There is something increasingly peculiar about the British Right.
It wants to celebrate Britain as the greatest country in the world while simultaneously proposing policies that would make large parts of Britain less British.
The latest chapter is Kemi Badenoch’s attack on housing benefit and her suggestion that people receiving housing support should not necessarily be living in expensive parts of the country.
In other words, if you cannot afford London, perhaps you should leave London.
This is not an entirely new idea. We have been here before.
Thatcher and the beginning of the great housing contradiction
To understand the present argument, we need to go back to Margaret Thatcher.
Thatcher’s government embarked upon one of the largest transfers of social housing into private ownership in modern British history through the Right to Buy.
The political argument was seductive. Give council tenants the opportunity to own their homes and create a property-owning democracy.
But there was a problem hiding underneath the rhetoric.
Every council house sold was one fewer genuinely affordable home available for future generations of tenants.
The answer from the political Right was, in essence, that the private housing market would take care of those who were no longer able to obtain social housing.
But markets have a rather awkward habit of responding to demand with prices.
And when rents rose beyond the means of people on low incomes, the state did not simply walk away.
It increasingly paid Housing Benefit to help people meet those rents.
Therein lies one of the great contradictions of the modern Conservative housing philosophy.
Sell the affordable housing owned by the state.
Allow the market to determine rents.
Discover that poor people cannot afford those rents.
Then subsidise the rents from public funds.
The state therefore moved from being a provider of housing to becoming, in significant measure, a subsidiser of private landlords.
The public money did not disappear.
It merely changed direction.
The benefit fraud convenient narrative
Then came another curious development.
As the Housing Benefit bill increased, the political narrative increasingly focused upon fraud, abuse and claimants allegedly exploiting the system.
Rules became more complicated.
Entitlements were restricted.
Controls were tightened.
The claimant was increasingly portrayed not as somebody experiencing the consequences of an expensive housing market, but as a potential problem within it.
Yet there was a rather obvious question which the political debate frequently avoided.
Why was the Housing Benefit bill rising in the first place?
If the state had progressively withdrawn from providing affordable housing, while private rents increased, then the increasing cost of housing support was not necessarily evidence of a population suddenly discovering how to defraud the welfare state.
It could also be evidence of the housing market doing precisely what markets do when affordable supply is inadequate.
The policy had created a structural problem and then attempted to explain the cost of solving that problem as the moral failure of the people caught inside it.
That is quite a political trick.
The great austerity experiment
David Cameron and George Osborne did not invent the financial crisis of 2008.
But they certainly understood that a crisis creates political opportunities.
The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition came to power in 2010 and austerity became the organising principle of economic policy.
The argument was presented principally as one of fiscal necessity: the country had to repair the public finances.
But austerity was never merely an accounting exercise.
It was also an ideological project.
The question was not simply how much the state should spend. It was what sort of society the state should produce.
Housing became one of its principal battlegrounds.
The so-called “bedroom tax” reduced Housing Benefit for working-age social housing tenants deemed to have more bedrooms than they needed. The reduction was 14 per cent for one additional bedroom and 25 per cent for two or more.
Then came further restrictions on housing support, including measures affecting tenants in the private rented sector.
The result was a growing pressure on low-income households in expensive areas.
And here the contradiction becomes almost comic.
The same political philosophy that had helped expand reliance upon the private housing market increasingly complained about the public money required to make that market accessible to poorer people.
The state had helped create the conditions.
Then it became irritated by the bill.
Osborne’s two-child politics
George Osborne’s 2015 Budget introduced the two-child limit for certain benefits, beginning another chapter in the politics of conditional poverty.
The policy effectively told poorer families that the state would support only a prescribed number of children.
It was a remarkable proposition.
The state did not control how many children a family already had, but it could decide how much support the third child was worth.
The policy has now been reversed, but its political significance remains.
It told us something about the philosophy behind welfare reform.
The question was increasingly not:
How do we make Britain affordable for ordinary people?
It was:
How do we make ordinary people fit themselves into the Britain that the market has produced?
That is a very different philosophy.
The London problem
London presents the contradiction beautifully.
The city needs cleaners, nurses, care workers, drivers, restaurant workers, construction workers, security guards, teaching assistants, retail workers and countless others whose wages are nowhere near sufficient to purchase or privately rent the homes that the city requires them to occupy.
Yet the political answer increasingly appears to be that people receiving housing support should simply live somewhere cheaper.
But cheaper housing is frequently found where there are fewer jobs.
This creates the remarkable spectacle of a political system effectively saying:
“We need you to work here, but we cannot accept the cost of your living here.”
That is not an economic solution.
It is social sorting.
The great British displacement
And this is where the current rhetoric about sending poor people “up North” becomes particularly revealing.
The people making the suggestion generally do not have to move North.
Their jobs are not being relocated.
Their children are not being taken out of their schools.
Their families are not being uprooted.
Their social networks are not being dismantled.
They are not being told that the place where they have lived, worked and built a life is now too expensive for them.
The people being asked to move are the people who have the least economic power to resist the instruction.
That is why the language matters.
“Move somewhere cheaper” sounds like neutral economic advice.
But when applied systematically to an entire class of people, it becomes something else.
