Housing is a controversial issue because it touches on people's basic instincts for security.
Baggini suggests that the white working classes in Barking and Dagenham can legitimately blame their housing poverty on the arrivals of new economic migrants. They are taken away scarce housing and forcing sons and daughters of East Enders to flee to the Essex suburbs. The Council lives in fear of being labelled 'racist' if it considers entitlement to be just and deserving case to prioritise over the needs of more recent housing applications.
There is simply no evidence presented to show this. There are plenty of stories flying around East London, whipped up by the BNP but no definitive statistics or data to prove the case. The business case for the priority principle has not been made.
The shortage in housing has opened up an important debate on how the welfare state wakes up to globalisation. A sensible argument can be made that when a new population arrives in one place (via immigration or internal migration) more attention should be paid to existing residents and what the implications are for them.
Space is a real problem in East London and it's competition for space in this area that puts immense pressure on housing rules. The average square feet in Tower Hamlets is gold dust because of its proximity to the City of London. The locality's proximity to the City of London at a time of financial deregulation, and private housing and mushrooming of Right to Buy schemes, clashed with the arrival of new Bangladeshi families with housing and education needs to one borough, and the rapid gentrification taking place at the same time, made the competition for space in this part of London a radical cocktail for popular anger and resentment. The pace of urban change left the local white working classes disenfranchised and it was easier to blame the Bangladeshis than articulate their opposition to the wholesale transformation of their landscape by commerce and capitalism.
The Baggini-Hodge hypothesis blurs the issues for me in so far as they correlate competition for housing with trends in migration. The priority principle with its emphasis on entitlement due to length of residence compared with the needs of new economic immigrants necessarily adds a racial dimension to a housing crisis, which is essentially about housing shortages. It is not about new immigrants jumping the queue.
Applying the priority principle will change the fundamental character of the British state. Do we roll back peoples citizenship once granted? It is difficult to see what else a fair and transparent system could do—a welfare state based on need is progressive, to have it any other way would be less progressive, less British, and less liberal and would've privileged longer standing white communities, irrespective of need.
There is a fundamental question that haunts all well-meaning liberal countries with finite public resources. Does length of residence entitle you to a more durable stake in British society? Yes, it does, to a point but any well-meaning liberal country must also include some measures to support vulnerable groups and offer social protection to bring all its citizens to a level playing field.
But another problem arises immediately in that most the children of immigrants these days were born in the UK and their ties to the British Isles might go back as far as any white Briton. How far does one's roots need to go before priority kicks in? What happens when the competing demands of two long-standing communities conflict?
The priority principle is an interesting concept with roots going back to the postwar compact. The notion of entitlement that haunts sections of British society remains problematic in today. The postwar compact existed tenuously and mythically until the end of the cold war. The mythical compact with the working classes, which entitled them to universal basic services like the NHS was based on admitting poorer citizens into full British society as stakeholders. It is strange to see the compact invoked so often by a generation that is barely able to recall what the second world war stood for—particularly as no one in my generation believes in it any more.
Are we whining because the welfare system works? The priority principle is a smoke screen. It's proponents aren't brave enough to ask the question that its fans really beg to get answers to—do we want to change the rules of the game so that we do not have a fair system of housing? Is this what our sense of welfare has been reduced to? There is the ultimate danger, though, in a country with a history of racism for the priority principle, to end up with racially differential outcomes. Immigrants cannot jump the queue in the current system.
Politics is about the competitive allocation of resources. If some of our politicians want to destroy the foundations of the British welfare state because they no longer believe in it and have other important priorities than investing in essential basic services for all, let's not use the immigrant card as a smokescreen. Its critics will have done better to investigate how the welfare state wakes when globalisation bites.
