Labour disown the dispossessed

Grant Shapps, rising energetic housing minister but friend-of-the-earther, proposes that people earning over £100,000 a year in council accommodation should have to move out, to make it available for the poor.

We know high earning Bob Crow on £254,000 a year pays £150 a week for his 3-bed home in Woodford Green.

And Socialist dinosaur Frank Dobson, an ex-Cabinet minister earning £66,000 a year, whose wife is a university lexturer and who lives in one of the most expensive council homes in Britain, claims he could not afford to rent a flat privately.

Ed West thinks this is privileged lefties looking after their own.

A friend who worked in social services in a wealthier London borough once remarked that many of her impeccably Left-wing colleagues, many of them on upper-five figure salaries, lived in council properties. They considered it both a right and duty, because by using the council housing sector they were ensuring a two-tier housing system did not grow.

Of course the problem with that idea, as I once explained to a socialist, is that there will always be a two-tier system in housing. Someone has to live in Bloomsbury and someone has to live in Stoke – who gets the former address? I guess the answer is obvious: the socialists who run the system!

But it's wider than that.

Kieran Thorpe, Labour group leader on Welwyn Hatfield Council, has stood up for the rights of those on six figure salaries to remain in council homes. They don't even have to be left-wing!

Thousands of poor families are desperate for council accommodation. Time was when Labour stood up for the disadvantaged and dispossessed. No longer. If you're a fat cat whose housing costs are subsidised by taxpayers earning less than you, good luck to you. If you're a fat cat blocking the poor from getting decent cheap housing, good luck to you.

The Conservatives want to give more poor families a hand up. It's Labour who support the incumbent fat cats and disown the dispossessed.