Gordon Brown has done a lot of listening. At least,
that's what he tells us. The new Prime Minister has toured the country,
talking to people, noting their frustrations, fears, hopes and dreams.
Remarkable. It was like a Gordon Setter with a barking disorder
suddenly becoming the champion Hearing Dog.
Having
switched his broadcasting kit from transmit to receive, Mr Brown was
accepting messages with the readiness of a BT call centre. It sounded
encouraging - until this week, when he unveiled his response to all
that listening: a stew of initiatives and targets, largely rehashed
cold potatoes, lacking the beef of deliverability, much less the gravy
of affordability.
I have never been quite sure how
green Mr Brown really is, but if he recycles rubbish as keenly as he
recycles policies, Downing Street's dustmen will soon be looking for
new jobs.
Mr Brown produced 23
Bills, including proposals on housing, education, health, security,
welfare and environment. Aside from his headline-grabbing decision to
scrap Britain's first super-casino (despite having voted for every
stage of the Gambling Act), the main priority, he said, was to build
three million new homes across the United Kingdom by 2020.
This
gives us a clue to whom Mr Brown was really listening, while Tony and
Cherie were packing their bags. Was it to three quarters of the British
population (including many from ethnic minorities) who want far
stricter limits on immigrant numbers, or to two thirds of the public
who favour withdrawing British troops from Iraq? Apparently not.
That's
hardly surprising, given that immigration and Iraq are the most
important issues over which the Government, with Mr Brown riding
shotgun, has driven a coach-and-horses of deceit.
By
deliberately understating the numbers of migrants coming here, while
massively overstating - sorry, make that inventing - a threat from
Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction", Labour has underpinned
key domestic and foreign policies with little more than flummery and
fabrication.
Mr Brown does listen, but only
selectively. Very recently somebody told him something interesting,
which he heard loud and clear. It was a nugget of information, far more
valuable than anything he might have picked up from Middle Britain.
A
bright spark pointed out that there was a sure-fire way for him to be
re-elected - a slam-dunk. And I think I know who it was: Frank Luntz,
the American political consultant best known for crafting phrases to
make unpalatable messages seem attractive. Or, as one of his critics
put it: "Spraying perfume on dog turds."
Writing
in the Financial Times last month, Mr Luntz said that Mr Brown's
eventual success will not be determined by a new twist on New Labour,
but by an issue that "Mr Brown can uniquely make his own: affordable
housing".
Setting out what seems to be Mr Brown's
battle plan, Mr Luntz added: "He [Mr Brown] will announce within hours
of moving into his new home that 100,000 young couples will soon have
the chance of moving into their new homes… They will repay him by
delivering the election affirmation he so desperately wants."
This
time Mr Brown was listening all right. His speech on Wednesday focused
primarily on "putting affordable housing within the reach not just of
the few, but the many".
In principle, there's
nothing wrong with that. Housing is a hugely important issue for
millions of Britons. The desire to acquire one's own home, with all the
responsibilities and commitments that such a move entails, is not to be
discouraged. Offering hard-working people the chance to become property
owners should be at the centre of Government's effort to create an
aspirational society.
But when you look at why the
housing market is so distorted - such that someone on an average wage
must pay eight times his pre-tax annual salary in order to purchase an
average house - it becomes clear that Mr Brown's Labour administration,
far from providing solutions to this crisis, is in fact responsible for
two of its most important causes: fractured families and unprecedented
levels of immigration.
Not that you would gather
this by listening to ministers. They prefer to talk about the failure
of dastardly banks to offer fixed-rate, long-term mortgages. Or greedy
builders, hoarding land, instead of releasing it for development. Or
slothful planning committees, taking an eternity to grant building
permission. Or Nimby lobbyists. Or Swampy's mates.
There
is something in each of these explanations. But they pale alongside the
effects of a welfare system that discourages marriage, encourages
parents to live separately, gives teenage girls an incentive to become
pregnant in order to secure council housing, and tells the world's
dispossessed that, if they arrive in Britain with nothing, our
obligation is to find them a home.
This is an
issue that few in authority are prepared to discuss publicly in case
they are branded "racist". When Labour MP Margaret Hodge highlighted it
as a problem in her Barking constituency, Cabinet minister Alan Johnson
scandalously accused her of "using the language of the BNP".
Simple
facts on housing and immigration are hard to come by, as a recent ITV
documentary presented by Mike Nicholson discovered. Officials claimed
not to know all the numbers. What Nicholson did reveal, however, was
that Mr Johnson's assertion that immigrants take up only one per cent
of social housing was wrong. The real figure is five per cent.
Capital Economics, the City forecaster, estimates that 750,000
immigrants came to Britain in 2005 alone, far more than government
figures indicate. More than one million British passports have been
issued to immigrants since 1997. You need only the weakest grip on
basic economics to work out that a rapid increase in the population on
this scale will put parts of the housing market under intolerable
pressure.
Never mind, Mr Brown has been listening.
He has ordered vast estates of new homes in the next 13 years, while
simultaneously promising to protect the green belt. On the basis that
trees and ponds don't vote, I wouldn't bet on it.
And
who, by the way, is going to pay for all this "affordable housing"? As
usual with Mr Brown, the difficult details are conveniently missing. He
simply talked about "partnerships with local authorities, health
authorities and the private and voluntary sectors". No mention of value
for money.
We can only hope that it fares better
than many other recent public-sector capital projects. According to an
investigation by the Taxpayers' Alliance into 300 such schemes
completed in the past two years, there was an aggregate cost over-run
of £23 billion.
The report concludes: "This stems
from a failure properly to specify what is desired from a project
before the project begins, underestimating costs to get the project
approved and paying over the odds in an attempt to solve the problem."
Gordon, are you still listening?
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