Comments on: The voting gap between homeowners and renters is the widest it’s ever been

By: patrick newman

patrick newman — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 09:27:38 +0000

Dave, you have partially answered your own question on these stats in your last sentence. I think you will not find a very high correlation of youth and social housing tenure – mainly because it is an eye of a needle job for a young person to get a council dwelling offer these days.

By: Lawman

Lawman — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 09:22:27 +0000

One aspect is that everyone needs a stake in society. ‘Socialist’ means we are better off collaborating within a society, rather than being a collection of competing individuals.

House ownership is one important way to achieve this. In addition, provision of public sector tenanted accommodation, with security of tenure and affordable stable rents.

As such, we should pursue the policy of pre 1997 Labour governments and undertake a large house building programme: with attractive smaller size houses and flats (not ghastly tower blocks); not ‘mansions’ with 20% social housing.

This would help the less advantaged and give them a stake in society. It would also attract votes.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 07:48:38 +0000

I think far too much has been read into these numbers.

Did you not consider that this mirrors the age split almost perfectly. The number of young people renting is far far higher than older people. The number of older people owning outright is far far higher than the number of young people. Given that age has been shown to be one of the biggest determinants in voting preference in the election it is far more likely that these stats are a result of age rather than home tenure although obviously home tenure and age are strongly correlated.