Hey, guys, I’ve got this great new idea for sorting out Britain’s defence problems. The British military is under-equipped, right? The biggest problem facing our boys is that they, basically, just don’t have enough stuff.
So, here’s my plan for making sure the military does have enough equipment: we sell off all the equipment that it already has. But – and this is the clever part – we do it at a massive discount.
No, trust me, this is definitely going to work.
Because, with the money we get from those sales, we can then buy some new equipment, right? I mean, probably not as much as we had to start with, because we offered that discount to motivate sales. That is certainly a downside, I’ll admit.
But you can only play the cards you’re dealt, and as we all know, there’s no money left. So, thanks to the mess that Labour left us in, the only way to guarantee we have a properly equipped military is to sell off all the equipment that the British military already has.
And that is my long-term economic plan for Britain’s hardworking soldiers.
Okay, so, nobody seriously thinks that this is a sensible military procurement strategy. And yet, in a different sphere of public life, “giving stuff away to make sure you have enough stuff” is an entirely respectable position, despite the fact it implies a level of economic illiteracy that should get you banned from so much as entering a branch of Tesco.
Yesterday, the Sunday Times confirmed that the Tories were, as a key plank of their manifesto, consider a massive ramping up of the right-to-buy. That, you’ll recall, was an iconic Thatcher era policy under which council tenants were given an automatic right to purchase their homes at a massive discount, and which has had absolutely no downsides in the 30 years since.
The point of the policy was to turn Britain into a “property-owning democracy”, and it was, at heart, a political move. It worked on the assumption that people who own homes are more likely to vote Conservative than people who live in council houses. So, if you’re a Tory, you want more of the former, and fewer of the latter.
That, someone clearly thinks, still applies. Somebody in the Tory hierarchy has looked at which voters the party needs to win over to stay in government, looked at the fact there’s a housing crisis, and put two and two together to make the square root of minus one.
Now, the party’s manifesto will reportedly include an extension of the right-to-buy to cover tenants living in housing association (HA) properties. The proceeds of these sales, unlike the proceeds of past right-to-buy transactions, would be ploughed back into extra housing. In other words, it amounts to making sure we have enough tanks by selling off all our tanks.
There are so many problems with this policy that you’d think at least one of them would have come up in the discussions at CCHQ. One is that it HAs aren’t actually an arm of government, so the government is promising to sell things it doesn’t actually own. It can probably find a way of making them do so anyway, but the bills that’ll result from the resulting legal wrangling seem an odd sort of thing to prioritise right now.
Another problem is that the policy will haemorrhage money, since that discount basically amounts to the state giving individual tenants a bung. “Sources” claim it’ll eat into the housing benefit bill; that sounds optimistic to me, but even if it does, it will have done so by handing out houses to a lucky few, and as a British taxpayer who isn’t being offered a subsidised house I feel a bit miffed about that.
And that is the biggest problem here: never mind the fact it’ll generate less cash that it costs us, or the fact that if the Tories really wanted to get the state building houses again they’ve had five years in which to do that. Consider the political ramifications.
A Reuters report over the weekend said that the policy was “aiming to sway voters who are struggling to buy a house”. Now I know quite a lot of voters who’d describe themselves that way, and at least some of them would probably be open to a touch of electorally bribery. Extending right-to-buy to them would be a massive vote winner.
So why is nobody doing so? Because those people, some 9m of them, live in the private rented sector, over which the government has even less control than it does over housing associations. Those people would love the right to buy a house – but nobody is coming forward to give them one.
Because the problem with Britain’s housing market is not that HA tenants can’t buy their own homes. It’s that we need to build more bloody houses.
Still, I’m sure private renters will be delighted to see a future Tory government handing out subsidised houses like sweets to those who were lucky enough to be living in them at the time. It’s quite clear to me now that the only way to make sure we have enough houses is to give away houses. Black is white. War is peace. Madness is sanity.
That makes sense, right? Right?
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