Should British citizens born in this country be privileged over those born abroad? Reform UK’s latest housing policy includes a pledge to prioritise workers born in Britain when allocating social housing. At the heart of this policy lie two important questions. How should we allocate scarce resources? And what does citizenship mean?
There are two ways in which policymakers can think about an essential resource for which demand is greater than supply. One is to reduce scarcity, the other is to ration it. When it comes to affordable housing, politicians have, for half a century, talked about the first but pursued the second.
Rationing requires policymakers to decide how best to allocate the resource. The obvious metric is need. But defining who is most needy is not straightforward. Nor is it necessarily popular. Many who are needy can face social stigma – the unemployed, single parents, asylum seekers. And they do so not least because politicians often set one group against another, blaming one for the other’s deprivation.
Nevertheless, the insistence that foreigners are excluding Britons from social housing has become embedded in the national conversation. And a conversation about housing has transformed into one about immigration, with foreigners – and, now, British citizens born abroad – fingered as responsible for scarcity.
Any serious social house building programme requires considerable state input. The Centre for Cities estimates that to match the rates achieved between 1956 and 1979, the government’s Affordable Homes Programme must provide £16.6bn every year. Currently, the AHP promises £39bn over 10 years, the first tranche of which was released this week. The revelation that only 60% of an initial £10bn spend will be allocated to social housing led to criticism that Andy Burnham had backtracked on his pledge for it all to “be dedicated to council homes”. Reform’s pledge to build 50,000 affordable homes a year is like promising to build the front porch but not the rest of the house.
A fundamental principle of liberal citizenship is the acceptance of all citizens as formally equal
A fundamental principle of liberal citizenship is the acceptance of all citizens as formally equal
Funding the necessary level of housebuilding requires governments to make difficult calls about tax rises and increased borrowing. Which is why many politicians find it easier simply to blame foreigners.
What kind of a society is it, though, that is unable to provide its citizens with the most basic of needs, such as housing, and has deliberately chosen not to do so over the past half century? And what kind of a society scapegoats marginalised groups to camouflage that failure?
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The second issue Reform’s policy raises is what it is to be a citizen. A fundamental principle of liberal citizenship is the acceptance of all citizens as formally equal. To create two tiers of citizens based on where one was born, and to treat Britons unequally on that basis, is to eviscerate this conception of citizenship.
It is an inherently dangerous step. Beyond social housing may come the argument that British citizens born abroad should be denied certain benefits or should pay for the use of the NHS, just like foreign nationals. Some commentators already argue that citizenship has been handed out too liberally, to the wrong kinds of people, and that in many cases it may have to be revoked. Such claims feed off the growing debate on the right over ethnic visions of Britishness and attempts to whip up anxiety about white decline.
Last year, Tory MP Katie Lam claimed that too many people “who came here legally… shouldn’t have been able to do so” and “need to go home” to help create a more “culturally coherent” nation. Lam was not talking about British citizens, and she was mildly rebuked by Kemi Badenoch, but, given the direction of political winds, it is not too difficult to imagine the leap from “deport legal migrants who should not have been given legal status” to “strip citizenship from those who should not have been granted it”.
If that sounds implausible, think of how implausible it would have seemed 20 years ago, even to conservatives, that Britain should embark on a policy of mass deportations, including of those legally settled here, or that British citizens should be treated unequally depending on their place of birth.
Photograph by Evening Standard via Getty Images
