Thought For The Day - 8 June 2007

Yesterday came the news that house prices may rise yet higher, to ten times annual income. I think that’s scandalous. Young couples today have to mortgage their lives to afford a home. A while back I helped celebrate the centenary of Hampstead Garden Suburb, Dame Henrietta Barnet’s project to create social housing in one of London’s loveliest areas. The houses were designed for all income groups, including cottages affordable by poor families then living in inner city slums. Today those cottages are almost unaffordable for a couple living on two incomes, especially if one of them is a teacher and the other a nurse. So how are we better off?

It was 12 years ago when we first heard that there was going to be a problem. The then Secretary of State for the Environment, a highly committed Christian, invited the Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, the late Cardinal Hume and myself for dinner. He told us in despair that there was a need for 400,000 extra living units in South East England, because marriage was breaking down, there were fewer families and more people were living alone.

And that too has to do with the market. What in a consumerist culture is the meaning of words like loyalty or steadfastness? We used to buy things hoping they would last. Now we often buy them and throw them away a few years later in favour of the next new model. And that can apply to what we once called marriages as well.

The Bible has a word for this. It’s called idolatry. In ancient times people worshipped the gods of the sun and rain hoping they’d bring a good harvest. Today we sometimes worship the shopping centre and the property pages hoping they’ll bring happiness. What people forgot, then and now, was that these forces, whether of nature or the market, are blind. We thought the result would be affluence. Instead what we got was affluenza: that strange condition in which the more we have the unhappier we become.

Oscar Wilde defined a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. We’re in danger of becoming a cynical age, knowing the price of a house, but forgetting the value of a home. If we worship the market, it can turn us into slaves. For heaven’s sake let’s make housing affordable for young couples again. Let’s put people first. We were not made to serve the economy. The economy was made to serve us.

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