The Royal Mail property privatisation scam is really paying off (at the public expense)

After I pointed out Vince Cable's pivotal role in flogging off the Royal Mail at miles below its true value a couple of hard-right pro-privatisation astroturfers turned up with a novel argument aimed at defending the sell-off.

Their argument says that Vince Cable and George Osborne flogged off Royal Mail for 330p per share, and after initially soaring to 445p on the first day (because investors realised how under-valued it was) six years later this share price has receded to 260p.

Their argument goes along the lines that 2013 was actually a good time to sell off Royal Mail because six years later in 2019 the share price has fallen by roughly 20%.

What this argument completely ignores is what has been happening at Royal Mail since it was flogged off in 2013.

One of the main revenue streams the new capitalist owners have found is flogging off chunks of Royal Mail land to property developers for £hundreds of millions.

It's estimated that they've already raked in over £400 million in land sales. That's over half of the £787 valuation of the entire Royal Mail property portfolio at the point of sale, raked back in by selling off just a few chunks of inner city prime building land!

For example a 2.7 acres Royal Mail site in Battersea was sold to developers for £101.2 million, but the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition priced it at just £12.9 million.

The neoliberals in government flogged this piece of prime building land off at less than 13% of its real value, meaning the other 87% of the value of this public land went straight to the new private owners.

Another example is the 6.25 acre Mount Pleasant sorting office that was valued at £29 million by the Tory/Lib-Dem government at the point of sale, then flogged off for £193 million just a few years later. A cool £164 million profit for the new corporate owners from Vince and George's deliberately under-valued sale of public land.

That's almost £300 million of Vince Cable and George Osborne's £787 million valuation of the entire freehold Royal Mail property portfolio recovered through the sale of under 10 acres of Royal Mail land!

So did the new corporate owners reinvest these massive property windfalls in the Royal Mail business? Maybe to diversify in the face of collapsing demand for hand delivered letters?

Of course they bloody didn't. They paid it out in bloated executive salaries and shareholder dividends that have exceeded £1 billion since the privatisation!

The last Royal Mail boss just quit with a huge £2.7 million golden goodbye, and his replacement was welcomed with a staggering £5.8 million tax-free golden hello! All paid for not through successful operation of the business, but through selling off public land that was acquired at miles below its true value.

The owners of Royal Mail know that the postal delivery business is not a brilliant money spinner in itself, but that the Royal Mail property portfolio is an absolute goldmine of prime building plots in towns and cities across the nation.

Royal Mail is being asset stripped before our very eyes, with what was publicly-owned land until 2013 being flogged off for massive unearned corporate profits.

They're not doing anything smart, or innovative, or productive to "earn" this cash, they're simply gorging themselves on the vast difference between what the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition said the Royal Mail property portfolio was worth when they flogged it off, and what it's actually worth.

And the incredible thing is that defenders of this maniacal neoliberal zeal for privatisation that sees our public land flogged off at a tiny fraction of its true value will concoct ludicrous little fairy stories about how it was all good, and fine, and proper because the share price happens to have fallen slightly after six years of absolutely brazen asset stripping!

And the sad thing is that some people will be so gullible, and so averse to considering the facts for themselves, that they'll actually mindlessly believe this abject neoliberal nonsense that everything is fine and dandy, and that Osborne and Cable actually did us all a wonderful favour by flogging off our land at a ridiculous fraction of its real value.

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The Tories create laws to benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of us

In 2016 former Tory Chancellor George Osborne introduced a new 3% Stamp Duty rate for people buying property to rent out, but for some reason he decided to create an exemption for anyone purchasing more than six properties at the same time.

The very next year the Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt took advantage of this loophole by purchasing seven luxury flats in Southampton, saving himself almost £100,000 in Stamp Duty.

Osborne's loophole was obviously designed to benefit the mega-rich with sufficient capital to purchase seven or more properties at once, but to see one of his actual Tory colleagues taking advantage of it just goes to show what a grotesque bunch they really are, designing legislation to benefit themselves and their mega-rich mates at the expense of everyone else.

