culture shock

My wife and I arrived in Bath in 1969. Beautiful, sleepy, historic, cheap, kindly. We rented a flat in the centre of the city, just by the river at its most-photographed, and with lovely views. We had a sitting room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. I was earning about £1,000 a year and we paid some £250 a year rent.

The children came along, so we had to get something a little bigger and in 1975 we managed to buy a rather battered Georgian house - four bedrooms, kitchen, sitting room and dining room and a long garden, spectacular views over the city. By now, I was earning nearly £4,000 a year. The house cost a stately £12,000 and we got a mortgage from the local council, payments were about £1,000 a year.

The wonderful thing about our situation was that we had nice neighbours, interesting,friendly, educated, polite, relatively hard up. Some had lived there all their lives, some had recently moved in, we had a bookmaker, a writer, a builder, a clerical officer and a teacher amongst the others - classless, you may say.

I saw that same house in an estate agents window today priced at £875,000. The mortgage to purchase this house would cost in the region of £50,000 a year. On the same scale as me, 30 years ago, you'd have to earn at least £200,000 to finance that reasonably.

What is the moral that we must draw from this - you need to be very rich to enjoy the style of life your parents had, and if you're not OUT!

Out far enough to roam the streets on Saturday nights, drunk, dejected, arrogant, abusive.

Housing is important, it's not just the roof over your head, housing dictates the mix of society and has an effect over how we think and act. Where you live and with whom is the primary effect of society on you and your family day after day.

What kind of society do we live in when a socialist government depends on the support of right wing newspapers? What kind of society do we live in when a socialist government sells off supported housing? What kind of society do we live in when our kids have no hope of expecting the same lifestyle as their parents.What kind of society do we live in when greed is rewarded and open-heartedness laughed at? What kind of society do we live in when a socialist government fosters xenophobia in its wish to support its agressive actions.
A dysfunctional society. That's what.

It's all wrong. But most wrong is the physical segregation of the working classes.