Have no fears! This is not another expensively produced housing stock transfer promotional film but a film that captures the resistance of tenants in Edinburgh to housing privatisation in 2005.

A key plank in the Scottish Executive’s privatisation programme has been it’s commitment to housing stock transfer across Scotland. Housing stock transfer, that is the transfer of council owned and managed housing stock (what used to be called ‘council houses’) to ‘registered social landlords’ has been the main component of Executive public housing policy since 1999. Arguably the drive to remove what remains of Scotland’s depleted council housing stock, which has decreased by over 65 per cent since 1979, from councils – and public political accountability – has surpassed a similar programme of transfers across England and Wales which serves to remind us, if indeed we need more reminding, that ‘Scotland’ is not being ‘protected’, as some would have us believe, from the more radical aspects of Blairite and Third Way ideology.

Housing has long been central to political and social agitation in Scotland. From the Clydeside Rent Strikes of the First World War and early 1920s, through to squatters and other struggles in the post-1945 era, housing – and the demand for decent and affordable public housing to rent has been to the fore in Scottish politics. Housing stock transfer, in some respects, represents the latest episode in this long history. It has re-ignited the politics of housing in Scotland; it has refocused attention on the question of affordable housing provision for a sizeable proportion of the population of Scotland today. It has also called into question once more the nature of New Labour’s UK-wide programme of public sector ‘modernisation’ and the wholesale restructuring of welfare provision. And let’s make no mistake, council housing has played a crucial role in the development of state welfare/social policy in Britain during the course of the twentieth century.

These issues provide the background context for this excellent film which explores opposition to Edinburgh City Council’s plans during 2005 to transfer 23,000 council houses to the City of Edinburgh Housing Association (CESA). Focusing on the campaign by Edinburgh Against Stock Transfer (EAST) to defend council housing in Edinburgh, the film presents many of the key issues that lie at the centre of the stock transfer debate across the country. Not only is it in Edinburgh that tenants and other campaigning groups have argued that the case for transfer has often been high on expensive and glossy promotion, usually involving well known ‘media personalities’ (and in Edinburgh Sally Magnusson joins the list of those who have featured on promotional films), and low on making open to public scrutiny many of the key funding and other policy implications of transfer. ‘Smoke and mirrors’ neatly describes not only how housing transfer has often been promoted – but also privatisation in all its diverse forms.

Much of the focus of housing policy and housing debate in Scotland has focused on the particularities of Glasgow and its acute housing problems. That this film focuses on Edinburgh gives it added weight, I feel. Coming on the back of the decision by Glasgow tenants to vote for transfer in 2002 there was expectation, not least at Scottish Executive and local government levels, that tenants in Edinburgh and elsewhere in Scotland would follow suit. However, the ongoing controversy around transfer in Glasgow was an important factor in persuading Edinburgh tenants to reject transfer. They voted by 53 per cent to 47 per cent to reject transfer in a ballot in December 2006. The ‘Glasgow Factor’ features strongly in this film and incidentally this was identified by Edinburgh Council’s housing department following a post-ballot survey as a key issue in the no-vote.

Since the Edinburgh no-vote, two other ballots of tenants, in Stirling and in Renfrewshire, have resulted in no-votes. In each area the same issues prevail: that transfer is privatisation in all but name, it removes public housing from local democratic political control and leads to higher rents (and profits for financial institutions!) (see Defend Council Housing, 2006 – www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk).

This is a partisan film and is all the better for it. It does not offer some kind of bland ‘balanced’ account of transfer but it clearly on the side of those rejecting transfer. Having seen many of the promotional videos produced at great cost by local authorities up and down the country, this DVD offers a range of different and crucially important insights on the transfer process. In this respect it has relevance well beyond Edinburgh and Scotland. If I had one criticism to make it is on the Edinburgh ‘context’. It is clear from the film that transfer in Edinburgh would have seen valuable chunks of council owned land sold off to the private sector for next to nothing (and each housing unit was only valued around £900). In places such as Leith, where there is great demand for land for expensive ‘upmarket’ housing, there are obvious attractions to developers here. Yet that Edinburgh currently represents a ‘boomtown’ for property developers, banks and financiers remains somewhat implicit. The declining quality and poor conditions of the council-owned stock stands in increasingly sharp contrast to the accumulation of wealth not least in terms of property elsewhere in the City. Edinburgh’s tenants, in rejecting stock transfer, were not only putting one over on the Scottish Executive in its own ‘backyard’ but also drawing attention to the yawning gap that New Labour is presiding over across the UK. This film is a must for all of those who are resisting New Labour’s privatisation agenda across the UK.

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