As a disgusting taster for its mendacious manifesto, the Labour Party kicks off the chapter on housing by invoking Grenfell Tower.
The suggestion is that the fire was emblematic of a wider housing crisis: Of poor tenants living in dingy rooms and of beggars dying on the streets, all because of the evil Tories.
This naked attempt to make political capital out of a human tragedy is entirely in keeping with the vindictive and spiteful mentality on display.
Jeremy Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, have a talent for identifying genuine problems and the housing market is certainly one of those.
As a disgusting taster for its mendacious manifesto, the Labour Party kicks off the chapter on housing by invoking Grenfell Tower, writes Ruth Sunderland (Pictured: Jeremy Corbyn)
But their so-called solutions are malevolent, ludicrous and untethered from real-world economics. Worse, under the guise of caring, they reek of envy and hatred of any form of aspiration, no matter how modest.
It is true that the property market is far from perfect. Prices in many parts of the country make it very difficult for young people to get on the ladder and some housebuilding bosses have been hideously greedy.
But Labour has no real intention of helping first-time buyers to put a foot on the ladder, give their children a decent education and perhaps even leave them a small legacy.
Quite the opposite. Corbyn and McDonnell want to go to war on property ownership and indeed the middle-class way of life as we know it. Their real agenda is to dismantle the Thatcher revolution that, among other things, gave millions of Britons the chance for the first time to own their own home.
Corbyn’s Labour is promising a vast building programme of a million homes over a decade, many of them council houses.
But like all the other mirages in his socialist dreamland of milk and honey, this is fantasy. Where will these homes be built? Construction on this scale would mean carpeting the countryside and greenbelt with new estates, ruining beautiful landscapes and blighting the lives of people in our villages and hamlets.
The suggestion is that the fire was emblematic of a wider housing crisis: Of poor tenants living in dingy rooms and of beggars dying on the streets, all because of the evil Tories (Pictured: Grenfell Tower in west London)
Corbyn’s Labour is promising a vast building programme of a million homes over a decade, many of them council houses (Pictured: the Labour manifesto)
Who will do the building? Unless Labour plans on adding housebuilding firms such as Taylor Wimpey and Persimmon to its nationalisation list, it will have to be the hated private, profit-making sector.
And how is Labour to pay for this, and other budget-busting schemes?
By taxing Middle Britain into oblivion, that’s how.
In power, it would mount an unprecedented assault on middle-class families and the values they hold dear.
In its ‘grey book’ of costings, the party reveals it wants to raise £5billion by slapping VAT on private school fees, reversing cuts on inheritance tax and scrapping the marriage allowance.
There, in one telling paragraph, is a window into Labour’s toxic and delusional world: An attack on the institution of matrimony, with penalties for trying to give your children a good education or leave them a legacy.
And don’t even think about having a second home. That’s very much verboten in the joyless world of McDonnell, even though, of course, he has a second home of his own on the Norfolk Broads.
Members of the shadow cabinet listen to Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn speaking during the launch of his party’s manifesto in Birmingham on Thursday
He plans a new tax on second homes, ‘to help deal with the homelessness crisis’.
To imply, as this does, that people who have the temerity to own a second property are guilty of putting others on the streets is utter malice.
Homelessness is a social evil with complex causes – and it will not be solved by putting punitive taxes on vacation homes.
According to Labour, its plans will cost more than £82billion, which it will raise through additional taxes. But this is sheer fantasy. Labour simply cannot raise that much money by soaking ‘the rich’.
In the poisonous philosophy of Corbyn’s Labour, any aspiration for a better life, to improve one’s circumstances through one’s own enterprise, is a sin that must be stamped out. To be even mildly successful is to be marked out as a target. The only safe status is that of poverty-stricken victim.
Labour’s manifesto is 105 pages of weapons-grade resentment masquerading as a plan for a fairer economy. It is an insult to the intelligence of the British people, who may not all have PhDs in economics, but know the spiteful politics of envy when they see it.