.)

As for the Labour Party, all I can say is that I hope that the 'partners' at both ends of the M4 will use the breathing space granted by the compromise over the Housing LCO to have some very serious and private discussions about the nature of their 'partnership', in order to avoid similar shenanigans over future LCOs. Plaid always knew that 'One Wales' applied only to the programme of the Assembly government; but we genuinely thought that we had signed an agreement with the Labour Party as a whole over the power to deliver that programme. Did they have the same understanding?