the world turned upside down

After last week's shock announcement that the Home Secretary needs a bodyguard to go for a kebab, and thinks (yes she does; she said so) that "no one would" go out and about in Hackney after dark, we now find that our new Housing Minister Caroline Flint is shocked at the number of council tenants who don't have jobs. Funny; one might be reasonably shocked by these sorts of things, but of course the big difference between her and Labour Ministers of old is that she thinks all these jobless tenants are just a bunch of lazy bastards.

The number of council tenants without jobs has risen, from 20% in 1981 to 55% now. That means of course that where most council tenants previously were trotting off of a morning with their dustcarts, chip vans and nail files, nowadays they are less cosy to look at and think about. According to Flint, that's reason enough to take these people in hand and make sure they're at least looking for a job - sinisterly, even to make sure they're "employable"* - before they're allowed to have a council home.

After all! The likes of us aren't paying perfectly good taxes to support the likes of them, are we!

"She told the Fabian Society on Monday: 'The link between social housing and worklessness is stark. I am concerned about what has been called a collapse in the number of people in council housing in work over the past 25 years.

'We need to think radically and start a national debate'."

Okay - so let's start the debate. First of all, I move that the word missing from her statement to the Fabians is "causal." There is no evidence that being given a council home has in any way encouraged these people to become, or to remain, jobless.

In 1982 the unemployment rate famously topped 3 million, or one in eight people. It was going up, at the time, not down. Remember why Thatcher was so thrilled when Argentina invaded the Falklands?? In 2007 the unemployment rate was around five per cent, or one in 20 people. Spot the difference. I'm not even sure what the population has done in that time, but the actual number of unemployed people now is around 1.5 million, or half what it was in the early eighties. Does that sound to you like a huge segment of the population has just decided not to work?

As it happens, in 1984 - three years after the date the Minister is concerned about - yours truly here was party to the purchase of a flat in Wimbledon (I know, I know - I was a child bride, I liked being near the Wombles) for £29,950. The combined salaries involved in the mortgage - from two young people both, at that time, working in shops of one sort or another - came to roughly £16,000. In other words, we were earning more than half the amount the flat cost.

Er - compare that to now. On a salary of over four times what I was earning then, I am unable to afford to buy a flat. Well - okay - I have kids, I'd need a bigger flat, and I'm only one adult in the equation, not two. However. The average price of a home in 2007 hit around £200,000. Even in nasty old Hackney you can't even buy a garage for twice the combines earnings of two shop assistants.

The Telegraph puts it this way:

"To put current house prices into perspective, the median weekly wage, according to the Office for National Statistics, is £447 – equating to £23,244 a year. Average house prices, then, have reached a remarkable 8·6 times average earnings."

Now, you may recall that many council properties have been sold off under Right to Buy. Many of those places now fetch the same prices on the open market as other properties, despite the fact that councils deprived of the rental income can't even afford to keep up the communal areas properly - such is our housing shortage - and, thus, the competition for those that remain is so fierce that there are severely overcrowded families growing up and even leaving home before they can be rehoused in larger properties. I, at one stage having not worked for nine years and finding myself with nowhere to go, spent several years in a one-bedroom privately rented flat that cost me more than a 3-bed council house would have (of course I was working; I was doing nothing bloody else). I currently, in a 'good job', spend nearly half my take-home pay on the rent of the cheapest habitable two-bed flat I was able to find (in good old Hackney). (It's very nice, actually, but that is beside the point.)

Now, in this climate it stands to reason that the few council properties that do remain will go to the most desperate people in our society, those with no jobs, those who can't raise a deposit for a rented place, those who have been made homeless (the only way to get housed in inner London), those who have no other option. The ones the council has to house.

They are the deserving poor.

Of course fewer of them are working.

Caroline, wake up! Wake up! It was all a dream!

* I wonder if that means they have to speak English, too.