It’s also drivel because people who work may also be entitled to housing benefit too, although perhaps not the full amount depending on their wages and family circumstances. But a working person claiming all in work benefits and tax credits in rented accommodation will in the vast majority of circumstances be better off than a person out of work on benefits.

What an idiot, I live in Dorset, where there are villages where 50% of the properties are second homes and private rents are skyhigh. The only decent reasonable housing is provided by housing trusts etc. The Tories are talking of reintroducing the right to buy even for them, madness!

Thanks very much for this, Don.

I made a start at the Guardian article but really lost the will to live because of the atrocious writing style and didn’t get very far.

I have guessing for some weeks that “Red Toryism” is clever schtick by a wonk on the make.

Its sole and only purpose is “the brand” – a PR exercise designed to give cover to the trendy metropolitan elite to jump nimbly from onto a winning bandwagon from the one with its wheels falling off, without loss of face: “Oh yah, the Tories have reeaaaally changed, you know they have Red Tories now” “Oh reeeeeaallly, that is so amazing” (etc etc)

There is no need for there to be any substance there and surprise, surprise, there isn’t. It’s quite insulting that it is such unthought-through verbiage, and bodes so badly for the next 5 years.

Unbelievably cringewrothy. This blonde guy is literally talking out of his bum. These are people who then go on deciding the future of ordinary citizens, which is alarming to say the least!

“Leaving aside the atrocious writing style, this is total and utter drivel, even by the extremely low standards of most discussion about housing policy. Council rents are lower than rents in the private sector, whereas Blond appears to think they are ‘unaffordable’ for working people.”

- Nothing wrong with the style, it’s just fairly complex. Which is ok in itself.
- Calling it ‘total and utter drivel’ means you’re going to have to work really hard to show why, otherwise you’re just being very offensive without justification.
- You imply in the last sentence that Blond is incoherent. But that may not be the case at all. Council rents could be lower than private sector rents *and still* be unaffordable for working people. There is no incoherence here, as it stands.

“The reason why very few working people can get a council house is because of the massive shortage of supply, not because of a conspiracy by councils to raise rents so that only people on housing benefits can afford the rent.”

- Yes, you are probably right about this.

“Based on this nonsense, he has a totally incomprehensible suggestion whereby councils will borrow money and give it to those of their tenants who have been on housing benefit for a long time. People will then be able to trade these capital credits, and this will give them a route out of poverty.”

- I don’t see why this is incomprehensible. It looks quite comprehensible to me – can you explain why you think this is ‘incomprehensible’?

“They will get this (presumably) instead of housing benefit/Local Housing Allowance, because the idea is to move from spending on welfare to ‘investment’. The kindest thing it is possible to say about this idea is that it doesn’t address any of the problems that social housing tenants actually face.”

- The idea of moving from spending on welfare to “investment” seems to me like quite a good one, actually. Rather than just giving poor people money to give back to the council in the form of rent, why not give them something with more dynamic potential – i.e. an investment that would have some sort of ‘return’. I can start to imagine why this *would* address problems that social housing tenants face: being stuck in a dead-end situation with no route out would be one thing that might be tackled by having a stake in the future through the returns to an investment, rather than pitiful amounts of cash fed straight back into the system, making one totally dependent upon the state. I generally don’t like the flagrant use of the word “empowerment” in politics, but I do think that this approach is more “empowering” than just throwing small amounts of money at poor people to keep them just about above the bread line.

“Blond’s other ideas seem at a first glance to be equally nonsensical, and he’s been churning this sort of stuff out for months. But really, there is nothing to see here which is even worth beginning to engage with.”

- You are just not justified in making this conclusion. Blond’s ideas you have addressed here don’t seem nonsensical at all – so it’s hardly fair to lambast the other ideas which you gesture at vaguely and don’t even name. Your final sentence seems to me simply untrue, and a little arrogant to say the least.

Don, I’ve read your articles for quite a while now, and I usually agree with a lot of what you say. Politically, I’ve far more in common with you than Blond.

But Blond is a very clever man. To take him on requires more thought and effort than a lazy piece putting up a straw man of Blond’s position to burn down with flippant arrogance. If we on the left just do that, Blond will win…

No, I’ve read that section a few times and I still don’t undertand what he means.

