“IT IS the essence of bourgeois socialism to want to maintain the basis of all the evils of present-day society and at the same time to want to abolish the evils themselves.”
Thus Frederick Engels in his famous work The Housing Question. His analysis seems particularly apposite as the bourgeois socialists of the Labour government launch their plan to tackle Britain’s housing crisis.
Labour can perhaps be credited for at least recognising that there is such a crisis. The last Tory government spent 14 years in denial, missing target after target for building new homes and eventually giving up on even the ghost of an effort to meet them.
In particular, it capitulated to entrenched local interests within the Conservative Party which did not want the problem resolved at the expense of their own particular patch.
The result has been an epidemic of homelessness, meaning hundreds of thousands of families will spend this Christmas in temporary accommodation, with many people living on the streets.
Turning housing supply over to the market has meant that securing a home is out of reach for millions as property prices soar. Greedy and unscrupulous landlords have filled the gap, making the private rental sector a nightmare.
The government has now set out to address the evil while maintaining its basis in the domination of private capital in the construction and supply of housing.
Its plans focus heavily on planning reform, loosening restrictions on where new homes can be built and giving ministers the powers to over-rule local objections. Local authorities will be held to targets directed at meeting the target of 1.5 million new homes built in the course of the next five years.
However, it is so far unclear how much of these new homes will be social housing, and how much will be badged as “affordable” when in the private sector.
Local councils are not only indignant at their rights being curtailed, they also question whether the targets are remotely feasible, given constrictions within the construction industry.
What the government is not offering is a massive state-directed house-building programme. It is instead merely trying to make private housebuilders’ lives easier for them.
All experts agree that the measures announced this week will make scant short-term difference and, indeed, it is not certain that the government will be able to show substantial results by the time it next faces the electorate.
Yet there is no doubt that resolving the housing issue is key to addressing many other social tensions, including those the Tories shamelessly play on, claiming that most new homes would be allocated to migrants — an allegation entirely without foundation.
Labour, however, is left simply hoping for the best from private capital once various obstructions have been swept away, including those that have at least some democratic foundation.
Engels was clear: “Whoever declares that the capitalist mode of production, the ‘iron laws’ of present-day bourgeois society, are inviolable, and yet at the same time would like to abolish their unpleasant but necessary consequences, has no other resource but to deliver moral sermons to the capitalists … whose emotional effects immediately evaporate under the influence of private interests.”
Labour may learn that the hard way. If it is too much to expect Starmer and Rayner to embrace Engels’ conclusion — “as long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers” — they should at least throw the weight of the state behind social house-building rather than hoping for the best from the capitalists.
