In the 19th century - and up to Rachman - capitalism proved an evil landlord the slums of Salford shaped Frederick Engels' idea of the proletarian condition. Some of that has to do with historical memory. Renting is still almost a shameful condition, a sign at best of transition, even social failure. Here, too, is a prime minister preaching the virtues of movement and modernity, yet a third of the population is immured in subsidised rental accommodation while, in the private sector, geographical disparities in house prices make a mockery of the 'flexibility' extolled in the summiteers' papers. We have just registered the lowest level of private house-building since the first world war. Here's a chancellor trying to educate us in the virtues of production as opposed to the old Labour fixation with distribution, but what quickens the pulse is essentially the divvying up of an almost fixed stock of private houses. That, however, invites questions about the sacred sovereignty of each individual little box owner which successive governments, Labour especially, have not wanted to ask. On the fringes of Birmingham and Manchester entire districts of privately owned housing are already past the point of patching they need to be knocked down. Step away from the yuppie streets full of skips and, even inside London, you find districts falling apart. A country that prides itself on high rates of uptake for new technology, mobile phones and PCs rests content with crumbling and ancient brick shells.

Inside, despite Changing Rooms, more often than not it's south-east Asia by way of Ikea's Stockholm depot. Often they don't care - why bother about physical condition when prices just keep rising. For this product, purchasers get no guarantee and receive little help in finding out what they are actually buying. What a peculiar 'market' this is, with estate agents who, for the most part, have never been within sniffing distance of chartered surveyordom we joke about their rhetorical flights - the other word for it is lying. If prices rise between 7% to 10% in the next year, and the interest rate is 5% or less, someone borrowing 90% of the price of a house and spending, say, 6% in total transaction costs including stamp duty (which Gordon Brown did tentatively increase) ends up with a nice little earner. Buy now while stocks last, land economist Alan Evans has been saying about London and the south-east for years. Another is the way tax advantages have been loaded for the past 40 years on this one form of tenure.īuying a house has become a one- way bet. Why? One reason is a political refusal to tackle land ownership and supply. (The highest concentration of home ownership is in northern Ireland, with hardly a building worth a second glance.) Appearance is secondary to speculative potential. So we care little how it looks - let me take you by the hand and lead you down mean owner-occupied streets in towns and cities across the UK.

Dirty land i get knocked down