Social Cleansing, Gerrymandering – or both?

By Colin Ellar

I once overheard someone discussing Tory statecraft, and it made me reflect on the multi level strategic thought that had gone into the capping of housing benefits.

On the Daily Mail populist level, capping resonates strongly with readers as it seems perfectly reasonable that your benefits scrounger should not be able to live in a nicer, more expensive place than your average honest working type. The fact is whether the tenant is a hardworking, low or middle paid family or another unemployed individual or family, all the housing benefit goes to your good old capitalist landlord.

It is not the fault of tenants and residents that rents are high, it is the work of “the market” – that is a bunch of policies that throttled the building of new affordable houses and flogged off the existing council properties for knock down prices in order to move owner occupiers in. The dearth of buy to let mortgages on the cheap allowed a market to develop where the poor tenants were buying thousands of houses for do it yourself landlords. I wonder how this news of rent capping is being considered by our landlord friends if this policy puts all those mortgages at risk?

On the next level – voter manipulation – this policy ticks all the boxes. Seats like Westminster North or Hammersmith in London are the real target of this manipulation. Gerrymandering while illegal if done to manipulate the vote at a local government level as ably applied by Dame Shirley Porter in Westminster, is above board if done by national government through changing the benefits system. If the Conservatives can squeeze 30 or so seats from changing the boundaries in reducing the number of MPs to around 600 then they only need to alter another 20 or so by this wheeze to have an easier job making Ashcroft’s millions do the job for them next time.

Of course with the very powerful commercial marketing data bases that the major political parties use to identify their potential and identified voters, it is an afternoons work to see the effect of removing a certain sliver of the population from an area in terms of how it will affect both the ethnic mix and the voter mix in an election. For all the Bosnian style bluster from Boris I am sure he will not make too much further noise when Tory central office show him the stats and how this policy will potentially advantage him in 2012.

So if you peel away the onion and put your political thinking cap on you can see Tory statecraft for what it is. Sickening innit?