The scandal doesn't stop there either. Jeremy Hunt also defied parliamentary ethics when he "forgot" to declare this investment on the parliamentary register of interests, and he also broke the law when he "forgot" to tell Companies House about his financial interest in the company used to buy the flats (an offence that could result in a two year prison sentence if it was one of us that did it, rather than a member of the privileged class).

This scandal reveals the sheer self-serving greed of the Tory party by proving that they design legislation to benefit them and their own class at the expense of the rest of us, but don't expect it to dominate the mainstream news because exposing this scandal runs entirely counter to the current primary objective of trying to ensure a poor Labour result at the local elections.

If this was one of Jeremy Corbyn's shadow ministers then we know they'd be hounded from pillar to post over it until they were forced into resigning, and how the scandal would dominate the headlines for days, but because it's a Tory member of the establishment class it'll receive very limited coverage, and Hunt will ride out the storm without even coming close to being under pressure to resign.

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Vince Cable is actually complaining about the consequences of flogging the Royal Mail!

In the Autumn of 2013 Vince Cable was the Tory/Lib-Dem Coalition minister who sold off the Royal Mail to a bunch of private profiteers at way below its market value. In 2017 he has the absolute brass neck to complain about the consequences of that sale.

Vince knew that he was ripping off the public by flogging the Royal Mail at way below its real market value, but he simply didn't care.

Vince knew that public opinion was dead set against the sell-off, with 67% of the public against to just 20% in favour, but he went ahead anyway.

Vince knew that Royal Mail sorting offices across the nation were sitting on prime bits of development land worth £billions, and that the sale of just a few of these sorting offices would recoup the entire £2 billion price he flogged the Royal Mail off for.

In hindsight the sale of the Royal Mail has been described as "crony capitalism at its worst" and the widespread predictions that the private owners would cash in on the property portfolio have come true.

When Vince Cable flogged off the Royal Mail in 2013 he valued the 6.25 acre Mount Pleasant sorting office at £29 million. Just a few years later in 2017 the private owners flogged it off to developers for £193 million. 

A cool £164 million profit at the public's expense.

The same story in Battersea where 2.7 acres were sold off for £101 million, when the "book value" of the land was marked as just £12.9 million when Vince flogged it off.

The sale of just two London sites has raked in almost £300 million for the private owners of what was our public property just a few years ago, yet when Vince flogged it off he priced the entire Royal Mail property portfolio of over 2,600 sites at just £787 million!

Within five years the private profiteers Vince flogged our property to have recouped almost half of his total property valuation with just two property sales!

Anyone would have thought that the man responsible for inflicting such a brazen rip-off on the British public would disappear from public life in shame, but not Vince.

After losing almost all of their MPs as a result of their collusion with the Tories and their ruinous austerity agenda the Lib-Dems have been left with a rump of just a dozen MPs, and in their wisdom they decided to appoint the man responsible for this outrageous rip-off as their party leader!

And now Vince is on Twitter complaining about the planned closure of the Royal Mail sorting office in Hampton in his own constituency.

Vince Cable was responsible for one of the most brazen public swindles of the Coalition government, but he's so arrogant that he thinks that everyone will have just forgotten by now.

He's so confident that he's got away with this massive swindle that he's actually trying to score political brownie points for protesting against one of the consequences of the rip-off privatisation he carried out less than five years ago!

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Brexit is a shambles and the political class are floundering

The political class have had ten weeks to come up with some kind of plan to deal with the vote for Brexit, but the woeful state of the drivel most of them have come up with so far has actually left us with the situation where the confusion over what Brexit is actually going to mean for the British economy is actually growing rather than diminishing!

No plan

The Brexiteers who goaded 37% of the public into voting for Brexit clearly had no plan whatever about what to do if they got their way. Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson made that absolutely clear by the way they immediately scarpered after the event.

This total lack of anything even remotely resembling a plan of action that the political class could be held to in the result of a Brexit vote was the main objection of anyone who considered the subject with any degree of seriousness. Had the pro-Brexit camp actually presented their plan we could have considered it on its merits. The fact that they just had a random jumble of slogans, utopian fantasies and false promises instead of an actual strategy for what comes next meant there really was nothing serious to consider.

