Rearden Metal
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
They'll steal your house next
Free speech has already been eroded in the UK. You can expect a stiff talking to by the local police if you say anything they regard as unacceptable. For example, the Bishop of Chester, the Right Reverend Dr Peter Foster, was intimidated in this way for suggesting that homosexuals could "reorient themselves".
The same sort of people who are against free speech are attacking property rights now. John Prescott, our articulate, well-groomed and mild-mannered 'Deputy Prime Minister', has suggested that if a house is allowed to remain empty for six months, the local authority will be able to put in a tenant of their choosing. There was a rather feeble debate about this on BBC Radio 4 this morning. Feeble because the person chosen to oppose this tyrannical idea, a spokesman from some sort of association of landlords, I forget the details, failed to mention property rights and implied that the idea was all right in principle, but six months was rather a short time limit.
We are assured that 'ownership will remain with the landlord'. So that's all right then. But as everybody knows who has ever bought a house or a piece of land in Britain, there is no such thing as freehold ownership of real estate. Planning regulations have long prevented that. If you cannot do what you want with something (subject to the obvious limitation of not preventing others doing what they want with what is theirs) you don't really own it in any meaningful sense.
Apart from the numbing, depressing, spirit-deadening stupidity of the idea, it will of course make the housing problem worse. If a landlord can lose the right to manage their property, who'd be a landlord? How carefully will a local council choose the new tenants, and how well will they treat the house?
The housing shortage, like all other shortages, can be solved easily. In fact, the shortage is nothing like as bad as it was, because some steps were taken in the right direction during the Thatcher Terror, like the introduction of Assured Shorthold Tenancies, making it easier for landlords to end leases and thus get rid of undesirable tenants. Further steps would include the abolition of planning regulations. For those who like their radicalism watered down, the abolition of stamp duty on house sales and inheritance tax would be smaller steps in the right direction.
