Will the Tory Right-to-Buy Policy Lead to Riots in the Street?

With just two weeks of staged rallies and transparent photo-ops left until the general election , the red team and the blue team are busy setting out the pledges they're definitely not going to break if elected. Of all the policy clangers to have dropped recently, the Conservative's universally derided housing policy is particularly moronic. In a moment of life imitating The Thick of It , the Tories ingeniously plan to address social housing shortages by selling off more social housing, using the fast cash to… sell off even more social housing.

Despite the policy being announced a month ago, the timing of the last week's fanfare is cynical: panicked by opinion polls suggesting people don't hate Ed Miliband quite as much as they had banked on, Team Tory have decided it's time for the pre-election bribes. Right-to-Buy, which looks like an attempted Right-To-Buy-The-Election, promises to sell off the most valuable council owned properties . The proceeds will then be used to fund massive discounts for housing association tenants, who – provided they are fortunate enough to afford a sizeable mortgage – will be able to purchase their property. Coincidentally this will largely effect areas that happen to be Conservative marginal seats.

Cameron informs us that the reason for such largesse is because the Tories are the party of "security" and the dream of the feted "property owning democracy". But with fewer people now owning their homes since before Thatcher's original Right-to-Buy, it seems that the Tories are more the party of financial security for landlords.

Thatcher's flogging of the family silver is a major factor in our current housing crisis; simultaneously halving house building whilst selling 40 percent of council homes to private landlords, enabling them to command extortionate rents. Right-to-Buy was little more than a massive upwards wealth transfer, with huge privatisations opening up the British housing market to international capital, creating a class of parasitic landlords demanding ever increasing rents, subsidised by the state through housing benefit. With Thatcher's housing policies increasingly recognised as an unmitigated disaster, it takes a special sort of idiot to think – in the middle of a housing crisis that is driving millions into poverty – that the situation will be improved by allowing a half-arsed impersonation.

Enter Alex Morton, a self-confessed "policy wonk" – bureaucratic speak for "boring person at parties" – and author of Cameron's policy. Alex is apparently a housing expert, which is strange because his previous experience working for the Conservative Party and the Civil Service had nothing to do with housing. Until recently, he worked for Policy Exchange, described as "Cameron's favourite think-tank". Policy Exchange's website proudly boasts about how much Conservative policy they have influenced, even producing infographics of just how many terrible ideas they've launched. Exactly who funds Policy Exchange's multi-million pound budget is a secret they're not going to tell you, and they insist that their research is independent and evidence based, but given Morton's propensity to preach that property developers' profits definitely aren't causing the housing crisis, I'm willing to make an educated guess.

"Ending expensive social tenancies" – Mortons report written in 2012 – is eye-opening in revealing thinking behind Cameron's election gambit. After outlining Cameron's 47 percent (and rising) cut to housing budgets and acknowledging the severity of the housing crisis, Morton paradoxically agrees that "Housing cannot expect any more money", proceeding to design his entire policy to fit the permanent austerity agenda.

Any socially owned property above the average value for its location constitutes a "mansion" for Morton, with this encompassing nearly a quarter of available social housing, and viewed as unfairly occupied by the undeserving poor. It's not clear how a council property that has had its value artificially inflated by a housing bubble suddenly becomes more expensive to operate.

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Proposing to build a sort of perpetual motion machine which sells off social properties on the markets to build more social housing elsewhere, Morton thinks the government can simultaneously build more houses whilst continuing with ever-deeper cuts. While this might sound clever-clever, unfortunately it's complete bullshit.

Morton is candid in acknowledging that the effects of his policies would mean the end of social housing in many parts of London, with replacement homes located as far as 30 miles away from those to be sold – but no further, 31 miles would be much too far, he suggests.

Across the scale of a city this amounts to a new enclosure of city centres; hollowing them out and dispossessing the poor to its extremities. However this social cleansing is no mere side effect but a desirable perk to Morton, who insists socially mixed housing is "artificial" and "failing". Set against this call for a renewed class segregation, Morton's suggestion that no one will be forced from social homes in wealthy areas seems vapid.

But perhaps the most intensely stupid aspect is the evangelistic, blind-faith that a housing crisis induced by a speculative property bubble – itself indicative of the failure of free market mechanisms – is best solved by even greater market speculation with what little remains of social housing provision. To see how these policies work out, we can look only as far as page nine of Morton's own policy – which explicitly states that if funds from sales are used to fuel prices further, "These policies could do more harm than good".

Shortly after publishing his work for Policy Exchange, Morton spun though the revolving door between his think-tank and Westminister to become the chief architect of Cameron's housing policy. Seemingly forgetting Morton's own warnings, instead of funding new homes, the government now wants to use the money from council sales to extend Right-to-Buy to housing associations; further privatisations that will exacerbate both the property bubble and the lack of social housing. A housing policy that asset-strips the homes from some of the most vulnerable to subsidise wealth transfers for prospective Tory voters obviously doesn't sound so great. But hey, if you can't convince them, confuse them: Cameron additionally claims to be "unlocking" 400,000 homes on brownfield sites with £1 billion. These sound like impressive numbers, but working out at just £ 2,500 per unit, in housing terms this buys you as much fuck-all as you like.

Whilst history might have ended for Thatcher, her ailing tribute act would do well to revisit the Conservatives' own housing past. Arguing for the establishment of the Welfare State and its social housing programmes in 1943, Conservative MP Quentin Hogg famously implored to parliament that "We must give them reform, or they will give us revolution". Hogg was articulating the palpable fear amongst the ruling class of a battle hardened and angry proletariat who had returned from the Second World War to ruined cities. Mass rent strikes and widespread squatting movements involving hundreds of thousands of people presented a serious threat to the monopoly of the landlords, who, fearing a total loss of control, were forced into action.

Successive governments are dismantling the panacea that staved off rebellion when Britain was at its most politically turbulent seven decades ago. As the accelerating housing emergency forces more and more people into direct confrontation with the state, the pressure building in British cities is capable of blowing sky-high. With groups such as the Radical Housing Network openly discussing rent strikes and vowing to fight these fresh privatisations by "any means necessary", it is possible that a housing bomb lies beneath the housing boom. If Morton and the Conservatives are stupid enough to drive through the violence their latest policies entail, it will be they who are lighting the fuse.

Ben Beach is nearly an architect and is a member of the Radical Housing Network.

Update: A previous version of this article stated there were three weeks until the election rather than two. This has been corrected.

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