more money—so they live somewhere else and rent out their flats for a large profit. The Tory government is clamping down on this here and in Westminster especially. Wandsworth Council wants to make it that all new council tenants have six months tenure, not tenure for life. And if you become richer you have to move out and if you become unemployed you can’t be allocated a house. I cannot say I disagree that social housing should be for those in need and ought to be under periodic re-evaluation for those whose economic and personal circumstances have changed. There seems to be a misdirected critique from both the Left and Right when it comes to discussing social housing--the Left rebukes criticism of the abuses that do occur and so there is this perpetual wall of resistanc on the Left to any sort of reevaluation of social housing while the Right pretends that social housing is somehow always a form of entitlement. There must be a way for us to discuss the problems of social housing for which the Battersea mural’s vision remains apotheosis. For
instance, I know of many people in the city who received their council flats when they were students and today are professionals still living in flats they no longer economically need; yet there are many Londoners who struggle to find affordable housing due to occupying low-wage jobs. It is wrong that people take advantage of the system. There are also a lot of people who pretend to be single when they have a partner with whom they live. If they don’t have a partner they can get a flat more easily, so some pretend that they don’t have a partner so they can get a two bedroom flat for the children. So there is a privileging of single parents over married parents and both these groups over single people? Yes. That is why people were kind of keen to realise the “right to buy” because they were unfairly treated if they earned just over the limit to pay the full rent, the full tax as it was then, and it would more—it would be twice as much than if you got a mortgage from