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Brown must invest and build his way out of gloom and bust
ONCE Gordon Brown boasted he had put an end to “boom and bust” in the economy.
Now, faced with a struggling economy, his mantra is no longer heard.
But yesterday (Wednesday) in his address to Parliament he returned to another favourite expression – helping to put young people on the “bottom rung of the housing ladder”.
But hasn’t he noticed that the housing ladder has been pulled up by the credit crunch and the shaky mortgage market?
That no matter how you tinker with the private housing market it will never be able to provide homes to ease growing social pressures?
Gordon Brown could go in another direction
He could invest his way out of the housing crisis, by pouring a few billion – much less than is spent on Trident, Iraq and Afghanistan – into a planned council housing project, run by local authorities
Unfashionable though it may sound to the neo-liberalists among the Brownites, he could go back to the basic Keynesian policies of the late 1940s and 1950s, endorsed by the Tories of that decade, and build his way out of the recession.
Suicidally, he shows no signs of changing course, even in the face of the disastrous local election results.
An announcement by Barratt Homes this week about their new development in Bloomsbury highlights the Gordon Brown dilemma.
A block in Huntley Street, owned by a public body, University College London Hospital, and once used sensibly as a hostel for nurses, was allowed to fall into disrepair before being flogged off at a questionably low price.
This is typical of sales of residual sites by National Health Service bodies in recent years.
Now, 33 flats in Huntley Street are in the process of being sold for around £30 million – at around £700,000 each – while only 20 will be let at low rents for key workers.
Holborn MP Frank Dobson has protested; campaigners have protested.
But their concerns are swotted away.
Somewhere, no doubt, in dusty government dossiers these 20 flats are part of the statistics compiled to prove that sufficient affordable homes can be built to solve the nation’s housing shortage.
It’s a discredited policy, but Gordon Brown refuses to recognise what is staring him in the face.
Meanwhile, the Huntley Street fiasco proves that profit is still being put before social need.
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