GRENFELL TOWER AND THE HOUSING CRISIS

The privatised management company that 'ran' the Grenfell Tower estate on behalf of the cash-strapped Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea saved themselves £5,000 by using flammable cladding on the building instead of the flame-proof stuff. This small but venal illustration of the subordination of people to profit will be talked over much, as well as repeated refusals by Parliament to legislate for safety in rented accommodation. These questions should be more important than whether Theresa May lacks the bottle to face the public she appears to fear, when she thinks about them at all. She is the head croupier in a system designed to drain the poor for the benefit of the rich, and Kensington and Chelsea just happens to be one of those boroughs where the extremes of rich and poor meet, if not rub shoulders.

There are eight bands of poll tax, sorry council tax, in the borough. They are based on valuations set in 1991. The lowest is for houses (or flats, I will use the term houses here) up to £40,000; the highest for all properties over £320,000. The value of the cheapest property in the highest band is eight times the value of the most expensive in the lowest band. The tax paid in the highest band, however (£2124) is only three times as high as the lowest band (£708). An incentive to buy high.

But the average house price in Kensington and Chelsea right now is £1,371,000. It was $1.2 million in 2014, when the London average was £400,000 and the national average £200,000. The median in London has increased from £87,000 in 1996 to £462,000.

Two things are obvious. Property is a great investment. Those empty luxury buildings that are unoccupied are owned by (often foreign) investors, many of those from countries where personal wealth can be, shall we say, volatile; they are appreciating steadily and rapidly, while the property taxes on them are negligible.

Second, because those taxes are negligible, local council revenues are far less than they ought to be, even taking into account cuts instituted by national government starting in the Thatcher years. Councils rush to privatise services they've already cut back, and get out from the 'burden' of paying employees and giving them pensions. They close libraries, they turn off street lights (at least out here in Tory-controlled Waverly), they ignore safety concerns in high-rise buildings and try to clad them to stop offending the good taste of the wealthy who are forced to look at the buildings each day.

In the election campaign, one of the Labour party's proposals was to tax off-shore assets and income. When they costed their manifesto, they estimated the income from this tax, then cut that estimate in half, to allow for the idea people right re-patriate their money rather than face the tax. When the Institute for Fiscal Studies did their costing of the manifesto, they allowed zero income from this tax (thus creating a spending deficit) by assuming all the off-shore money would be repatriated.  Which of course would increase normal tax revenue, but no matter.

A starting point on treating the residents of social housing fairly might be to indulge in a re-rating of council tax, increasing the number of upper bands to make the tax much more progressive. It might include the imposition of an abandonment tax for buildings left empty. It might also reconsider (though this would be a decision for Parliament) placing the responsibility for property tax on the owner, not the renter, of a property.

Some of that revenue might be dedicated to building new social housing, on a more human scale. British city planners ought to be studying Jane Jacobs, not Andreas Gursky. The starting point for the housing crisis in this country was the Thatcher government's decisions to sell council houses, without provision for replacing them, while making it easier and cheaper to own multiple properties, and rent them out.

A rethink of housing policy is not really complicated. This is not a problem without a solution; it is a problem lacking a will to enact the solution. The part that will be made to sound complicated will be where the money will come from to enact such policies. The answer is that the money is staring residents of Kensington and Chelsea in the face, in the shape of empty properties owned for investment, in the shape of buy-to-let properties, and in the shape of owners getting a huge break on property taxation from local and national governments who are their friends, and don't really have time for those on the other side of the tracks. Or the Westway.

MILLENNIUM, JULIA CHILD, JANE JACOBS, HENRY PORTER AND HARLEY GRANVILLE-BARKER

I was catching up with some papers on the flight to the US Wednesday, and was chuffed to see the Observer's house neo-con Nick Cohen quoting Mario Vargas Llosa's article in El Pais about the Millennium trilogy: Vargas Llosa compared them to the same sense of 'feverish excitement' he'd experienced reading 'Dumas Dickens and Hugo as a boy, those stories about what he called 'just avengers'. I couldn't agree more, in fact, Cohen could have found the same take on Stieg Larsson right here, among Irresistible Targets' Bullseyes!

