On The House

Storms, moral panics over internet drinking games and the Winter Olympics have pushed some significant stories off of the news agenda.  Amongst these is the matter of all those mansions in London - bought back in nineties and noughties by multi-millionaires, many of them foreign - which have stood empty for years, with some now slipping into states of extreme disrepair.  The last time I saw anything on this was on a TV news programme, where some apologist for the wealthy, was piously telling us that the fact that there properties were standing empty made no difference whatsoever to the housing situation for poorer people, characterised by insufficient numbers of affordable properties and social housing.  What a cock.  Those empty properties are symbolic of what is wrong, not just with this country, but the entire global economy.  A small elite have accumulated so much of the world's wealth that they can simply buy anything, just because they can, regardless of whether they ever actually utilise these possessions or not. 

If they limited their acquisitions to just expensive cars, or luxury yachts, say, then it wouldn't be so bad.  The problem comes when they acquire resources like property, and deny the wider community its benefits.  Really, if they let those mansions out, even to other rich bastards, then it wouldn't be so bad, at least they would be utilised.  But, getting back to my rambling point, in their empty state, they are symbolic of the increasing privatisation of resources, leaving our use of them at the whim of wealthy absentee owners.  I know it is terribly unfashionable to champion the concept of public ownership, (and damn near illegal to suggest that restrictions be put on the activities of private capital), but really, do we want to live in a world where it is OK for the super-rich 1% to purchase large swathes of property and then just abandon it?  Not that I'm advocating the nationalisation of empty mansions - but local councils should surely be able to slap compulsory purchase orders on them, pay the owners a pittance, then pull the old piles down and put up social housing in their voluminous grounds. It'll never happen, I know, but it's a nice thought. 

Anyway, I'd better hurry up and post this, as the wind is battering the house, (for those who care, the roof was repaired yesterday), and the lights are flickering...