Cameron’s Home Truths

Basically if you are under 25, you can’t have one. (BBC News Website 24 June 192012)

This presents an interesting bind:

• Under 25 and without a job, but you can stay at home sharing a bedroom with your teenage siblings
• Move away for a job (“on yer bike”), but you have to live on the streets (unless you move to a cheap area – where there are no jobs)

So Posh-boy, what’s it to be:

• Condemn young benefits scroungers who should be denied support and stay at home in a state of “enforced idleness”
• Condemn the homeless who “pollute the streets” and should be swept away with water cannon?

Perhaps we need a “non-condemn” solution?

• Jobs (Oh I forgot that is a private sector responsibility, and the private sector is waiting for the banks, the banks are waiting for consumer confidence, consumers are waiting for jobs)
• Decent basic affordable available rental accommodation.  (I remember living in a YMCA hostel after leaving school and working away from where I was dragged up).  I suspect, however, that funding for such schemes is being cut.

I don’t think Posh-boy understands that not all young people are feckless benefit scroungers.  A few are (inevitably – a few Tory donors are rogues – inevitably), but he should not tar the majority with the same toff-pleasing brush.

He also needs to remember that the “great unwashed” will not inherit wealth or property, but will have to save for a mortgage deposit if they are ever to own property.  And in our “property-owning democracy”, owning property has been one of the best ways to ensure your financial future.  For true social mobility (a concept that I suspect fills posh-boys with a sense of horror), you have to be able to access means of becoming wealthy and self-supporting.

Alternatively, he and Gideon may want to think how they can disassemble (very carefully) our reliance on a single commodity (housing) for investment.  That would be radical.

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