A rant about short memories

There is a rarely a week that goes by without the Daily Mail highlighting some family, normally with immigrant parents or a single mother (the Mail can't decide which is worse) who have some children and live on benefits, their rent paid by the council and therefore "hard working taxpayers".

Each article is met with an outcry from its readers. The benefit cap plan which was derailed by the Lords this week is already being mourned. 

I have often commented on how people voting in the Tories in 2010 (which they didn't quite do of course) must have very short memories as to what they didn't do for the worse off members of society, and today I read an excellent blog post by Fleet Street Fox which highlighted something else that the Daily Mail readers might like to read to further their understanding of the situation.

It was of course the Tories that sold off council homes in their misguided and peculiarly Anglo-American belief that home ownership is the be all and end all. In France and Germany, and elsewhere in Europe home ownership is not held as being so important. Having a home is the main thing, and most people, especially in Germany, are content to rent throughout their lives. rental is, in fact, the norm.

But Thatcher decided that everyone should own, so sold off the council housing to the people renting the properties at a good price. Great for the people who were able to buy their homes, but a little shortsighted, as Fleet Street Fox points out today in her blog post:

"Except the dole is all of £60 a week, and the reason immigrant-mums-of-six are in stinking big houses are because we sold off our social housing stock more than 20 years ago. Councils are still legally-bound to provide homes and so are forced to make use of the private rental market, where your average human landlord charges whatever they can get away with, leading inevitably to a workless family being allotted £1,000 a week which goes straight into that landlord's pocket (this is why wages are better)."

An excellent point, and from an angle which I had never even thought of before, and proves yet again that the problems we are having now can't just be blamed on the government's predecessors, but on their very own party's politics. Can't believe I hadn't picked up on that before.

PS - Anyone interested in politics or the press really should read Fleet Street Fox. I can't recommend it enough.