You might think this is good news. From The Times:

Council homes for life ‘to be scrapped’ - People living in council houses will no longer be entitled to a subsidised tenancy for life under Whitehall proposals to address waiting lists. New tenants would have fixed-term contracts under the plans, with regular reviews every few years, The Times has learnt. [...]

At the moment anyone allocated a council home can usually stay for life, irrespective of circumstances. People in council homes paying subsidised rents can end up relatively wealthy, and in some cases they can bequeath the tenancy to their children. Frank Dobson became a Cabinet Minister while living in a council flat in his London constituency.

But no, even this is not a move to logic and fairness, removing privilege from state clients and getting the state out of people's lives. The bit I cut out reads:

If a tenant’s financial position improved he or she would be encouraged to take an equity share or to move to the private sector. If they refused they could face higher rents. The right to a council home is also likely to be tied to a requirement to have or be actively looking for a job.

The measures are being considered by Margaret Beckett, the new Housing Minister, in the most radical shake-up of the social housing system for decades to ensure that those who deserve council homes get them.

So this is not, repeat not, a plan to reduce dependency, to diminish the proportion of the population in receipt of the taxpayer's subsidy, nor even to relieve poverty.

It looks like the proposals will be both more intrusive, bureaucratic and moralitarian than the present ones. Instead of in old socialist style checking people are poor enough to qualify for subsidised housing and leaving them to it, on the (generally correct) assumption that the dependent poor are unlikely in general to get much better off, and not worrying if some do, we are to look forward to a new grand scheme of supervision, whereby people are compelled continually to immiserate themselves for the inspectors in order to keep their roof. So there is to be a new premium to be created for inadequacy and profligacy.

But the dependent class may not be too miserable or helpless. The very people who in a reasonable humane system we might be willing to help (those too feeble or disturbed to be able to earn a living) will not be the ones that are targetted for assistance, but those who have or are actively looking for a job, who show every sign of being able to look after themselves, in other words.

How to explain this? It is neither likely to be economically efficient, nor is kindly (foolishly or otherwise).

We need to note that as a project it embodies Gordon Brown's puritan obsession with "hard working families". I do not particularly care if people are feckless or pleasure seeking as long as it is not at my expense. I rationally wish I could be a bit more feckless and pleasure seeking myself, but I can neither afford it, nor do I have a sybarite's soul. But the Brownite regards suffering and struggle, social compliance, and resentment of the easy life, as the core moral values.

And this is of a piece with the politics of New New Labour. For the struggling compliant, resentful of others pleasure, are reliable voters for the gifts of authority. The feeble and disturbed who can make no shift for themselves are not voters at all. This is a plan to build, and politically police, a new client class.

[To pre-empt the objection that at least it gets rid of privileged access to council accomodation to party apparatchiks and local government employees, I would point out that that form of corruption is already obsolete. Such people now get subsidised equity as often as subsidised rent, and get to live with others like themselves, not among the lumpenproletariat on council estates, because they have a claim as key workers. Key workers (who are largely middle-class and paid above average, even including town planners and Connexions advisers) constitute another client class of the state that has been silently established this last decade. Welcome to nomenklatura UK.]