Britain’s acute housing crisis has been allowed to get ever worse, in part because the wrong targets are persistently scapegoated for it. Migrants are a long-running target, of course; those deemed to be undeserving benefit claimants, such as teenagers mothers, are another traditional favourite. On one level, there is a perversely ingenious strategy at play. The more the government shrinks the nation’s council housing stock as a deliberate policy, the more those languishing on waiting lists feel as though they are competing for scarce resources, and the more they are incentivised to delegitimise other “competitors” as undeserving. The government is let off the hook.
Which brings me to the case of Labour backbencher Kate Osamor, who spent Christmas enduring a media storm because she declared that she was “proud, not ashamed” to be a council tenant. This is a disgrace, apparently, because someone on a parliamentarian’s salary should free up their house for the more deserving. This line of argument is not only wrongheaded, it goes some way to explaining why a housing crisis has enveloped Britain.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Q8bmQq
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