Even worse than the Brexiteers having no plan for Brexit was the fact that David Cameron's government had no contingency plan whatever in case their gamble with the entire future of the UK economy backfired. Cameron's choice to risk the future of the country for a bit of short-term party political advantage at the 2015 General Election was bad enough, but having no plan in case it backfired and then just resigning and washing his hands of the whole mess he created was truly abysmal stuff, even judged against his own utterly woeful track record as Prime Minister.

Making it up as they go along 

David Davis' long-awaited Brexit speech was truly abysmal stuff. Flanked by the other merry Brexiteers Boris Johnson and Liam Fox, Davis' wasted fifteen minutes with a hopeless display of unfocused waffling. In the process he managed to clarify very little other that the fact that even after ten weeks these charlatans have got no coherent strategy for removing the UK from the European Union.

One of the only concrete Brexit policies that Davies actually bothered to detail in his rambling speech was the plan to retain of the EU's system of landowner subsidies, under which wealthy landowners are showered with taxpayers' cash simply for owning vast tracts of land, with no obligation to actually cultivate anything whatever in return for their handouts.

In guaranteeing the continuance of these farcical landowner handouts, Davies made it absolutely clear that the Tories are determined to keep one of the very worst and most iniquitous elements of EU membership simply because it benefits the land monopolist class who bankroll the Tory party (and make up a significant proportion of their MPs too).

The next day Davis had to be slapped down by the Prime Minister's office because his prognosis that the UK retaining membership of the single market would be "very improbable" is not government policy.

It's clear that one hand doesn't even know what the other hand is doing. An extraordinary mess!

Davis may have been speaking above his station when he publicly poo-pooed the idea of the UK staying in the single market, but what the actual government policy is remains entirely unclear, which brings us to Theresa May.

Theresa May

It seemed unlikely that anyone could put on a less reassuring performance than David Davis (who guaranteed that taxpayer funded handouts to his landowner Tory mates but had not a single word of reassurance for vital sectors of the economy like manufacturing, retail, science, education, energy, transport or health) but Theresa May managed to trump him the next day with an utterly vapid performance at Prime Minister's Questions.

After trying to score points against Jeremy Corbyn by giving a massive and unprecedented boost of free publicity to an extremely distasteful hard-right Twitter ranter by name-checking him on the public record, she then repeatedly and egregiously evaded a perfectly clear, sensible and simple question from the SNP's Angus Robertson, about whether Theresa May wants the UK to stay in the European Single Market or leave.

All Theresa May could come up with was a load of flustered and patronising waffle while the Tory benches tried to save her embarrassment by trying to drown out Robertson's questions with their now customary barrages of hooting, jeering, braying and assorted animal noises.

It's absolutely inconceivable that Theresa May will be able to keep on stalling for years on end about whether the UK is going to seek to retain membership of the single market with vacuous platitudes like "Brexit means Brexit", but that's all she's been doing for 10 weeks already, so maybe endless stalling is actually her plan? Who knows?

It's hardly a rabidly left-wing Trotskyite position to say that vital sectors of the UK economy like manufacturing, retail and services will suffer if this uncertainty continues. If the UK government is not going to seek membership of the single market, UK businesses need to know about it, and they need to know about it soon so they can come up with business plans to try to mitigate the economic fallout.

The "Norwegian option" or "Hard Brexit"

Assuming that the stalling is one day going to come to an end and that Brexit is eventually going to go ahead, a lot of people think that "the Norwegian option" is the best of a bad situation. 

The problem is that single market access comes with certain stipulations, including the free movement of labour within the single market zone. It's inconceivable that the EU would allow the UK to keep access to the single market without us agreeing to the free movement of labour (because it would clearly incentivise a chaotic disintegration of the EU as other states quit in the hope of their own cherry-picked sweetheart deals).

Keeping single market access and scrapping the free movement of labour is a complete fantasy. You couldn't really get a purer political example of people wanting to have their cake and eat it. When Theresa May says she wants to scrap free movement but refuses to say that she wants to quit the single market, she's blatantly playing utopian fantasy land politics and taking anyone she expects to believe it for an idiot.

