Right to Buy is a deeply unequal stopgap, not a solution to the Housing Crisis

Under George Osborne's direction, the Conservative approach to tackling the housing crisis was to resurrect Thatcherism. This came in the form of Right to Buy, the cheap sell off of social housing to first time buyers.

The trouble is, from the start, it was always going to be a time and resource limited solution. Eventually, as always, the Tories would run out of public assets to privatise and the well would run dry.

As New Statesman Political Editor George Eaton put it, "the problem with Thatcherism is that eventually you run out of other people's assets."

Today, the homelessness charity Crisis and the Local Government Association (LGA) were on the same page in calling out the effects of Right to Buy on social housing: the draining of a vital resource that is not being replaced.

Right to Buy, like Thatcherite policies in the 1980s, plugged gaps created by the withdrawal of the state with privatised public assets to buy time for the private sector to get prepared to take over and pick up the slack.

Osborne's policy kept the middle class housing sector afloat at the expense of social housing - even that technically owned by housing association independent from the government - which was sorely needed to provide affordable shelter for the least well off.

Now as then, the results are wildly inconsistent and deeply unequal.

Crisis have put forward a strategy to eliminate poverty in the next decade that puts new social housing - a hundred thousand new homes a year - at the centre. It combines these with a national rollout of Housing First and the strengthening of the rights of renters.

The LGA say that the core of any sustainable social housing plans, like those proposed by Crisis, must by necessity be devolving proper funding to local government so it can get on with the work of building homes.

For progressives, redistributing funds to local government for affordable and social housing is a clear cut issue - especially to poorer areas that see the least benefit from a scheme that doesn't even return the full receipts from the sale of local housing assets. But will Conservatives listen?

The Northern Powerhouse is a smoke-and-mirrors sales pitch to sell the North and it's assets. The North needs something real.

Photograph: Northern Rail train at Manchester Oxford Road by Mikey. (License) (Cropped)

The chaos caused by the mess Northern Rail has made of it's timetables, has led to commentators calling into question how committed the government really is to the vaunted Northern Powerhouse - it's plan to rejuvenate the North.

Perhaps this mess would have been containable for the government, if it wasn't for the fact that the collapse of the rail network in the North comes not in isolation, but on the back of big promises that been ever further downgraded until they have been all but scrapped.

Tory ministers had pledged major upgrades and major new links. But the big pledges were watered down. Last summer, the transport minister announced that Electrification for the North were cancelled, even as he confirmed more investment in London.

And the ambitions of the TransPennine railway upgrades have been severely contracted - originally pitched as work from Liverpool to Newcastle, the latest focus is just on speeding up links between Bradford, Leeds and Manchester.

Even in the face of the current crisis, the Transport Secretary has been reluctant to talk punitively of how the rail services are being run - even as they are effectively curtailed, cut down to something approximate to an emergency schedule.

It isn't hard to see why the Northern Powerhouse now looks to have been all smoke and mirrors.

Part of the problem is that it was. In essence, the government plan for devolution was constructed around a branding exercise - the "Northern Powerhouse", the "Midland's Engine" - the semantics of which give away the broader aim of gearing the regions towards serving the corporate interests of UK PLC.

In practice, devolution reflected Conservative interests. It cut money from local services, only to return it, in part, through the Metro Mayors - executive figures, alienated from local government and accountability - whose role seems mostly intended to spend the funds on easing the way for business.

The focus was on building a framework, an infrastructure, that will encourage inward investment into a transport hub that would have most Northerners at most an hour away from most major Northern cities and their employment opportunities.

But the plan has also effectively cut local people out of the loop - developing plans for them, to impose on them. And the focus is still on the cities, and not post-industrial towns, where people have been left feeling abandoned.

Recently speaking at a Manchester Business School event on the Northern Powerhouse, Vince Cable delved into how the Powerhouse plans that he and George Osborne developed unfolded.

Cable said that the Northern Powerhouse was supposed to achieve two things: balance out the lure of London and address previous failures to get people and jobs in the same place - which he referred to as the "work to the workers, or workers to the work" dilemma. Transport would be key to Powerhouse's "workers to the work" approach.

Cable argued that efforts were however undermined by budget cuts - the Liberal Democrat said that he protested cuts to capital spending, and that the local government minister failed to protect local government budgets.

The result was a collection of cities, still poorly connected, that have become more vibrant and dynamic, but are still surrounded by impoverished suburbs - already stripped of opportunities, now cut off and drowning amid cuts.

