Rent Britain

A report by two housing organisations has caused a headline writer at Britain's leading liberal newspaper to confuse England with the UK thanks to its shock implication that the Government, which has denied that its housing policies amount to social cleansing, is in fact engaged in social cleansing through its housing policies. The Government intends to link housing benefit to the price of consumer goods rather than the price of rents; this of course makes perfect sense to the kind of people for whom a house is a market asset and whose actual accommodation is either inherited, paid for by Daddy or, in Nick Clegg's case, supplied by Daveybloke in the form of a nearly clean basket just outside the office door. The housing minister Grant Shapps proclaimed that the resulting cuts in benefits would induce landlords to cut rents, rather than doing what the forces of Socialism would do and kicking out tenants who cannot pay the rent in favour of others who can. The report claims that people will be forced into ghettos where rents are lower, jobs are fewer and the Big Society waits in the wings with its riot shields and pepper spray, thus undermining the Government's stated aim of getting people back to work. This will certainly come as a shock to anyone who regards the Government's stated aims as possessing some vague relevance to what they actually intend doing; but it is unlikely to surprise anybody else.