What is fair about people in social housing being prevented from having family and friends to stay over?
What is fair about someone who has lived in what is their home for years, finding that they have no choice but to be moved out because they have one cubby hole too many?
What is fair about someone who has lived with and looked after an ageing parent at home, having to leave that home following bereavement?
English MP, Frank Field has a creative approach to the move. He is urging local authorities to knock down walls and make one space bigger, while keeping to the the rules. His anger is such that he is also advocating direct action for the first time in his political life.
Nothing about this change of regulation is fair. All it can do is to consolidate an underclass. That is primitive and dangerous politics.
It will not save public money. It is already requiring more to be spent.
Local authority housing associations are already having to go to the market to purchase stocks of one bedroomed accommodation. Glasgow is spending £16 million to do so.
All this will do is massively benefit profiteering private landlords who will find their meanest accommodation the subject of competitive purchasing by desperate housing associations.
This is looking increasingly like a move to one room bedsit hostels as social housing. They used to be called workhouses and they bred disease.
This is all of a piece with the almost comically stereotypical conduct of a Conservative-led administration at Westminster.
Some patently disabled people are having their disability allowance removed. From today, others will be docked welfare benefits or will have to move home because they have an extra cupboard-sized room.
And we have all seen absolutely no action taken against the banks and bankers who really skewered the national economy.
The welfare cuts starting today are indiscriminate and deeply prejudicial.
There is an urgent need to cut the welfare budget and to get people in to work – but this is a matter for judicious consideration and the preparation of a phased transition to a different culture.
It cannot be brought about by the gear crash metholodology the current government is enforcing.
