The UK government is relaxing regulations to enable builders to develop brown land sites. The rationale for this is that the country is desperately short of housing stock and that at the same time vast tracts of urban land lies in waste. To marry the two makes simple sense as it seems to solve the problems of urban decay and housing shortages in one leap, whilst simultaneously boosting the economy and creating work. The solution is not only simple, it is fraudulent.
There is no shortage of housing in the UK. What there is, is a dearth of available housing. There are a vast number of empty properties which have been allowed to fall into disrepair. There are also a number of second properties used as holiday homes.
The phenomenon of Holiday Homes is so extreme in parts of the UK that there are many areas where local people cannot get accommodation in spite of vast amounts of housing stock laying idle for most of the year. A case in point in the seaside town of Abermaw which has a permanent population of less than 3,000 people, rising to over 120,000 when the tourists swarm across the border from England in summertime. English parasites are making the lives of ordinary people in neighbouring Cymru a misery. Homelessness goes hand-in-hand with empty housing. The Capitalist system is directly responsible for the greed and selfishness of second home owners impacting upon the quality of life of those who cannot secure even a first home.
Holiday homes are not the sole problem. Buy to Let mortgages allow people with no conscience to get hold of property, rent it out at a rate which far exceeds the money they expend in mortgage repayments, and make an obscene profit while keeping tenants in a position of insecurity, being able to evict their occupants with very little notice. Buy to Let pushes rents up, creating poverty traps. The Tenants effectively buy the property for their Landlords. The Tenants work to earn money which then goes on to enrich others who do nothing to earn that money. This is simple Theft.
Earning by the labour of others is immoral and unacceptable. Landlordism is a form of exploitation which causes misery of many types: the abuse of people by extorting money to line the pockets of bankers and the unscrupulous bourgeois parasites; denying security of accommodation by treating housing as a business rather than a right; mental and physical ill-health resulting from the stress of being at the mercy of landords; rape of the land by forcing the building of new housing to make up for that which is withheld for profit and tourism; the inhumanity of homelessness; forcing people into inadequate housing due to pricing decent housing beyond the reach of the Working Class.
SWPE would solve the housing crisis by socialising all property and reallocating it to the people in equal measure, with everyone given enough space to live in comfort, to have space to be self sufficient in basic food requirements and to have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their own labour in workshops attached to every home, for personal use or for trading with others with no exploitation of anyone, as equals.
The owners of Second Homes, the owners of Royal Palaces, the bourgeois filth who have become rich by exploiting the ordinary people, the vile usurious Buy to Let criminals who use the sweat of other people to build their rachman-like property empires - all these will be held accountable for their theft of the wealth of the people. Everyone else will rejoice in the liberation from poverty, housing insecurity and bedsit prison. Redistribution of Property is the key to lasting freedom. Prohibition of landlordism with the anti-human use of property as an economic commodity, is the only way to prevent the re-emergence of the Capitalist disease.
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