Housing Entitlement Day

Shelter's annual affordability index, published earlier this month, shows how disastrous the house price increases have been for most people in the UK. It indicates that the price of a first home has risen from £52,674 to £159,494 over the past ten years, with house price to income ratios rising from 1.72 to 3.4. Mortgage repayments now represent 21 per cent of household income compared with 12 per cent a decade ago. This cash is returned as interest payments to wealthier home-owners and bank shareholders - another redistribution of wealth from poor to rich.


Many years ago, Spencer Fitzgibbon, a former external communications supremo for the Green Party who has now retired to write novels, came up with a brilliant policy which he called 'housing entitlement'. The idea was they we chose a day and made it law that, wherever people were living on that day became theirs.

This was a brilliant stroke - a thought experiment that requires you to question what home ownership means, and whether something as fundamental as the need for a roof over your head should ever be subject to the vagaries of the market.

So what would it mean for different groups in society? Those with mortgages would lose them instantly - no need for the stress of working to pay for housing. Those who were renting would suddenly gain home security and an asset to allow them onto an equal footing with the more prosperous members of society. These would be the winners.

And what about the losers? Mutual building societies would no longer own assets and would have to begin again by taking deposits from savers before they could lend. Private banks would also lose their assets - which would impact severely on the indirect absentee landlords who make up their shareholders. Landlords and landladies would also lose assets - the more they owned the more they would lose.

The great thing about this thought experiment is that your reaction depends entirely on where you find yourself in the present housing hierarchy, but the reality is that the majority of this people would, on average, find their well-being improved by such a policy. The overall losers would be quite a small number of very rich people.

Every now and then the government could name a new housing entitlement day. It could be about every 40 years or so - like biblical jubilees - about the amount of time it takes the greedy and unscrupulous to distort the ownership system enough for goodly citizens to really be suffering. Tweet

Capitalist mantras

Capitalism is a powerful economic system, but more importantly it is also a system of ideas. We grow up with such ideas in childhood and reinforce them in our dealings with each other. The ideas are communicated, maintained and elaborated through a system of mantras, which operate to control our thinking and to tie us in to a nasty, selfish way of behaving in society. I’ve listed some of the most popular further on, with some suggested replacements. On the principle that it would be a good idea not to do the opposition’s work for them I would suggest you begin to eliminate these from your vocabulary, and challenge them when used by others.

Some of these are rather insidious. For example, if you believe that there is no such thing as a free lunch it makes you feel like a ‘loser’ (a tremendous capitalist concept) every time you give something away, such as a lunch for your friends. Your act of generosity immediately becomes a gesture that requires reciprocation. Against the backdrop of this mantra, gift becomes exchange. Kindness is lost to capitalism. I am making a collection of these as a consciousness-raising exercise so please send others on a postcard or by email.

The way to reject the mantras is through active intellectual subversion. If you find one of the mantras pops into your head, or that you are responding to it in your behaviour, you need to switch it for something that has the opposite consequence. I once saw a poster for a band called ‘Shocking Insanesburys’; the name is subversive in itself since the comfortable task of supermarket shopping has been ideologically challenged. The band-name is more accurate for the nature of consumption in modern capitalism, which is no longer about satisfying desires but rather about bringing the competitiveness of production into our homes.

More importantly you can engage in random acts of kindness of pointless acts of beauty. An excellent one you can try is to pay the toll for the person behind you on a bridge or stretch of road. I have tried this on the Severn Bridge and it completely fazes not just the recipient of you generosity but also the toll-keeper. Anything that gets people questioning has got to be good!

Here are a few examples. Please send me more, or better revised versions and I'll add them to the blog:

There is no such thing as a free lunch → Food is for sharing
You can’t get something for nothing → Unless you are a shareholder or landowner
Everybody has a price → Generosity is its own reward
Time is money → My time is my own
If you’re so clever, how come you → If you’re so rich, how come you ain’t
ain’t rich? happy?
Nothing in life is free → The best things in life are free
Money makes the world go round → Love makes the world go round
We need to protect our wealth → We need to rely on the love of others
If it isn’t hurting it isn’t working → If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution Tweet