Channel 4 video: Architect and campaigner George Clarke invites you to join the campaign to fill Britain's empty homes.
Newer longer video at: http://youtu.be/GnGo_C7sDY0
The Great British Property Scandal | George Clarke | Channel 4
While I can understand how, in the face of lots of seeming misery, it's easy for the host to throw stones and pine for the days of pre-Thatcher nationalized housing, that's hardly the answer now, anymore than simply allowing squatters in the U.S. to "occupy" expensive homes in Cambridge, Chevy Chase or Santa Monica that have been foreclosed, but which still have value, is the answer here for inadequate housing for some.
Thatcher's efforts, while frequently knocked and reviled now among the professional Left, would NOT have been possible without her and the Conservative Party having had something positive and tangible to offer by way of a public policy that the majority of the British people believed was long overdue
And what was that you ask?
How normal.
But THAT is what the Labour Party was vehemently opposed to.
Think about the ethical contortions you have to bend yourself into in order to justify that sort of anti-social policy.
Telegraph TV video: Prime Minister David Cameron -pictured here alongside coalition partner Nick Clegg of the Lib Dems- discusses the government's £400m investment in housing, 95% mortgages, and principles of home ownership. November 21, 2011.
My own experience in living in different parts of the U.S. -with often very different norms and customs- is that the one constant in this country regardless of where you are in the social order is that most people who are given something for nothing -or almost nothing- rarely fully appreciate it or properly maintain what they are given as long or as well as people who actually earned it.
And the same with their kids.
The Telegraph
The Great British Property Scandal, episode one, Channel 4, review
Andrew Marszal reviews the opening episode of The Great British Property Scandal, part of Channel 4's week-long focus on the nation's housing shortage.
By Andrew Marszal
10:00PM GMT 05 Dec 2011
Margaret Thatcher’s time in office left many enduring legacies – crippled unions, privatised industry, even a pop at a third Oscar for Meryl Streep. But few can be as divisive as her “right-to-buy” policy of selling off government-owned council houses, which is now being revamped for the twenty-first century by David Cameron.
Read the rest of the review at:
George Clarke's official website, full of more info about this effort, is at:
This website should be working soon: www.channel4.com/propertyscandal
I've already alerted my stealthy covert affairs team members in Chelsea and Notting Hill to record the show and try to get it to me in fairly short order, though I strongly suspect that some vids of it may start appearing on YouTube within the week before they are pulled off for copyright violations.
As always, if members of the team are captured, the secretary will disavow all knowledge of their actions.
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