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The journalist, author, and environmental and political activist George Monbiot wrote for the Guardian on May 23: “Every purchase of a second house deprives someone else of a first one.”  He was discussing the possibility that people seeking to buy second homes in desirable rural areas might have to pay an ‘impact tax’ and apply for planning permission.

Monbiot thinks this is right-on, even if it is woefully lacking. As Monbiot points out, what is needed is a real deterrent - like the deterrent effects of high house prices in rural communities on young local people. Make second homes “prohibitively expensive.”

Second homes are blighting local rural communities.  The growing phenomenon of winter ‘ghost towns’ received rare press coverage following tame recommendations made by the Affordable Rural Housing Commission in May, aimed in part at curbing the narrow elite’s appetite for and ease of access to second-home ownership.  In Lindisfarne, a village on the Northumbrian coast, 55% of houses are holiday homes and the school was closed for lack of children, reported the Telegraph.

But the problem of second-home ownership is not limited to desirable parts of the British countryside.  Wherever second-home ownership is fashionable local people are priced out of the market, whether in rural villages and hamlets, in cities, or abroad.  To point this out, though, as Monbiot quite rightly did, is something of an unspeakable truth.  The Commission’s chair, former Channel 4 political correspondent Elinor Goodman, has a second home in Westminster.  And most MPs with a constituency outside of London have at least two homes.

In April, Downing Street faced embarrassment over seemingly unexplainable increases in expenses claimed for Tony Blair’s constituency home in County Durham.  Bought outright in 1983 for £30,000, the premises have since cost the taxpayer significantly more than the purchase price, claimed by Blair as expenses.  The Blairs also have 11 Downing St and Chequers Court at their disposal.

In way of rental investments, the Blairs rent out their Connaught Square property, bought for a cool £3.6million in 2004.  And the 2002 purchase of two new flats in Bristol – one of which was also a rental investment – was memorably negotiated for Cherie Blair by convicted fraudster Peter Foster. 

The Prime Minister’s £184,000 (plus expenses) annual salary and Cherie Blair’s considerable income as a lawyer - and now author - still begs the question how the Blairs can afford a mortgage debt estimated to be in the region of £4m.  This is the crux of the problem; the affluent do inexplicably well out of the existing system.  Why would they want to drastically change it?

MPs pay the issue of underused homes and a skewed housing market lip-service, as they wonder if they’ve set the security lights on their second or third ‘home.’  Even if it wasn’t against the personal interests of most MPs to lobby for meaningful measures against second-home ownership, the political will would still be lacking.  Labour has the means to improve access to affordable, decent housing, not least because Labour has methodically implemented cost effective changes to housing policy.

But these financial gains to the Treasury - amounting to billions - have not, and won’t be, invested into generating better and affordable housing for all.  Modern Labour, irreconcilably far from its founding socialist dreams, works for the profit of an affluent minority.  From April 1 the council tax rebate for second homes was reduced from 50% to 10%, but why oh why should there be any discount at all?

In short, people rich in capital are helping to build an inaccessible and unaffordable housing market for people less rich in capital.  Low-income households and average-income households alike, if not already on the housing ladder, don’t stand a chance.  Welcome to the UK under New Labour.  Unlike the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, the UK under Tony Blair is unlikely to uphold a home for all as sacred.