Keeping the single market and not scrapping the free movement of people from the EU into the UK would cause an apoplectic storm of protest from the huge xenophobic-Brexiter contingent. The very reason these people voted out of the EU was to get rid of the pesky foreigners. Any deal that involved keeping the free movement of labour would have them wailing and shrieking even louder than they were before, or perhaps even descending into the violent lynch mob mentality eluded to by Nigel Farage and openly promoted by the leaders of Britain First.

That just leaves "Hard Brexit" which would have severe economic consequences for huge numbers of businesses and jobs. Anyone rooting for Hard Brexit whilst working for a Japanese car company in Sunderland (where a majority of people actually voted for Brexit!) really doesn't know their arse from their elbow. They'd actually be rooting for the endangerment of their own jobs and livelihoods because they've swallowed some Brexit fairy tale about "taking back control"!

Jeremy Corbyn

Lot's of people see me as completely biased in favour of Jeremy Corbyn because I generally swim against the tide of savagely anti-Corbyn propaganda that is passed off as news these days, but I'm not. Nobody is beyond criticism.

Corbyn has outlined a stance that the UK should try to negotiate a settlement that keeps access to the single market but frees us from the EU obligations that bar the UK state from intervening to rescue our industries* and that force us to keep privatising public property and services.

These toxic hard-right economic rules are one of my biggest criticisms of the EU, so I understand why Jeremy Corbyn would want them scrapped, but the problem with this stance is that it's pretty much as unrealistic as the single market + no free labour pipe dream that Theresa May keeps pandering to. It's unrealistic because it's against the EU's own interests to allow departing nations to cherry-pick the best bit and scrap all the absolute crap that comes along with it. If they allow that, everyone would want to leave.

The only way that the UK could have stood a chance of scrapping the hard-right pro-privatisation, anti-interventionist neoliberal dogma at the core of the EU would have been to stay in and try to form a pan-European left-wing alliance demanding reform for the whole of the EU. Pleading for a spectacularly unlikely special deal just for the UK at the moment we strop out of the door is an utterly futile strategy.

A second referendum

If you think Jeremy Corbyn's policy is silly, Owen Smith's is even worse. A second referendum on whatever settlement the Tories eventually cobble together could only have negative outcomes.

Either some 37% of the public actually vote in favour of it and give the Tories an actual democratic mandate for the hard-right lunacy they're bound to come up with to please their donors (bankers, the landed gentry, corporate fat cats, tax-dodgers and private health profiteers), or the public vote against it causing years more of damaging economic chaos and uncertainty as the country descends into furious bickering about which referendum outcome is the more legitimate as we're left neither fully in, nor fully out of the EU with the clock ticking towards us being ejected anyway at the end of the two year Article 50 negotiation period.

It's telling how bad the situation is that this state of chaos and uncertainty is actually considered by some people to be the best case scenario!

Conclusion

The main reason I objected to a haphazard abandonment of the EU with no clear strategy for what comes next was not some misguided love of the EU**, it was an understanding of the near inevitability of such a vote resulting in a paralysing mess with a savagely right-wing bunch of Tories intent on running the show for the benefit of their financial backers.

It's really hard to say who is coming out of this the worst. David Cameron for gambling the whole future of the UK and losing; Brexiteers like Boris, Farage, Gove and IDS who were so full of false promises and utopian fantasies before the vote but clearly still have no plan ten weeks after it; the appalling Brexiter ranters who keep telling everyone who tries to discuss this mess to "shut up and get over it, you lost" as if the referendum was some kind of sodding football match; the naive opportunists who believe in Theresa May's cake of access to the single market without paying the price of it with free movement of labour; Jeremy Corbyn who now apparently thinks it's possible to ditch all of the hard-right economic dogma that comes with EU membership but keep access to the single market; Owen Smith and various others in the political establishment who are pinning their hopes on a second referendum to undo the result of the first referendum and further draw out this damaging uncertainty, or the 37% of the public who voted to dump our country into such a chaotic and unstable position under the delusion that it's even possible to "take back control" without anything even remotely resembling a plan of action for how that was to be done.

