Manchester Houses Aren’t Homes

Andy Burnham’s Dodgy Deals With Property Developers Are About Far More Than Simple Corruption

It is now over a decade since the Greater Manchester Mayors position was created as part of a stitch up deal between the Labour Party and the Tory-Liberal coalition. Portrayed by the propaganda of the time as being part of the “Northern Powerhouse” the Mayoralty was actually a profoundly anti-democratic move by the usual collection of local and central government sleaze bags that drained ever more power away from elected councillors and concentrated it into the hands of one official (the Mayor) and a series of entirely bureaucratic bodies that answered only to him. This is part of the long term war on local government that has been waged with equal enthusiasm by all the major bourgeois parties. The aim has been to remove any possible barrier to the needs of capital. That is why the Tories under Thatcher did away with the Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Greater London councils and it is why local government has been stripped out of spending powers ever since then. The recent story in the Daily Telegraph regarding Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham’s using public money to provide £800 million of loans to a property developer is illustrative of all these problems. Burnham was able to provide these loans to the company concerned with zero scrutiny and with no examination of his actions by local councillors across the Greater Manchester area. What was Burnham’s justification for this? The only argument that his office was able to present to the Telegraph when asked about this was that the property developer concerned (Renaker) was helping to “regenerate” areas of Greater Manchester. This is despite the fact that the housing built by the company didn’t even qualify as “affordable” under the very loose definition used by central government and that some of the towers that the company built were in fact sold off to Asian investors straight away. What this shows is that not only is the Greater Manchester Mayor operating without any scrutiny but also that his office is being used to subsidise the profits of a property developer which is not building even affordable private housing at a time when the homelessness problem in the region is getting worse every year, pay is stagnating and housing costs are escalating. Why then is the “progressive” Mayor securing loans out of public funds for a property developer? The answer lies partially in the way that the agreement for the creator of the Mayors post was written a decade ago. In the document agreed by the government of David Cameron and the regional councils the Mayors office was given a housing budget but this was money which could only be spent on private developments, not social housing. What this reveals is very interesting because it tells us a lot about how the institutions of the British state (local and national) work. Part of the job of the British capitalist state is to funnel money and underwrite the investment of private companies in many sectors of the economy, Far from being the bold “risk takers” that their propaganda would have us believe most British capitalists are very risk averse and hesitant to invest inside Britain fearing that the profits they can make would be far too small. In order to try and get around this the government frequently underwrites the costs of private companies, especially in the field of property development. What we get, not just in Manchester but nationwide, is a system where social housing is being destroyed and private developments getting built with the plan to force people into either taking out a massive mortgage (which they will never pay off) or going into the ruinously expensive private rental sector. The state underpins this in various ways so the government at every level is guaranteeing that the costs of housing escalate ever more and the house price bubble keeps on inflating. Andy Burnham is just one example of this in his shady dealings with Renaker but he is merely reflecting the practice of the entire political class which exists to serve the needs of capital. What this shows us is that the entirety of the British state only serves the needs of capital, not workers and that British capitalism is an utterly parasitic entity dependent upon endless funds being provided by the state. It has no justification for its existence. The days when capitalism could claim to be an innovative system have long since vanished and now it must be destroyed.