Housing: Essentials of life are costing more than ever

[Tony Gosling]

Housing: Essentials of life are costing more than ever

http://rt.com/op-edge/uk-poor-treated-animals-398/ (extract)

As Britain hits the top of the league this month, proudly beating 
Germany by importing more Ferrari sports cars than any other country, 
millions of unemployed have already lost in the clamor for low paid 
jobs. Many disabled and infirm too will never earn a living and the 
British government is forgetting at its peril that these people are 
human beings who deserve the minimum: food, warmth and shelter.

As these basic needs are withdrawn the obsession with 'equality' in 
gender, race and sexuality consistently ignores the chasm that has 
opened up of income inequality. Having taken the food from over half 
a million mouths and made it impossible for people to heat their 
homes the Cameron government now threatens them with homelessness too 
and it's here that his cruelty hits his economic ineptitude head on.

Given that Britain has been forced by the EU to open its doors to 
foreign labor we are seeing around 200,000 economic migrants a year, 
Britain's biggest wave of immigration ever. Anyone who questions the 
wisdom of this is simply branded 'racist'. Along with the rich buying 
up houses as an investment, and a virtual halt in construction of 
affordable housing this is elevating the cost of British 
accommodation to dizzying heights.

Though it looks good to some on paper, Britain's housing bubble 
results from a housing oligopoly controlled by just a handful of 
massive firms of whom Barratt, Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, Berkeley, 
Bellway, Redrow, Galliford Try, Bovis, Crest Nicholson are the 
biggest. With an oligopoly on place you can be sure buying a house 
bears no relation whatsoever to the cost of building one.

The average three bedroom council house has two main ingredients in 
cost: materials, and labor. A rough estimate of the bricks, wood, 
tiles, plasterboard, windows, doors and other fittings that go into a 
house is 7,500 pounds and taking man hours of labor at 10 pounds an 
hour brings that up to a build cost of 15,000 pounds. Spread over the 
lifetime of a house of 200 years, this works out at around 2 pounds a week.

The difference between this and the average actual weekly rent or 
mortgage repayment for a two bedroom house in Southern England is 400 
pounds, a profit margin of 20,000 percent. The house-building 
oligopoly and lazy 'rentier' classes are extorting almost the entire 
rent every week from the poor. From these figures it seems the entire 
UK economy is now based on nothing but the threat of eviction. So 
perhaps this is why Cameron has criminalized the squatting of 
residential properties in Britain, which has been a legal guarantee 
since the dawn of time.

Just this week we have seen what happens to people who, faced with 
trying to pay for housing which has been inflated 20,000 percent 
above the cost, try to buy land and do it themselves. Matthew Lepley 
and Jules Smith bought twenty acres of land in Beaworthy, Devon and 
have built a simple but beautiful eco-home on it, but now 
<http://rt.com/op-edge/uk-poor-treated-animals-398/http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2570061/Couple-spent-five-years-building-Britains-greenest-home-HAND-tear-refusing-planning-permission-against-principles.html>face 
an order from the local Torridge District Council to tear it all down.

Perhaps the government is worried that if the word gets about it 
would deflate their precious housing bubble? Thankfully there are 
many more who have built in secret and do not intend to reveal to the 
authorities where they are living.

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