That line, though:
I tell her that the flat she could have bought for around £20,000 would now be worth somewhere between £350,000 and £400,000.
No, it fucking wouldn’t be “worth” £400,000, it would still be worth £20,000, but you’d need to fork over twenty times that much for it. That’s the problem. The worth of the houses haven’t gone up, but the prices demanded for them has. That flat went from costing a year’s salary to costing ten years’ salary.
Her think tank’s research found that 41% of homes sold through Right to Buy are now privately rented out. “Homes that were built with public money, and with the aim of providing an affordable and secure path to home ownership, have since been turned into assets,” Harris says.
This was the real aim of Right to Buy - turn low-rent council housing into money-making assets for the rich.
Just another reason to say fuck Thatcher.
One of the few examples of long-term thinking by the neoliberals. All in the service of fucking the working class.
Selling off state assets at a discount to the next generation of landlords.
Most people who turned up to Thatcher’s funeral just wanted to make sure she was dead.
I wish that were the case, but there were plenty of fawning sycophants who found her “empowering”
At least we got a public toilet out of it.
What makes you say that’s the real aim, rather than the stated aims?
Tory philosophy. The state = bad. The state supplying cheap housing is like fingers screeching down a blackboard to neo liberal fanatics.
I don’t understand how that leads to your conclusion. If it’s because of the Tory philosophy that the state is bad, surely the real aim would have been to reduce the power of the state?
The reason I’m asking is because I think people tend to be overly cynical and won’t accept the possibility that people disagree with them honestly, finding it easier to believe that they disagree dishonestly. To me it seems perfectly plausible that Tories thought they could reduce the power of the state, do something good for ordinary people, and expand their voting base, without realising/believing that this approach would lead to many (but not most) of those assets essentially becoming investments.
They’re reducing the power of the state by selling off its assets on the cheap.
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make; that doesn’t tell us anything more about why, except what we’ve already said.
Because normally the Tories sell it off to themselves or their mates. In this instance, they let council tenants benefit from their practice.
Doing so endears people to them and their behaviour of selling off assets. It thus makes it easier for them to get away with selling more state assets off to their mates.
Thatcherism was a huge program of selling stuff off to ordinary people. Your reasoning makes no sense at all.
Kind of amazed that this article didn’t include the fact that Councils were restricted with their spending of the proceeds of Right to buy sales (of which they received 50%) to paying off their debt.
Its a first step but it won’t be fixed overnight as the houses have already been sold off.
