Doesn't cover the cost of the NHS.

Thousands thrown on the scrap heap, the associated industries dead and buried. Where was that great champion of the working classes, Quisling Benn, when this destruction of communities was going on?

That's because you've nothing else.

You voted Lib Dem, you've said several times. You did read their manifesto didn't you? No, of course not, you thought you were being clever, giving it to the Tories eh? So just why did you vote to privatise the NHS, sunshine?

An even worse waste is spending money on homeopathy. The pseudo-scientific explanation of why it works is complete BS. You might as well drink water.

you still making your living renting out vermin-infested hovels?

And we have a Minister for Heath who believes in this mumbo-jumbo.

He also managed to remove himself from any personal resonsibility for NHS reforms and their subsequent problems.

Some fooking secretary of state eh?

The tenants paid rent. A reasonable one. If it was waived if they were unemployed or disabled the cost was negligible. You obviously prefer your taxes going towards housing benefit to subsidise the vastly higher rents private landlords charge and the huge housing benefit bill is of course "paid for by everyone else".

How stupid is that?

And then complain that taxes and benefits are too high. It's batshittery of the highest order.

Its very stupid indeed.

As I've mentioned many times before in the early 1970s I began my career in the building industry and cut my teeth on many council and housing authority new builds and refurbs, I'm talking of thousands of houses spread from Yorkshire to Tyne & Wear, some of those sites were for 400 or so dwellings so we're probably talking about tens of thousands in the ten years I was in the industry.

We afforded this during at least one recession, a national steel shortage, and three day weeks - we had the balls to just get on and do it then and recognised the need for affordable houses for the working low paid under both Labour and Conservative governments.

I don't understand for one minute why the attitude change after just one generation, its too easy to blame the right to buy scheme - the complete lack of affordable (not market rent) rental accommodation but moreso the complete lack of any desire by any political party to learn from the 1970s policy of housing provision should be the one major issue that all party's have to answer to - but I doubt that it will ever be mentioned.

Oh bless, it's so sweet that you scrabble around in the dark trying to work out what's what. I know, perhaps when your kids ask "dad, just why did you vote to sell the NHS to the chums of the Tories?" You can say it was dark in the polling station and couldn't see the voting form. It'll sound so much better than having to admit you were trying to be clever and failing spectacularly.

About as reasonable as paying a mortgage judging by the amount who bought them from the government. Still, as you once again fail to grasp what I'm saying, if you give someone a house that they pay rent on, a reasonable rent, but they can stay in it for ever AND then pass it on to a family member AND they're not responsible for the general upkeep of it then what's the point? Let them buy it, they were only going to stay in it anyway, look at poor, dead communist Bob Crowe, couldn't get him to pass on his council property to someone who may have actually benefited from it, still as long as he was alright, sod the poorest in society who he could have helped.