Vote buying

Vindico* has trotted out the the tired and tested mantra "... the empowering reforms of Thatcher's council house sell-off; the creation of an asset owning society." which set me thinking about 'vote buying'.

As an aside (this not being the main thrust of this post, but worth mentioning) I personally object to the sale of council houses at undervalue;

1. It was (and still is) ruthless vote buying.

2. If the State sells off assets, then it should try to obtain the best price on behalf of the ultimate owner of those assets, i.e. the taxpayer.

3. Obviously, the sale of shares in state-owned monopolies at undervalue to the general public (i.e. the taxpayer) in very small lots is perfectly OK, the winners and losers are the same people. This does not apply to the sale of council houses to individual 'better off poor' households**.

But that is not the main point of this post...

4. Which is ... that is no way to buy votes! The Tories simply made one-off gifts, worth £10,000 or £20,000, to a small strata of council tenants. Once those people have cashed in their capital gains and bought privately, there is no motivation to vote Tory again; the cupboard is bare, the ammunition spent.

5. As ever, Nulab have shown how to do it!. First you create an army of two million 'key workers' on not-particularly-high-salaries; then you engineer a bubble in house prices; then you offer said key workers all manner of gimmicky shared-ownership schemes***, which seem attractive enough on first sight, the hook being, once you sign up you are a tied worker; if a key worker is ever tempted to give up his or her job as, let's say, a Senior Play Ranger then the simple fact that they will simultaneously be forced to move home and sell what little 'shared equity'**** they have to the State's preferred bidder makes the whole procedure (changing jobs and moving home) far too stressful, so they stay put.

6. And they are also captive voters; to keep their homes, they have to keep their jobs, and to keep their jobs they have to keep voting Nulab, as any sensible new government would scrap all these stupid jobs (and there are, as mentioned, at least two million of them). Brilliant! And it's all done with taxpayers' money!*****
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Footnotes:

* With whom I agree on most things, of course.

** If they can afford to buy, they shouldn't be in council housing anyway. It'd be far better and cheaper to increase their rents while simultaneously reducing housing benefit to private tenants - that way, the better off poor would be able to buy up the homes that are no longer profitable for private DSS landlords; and the benefit claimants would move into the newly vacant council housing.

*** And rename them regularly, they are currently called 'Social HomeBuy', 'New Build HomeBuy' and 'Open Market HomeBuy'.

**** And of course, once prices have slumped and our tied workers have negative equity, they will have the added pain of buying themselves out of slavery. Perfect!

***** A tax which falls particularly heavily on property developers, who have to sell a certain fraction of new-builds to the Powers That Be at cost-price for them to pass on to their tied-workers, and on private sector workers who of course are chasing a relatively smaller number of homes for sale. It's a bit like the system of redistribution in Zimbabwe, but much more sophisticated.