Is a home for life right?

Published: 20 August, 2010

• KEN Livingstone’s article (Beware Tories’ ghettos for the rich, August 13) is another horrendous example of the delusional, dogmatic socialism which got us into this economic mess. 

The notion that anyone should expect to have a home guaranteed for life is wholly fantastical – having to keep a job to sustain a reasonable mortgage or pay rent is part of being a responsible adult.  

That anyone should expect the right to a permanent home in the heart of one of the world’s most expensive cities, where many working adults are struggling to maintain tiny, privately rented rooms or flats, is nothing short of insulting. Clearly, Mr Livingstone wants a city where only the super-rich (such as himself) and the state-supported poor can possibly hope to live. 

One of the reasons there is a dearth of genuinely affordable properties available privately is that so much land is taken up in an artificially over-populated Islington subsidised by the state.  

This leaves people who choose not to live off the massive public gravy train without any prospect of home ownership. 

Creating entire communities of chronically dependant people through more government subsidised housing projects will continue to create damaging distortions in the local economy, requiring further subsidisation of schools for impoverished children and costly transportation expansion, as well as strains on other vital services like the NHS. 

All this must be paid for by the growing minority of hard-working people in the borough. If Islington is too expensive to live in without lifelong government handouts, please leave and take your five children with you. 

There are plenty of minimum-wage jobs elsewhere in the country where the cost of living is genuinely cheaper. You do not need to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world on my back. 

Bravo to Cameron for ending the secured tenancy debacle.

DAVID COLLINS
N5