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OR

* =  Apart from the banks of course, the EU turned a big blind eye to the £1.5 trillion in bailouts, subsidies and financial support we handed to them back when the global economy was paralysed in a huge insolvency crisis caused by their own reckless gambling.

** = I'm confident that I've written far more critiques of the EU than 99% of Brexit voters. Take this, or this, or this as examples.

What is ... Land Value Tax?

The idea of Land Value Tax (LVT) Land Value Taxation is a method of raising public revenue by means of charges on the value of land. LVT is widely regarded as a very efficient form of taxation, not least because it's pretty much impossible to avoid/evade.

Land monopolists
Throughout history one of the most commonly proposed solutions to the problem of land monopolists is forced redistribution, where the land is simply taken by force and redistributed to the community, but LVT advocates take a different approach. They propose that that wealthy landowners who monopolise land shouldn't have their land taken by force, but that they should pay a tax to the community.

LVT would act as an incentive for them to either put the land to productive use in order to cover the cost of the tax, or to transfer ownership of the land to someone else who would put the land to better use.

Advocates

The idea of taxing the value of land has been around for thousands of years. The Apastamba Dharmasutra is one of the oldest Hindu documents in existence and in its section on property and taxes it states that "If any person holding land does not exert himself and hence bears no produce, he shall, if rich, be made to pay what ought to have been produced", which is an expression of the view that tax should be applied to the potential value of the land, not to the actual produce of the land.

The most famous LVT advocate was the 19th Century American economic philosopher Henry George. George was clearly influenced by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who decried the inequalities caused by land monopolisation in the 18th Century:

"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine' and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody'."  Rousseau

Other early LVT advocates include the physiocrats (most notably Anne Robert Jacques Turgot and François Quesnay) the British economists Adam Smith (probably the second most egregiously misrepresented economist in history behind Karl Marx) and David Ricardo and the British-born US revolutionary Thomas Paine. 

Modern advocates come from across the political spectrum. The Green Party have been long-term LVT advocates, the Corbyn-McDonnell Labour leadership are much more open to the prospect than any Labour leadership in decades. On the right, the free-market fanatic Milton Friedman advocated LVT saying "There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise – and yet we need taxes. ...So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land".

Benefits

There are many potential benefits to Land Value Tax. It would discourage rentierism and land speculation, improve land use, raise wages and eliminate the need for taxes on productive activity. One of the biggest benefits of all is that it's a tax that would be almost impossible to avoid/evade because it's simply not possible to move vast tracts of land to tax havens like the British Cayman Islands.

The economist Fred Foldvary states that  LVT encourages landowners to develop vacant/underused land or to sell it, and that it deters speculative land holding, dilapidated inner city areas return to productive use, reducing the pressure to build on undeveloped sites and so reducing urban sprawl.

One of the main benefits of LVT is that it would allow taxes on productive activity to be reduced or abolished. The idea of using a land tax to reduce or eliminate income and consumption taxes would clearly be to the benefit of millions of working people who own little or no land, but the wealthy landowner class obviously wouldn't like the idea at all.LVT is rightly regarded as one of the most efficient taxes imaginable because it doesn't deter productive activities by taxing them and because it would be almost impossible to avoid.

A fairer system

A tax system that targets the asset-rich rather than the hard-working, and that is pretty much impossible to avoid/evade would clearly reduce inequality and improve social mobility. People who work hard would be able to keep more of their income, while those who generate their wealth by idly monopolising land would have to pay tax to the rest of society for the privilege.

The current system of imposing taxes on income and consumption instead of land value clearly benefits those who derive most of their wealth from property and rent, and who have the financial means to pay tax advisers to hide their incomes in tax-havens.

Just look at the way the Grosvenor dynasty managed to avoid paying £3.6 billion in Inheritance Tax through the use of trust funds so that the young Hugh Richard Louis Grosvenor could inherit a £9 billion property empire from his father.

