The Salisbury Review ran a piece by Dalrymple on social housing back in their Winter issue. He argues that welfare benefits like housing are bad for the giver and the recipient alike, and he points out a rather perverse phenomenon:
…the paradox must have struck many people that Britain is a country with a high level of long-term unemployment (the majority of those in receipt of sickness benefits are in fact unemployed) which nevertheless imports large numbers of foreign immigrants to perform unskilled labor. It is one thing to import people because your economy is so flourishing that it cannot find the workers it needs, but quite another to do so while maintaining equally large numbers of people in state-subsidised idleness.
Read it here (subscription required)
Good grief, does the old fool ever shut up?
I guess that NHS pension of his doesn’t stretch very far.
We have fewer social housing tenants than ever before mainly thanks to the introduction of the right to buy scheme by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979. Do keep up, Doctor.
Totally agreed. Few have the brain cells to figure out or recognise an alternative
We have a very similar problem with reserve housing in Canada, in which repairs and maintenance are very difficult because of the bureaucracy of the ministry of Indian Affairs. The aboriginals that stay on reserves in isolated and remote areas have no hope of employment locally and no sense to leave because they would need to pay their own way off reserve.