CS Lewis, the author and Christian theologian, was, perhaps not surprisingly, a great advocate of reading old books. This, he argued, forcibly reminded you that every age had its characteristic assumptions and errors. Past controversies showed that “both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny”, and were “all the time secretly united … by a great mass of common assumptions”.
Lewis’s point was that we should try to remember the same thing would be true of the present day, too: there would be assumptions so widespread, so taken for granted, that they would go unquestioned and unchallenged.
Well, I think that I have found one such belief for our modern age. It is the widespread but little-discussed assumption that your property is not really yours, owned absolutely for you to do with as you wish, but rather that it is held, as it were, in trust from the state, and is only fully free to use in line with the state’s purposes.
I urge you, try – for it is difficult – to think yourself back to a world in which what you had was genuinely yours, where the government did not assume the right to tell you what you could do with it, where you could simply say “No: I use my own goods in my own way”, where you were the master and the government the servant.
Once upon a time, it really was like that, at least in Britain. It only faded away with the massive expansion of the public sector after 1945.
Think yourself back to that world, and then contemplate the measures the current Government is proposing to “solve” (for they will not solve) our housing crisis.
We already have the dreadful, shocking, wholly unconservative, Renters Reform Bill, which will – if you are once so foolish as to allow someone to rent your house from you – mean that they could have the right to live there forever. You won’t be able to get them out except on conditions specified by government.
Or, last week, we learnt that local councils are buying up empty homes to get migrants out of hotels. The nominally Conservative-run North Northamptonshire council backed off from a plan to force-purchase a house in Rushden when it turned out that the owners were still living in it. But it isn’t scrapping the policy and the council’s letter actually says that it sees “empty privately owned properties” as “a wasted resource at a time of high housing need”.
It may indeed surprise you that councils have long had the right to buy your house, or make you let it out, as long as there is proven housing need within the area (a criterion which would fit virtually any part of Britain nowadays). You might have a good reason for wanting to keep your house empty – it is, after all, your house that you have paid for – but never before, outside wartime, have you had to persuade the state of that.
There is no end to it. Only this week the Government announced that it would require you to get planning permission if you want to rent your house to holidaymakers via Airbnb. Perhaps they don’t really want people to go on holiday in this country after all.
These measures are crazy as public policy. They are based on an assumption, which of course cannot be articulated, that we will never build enough houses for everyone here, and that we must therefore work the existing housing stock even harder.
But we already have incredibly low vacancy rates by European standards (2.7 per cent of the stock is vacant, whereas in France and Germany it’s about 8 per cent) and relatively low levels of second home ownership (9 per cent of households have a second home, though only a third keep it for their own use, while in Germany it’s 15 per cent and in France 18 per cent).
The truth is that, even if we stopped inward migration entirely, we would still have to build nearly four million houses for the people already here just to get us to the European average of housing per person. There really is no way round this – and we must change our Attlee-era socialist planning laws to do it. The Government’s tinkering is a pure displacement activity that actually makes the problem worse by allowing everyone to avoid confronting reality.
But the bigger problem is the mentality these policies reveal. We are now just one step away – and maybe we will get there if Labour wins the election – from the allocation of housing to various recipients felt to be more or less deserving – “local” people, asylum seekers, whatever – and from stigmatisation of people who want to use their property as they wish.
If you wish to keep your house empty, or just let it to whom you please, prepare to be treated like a modern-day kulak, a “hoarder” of housing against the public good.
This collectivist mentality is everywhere once you spot it. It even applies to your property in your own body. Are you happy enough with being a bit overweight and the risks that come with that? You need to think about the burden on the NHS and slim down a bit. If you are ill and elderly, are we too far off from a world in which you are encouraged to let the state kill you? In the wider collective interest, obviously.
We are a long way down the road to a society where governments – of all colours – have effectively nationalised private decision-making. Yes, you have certain rights, but only if they are consistent with the wider collective aims set by the state. If they aren’t – well, then you can’t rely on them.
There’s a massive gulf between today and the pre-1945 world. Then, a free people had inherent rights, including the right to property, and created a government to help enforce them. Now, rights are created by government order, from the European Convention on Human Rights down, and can be changed by fiat.
The two worlds may not look that different, but there is a huge mental gap between them, a revolution in the way we see our country and our place within it. In the old world, it’s our country and we shape it; in the brave new one, it’s theirs, and we do what we can on sufferance.
We have all got used to it. It doesn’t even seem odd any more. And no political party is remotely interested in turning back the clock.