Society is set up in a way in which the poor and ordinary have to pay taxes on their income, and tax on their consumption, and another load of tax if they're lucky enough to inherit some wealth, meanwhile the tiny super-rich minority repeatedly sidestep paying their share of tax.LVT would massively reduce the iniquity of the tax system. If you own land, you pay tax on it. It doesn't matter whether the landowners register themselves as a company in a tax haven or not; it doesn't matter if the land is owned through an elaborate network of off-shore trust funds; if they own land in the UK they need to cough up the tax. If they don't pay the tax, the land can be incrementally taken in lieu of payment and redistributed to people who will bother to pay the tax.

Resistance of the land-rich

Given the incredible power of the inherited wealth aristocracy in the UK, the prospects of a fair land tax system being introduced here look very slim indeed.

The British political class is absolutely riddled with landowning aristocrats, especially the ruling Tory Party and the unelected House of Lords. The prospect of a Tory government introducing LVT is absolutely laughable (Tory MPs have twice wrecked Labour Party efforts to introduce LVT, once in 1931 and again in 1951).

The prospect of getting LVT through the House of Lords is not quite as ludicrously unlikely as the Tories introducing LVT, but Britain's bloated and unelected upper chamber is utterly riddled with wealthy landowners who would obviously be inclined to protect their own self-interest by fighting tooth and nail to scupper any proposed LVT legislation.

There are clearly a great number of unelected Lords who would prefer to see the burden of taxation put onto workers and productive businesses instead of onto their property empires.

The mainstream media is also heavily dominated by billionaire tax-dodgers with vast property portfolios. Any politician proposing LVT would have to expect  a vicious propaganda war to be waged against them by the likes of Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro), the Barclay Brothers (Telegraph, Spectator) and Richard Desmond (Express, Star).

Landowner subsidies

The introduction of a Land Value Tax would have loads of social and economic benefits, but it has been fiercely resisted by the powerful landowner class because they know that they'd be unable to avoid paying it. In fact the privileged European landowner class have resisted Land Value Tax so successfully that they've actually managed to establish for themselves a system of taxpayer funded Landowner subsidies!

In the past farmers received subsidies for their produce, which is problematic in its own way, but kind of makes sense. Nowadays there is no necessity for them to actually produce anything at all, the EU pays out vast subsidies to landowners simply for owning the land.

The UK electorate has voted to leave the EU, but thanks to the extraordinarily reckless lack of a government contingency plan for Brexit and the interminable foot-dragging over Article 50 we're still in it.

When the Tory government does eventually get around to developing an actual plan of action and then leaving, they've already made it clear that the taxpayer funded handouts to landowners are going to continue if not increase. It would be crazy to expect anything different from a political party that counts inherited wealth aristocrats and farmers as two of its most loyal demographics.

Instead of having a fair tax system based on taxing wealth, we've got a system based on taxing consumption and labour in order to actually hand out subsidies to idle land monopolists!

Henry George's Land Value Tax is a great idea because it taxes the super-rich on wealth that they simply cannot hide, but the European landowner class are so powerful that they've not only successfully resisted Land Value Tax, they've actually had politicians devise a polar opposite system to further entrench their privilege by diverting the money raised from taxes on consumption and labour into lucrative subsidies to be showered on wealthy landowners whether they put their land to productive use or not!

LVT and Basic income

The concepts of Land Value Tax and Basic Income often go together. In 1797 Thomas Paine wrote that every person should be entitled to a basic subsistence income funded by a tax on land "as a compensation in part for the loss of his or her natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property".

The majority of modern-day Basic Income advocates suggest that it should be funded through some form of Land Value tax.

If you want to know more about Basic Income check out the following articles:

• An introduction to Basic Income (simple)

• Basic Income vs the current UK welfare system (a little bit complicated)

• A Basic Income Labour Market analysis (a bit more complicated)

Progressive politics

Any political party with a genuine interest in the development of a fair and efficient tax system should at least consider the benefits of LVT.

