Socialism, Creativity, and the Housing Crisis

by Ben Irvine (December 2018)

Reflections on the Thames, Westminster, John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1879

A few months ago I purchased a house—with a great sense of relief. Britain is in the grip of an unrelenting housing crisis, and I’ve spent the last decade caught up in it. Before I become complacent, I want to reflect on what it has been like being a young person in a developed country where one of life’s necessities has become a scarce resource.

Admittedly, in some ways I’m not a standard example of a young person. Though I attended a state school in a working-class area of North East London, I ended up completing a PhD in Philosophy at Cambridge University, and now I’m an internationally published writer. (And—ahem—I’m not very young anymore). If I had wanted to sail clear of the housing crisis by cashing in on my education and climbing through the ranks of a professional career, I suppose I could have done. Instead, I chose to prioritise my writing career. For almost ten years, I have supported myself through various low-paid evening jobs, and I continue to do so. In that sense, you could argue I’ve been something of a housing crisis tourist: I have made life hard for myself voluntarily. But actually I think stories like mine are an overlooked aspect of the crisis. Almost all aspiring artists—writers, painters, illustrators, musicians, magicians, actors, dancers, comedians, or whatever—will have to ‘slum it’ at some point in their careers, especially early on. The same goes for aspiring entrepreneurs, or any other creative type of person. For creative people, keeping costs down is part of the process of success. Unfortunately, with housing costs skyrocketing, keeping costs down isn’t as easy as it used to be. The housing crisis has made it harder for young people to pursue creative careers.

If this all sounds like middle-class moaning, let me explain that there is another aspect to my experience of being a writer during the housing crisis. Being chronically poor has given me an insight into many topics that I studiously avoided during my education. While I was studying philosophy, I never dreamed of what life is like for people outside of the so-called ‘elites.’ But now I know what it’s like to survive on a low wage, and to live in cheap lodgings (as, indeed, Orwell himself knew). As a result, my sympathies have changed beyond recognition—mostly, but not always, in favour of the proverbial ‘man in the street.’ I’ve become wary of intellectuals. The trouble with intellectuals is that, in their arrogance, one of the countless things they are ignorant of is how much damage their ideas can do. Bad ideas lead to bad social norms and bad governance. The housing crisis, I now believe, derives predominantly from bad ideas—ideas that urgently need to be challenged with a heavy dose of reality. Sometimes it takes a tourist like me to state the obvious.

Or, indeed, a refugee—of sorts. The house I bought is located in a former mining village in the North East of England, an economically deprived region that has remained on the periphery of the housing bubble that has engulfed the rest of the UK. My house cost me a twentieth of what a similar dwelling would have cost in London, where I grew up (and where the average house price recently exceeded £500,000). I’m very fond of the North East—I did my undergraduate and Master’s degrees at Durham University—so my move back here hasn’t been too much of a wrench. But the fact is, I’m a housing crisis refugee. I’ve left my family down south, because living anywhere near London isn’t economically viable for me. In this, I’m far from alone. Most of my school friends have moved away from London, because even people with decent jobs are struggling in the capital. Native Londoners are abandoning their city in droves. I haven’t really escaped the housing crisis. I’m running away from it every day.

Meanwhile, many of the lucky Britons who aren’t desperately trying to escape the housing crisis are actively avoiding it in another sense: they are avoiding thinking about it. Above all, they are avoiding thinking about the root cause of the crisis. In general, rising prices are caused by a lack of supply and an excess of demand. Rising house prices are no different. Not enough homes are being built, and there are too many people who need homes. Since the early 1970s, the rate of housebuilding in Britain has declined steadily (albeit with a small uptick in the last few years), while immigration has risen, especially in recent decades. In 1998, the annual net migration figure soared above 100,000 then stayed above 150,000 for two decades, exceeding 200,000 for eight years in a row, and peaking at a colossal 336,000 in 2015. Each year, the equivalent of a new city would have needed to have been built in order to accommodate all these newcomers.

The combination of low supply and high demand in the UK’s housing market derives from a single root cause: the ideology of socialism. In 1947, the post-war Labour government implemented the Town and Country Planning Act which decreed that landowners who wanted to build on their own land needed permission from central government. The idea was that the government would oversee a more ‘rational’ housing sector. A slew of national building regulations soon followed, as did green belt regulations that throttled the supply of housing in precisely the areas where it was needed most: on the outskirts of Britain’s growing cities. No subsequent UK government, of the left or the so-called ‘right’, has repealed the fundamentally socialist Town and Country Planning Act, which has caused desperate shortages, as socialism always does.

In turn, socialists ushered in the modern era of mass immigration. When New Labour came to power in 1997, they loosened the rules on immigration. Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for the party, has recalled that Tony Blair’s government wanted to attract more immigrants to the UK so as ‘to rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.’ The second part of Neather’s explanation hints at another probable motive for New Labour’s legislative support for mass immigration: they wanted to enlarge the electoral constituency for the left, immigrants generally being poorer than non-immigrants. Moreover, New Labour were probably confident that their supporters would help bring about this enlargement, by relentlessly telling immigrants that the only people who care about them are socialists, everyone else in British society supposedly being xenophobic and bigoted. Tellingly, Barbara Roche, who was Minister for Asylum and Immigration during Blair’s first term, declared that the immigration constraints of the day were ‘racist’.

Socialism, via its contribution to the housing crisis, is crushing creativity, the very same creativity that we will need if we are to escape from socialism. I fear we are in a spiral.

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Scapegoated Capitalism and Space to Create: A Writer’s View on the Housing Crisis. Find out more at www.benirvine.co.uk.

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