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Written by Austin Mitchell
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16 March 2005 |
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Austins response to the Guardian letter
I’m sorry Jim Coulter (16 March) finds my modest article to be “glossy propaganda”. It’s nothing like as glossy as the brochures, videos and paid celebrity endorsements shoved through tenant letter boxes in stock transfer ballots.
He says I shouldn’t call transfers privatisation. Yet if giving away the housing stock to a private company bound by the Companies Act and financed by and answerable to the banking sector isn’t privatisation, he should provide a better word for it. Charitable donations?
I don’t say the “easy profits” will go back to the housing associations. Nor will they go back to the community which made the initial investment. However, the financial industry built up to exploit this nice little earner will do well out of it so will RSL top management, whose pay is moving up to fat cat levels.
I’m not opposing stock transfer on ideological grounds. That’s the ground it’s being pushed on. I merely oppose it as daft, divisive, wasteful and unnecessary. There are better ways of bringing private capital into social housing than giving it all away. There are also better things to do to give social housing the huge boost it needs to provide for the rapidly increasing numbers of people who can’t afford to be first time buyers than an irrelevant fight over who owns the deckchairs on our Housing Titanic.
Jim misunderstands my attitude to housing associations. Many are excellent. So are many councils. All would benefit from tough regulation but if Jim misunderstands them as wilfully as he misunderstood my article then I can see why he thinks his feather duster regulation is “tough”.
Yours faithfully
AUSTIN MITCHELL |
