It's the same old sTory

It started in June, with Iain Duncan Smith announcing that the government was planning to force working people out of their homes and their areas to chase non-existent jobs the length and breadth of the country.

In fact, he phrased it as "plans to encourage the unemployed to move to other areas with better opportunities" but, stripped of the window-dressing, our version is almost certainly more accurate.

Because the jobs don't exist and, in addition, where a few new jobs do appear, there are many more than enough candidates available locally to fill them.

A survey showed on Tuesday that there are, in most areas, at least nine available applicants for every vacancy, rising in London to a mindbending 36.

Mr Duncan Smith's policy, therefore, didn't make much sense in the minds of anyone who knew the situation.

But it makes a lot more sense now, when put in the context of Prime Minister David Cameron's further mapping out of the policy's detail.

It turns out that mobility is the least part of the plan. The rest of it entails tenants losing their security of tenure and being made vulnerable to being summarily kicked out if their family circumstances change and, in any event, only having tenure for a fixed term, no matter what the circumstances.

The sheer vindictiveness of the policy was well demonstrated by Mr Cameron when he addressed a meeting in Birmingham.

"At the moment," he said, "we have a system very much where, if you get a council house or an affordable house, it is yours for ever."

And in shocked tones he warned that, "in some cases, people actually hand them down to their children."

And there you have it. The defender of inheritance and family wealth, both in principle and in his own life, feels that what is good enough for the wealthy shouldn't under any circumstances be extended to the lower orders.

If you're posh enough, you can inherit your parents' home when they die, but, if you are working class and your parents die, you ought to be kicked out in the street to fend for yourself, apparently.

Housing Minister Grant Shapps took it even further. Many tenants, he said, remain trapped in their homes by "the safety net that social housing provides."

Well, we've got news for the honourable gentleman. it isn't the social housing system that traps people, it is a system of low wages, insecure unemployment and a free market in house prices that constitutes the trap.

When a house for your family can cost around 10 years of your wages and you will pay back three times what you borrow, a mortgage is out of the question.

When your utility bills double every few years so that avaricious transnationals can pay big dividends to greedy shareholders, that constitutes a trap.

When the transport bills, if you move to a cheaper location, can outweigh the savings on the house price, those constitute a trap and it's a trap that there's little you can do about.

And when the government steadily sells off its social housing stock while at the same time making hundreds of thousands redundant and therefore in need of cheaper housing, that constitutes a trap.

No, this government's policies aren't about getting poorer people out of a social housing trap.

They are designed to get them into an even bigger and more vicious trap called the private sector.

And as animals know very well, when you're trapped, the trapper skins you and sells the pelt.

This coalition isn't looking to free people from a trap, it's looking to steer them into one that they and theirs can profit from.

It's still the same old sTory.