Last Friday, the Guardian reported that servicemen on leave from Iraq were spending their time camping in a queue at RAF Coltishall in the hope of buying the houses their families lived in before they were sold to the public. It’s another fine achievement of Michael Portillo’s 1996 deal to flog the entire MOD housing stock to a company run by William Hague’s best friend.
The problems were clear right from the start – rather like Right to Buy, it meant that the stock could only ever decrease, but unlike it, the tenants didn’t really get the choice of buying their house, but rather the choice of moving out or taking a chance of buying.
That Grauniad story is one of very few occasions the (cough) mainstream media have covered this in any detail. But as always, you can expect the Grauniad’s hyper-Blairite sister to do something really horrible. And they did, with this useful primer on how to take advantage yourself. Delightful.