In these conditions, of course, any investment for the North is welcome. And needed. But is tailoring the whole region purely for business the right way to go about it?

The Conservatives have sought to rebrand the North and prepare it's assets - including Northerners themselves, presented as a pool of workers and customers within easy reach and ready to scramble - for sale. Regional devolution becomes a sales pitch, all show and no substance.

But where are Northerners themselves fitting into this? People in the North are struggling to make ordinary journey's to work, that they really can't afford to lose. With competition for jobs so overwhelming, expensive journeys and cancellations are a direct threat to the ability of the lowest earners to get by.

There's only so much that an influx of business investors and new jobs could fix - even job security would unlikely be improved if the amount of work available better matched the demand for employment, such is the direction working conditions are headed in.

The North need more that is rooted there. Affordable housing. Affordable and reliable public transport. Career opportunities for the least well off, and least skilled, with the longevity and security around which to build a life.

Was any of this ever on the cards with the Northern Powerhouse?

The North needs public investment in public infrastructure and work deeply rooted in it's own communities - the means to make use of it's own resources. Achieving that from the outside, from distant Westminster, would be hard.

But from well organised and funded local government, taking seriously civic engagement, giving people a real voice and involvement? In that there is hope.

PMQs in Review: How have the government and opposition fared in Corbyn's first year?

The strike of Twelve on Wednesdays heralds the beginning of PMQs, a contest it is hard to say that progressives have been winning over the past six years.

Since Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader last autumn, PMQs has had an extra layer of attention paid to it. After Corbyn offered a new politics, kinder and more reasonable, commentators wondered at how that could be translated to the hostile cauldron of PMQs.

On the whole the answer has been a barrage of criticism of Corbyn's performances opposite David Cameron. At the top of the list has been his apparent lack of aggression and persistence, that has been accused of letting Cameron's ministry off lightly. It has also been said that there has been a simple lack of professional preparedness (Hazarika, 2016).

Part of Corbyn's problem, at least initially, was an unfocussed approach, where each question would press on a different subject. While that approach allowed for the covering of more ground, it also meant that ground was covered more thinly - or occasionally not at all in the face of a persistently aggressive Cameron, who frequently turned the format upside down by firing questions of his own back.

Others who stepped up to lead PMQs received a warmer response from critics. David Cameron is considered almost universally to have PMQs firmly in his grasp and to hold a position of confident control over the proceedings that makes life difficult for any opponent - Ed Miliband just as much as Jeremy Corbyn.

Cameron's and Corbyn's deputies George Osborne and Angela Eagle also had chances to take on PMQs. Osborne comes from the same PMQs school as Cameron, so his confidence comes with little surprise. But Angela Eagle's turn standing in for Corbyn had to be considered within the context of Labour MPs dissatisfaction with Corbyn.

Angela Eagle herself was a competent performer. Yet she also received much better support from her own benches than Corbyn is often afforded, which can only have made life easier. It also clearly suited the Commons that Eagle also went back to the old bantering approach.

While some of Corbyn's difficulties might be put down to his own flaws, there where early innovations. The use of letters from members of the public to add a new dimension to a question, which might force the PM to answer more straightly - something much needed within the format.

And that format itself aught to carry some of the blame. The Prime Minister is under no real obligation to give straight and clear answers to questions and there is no arbiter of the factual accuracy, relevance or suitability of an answer. It is left to the questioner to persist - a privilege that only two MPs are afforded.

Could changes to the format help? First Minister's Questions at Holyrood adopted a new longer format this year, giving more time to press for detail, and all of its opposition party leaders get a chance to ask a couple of questions. But whether adapting to that format or more likely remaining within the current format, co-operation between opposition MPs to coordinate questions alone - to hit a consistent tone and plant follow ups - would at least go some way, in the short term, to forcing the PM to give more specific answers.

September, when the recess ends, will see the new Conservative leader Theresa May return for her second appearance - and presumably further ones - but it isn't yet settled who her opponent will be. Whoever prevails in the Labour leadership election has to look back seriously and methodically at Corbyn's first year as opposition leader.

Regardless of whether it has been the fault of Corbyn or not, the opposition has struggled to get its message out and PMQs is one of the few opportunities for free, unfiltered, media coverage. The next leader of the Labour Party, as effective leader of the opposition to the government, needs to have a clear answer to the question: How can we make best use of those six questions and thirty minutes?