Tuesday 20 July 2010

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.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent post.

Martin

Lola said...

Quite. Welcome to the 'new feudalism'.

One thing, personally (and I concede that this is distorted by my own pathological feelings about Freedom) the 'Englishman's home is his castle' thingy applies to all homes - rented or owned (aka mortgaged to the bloody hilt) and has the meaning that your home is your inviolable private domain and what goes on there is no business of the State. And that the organs of the State have to ask (nicely) to be allowed in, even if you're alledged to have done something naughty. In fact this saying has always seemed to me to be a fundamental statement about the State having no business in most of most people lives. But I have been known to wrong.

Rational Anarchist said...

Have you considered that this may be a good argument to convince those on the left of the political divide that LVT is the way forward? Wealth cannot realistically be taxed - it's too hard to measure reliably and too easy to hide. But land on the other hand isn't going anywhere... and a nice big land tax would work well to reduce the fortunes of the priviledged rich

Lola said...

Reading your 'manifesto' again it seems to me that we'll have an awful lot of fun after you've nominated your cabinet.....

bayard said...

I think your analysis of the historic pattern of landowning is a bit simplistic. Even in mediaeval times there was quite a large class of small landowner "yeoman" who owned a few acres and farmed it. A lot of these became larger landowners at the time of the enclosures, but still worked their own land and were by no means the idle rentiers to which you refer.
Also, in the past, a lot of people rented by choice. It was not, as you imply, that the tenants were being exploited by the greedy landlords and being prevented by them from becoming property owners, it was that the tenants saw that they had a better deal. Property was a diminishing asset - as a house got older, it was worth less - and cost money to maintain. It was a hassle to buy, a hassle to run and a hassle to sell, all things that many thought were better left for someone else to sort out, i.e. the landlord.

Anonymous said...

"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?"

To be fair, at the time that the "right to buy" was introduced, council housing was extremely inflexible and if you were a council tenant you couldn't move elsewhere. Now that we have home exchange schemes etc, that may no longer be the case.

Also, since the assured shorthold tenancy didn't exist (it was created by the same government that introduced the right to buy) the private rental market was moribund.

What's more, you have selectively quoted from the article, which says:

"The study suggested right-to-buy owners were less likely than traditional owners, but more likely than social renters, to move for job-related reasons." (My italics.)

Mark Wadsworth said...

M, ta.

RA, I'll leave it to the Labour Land Campaign to present the more leftie arguments for LVT.

L, I appointed my 'bloggers cabinet ages ago. There were a few no shows but apart from that no changes so far. And we will be the most hated cabinet ever - until all our non-policies start working.

B, of course it's a simplification - it's a blog post. But your stout yeomen served the same function as today's homeowner - they had to be bought into the scheme of landownership by being offered crumbs from the aristocrats' table.

AC, sure, but flogging off taxpayer owned housing at an undervalue is not the unalloyed good that some Tories claim. I agree that 1988 Housing Act was a god thing, all in all, as was 1993 Leasehold Reform Act.

Mark Wadsworth said...

D, and deservedly so!

Until then it was accepted that land belong to 'the people' or 'the state' (as personified by the king, who was not a hereditary king) and everybody paid their ground rent and the king dished it out in such a manner as to maximise social cohesion.

Steven_L said...

You shouldn't let me read this kind of thing MW, it's a prime candidate for being regurgitated at the HOists after 8 pints.

Mark Wadsworth said...

SL, just boil it down to the bare essentials - tell them they own a pile of bricks worth £50,000 with a mortgage debt of twice that, and half their future income is going to be taken away in tax.

bayard said...

"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."

I think you have that the wrong way round. To my mind it's "Of course, the bankers and their willing sidekicks the large landowners,...." As you have pointed out before, rents, the main source of income for large landowners, are not affected by house price bubbles, being governed by Ricardo's Law. Thus large landowners do not benefit at all from the bubble in the same way as bankers do. They not only end up lending out and therefore making money on a hugely increased amount of money, but also, by soaking up the nation's spare capital, make it almost impossible for businesses to fund themselves with anything other than money borrowed from them.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, true, I struggle to work out who is the senior partner in this arrangement.

But don't forget that landowners like bubbles as well - they can flog off a dozen acres of near-urban land for several million quid every eighteen years at the height of the bubble and then pay for their kids to go through boarding school and go off ski-ing again for seventeen years.

Mark Wadsworth said...

... and don't forget that landowners and landlords like the idea that ALL income should be taxed at similar rates; a Georgist would say that land rents (and income from other government-protected monopolies) should be taxed 100% and other sources of income should not be taxed at all.

bayard said...

"- they can flog off a dozen acres of near-urban land for several million quid every eighteen years"

That's a tiny minority you're talking about. The rest of the rural landowners' land is in the undeveloped 85% of the country, far away from any convenient city. Generally, it is the most rural parts of the country, like Northumberland, that are the most feudal.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, and holiday homes and stuff like that.