'Spare rooms a luxury too far' says multimillionaire Baron

Yes, it's true. Apparently the country isn't being sucked dry by corporate tax evasion and bailing out the banks. It's the greedy low-paid who think that housing benefit should fund a home with a spare room.

Spare bedrooms for people in social housing are a luxury the country can no longer afford, a minister has said.

Tenants with spare rooms will lose £11 a week in housing benefit under changes going through Parliament.

Asked by You and Yours presenter Julian Worricker, if a spare bedroom should be regarded as a "luxury" for those in social housing, Lord Freud said: "Exactly - we have got a housing benefit expenditure that is simply out of control. 

You single parents disgust me. Wanting your children to have their own room. Can't you see that the world's 5th biggest economy is being dragged beneath the waves because of YOUR selfishness. 


Privately educated Baron Freud didn't make hundreds of millions of pounds by leeching a spare room courtesy of hard-working taxpayers. He made it through financial speculation and probably through inheriting a large amount of money. Why can't you?


(And while they're fining these people, it turns out that they couldn't move to smaller places if they wanted to):

Figures from the National Housing Federation suggest that around 180,000 social tenants in England are "under-occupying" two-bedroom homes, but just 68,000 one-bedroom social homes became available for letting in a single year.

Won't somebody tell Uppal to shut up?

A period of silent reflection on Uppal's part would be appreciated by all, I feel. Even sleep-deprived and 1000+ miles away, I'm finding his continued pursuit of public inanity deeply wearing.

So what's my favourite MP been on about this week other than keeping mum about his love of Saudi Arabia's less than cuddly regime? Well, here's an easy question and one that's deeply relevant to his constituents in the, er, English West Midlands:

What recent assessment he has made of the state of the economy in Northern Ireland.

I think this is a 'planted' question, especially as another Tory MP asks exactly the same question. It's a simple one for the (English, Shropshire constituency) Northern Ireland viceroy minister to answer. Or rather, it isn't because it's way too broad. Instead, it's an opportunity for the minister to imply that the Irish rabble are feckless dole scum who need turning out onto the streets while all the Tories bang on about how wonderful Northern Ireland is as part of the UK. Uppal follows up with another underarm ball to allow the minister to claim that NI unemployment is all the fault of the state and the private sector will magic up lots of lovely jobs. Then it will rain chocolate drops and fairies will dance at Ian Paisley's civil partnership with Martin McGuinness.

The really bad news is that Uppal's somehow leading a committee investigation into Welfare Reform. Given that he's openly contemptuous of a) the poor and b) social security, putting a multimillionaire who made his money by inventing wonderful innovative things and providing hundreds of jobs speculating in property in the chair is a clear sign that 'reform' = 'sod off oiks'.

Unsurprisingly, Uppal's contribution in the debate between MPs from all sides and some experts is limited to one long, long question which boils down to the brilliant aperçu that 'work should pay' and one in which he suggested that massively reducing housing benefit might be good for 'the market' (he wasn't elected to represent the market - he was elected to represent 'people'.

I was interested in some of the remarks that you, Dr Nolan, and actually the whole panel, made about how far the Bill can go in providing a carrot and a stick. There has to be a line in the sand on these things. This is quite a subjective question and I appreciate that you might not be able to answer it. Obviously, the current system is not perfect, and there might be flaws in what is proposed, but do you feel that there is a signal in this in terms of the tacit understanding that many people have with the current benefits system? Fundamentally, at its core it is trying to give the ethos that, regardless of whether people are worse off or better off, it is to everybody’s benefit—not only the individual’s, but society’s—that work should pay. I appreciate that I am asking you to respond from your own subjective view of tackling these issues and taking it head on.

Unfortunately, given that the Tories are the party of bankers and corporations, they mean that benefits should be so mean that people will do any job, however humiliating. I think that work should pay to some extent (though I'm not keen on forcing parents to spend less time with their children), but I'd do it by making work pay properly, i.e. a good living wage rather than the miserable wages grudgingly handed out currently. 

