[Cheech & Chong]
Matt Davies, at Woking Libertarians, refers to this BBC story, which has since been copied by some of the other MSM:
The Local Government Association… is calling for new powers to allow town halls to temporarily use shops as sites for community projects… to allow councils to take over shops once they have been vacant for three months.
Leaving aside the point about why council tax payers’ money should be spent on trying to prevent foreign news crews from leaving the UK with footage of boarded-up shops that might be embarrassing to the Brown junta (as all those photos of piles of rubbish were to Callaghan’s), there are a number of points arising:
What exactly is meant by the term ‘take over’?
Let us assume that I own a property in the High Street which has until recently been rented to a retailer. The retailer either goes out of business or moves, and I am unable for the time being to find a new tenant prepared to pay me the rent I am asking for the premises.
Three months pass.
What exactly will the council do now by way of ‘taking over’ my premises?
They could phone me up and offer me the rent which I am asking. As a landlord I would doubtless take them up on this, happy to be paid the market rate for what is now to become a diversity outreach drop-in centre or something. How long the council tax payers would put up with it would remain to be seen. I don’t suppose it’s very likely, because if it happened to one lucky landlord all the others would want some too.
They could compulsorily purchase the shop, though unless they also manage to nobble what is left of the property market this is likely to be an expensive option; rather more so, if they try it on with people and are dragged into court. Once again, it seems unlikely that the council tax payers will be all that keen on funding such lavish expenditure.
Either of these things could be done without the council having any new ‘powers’. So what is it that the LGA really want, and about which they are being so winningly coy?
Is not the point of this to obtain the use of my premises without paying me for it?
Might it include forcing me to continue to maintain the property at my own expense while the council use it?
Or might they simply seize the property without any compensation at all?
Who pays the council tax, business rate or whatever? Who pays for the services? Who pays for refitting the shop into a self-esteem counselling centre for people in the community with mental health issues?
Assuming that the measure really does last only for the duration of the recession (however that is to be defined, and notwithstanding the reluctance of the ruling class ever to forgo new powers once obtained), and that it is finally returned to me, who pays for rebuilding it back into a shop again, which, given what happened when the mental health issues community undertook a personally challenging self-expression validation exercise, will include filling in the crater?
If, before the recession is deemed to be over, someone comes to me and asks to rent the shop (despite whatever effect obtains upon retail goodwill by virtue of its current reputation as a lesbian IVF facilitation workshop apparently staffed by characters from a 1970s underground comic long since banned), how do I go about evicting the present ‘tenants’, who, outraged at my male-chauvinist capitalist-imperialist interference, and the prospect of having to reapply for their jobs with the council, have now called in all their mates from London and Brighton, some of whom are much scarier than themselves, written a piece in Schnews, done an interview with the regional telly, hung up a lot of banners and declared the building to be under the occupation of the LGBT Liberation Army (Marxist-Leninist) General Command?
One cannot help but wonder how commercial landlords (some of whom are quite large firms with competent legal departments) might react to questions such as these. I suspect it would usually end up, expensively again, in court.
My suspicions are that the LGA has not thought this through, that it will be impossible to implement, and that Brown’s boarded-up shops will duly join Callaghan’s rubbish bag mountains in the archive of British socialist icons.
