In 1979, 42% of the population in Britain lived in publicly-funded housing; today the figure is less than 8%. One and a half million households are on housing waiting lists, while 630,000 homes in England lie empty. In the last year alone, 80,000 local authority and housing association homes have been lost to the private sector. British capitalism in crisis is no longer willing to meet the costs of state welfare for the mass of the working class. The decimation of council housing over the last 50 years has forced the poorest sections of the working class back into the insecure, substandard and overcrowded accommodation which has always characterised its living conditions under capitalism. Cat Alison asks: ‘Who will build homes for the working class?’
Housing crisis: the capitalist norm
Today, evictions in England and Wales are at their highest levels ever; homelessness is increasing, with rough sleeping up by 30% in the last year alone, and thousands of households living in shoddy temporary accommodation. In the private sector, overcrowding, vermin, damp and cold are rife, and harassment, theft and negligence by private landlords are commonplace. The most vulnerable, such as migrants and young people, are easy prey for unscrupulous landlords renting out garages, sheds and even stairwells.
It is, in some ways, of no interest to capitalism whether workers sleep on a park bench or in a Mayfair penthouse, as long as they turn up for work, ready and able to expend their labour power for capitalism’s benefit. How that labour power is reproduced is the responsibility of the individual worker. However, what is of interest to capitalists is to maximise their profits. Higher wages are a burden on capitalism, because they are a drain on surplus value. It is therefore in the capitalists’ interests for workers to be housed as cheaply as possible. Historically, that has meant in substandard and overcrowded conditions – the slum accommodation that existed in all Britain’s big cities up until the 1950s and to which we are rapidly returning.
When the ruling class says the market can be trusted to deliver 250,000 homes a year to solve the crisis, it is lying; in the year 2015/2016, it managed just over half that amount. The private sector has no interest in providing decent, affordable housing for the mass of the working class. The only time there has been a serious attempt to build adequate housing for the majority of people in this country was when, for a brief period after the Second World War, the state intervened. From 1945 up to the 1970s, successive British governments carried out a massive state-funded programme of building homes. Only a real threat to the stability of British capitalism could give it the political will to do so; only an exceptional economic situation created the conditions in which it could.
Working class struggle and the postwar boom
In the aftermath of the Second World War, ruling class fears of social unrest were very real. Vast swathes of major cities had been obliterated during the Blitz. One third of the housing stock had been damaged or destroyed. The 1945 Ministry for Reconstruction estimated that 750,000 new dwellings were required immediately, and half a million more for slum clearances and to ease overcrowding. Squatters movements across Britain, led by communists, took over army bases and even luxury flats in London’s expensive Kensington district. With the Soviet Union, which had played a crucial role in overcoming fascism, providing a dangerous example to the working class, the priority for the incoming Labour government was to address the immediate practical problems facing a country whose economy and infrastructure had been devastated by war. It was clear that the market would not solve the problem. Only some kind of social democratic consensus that reached out to wide sections of the working class could achieve the rebuilding of British capitalism, and the cheapest and most efficient way of addressing the housing shortage in the immediate term was for the state to take over. The Labour Party won a landslide victory in 1945 on the programme of ‘cradle to grave’ state welfare promised by the Beveridge Report of 1942.
Such a programme was only possible because of the economic circumstances that emerged in the postwar period: a boom which was to last 25 years. Two world wars had allowed the US to emerge as the dominant world power. But British imperialism, though financially weakened, retained key components of its empire, which the postwar Labour government was able to plunder ruthlessly to finance reforms. Near-full employment became a reality and wages rose. The threat of political instability was largely seen off, with all but the most oppressed sections of the working class benefiting from this new-found prosperity.
Local councils were given new powers to build houses for working class people to rent, building an average of 130,000 a year from the 1950s to the 1970s. For the first time, millions of working class people had access to decent, affordable housing, with indoor toilets, electricity and running water on estates built around children’s playgrounds and amenities such as libraries, launderettes and medical facilities. For all its limitations – despite never existing as a universal right, unlike health and education, despite waiting lists, despite the whittling down of space and quality standards as the capitalist crisis began to reassert itself towards the end of the 1960s – this was a massive gain for the working class.
However, the dream of large-scale public ownership of housing would not last. By the end of the 1950s, measures were introduced to boost private-sector construction and promote home ownership among better-off sections of the working class. While in the early days of postwar consensus, Labour’s housing minister Aneurin Bevan had envisaged council housing as housing for general needs, where ‘the working man, the doctor and the clergyman will live in close proximity to each other’, by the 1950s, under a Conservative government, there was a deliberate move to promote private housing, and designate what was increasingly being described as ‘social’ housing as housing of last resort.
