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From International Socialism, No.55, February 1973, p.26.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
No Place Like Home — Britain’s Housing Tragedy
Frank Allaun
Andre Deutsch, £1.15
Frank Allaun’s insight (or lack of it) into Britain’s ‘Housing Tragedy’ only starts in the last 20 pages of this book, as the first 90 per cent is devoted to various individuals’ housing difficulties as told by the people concerned. The descriptive personalised dramas are moving but this book can in no way be described as a serious analysis of the ‘housing problem’.
Allaun’s ‘way out of the mess’ is to promise that Labour will build more homes, extend the option mortgage scheme, repeal the Housing Finance Act and give more money for Home Improvements, etc. He explains that the failure of previous similar promises by Labour was because the Acts had holes in them that nasty lawyers could get through, and that the Tories tore them up later!
The truth is that the Labour measures were dismal failures from the start, based on an analysis that somehow sees housing separately from capitalist society, in which profitability rules supreeme. Fortunately Allaun’s views and promises seem to be losing some of their credibility lately and he was recently booed at a trade-union meeting on ‘fair rents’ in his own constituency.
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Last updated on 27.1.2008