Michael Gove has taken another major Tory step towards making public services unaffordable – and his party unelectable.

He has transferred more than £14 million of Middlesbrough Council assets to the Middlesbrough Development Corporation, a private company chaired by Tory Lord Ben Houchen.

So it seems the bankrupting of local councils was a deliberate Tory policy, intended to force the sale or transfer of more public assets into private hands.

This is problematic on at least three levels:

Firstly, the MDC’s parent organisation, the Tees Valley Combined Authority, is the subject of long-running allegations against it – as described in a report commissioned by the Tory government.

Next: loss of assets means loss of revenue. In local government, assets are property that are used to provide services – that sometimes come with a charge. If they aren’t available to local government any more, then it means less money will come to councils.

Finally: this means the public will be asked to pay more for public services – because the council will have to rent the assets it has lost, back from the new owner.

This is simply a way of passing public money over to the extremely rich, who don’t even have to pay for it. And we all know:

Here’s a quick TV clip in which Houchen was nailed by the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire, proving that he is a liar and his corporations can’t be trusted:

Here’s the bottom line:

Funnily enough, the process described above was discussed on This Site, only a week ago, after economist Gary Stevenson told us why privatisation puts up our taxes. I wrote:

Neoliberal governments since 1979 have sold off all the property they own, meaning that – in order to provide services – they have to rent property from the rich people to whom they sold it all.

This is, of course, a ridiculous proposition because renting property from rich people is much more expensive than owning it oneself. We can see this from the sale of council housing; now councils don’t have any low-cost, low-rent houses, more and more people are becoming homeless because they can’t pay the sky-high rents demanded by private landlords, or the sky-high mortgages demanded by lenders.

So ordinary working people are now having to pay enormous taxes in order to allow our governments to pay for these services at exorbitant prices, because they’ve given all the means of providing these services to the rich.

Gary’s answer is to tax the rich, so they have to sell off their ill-gotten government assets in order to make ends meet.

The problem is that Tories like Michael Gove want the rich to own public assets and charge the Earth for the use of them; it’s an opportunity to say public services are too expensive and close them down, hugely disadvantaging the poor and laying them open to exploitation – by the rich.

Now that Gary has exposed the strategy, we can all see it for what it is.

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