1984 (22): Home-Owner-Ism (4)

From 'The Book' within the book 1984:

... the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.

For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power could be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. if human equality is to be for ever averted - if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently - then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

I'm sure we're all familiar with modern examples of this - such as the Ministry of War being renamed Ministry of Defence in the 1960s or the Central Office of Information which just pumps out propaganda.

But what about our 'Housing Minister'? Would one not expect that this rôle involves ensuring that the markets provide good quality and affordable housing, or failing that, at least providing social housing for those at the bottom of the heap? Nope, this job involves flogging off existing council housing* and misdescribing this as 'an age of aspiration'; trying to get the number of new dwellings built down to the lowest level in a century** and bullying the banks into lending ever more (taxpayers') money to potential buyers to drive up the price of existing homes that come up for sale.

Further examples of this 'controlled insanity' is the idea that as long as house prices keep going up, we will all magically become wealthier, when any sober appraisal of the facts suggests that only a small minority ('the High') can become wealthier and that the vast majority of people become correspondingly poorer.

The ultimate deliberate hypocrisy underpinning this madness is the old saying "An Englishman's home is his castle". People ascribe different meanings to it without realising that this is probably the finest bit of propaganda that the old landowning aristocracy ever invented. It is tantamount to an African dictator telling his starving countrymen "An African's grain of rice is his feast" or an Islamic theocrat announcing that "The burka gives women freedom to walk the streets".

The key to this is that the Norman invaders and their descendants brutally oppressed the English (or Celts or whoever else was kicking around) and they lived in castles - the castle was a symbol of oppression rather than protection. The landowners did a bloody good job as well, as late as a century ago, ninety per cent of the UK population were still tenants. Lloyd George briefly threatened the status quo, so what the landowners or 'the High', did over the last century was to sell off two or three per cent of their land for inflated prices to anybody whom the banks thought were worth exploiting.

The number of households who were owner-occupiers did not reach fifty per cent until about 1970, and has since levelled out at about seventy per cent. Electorally, they hold the upper hand so these are the people who have to be hoodwinked. In reality, most people 'own' very little indeed, apart from their bricks and mortar and a few hundred square yards of land. But they are sold the dream that this is their 'castle'.

Of course, the large landowners and their willing sidekicks the bankers, can only maintain their elevated position by exploiting those beneath them. So to keep the charade going, they engineer house price bubbles, cream off what they can in the good times and let the little people bail out the banks in the bad times.

This gives the English homeowner, briefly, the illusion that he too, like a landowning aristocrat is becoming wealthier without effort (income from business or employment is taxed until the pips squeak, of course, but work is for the little people, isn't it?) or 'living in a castle' to continue the analogy, but as there is nobody beneath him to exploit, all he is doing (consciously or not) is exploiting future generations (including his own children and grandchildren) - either by selling them houses at vastly inflated prices or by landing them with the future tax bill to repay the debts incurred with the bank bail outs.

Can nobody else see the 'controlled insanity' that sustains our rigid social system?

* Highlight from that article: "Among other things, [selling off council housing] was aimed at giving those in social housing more freedom to move to respond to job opportunities in different regions of the country." In the name of all that is unholy, who is more likely to be willing to move to another part of the country to find work - a tenant or a home-owner?

** Yes, I know the fat bastard isn't the Housing Minister, but he might as well be for all the impact that Grant Shapps has had.