By the 1970s, conditions of crisis for British capitalism were deepening. The ruling class was no longer willing to guarantee the relatively privileged conditions of higher-paid workers and the middle classes through the state sector while sustaining adequate living standards for the mass of the working class. And so, as the postwar boom faltered, the first nail was driven into the coffin of council housing with Labour’s 1972 Housing Act, which allowed councils to raise rents to near-market levels – a necessary precursor to Thatcher’s Right to Buy (RTB).
The 1980s onwards: a declaration of class war
The massive extension of RTB in 1980 was the largest government privatisation in history. It signaled clearly the ruling class’s determination to roll back state welfare and reassert the dominance of the market. It was a declaration of class war. Between 1980 and 1992, 2.2 million council homes were sold. Key to the strategy was the stipulation that receipts from these sales could not be used to fund new council house building. The majority of the working class was increasingly forced to rely on the private-rented sector as council housing was consigned to being accommodation ‘of last resort’ for the very poorest and most vulnerable. Councils were also required to hand over the majority of their stock to housing associations – essentially private companies – who are now the biggest ‘social housing’ landlords in the country. Politically, home ownership entrenched the division within the working class.
The 2016 Housing and Planning Act is intended to finalise this process. For British capitalism, now deep in crisis, the soaring value of land, particularly in London and the south east, makes it the perfect receptacle for parasitic investment. Under the Act, RTB will be accelerated; councils will be forced to sell off their most expensive properties as they become vacant; many working tenants face having to pay more to stay in their homes and, most perniciously, public land is to be handed over for private development. For Labour’s Lord Adonis, whose introduction to a report for estate agent Savills in 2015 provided the ideological framework for this new land grab, London’s 3,500 working class housing estates are nothing more than ‘brownfield land’ just waiting for lucrative development. The working class itself is irrelevant, invisible even, to be hived off into the private sector to live or rot.
The ruling class justifies this attack by arguing that it is not fair for some people to enjoy ‘subsidised’ rents at a time of austerity. The argument is fallacious: the building costs of most council housing were paid off long ago and this so-called ‘subsidy’ is the purely notional gap between low public sector rents and the vast profits the capitalists seek to realise from the land. And in any case, what are the discounts on RTB and Starter Homes, the ‘Help to Buy’ ISAs worth £2.2bn of Treasury money and indeed the billions of pounds handed over to private landlords in the form of housing benefit to meet exorbitant rents, if not subsidies to the private sector?
Even more duplicitous is the argument that there is no longer enough money for the state to sustain adequate housing conditions for the working class. There is plenty of money – there is simply no political or financial will. As the journalist Paul Mason has pointed out ‘despite a massive monetary stimulus into the housing market, and very generous handouts of government land to private builders, they produced a glut of luxury apartments and a shortage of homes for working people.’ The billions of pounds plundered from around the world that are washing around the system are used to build repositories of wealth, steel-and-glass monstrosities that blight London’s landscape, for overseas investors and oligarchs – often channeled through offshore trusts. There are acres of land, held in ‘banks’ by developers waiting for the value to soar to ever more dizzying heights. Even when local councils had a statutory duty to ensure all new residential development included a proportion of ‘affordable’ housing, private developers – in collusion with the councils – wriggled out of their commitments. In south London’s Elephant & Castle, one developer explained the lack of flats for social rent in their tower by saying it would have been too expensive to build separate entrances for the poor. This argument was accepted by Southwark Labour council, which was also responsible for flogging the nearby 22-acre Heygate council housing estate to developers Lendlease for just £50m. Two-bedroom flats on the site are being sold for upwards of £750,000. Why would the market invest in genuinely affordable homes for the working class when public assets can be plundered so profitably?
This is the contradiction posed by Jeremy Corbyn’s promise that, if he gets into power, he will build half a million publicly-funded homes a year. Given that he’s not even prepared to rein in his own Labour councils as they sell off working class estates, how does he hope to take on the capitalist state? Neither the economic conditions that gave rise to the housing provision of the postwar boom, nor a broad political struggle by the working class to defend its living conditions exist today. Without such a struggle – which must inevitably be built in opposition to the capitalist state and its Labour Party henchmen – the working class will be forced back into the slums.
The Fight for Housing
Sunday 6 November, 2-5pm
Somerstown Community Centre
150 Ossulton Street, London NW1 1EE
(tubes: King Cross or Euston)
Sessions on:
• Building resistance to the destruction of working class estates
• Fighting the overall benefit cap and the struggle against the Housing & Planning Bill
• Why capitalism cannot solve the housing crisis
With speaker on the international struggle for housing from Hungary and contributions from campaigns across London fighting for decent, affordable housing and against the destruction of their communities.
Called by the Revolutionary Communist Group, Focus E15 Campaign and Architects for Social Housing
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 253 October/November 2016