Displacement.
A city becomes affordable by removing the people who cannot afford it rather than by making the city affordable.
That is not solving the housing crisis.
It is changing the population to conceal it.
Britain once understood something rather important
What makes the present argument particularly strange is that Britain has already demonstrated a better model.
Peabody was founded in 1862 to provide affordable housing for Londoners on low incomes.
The Guinness Trust followed in 1890. Its founder, Sir Edward Guinness, established it specifically to improve the housing conditions of working people.
These institutions understood something that appears increasingly unfashionable in contemporary politics:
Workers have to live somewhere.
And preferably somewhere reasonably close to the work they perform.
The history of London’s social housing is therefore not simply a history of government handouts to the poor.
It is a history of urban planning, social responsibility and economic common sense.
The Victorian philanthropists who created housing estates in London understood that a functioning city needs different classes of people living within its social and economic fabric.
They were not attempting to create a city in which the wealthy occupied one geographical universe and everyone else was exported elsewhere.
The Ford lesson
Henry Ford offers another useful historical example, although he was hardly a socialist.
Ford famously increased wages at his factories to make employment more attractive and reduce labour turnover. The famous five-dollar day became part of the mythology of American industrial capitalism.
The underlying principle was simple.
A prosperous business required prosperous workers.
Ford understood that if workers had money, they could buy things.
It was capitalism with a social understanding:
Raise the floor and the whole economy can rise.
That was a tide lifting all boats.
It was not the modern political obsession with asking how little the state can provide before somebody falls through the floorboards.
The Americanisation of Britain
What worries me about the contemporary British Right is the emergence of an increasingly American conception of social geography.
America has perfected, in many places, the separation of communities by income, opportunity and property values.
There are wealthy neighbourhoods.
There are poor neighbourhoods.
There are gated communities.
There are neglected communities.
There are invisible lines separating one America from another.
Britain historically had something different.
It had class divisions, certainly. Britain practically invented class divisions.
But there was also considerable physical proximity.
The rich and poor could live within the same city, sometimes within the same district, and frequently depended upon one another.
That mattered.
Because a country is not merely a collection of balance sheets.
It is a collection of human relationships.
Britain is not Britain without the people who clean its offices, care for its elderly, drive its buses, build its houses, staff its hospitals, teach its children and keep its economy moving.
The Right’s impossible equation
The modern British Right increasingly appears to want an impossible equation.
It wants lower taxes.
It wants less welfare.
It wants fewer immigrants.
It wants cheaper public expenditure.
It wants workers to remain economically flexible.
It wants businesses to have access to labour.
It wants London and Britain’s other major cities to remain globally competitive.
But it also appears increasingly uncomfortable with the actual people required to make those cities function.
The result is a political fantasy in which the workers remain available but somehow live somewhere else.
The nurses can work in London.
The care workers can work in London.
The cleaners can work in London.
The restaurant staff can work in London.
But heaven forbid they should expect to live there.
The old social compact
There was a time when Conservatives could understand this.
Conservatism traditionally contained an instinct for social stability. It recognised that a society in which the wealthy become extraordinarily wealthy while the working and lower-income population is progressively excluded from decent housing, secure employment and social participation is not particularly stable.
The old idea was not equality of outcome.
It was social cohesion.
You could be rich.
Your neighbour could be poor.
But you were still neighbours.
That matters.
Because once people are physically separated by income, they increasingly stop understanding one another.
The poor become statistics.
The rich become abstractions.
Politics becomes a battle between tribes that rarely meet.
And that is how a country begins to lose the very thing its politicians insist they are trying to preserve.
The tide that once lifted boats
Peabody understood it.
Guinness understood it.
Cadbury understood it.
Industrial employers understood it.
Even Henry Ford understood a version of it.
Pay workers properly.
Provide decent housing.
Allow people to live reasonably close to their employment.
Invest in communities.
Let ordinary people participate in economic growth rather than merely survive within it.
The objective was not to make everyone equal.
It was to make the society sufficiently prosperous and integrated that prosperity did not require the poor to disappear from the view of the rich.
That is the great irony of the current argument.
The political Right spent decades encouraging home ownership, selling social housing, expanding dependence upon private rents and allowing housing costs to rise.
When the resulting system became increasingly unaffordable for people on modest incomes, the answer was to restrict their benefits.
And now, having helped produce a housing system in which millions struggle to afford a home, some politicians appear to have arrived at the final solution:
Move the poor somewhere else.
Preferably somewhere they never have to visit.
The British Right has not discovered a solution to the housing crisis.
It has discovered a method of making the housing crisis less visible to itself.
That is not conservatism.
It is social segregation dressed up as economic common sense.
And if Britain follows that road far enough, we may eventually discover that the country being “preserved” is no longer the country we were trying to preserve.
A country is not made stronger by pushing its poor beyond the horizon.
It is made stronger when the people who clean the hospital can afford to live near it, when the teacher can afford to live in the community where she teaches, when the care worker does not spend half her life commuting to the person she cares for, and when the wealthy and the poor remain sufficiently close to one another to remember that they inhabit the same country.
That was once understood.
Perhaps it is time Britain remembered it.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 