The benefits would go much further than just making sure that the wealthiest in society actually pay tax, it would also significantly reduce the problem of land speculators hoarding land and inflating property prices, and it would drive the economy by encouraging people to put land to good use, and by removing taxes on genuinely productive activities.

The first step towards a fairer system is the abolition of the ludicrous system of taxpayer funded subsidies for land monopolists, and the second step it to set about reducing taxes on productive activities and their replacement with LVT.

As far as I'm concerned, any political party that supports landowner subsidies and rules out LVT cannot possibly be considered progressive. If any political organisation insists that it is the responsibility of the landless to subsidise the land monopolists, rather than the responsibility of landowners to compensate society for monopolising the land, there's absolutely no way they can be considered progressive.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Why Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs deserve plaudits

I was rarely one to give Gary Neville plaudits as a footballer and still find it difficult to believe he's the fifth most capped England defender in history, but I have to say that I'm impressed and encouraged by his refreshing stance on the occupation by homeless people of the building he intends to develop as a hotel with his former Manchester United team mate Ryan Giggs next year.

Background

During the last parliament the Tories and Lib-Dems pushed through draconian new legislation against people occupying vacant buildings. This meant that Neville and Giggs could have used the courts to force the homelessness support group out of their building. 

It's also worth noting that the Tories in central government (and their Lib-Dem enablers) are not the only bad guys in this scenario. Greater Manchester Police, Manchester City Council (Labour controlled) and Manchester Metropolitan University have all been guilty of taking harsh measures against the homeless in the city. This backdrop of increased intolerance towards the homeless across UK society makes the footballers' approach that much more refreshing. 

It's a heart-warming surprise to see that it takes a pair of footballers to lead the way in taking a humane and common sense approach to homelessness, when the government, the police, the local council and the city university have all preferred to adopt the stance that property rights over-rule the welfare of human beings.

The agreement

Instead of initiating legal proceedings to evict the Manchester Angels homelessness support group, the footballers decided to let them stay on the proviso that they don't disrupt any of the surveying/building work while they're there.

A representative for the Manchester Angels has spoken about how delighted they are that the footballers have chosen not to force them out using the harsh anti-squatting laws brought in by the last government. His statement is a brilliant example of what can be achieved when people reach amicable solutions rather than resorting to a legal system that has now been so heavily skewed in favour of capital by the Tories.

"We undertake not to cause any damage to anything and to leave the building in as good if not a better state than we found it in. I have ordered smoke alarms to keep the building safe. I even suggested to Gary that he might be interested in employing some of the homeless people who are living here as labourers to help with the redevelopment work on the hotel."

The fact that both parties could come to such a simple agreement sets a really good example that life in the UK doesn't always have to be as bad as the Tories want it to be. 

These guys have set a great public example by coming to an amicable agreement instead of making a terrible public demonstration of the sickness of our society by having a bunch of desperate people evicted by the courts, which would have shown that in Tory Britain property is considered far more important than people.

Political footballers

I've often thought that elite footballers should try to do more social good with their fame and their extreme wealth: That instead of buying another brand new Bentley or adding another house to their extensive foreign property portfolio, they could do something with more social utility instead. I'm not the kind of guy to tell people how to spend their money though, nor ignore the fact that many footballers already contribute to all kinds of socially beneficial projects. It's just that elite footballers have such immense wealth these days compared to ordinary folk that their power to have a real political influence on society has never been higher.

I think one of the things that makes this case interesting is that it's one of the most overt forays into the political sphere I've seen elite footballers make. I wouldn't be surprised that Gary Neville's generation of footballers might be hesitant to take bold political stances. Giggs and Neville will both remember how their old Liverpool adversary Robbie Fowler was browbeaten and punished by the FA 20 years ago for daring to show solidarity with the Liverpool dockers. 

Deciding not to have the homeless people evicted from their building is a much bolder political stance than routine footballer stuff like setting up a charitable foundation, or telling the press how much of a wonderful guy they think David Cameron is (as Frank Lampard did just before the Tories handed him a vast income tax break while they simultaneously introduced Bedroom Tax on some 600,000 families with disabled members).