The Observer comment section also included an excellent essay by the definitely non neo-con Henry Porter, arguing for a repeal of all the laws passed during the last 12 years of Blairite government aimed at eroding civil liberties and creating a security state in the UK. He fails to note that on any number of these restrictions, this government has introduced tests, or vetting, which need to be paid for: the citizen as consumer, the subject as profit centre. There is a definite feudal element to this, beyond the obvious apparatchik revival brought on by a government 'socialist' only in the most cynically Stalinist sense of the word.

I then found myself a bit baffled by Philip French's Observer review of Julie & Julia, where he complained the film gave no mention to Elizabeth David, who was writing French cookbooks for the English before Julia Child was doing her TV thing for Americans. Huh? Do we need to check other countries too, to see if they had anyone promoting French cooking? Philip French thought this was as bad as Tom Hanks 'storming up Omaha Beach on D-Day in Saving Private Ryan, and no mention being made of the British Second Army coming ashore on Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches. Unlikely as it might have been for the Yanks getting slaughtered at Omaha to wonder for the cameras about how Monty's chaps were faring at the somewhat easier beaches to the east, I should point out that for someone being hypercritical about historical accuracy it's rather churlish to forget that the toughest of those three beaches, Juno, was taken by the Canadian Third Division (although it was part of the British Second Army, Canadians are actually not British, and despite Juno's casualties being the second-highest, after Omaha's, the Canadians actually penetrated the farthest off the beaches on the first day).

But the prize for churlishness went to a review by Christopher Turner, in the previous day's Guardian, of Anthony Flint's Wrestling With Moses, a book about Jane Jacobs' battles with Robert Moses which are the background to her classic book on urban planning, The Death And Life Of Great American Cities. In that book Jacobs described the ideal urban environment, which turned out to be exactly the kind of neighbourhood she was living in in Greenwich Village, which was threatened by Moses' plans to extend Park Avenue south through Washington Square Park, and turn Houston Street into a 10 lane expressway to connect the Hudson and East River crossings.

Turner somehow transmutes this into a battle between Jacobs' crowded urban mess and Moses' wide-open spaces. As it happens, I saw my birthplace, New Haven, lose whole neighbourhoods to exactly that sort of road-building (see Murder In The Model City, by Paul Bass and Douglas Rae), and those lost neighbourhoods were re-developed into exactly the sort of urban wastelands Jacobs feared. Yes, she broke the ground for gentrification which has turned the Village into the kind of place the people who made it interesting can no longer afford, but at least you can still walk through it. And by the way, it would be easier to take Turner seriously if he knew that the classic biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, was written by Robert Caro, not Anthony Caro.

There was also a nice little appreciation in that Guardian of Harley Granville-Barker, a much under-appreciated playwright, written by Richard Eyre. I noticed that he described Barker's wife as 'an American millionairess'. How this got past the Guardian's eagle-eyed sub-editors I do not know, as they insist on changing the word 'actress' to 'actor' whenever anyone else uses it, despite whatever confusion that may cause, as when I wrote of porn-director Gerard Damiano saying his experience as a hair-dresser helped him deal with actresses. As I wrote here, the subs changing that to 'actors' rather changed its meaning.

The Guardian insists on a gender neutral word for performers, but not for the very wealthy. They will not use a gender neutral word like 'spouse' to avoid 'husband' and 'wife', nor will they use 'homosexual' or 'gay' in most instances; instead they insist on gender-specific, not neutral, reference as 'gay and lesbian'. I'm sure you can think of other anomalies; that 'millionairess' leapt out at me means either it's a silly proscription or I am a rather sad and pedantic fellow. Probably both.