You referred specifically to the private housing sector—I thought I heard you right on that. In the current circumstances, an unscrupulous landlord could manipulate the situation. Do you not see some actual positive benefits in trying to provide a brake on the market, which has ballooned over the past few years?

Thankfully, the respondent slapped down our hero by reminding him of the actual human cost of his clever little plan - he doesn't manage to muster a reply.

There is a large amount of evidence to suggest that the changes that we are seeing in housing benefit prior to the introduction of universal credit in the future will leave large numbers of families far worse off than they are now, and run significant risks of increasing homelessness and poverty levels. I am not in a position to assess the precise impact that the policy will have on the market—no one is—but there is that real risk. There has been no pilot of this full-scale roll-out of national policy, and if the market effects are not as intended, there will be significant risks for poverty levels. It is almost inevitable that families will see their real terms incomes drop.

The sheer mediocrity makes my bum ache.

Out of sight, out of mind

For some reason, the government's plan to cap housing benefit to a low percentage of the average rental price is really bugging me. Every time it crosses my mind, it seems more and more evil.

The idea, say the government, is that the welfare bill is way too high. They won't examine the reasons for this - successive governments building an economy on low wages while encouraging house price speculation, permanently excluding the poor from home ownership while banning council house building - but they may have a point.

The solution is (as Tory mayor of London Boris Johnson said) a form of ethnic or social 'cleansing'. Poor people - most of whom have jobs - are to be thrown out of their homes if they happen to be Londoners or living in other affluent cities, and sent to cheaper areas.

Morally, I think this is appalling. Before we even consider the economics and practicalities, what we're proposing to do is to smash up entire communities. Imagine being, say, a descendant of London's working class. Your grandparents refused to be evacuated during the Blitz. You've worked in the family's inherited trade and clung on to your little patch for generations. But your business - a market stall, say - has been hit by supermarkets and your ancestral bit of London has been gentrified, with rocketing house prices.

Suddenly, a letter arrives telling you that you're being evicted, and sent to some tough estate 40, 50, 60 miles away. Goodbye to your market stall. Goodbye to your extended family. No more visiting the graves of your parents and grandparents, from your social network: sports clubs, friendly baby-sitters, drinking mates, your clubs and societies. Your kids start over at another school which isn't keen on a bunch of poor strangers. You don't know any of your new neighbours, who aren't impressed by a load of refugees being dumped on their estates, especially as there's a shortage of housing for the locals. You're now jobless too. So you have to claim more benefits, which doesn't endear you to your new council or neighbours.

It's worse if you're displacing ethnic minorities, who live together for self-protection, economic reasons and cultural reasons. Dispersing them without regard for these matters will cause ethnic tensions, will stoke racism, and crudely smashes apart a major plank in most people's cultural lives. Imagine being the first black family in some derelict Essex seaside town, with a paper like my own Express and Star screaming about benefit claimants… What if you're a Welsh-speaker, suddenly uprooted from a rural village and sent to an English-speaking city, perhaps a long way off? Your language is rapidly lost once it becomes one spoken only in the home.

There are massive advantages for the council that's got rid of you. They can sell all their council housing to the middle classes, and the private rented accommodation can be sold or rented to richer people too. Your kids won't be costing them money in free school meals, health checks, after-school clubs, ASBO wardens, lollipop ladies, social workers etc. etc. Of course people dumped in distant places without the benefit of extended families and established community links (no social cohesion, in other words) drift more easily towards crime, disorder, poverty, drugs and deprivation. But why should the Tory councils give a shit? They're somebody else's problem now.

Politically, it's a stroke of evil genius too - reminiscent of Shirley Porter, the Westminster Council leader who illegally shifted all the poor voters into one or two electoral wards to make sure the Tories would never be thrown out of power. Poor people largely vote Labour. If you send them to poor areas, you'll win a few more seats where they used to live and the refugees won't make any difference electorally to where they're going.

So: economically, morally and politically, this is evil: gerrymandering and social cleansing with no regard for community or consequences.

This is why I call them Tory Scum, by the way.