It is a shame that his grasp of the detail is apparently so weak, because the first three paragraphs is a good breif critique of what has fuelled the current debt crisis – only where he says that Cameron recognises the problem does he begin to go off course.

But off course he goes, not just on housing but on his other chosen bits too. He seems not to be aware at all, for example of the £30 million Community Assets Programme launched in Sept 2007, and the fact that it took over a year for the first grant to be made (he proposes giving community groups six months to develop detailed plans) or of the Scottish Community Right to Buy section fo the Land Reform Act in place since 2004, but to date with only 7 cases in any way activated by ‘communities’, set against around a 1000 from tenant farmers. Again, the devil is the detail he doesn’t do, and implementation of this kind of stuff doesn’t just happen because it’s a nice idea.

The same goes for social enterprises in deprived areas – nice idea but dependent on a basic purchasing power that he’s already accepted is not there amongst the poorest.

In general, it’s all pie in the sky stuff, and the voluntarism/social enterpise stuff is on a par with much of the well-meaning but in no way scaleable ventures of the New Urban Left in the 1980s around Council-led Local Economic Development (e.g. Manchester, Sheffield).

As for Time Banks (they were called LETS in the 1980′s) I think I’ll scream if I hear them mentioned again as a way to solve major economic inequality and well-being problems.

I am though interested in his scheme to means test Child benefit and how that might sell with his conservatives master; taking away £1,670 per year from a middle income family (it’s not clear what cut off point he has in mind) to give to poorer families to match to their Child Trust Funds is pretty redistributive certainly, but I suspect not a realistic option over and above raising higher rates of income tax (and the tories compain about stealth taxes?).

However, credit where credit’s due. It’s good to see him be clear that the myth of the US Community Reinvestment Act as responisble for the sup-prime crisis is indeed a myth. He’s obviously read his Krugman/Gamble.

Mmm, I think I feel my own post about this stuff coming on.

was struck by this …

“Councils have used their housing stock to generate cash income for benefit dependency for generations”.

- I think the use of “for” in this sentence is interesting. One might be expecting “from”
- So I think the claim is being made that “benefit dependency” is the (deliberate) goal of the policy. This is a fairly familiar claim from the right. The premise may be that the political power of the council depends on this.
- the policy is motivated by this issue, as much as by the asset redistribution, though in the Red Tory worldview this would be a win-win

somewhat against PaulSagar@5

I think Don’s basic point against the piece – it claims that the working poor are priced out of council/public housing, when public housing is at sub-market rents – is an accurate challenge.

The claim is that those on benefit need to be compensated between this differential, because they have been subsidising other council services.

Given that significant public resource has gone into making the rents sub-market, this is a strange way to found the policy and does not seem to stand up. (A better alternative would be to go with the earlier thought – priority needs to be given to the asset poor as a matter of fairness, participation and equal citizenship given the importance of assets to equal opportunity…. this brings in the broader pattern of asset ownership, whereas instead Blond argues the problem in this respect is that tenants are being scammed by public housing providers, which doesn’t)

It could be claimed that while these are sub-market rents but that they ought to be lower, but that would not fit with the claim that the working poor have been priced out (rather than under-supplied out) of more strongly residualised social housing, when they are likely to be paying more elsewhere, so that does seem to be a mistaken claim in the argument.

Sunder,

I agree with what you are saying.

My point was really that Don needed to do the work that you’ve just done, in order to draw his conclusions that Blond was writing ‘utter drivel’. There’s also the additional point that being quite rude and cocky about Blond’s thinking isn’t necessarily a wise tactical move.

“Simply pick one policy area that you know about and see if the author’s suggestions and analysis suggest they know what they are talking about. If so, read on, if not, bin the rest.”

Fair enough, let’s try it:

“Economists at Société Générale recently calculated that in the United States, the income of the highest paid fifth rose by 60% after 1970, while for all others it has fallen by 10%.”

That is drivel. Laughably untrue.

Someone (anyone!) is seriously trying to suggest that absolute incomes have fallen for 80% of Americans over the past 39 years?

Now, you might be able to weasel your way to saying that “relative” incomes have fallen, or that of the growth in GDP most has gone to the top 20%, or that the portions of GDP going to the 80 and the 20% have changed (which, given that inequality has risen would be true in principle, if not necessarily by these figures).