The factor that makes it such a bold political stance is that there are many wealthy property owners and defenders of capital who are going to react with disgust at the idea that anyone might actually help people who are occupying their vacant buildings, instead of throwing them out onto the streets.

How some right-wingers react

If you've seen any of the public reaction to this story, the overwhelming response has been "good on them" which is great to see, especially from the supporters of rival clubs. However, interspersed between the flood of positive reactions are a few incredibly bitter comments from people who absolutely hate that these footballers have wavered their own property rights in preference for behaving like decent human beings.

You might think that people bitterly criticising Neville and Giggs and predicting the ruination of their building because all homeless people are all "disgusting lazy scum" are just terminally miserable kill-joys, but in many cases there's more too it than them just wanting to pour scorn on the concept of showing a bit of basic human decency because they happen to be miserable gits.

It seems that several of these people really perceive the footballers' wavering their property rights as an attack on the whole concept of property, and by extension an attack on their own property rights. These people come across as absolutely terrified that some guys reaching an amicable agreement instead of launching eviction proceedings is setting some kind of awful precedent that it's preferable not to go around treating desperate people like inconvenient "scum" who deserve to be shoved back out onto the streets and turned into somebody else's problem, as they themselves would undoubtedly behave.

What seems to have passed a lot of these bitter cynics by, is that the building belongs to Giggs and Neville, so they can do with it as they please. If it suits them to allow homeless people to use it through the cold winter months, that's obviously their decision to make. To force them evict the homeless people out of blind adherence to the Tory principle that property rights are more important than human beings (as some people would apparently prefer) would be an obvious infringement of their right to do as they please with their own building.

Why footballers?

It's worth pointing out that the main reason this story has captured the public imagination is the fact these guys kicked a bag of air around in front of cameras to make their millions. If such an agreement had been reached with people who had made their millions designing computer software, running a taxi firm, speculating on the property market, selling plumbing supplies or whatever, the story would have been unlikely to go further than the pages of the local press. The fact that Neville and Giggs had high profile public careers is the main reason we've even heard of the story.

As for the actual reason they chose to take a non-confrontational approach, I think it would be churlish to say that they did it to avoid bad headlines about former Manchester United players evicting homeless people in the city. I prefer to think that it's because both guys grew up in ordinary backgrounds, and that doubtless they know several former team-mates from their youth and academy days who have fallen on hard times, so they did it out of basic human empathy. I'm pretty sure they both know that if their lives had panned out differently (they'd suffered a career ruining injury when they were young for example), they probably wouldn't be in the position to develop an exclusive hotel, and there's the chance that they might have ended up poor, and in need of a helping hand at some point.

Legacies
   
Having never met either of them I don't know Gary Neville or Ryan Giggs personally, but I imagine that when they're old and looking back at their lives, there's a chance that if this venture works out well, they'll feel a lot prouder of what they did for some of Manchester's most vulnerable people when they didn't have to help at all, than the fact that they owned a 35 bedroom luxury hotel in the city. 

I hope their decision to let the homeless support group stay in their building works out well, and that the Manchester Angels can be found a permanent home at some point in the future. I also hope that it encourages other footballers and ex-footballers to consider helping out the needy in their own communities. A couple of grand in support from a bunch of guys who earn hundreds of thousands of pounds a week might not seem like much to them, but it would be a huge contribution to a homeless shelter, food bank or soup kitchen in the community their club is based in.

It's not just financial contributions either. Many elite football players have enormous social media followings. I know from my Another Angry Voice Facebook page that it's possible to reach out to millions of people per week with fewer than 200,000 followers. Many footballers have millions of followers. Neville has 3 million Twitter followers, his former Manchester United colleague Wayne Rooney has 12 million Twitter followers and 25 million more on Facebook! 

Just imagine the number of people these guys could reach if they used their social media platforms to promote worthy causes and talk about social justice every now and then. I'd love to see more footballers get involved in politics, after all - being good at kicking a bag of air around actually seems an awful lot more meritocratic than the Westminster establishment practice of continually stuffing the unelected House of Lords with failed/retired political allies and millionaire party donors. 

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