'The Shock Doctrine' Comes To Britain's Social Housing Sector

The loony proposal from Iain Duncan Smith, aka The Chingford Slaphead, that long term unemployed relocate from one part of the country to another in search of work might not be intentionally mean-spirited, but it's mean-spirited nonetheless.

In a country in which the gap beween rich and poor already resembles that in 2nd Century Rome, people such as these can't get jobs for any number of reasons. The areas in which they live may have depended on heavy industries which were destroyed for political reasons. They may have been squeezed out of the labour market by economically racist employers intent on driving their wage bills down through a subsidy provided by a tsunami of cheap foreign labour. Many of them just don't have the skills to get jobs, a state of affairs which is nothing to do with them but is entirely the fault of the educational regimes they had to study under and governments determined to massage the unemployment statistics out of terror of the problem's full scale being revealed. Even when they do get jobs, the growth of IT and the Internet now means it makes no difference whether the job they do is done in Bellshill or Bangalore, and they have no job security. Nobody in the UK with a private sector office job has had job security for at least the past 10 years.

What these particular human chess pieces do have, however, is security of tenure in council housing. Having failed to get all of council housing's occupants out by trying to sell them their own homes at massive discounts which resulted in the taxpayer taking a hit on every one that was 'sold', the atavistic Tory hatreds of the British people owning anything in common and of the rich being beholden to the poor, those inconvenient walking reminders both of their own avarice and of how their previous attempts to enrich us all have failed, for anything whatsoever can now combine to get them out by withdrawing their security of tenure if they won't move to find work they can't be guaranteed will be secure and which they might not even get. It's a classic example of what GM Trevelyan called 'the radicalism of the rich at the expense of the poor', all those juicy social housing sites emptied and waiting to be flogged off for redevelopment, people exiled from the areas they've known all their lives because their faces don't fit in with the architect's plans, or else because they might spoil somebody's view. As Naomi Klein illustrated so well in 'The Shock Doctrine', in some parts of the world you need to have a natural disaster for this kind of thing to happen, for people who've lived in one place all their lives to be turfed out in order to help bring in the tourists. In the UK, all you need to be guilty of is living in a council house.

The idea that everything in life has a cost is one which was invented in 1979. It was after that date infamous in memory, the date when we should all have begun to realise that Capitalism can be just as malign as Communism, that its unpleasantly backward corollary, that you don't own your job, a mindset critical to the operation of what Klein so aptly described as 'the boor market', also began to develop. But in British terms, Duncan Smith's wizard wheeze has thus far been the icing on the cake on what seems like being the most inhuman, downright evil legislative program in living memory. The fact that people don't own the dwellings they live in will be shoved in their faces as a mark of obloquy. Sorry, you might have had security of tenure before, but you don't now - after all, it may be your home, but it's not your house.

This is enclosure of public lands, very possibly for private profit, all over again. Oh, it may be brownfield instead of greenfield, and vertical instead of horizontal, but if it looks like enclosure and smells like enclosure, then it's probably enclosure. They could not enclose the social housing stock for their own purposes from within; so they shall now attempt to enclose it from without by force of law but slyly, by saying it's for the residents' own good. I thought these boys were early 19th Century in their thinking; forget that. This is 18th Century stuff. This is an attempt to proletarianise the proletariat.