But to state that real incomes have fallen when GDP per capita (yes, after inflation) has damn near doubled?

Either he’s lying, in which we can pay him no mind, or he’s confused (ditto) or he really doesn’t understand what he’s saying in which case we should be laughing at him.

But that statement really is drivel.

Not entirely drivel, but somewhat over simplified. There are 3 economic measurements that have been combined in to one, which presents a largely correct, but not accurate picture.

The Congressional Budget Office reported in December 2007 80% of Americans have experienced a falling share of US income, and that the top 1% of the income distribution has received almost the entire income gain for that period.

Up until 2006, much of the “gain” in wealth was related to over inflated property prices (as per London).

With regard to incomes, median income peaked in 2000. Incomes fell from that point. The post dot.com bubble, which generated high levels of growth did not reverse the decline in median incomes.

With your overall criticisms of the article by Blond, may I point out that you have listened to New Labour far too much. You are not always better off in work. Although the combined taper of Housing and Council Tax Benefits is 85% when calculated on a 52 week basis and as neither rents or Council Tax are collected on a 52 week basis (most LA Rents are 48 week) and Council Tax is collected over 10 months, the effect of a change to income result in increases to rent and Counci Tax levels far in excess of 100%.

In addition LHA is being scrapped in all but name next year as part of the no cut cuts the Chancellor introduced in the budget.

This “community right to buy” is worth exploring. It could be used, for example, for closed rural or urban pubs, & buying of land from absentee landlords & that.

Rest of it’s a load of incoherent bollocks though.

Blond: Some sort of redress is required – a capital or asset credit, financed by a council bond, should be applied to those whose long-term benefit has, in effect, subsidised council receipts

You sure this isn’t vouchers by another name?

Thanks to everyone for comments.

Paul@5 – sorry you didn’t like this one, and thanks for the thoughtful response. Sunder’s dealt in more detail with some of the substantive points, but just in addition:

-Blond’s starting point (the working poor find council rents “unaffordable”) is a shockingly bad error. I’m trying to think of an analogy, it’s like someone writing about foreign policy and saying that the problems in Iraq are caused by the fact that the Americans haven’t been involved over the past few years. You probably wouldn’t then go on to read their ideas for peace in the middle east.

-It is up to him to explain what his “capital or asset credit” actually means – there’s no details about how much would it be, who would get it, or anything. (I take the point that in theory “investment” rather than spending looks like an interesting idea for welfare policy, but the upfront costs would be absolutely incredible and the practical difficulties in developing a workable scheme very hard, which is why Blond hasn’t got beyond generalities).

-what’s the evidence for Blond being very clever? He opines on a wide variety of subjects and appears to be fantastic at PR, but none of his ideas have been picked up by the Tories, and he simply does not know what he is talking about when it comes to translating any of his ideas into practice. The Fabians have done some good work engaging with him and absolutely demolishing him point-by-point in their calm and reasonable way, but I do think that it almost gives him too much credibility to pretend that he is some kind of serious and interesting thinker, when the evidence is that he is a buffoon with a lot of wildly impractical ideas not informed by the evidence.

Don

The disagreement with Paul turned out to pretty narrow – about the broader rhetorical flourishes around which you nailed the particular point – but he was certainly too generous in crediting me for simply paraphrasing what you said. The Iraq analogy is quite funny.

I think one can ask about Red Toryism at different levels:

Ideas: Where I do have more time and respect for this is that I think Blond is to be taken seriously in the history of ideas and political philosophy. I think he represents an important strand of conservative thought, though one rather marginalised on the British right since 1975.

Politics: Red Tory is smart media branding. I can’t help feeling, rather poor politics within the Tory party we have, which is certainly better dead than red in many respects. Whether or not that reflects any conscious trade-off in terms of target audiences, I don’t know. But this is also why it is important to have a scrutiny of this agenda.

Policy: The question of translating this to contemporary policy is a different issue. We don’t have much evidence yet. This certainly wasn’t a good start. If the policy agenda does not amount to anything, that will become an important part of the political critique.

(Though, to some extent, I feel that all of the left/right communitarian agendas presently at large struggle a bit to work out a policy agenda which is more than symbolic and which might run in a liberal and highly individualistic society like ours: that is what gives rise to their appeal to some extent, but also seems a barrier to a concrete agenda).