Imagine that the Conservative party is proposing to bring housing into public ownership. Imagine Labour is going to repeal all legislation that currently protects tenants and that the Liberal Democrats intend to transfer all responsibilities for social housing from local to central government. All pretty improbable? Perhaps, but as the past few weeks have shown, politics is a topsy-turvy world. It's becoming harder to predict what the political parties stand for any more.
Take the Tories. When they left office in 1997, they had set up a review of higher education. In government, they had phased out student grants, replacing them with loans. The clear implication was that the days of free university places were numbered.

All this fitted in with an underlying philosophy that favoured small government and self-sufficiency. Had the Tories been re-elected in 1997, they would have required greater parental or student contributions.

Now travel along the age spectrum to the state pension years. In government, the Conservatives abolished the statutory link that required pensions to rise in line with prices or earnings, whichever was higher: only the link with prices was retained.

They were committed to keeping taxes down and enabling a renewed private sector to stimulate the economy. As with student finance, they believed the future of pensions lay in greater self-sufficiency and less reliance on the state as the great provider.

For Labour, it was an article of faith that higher education should be free for all, because this was seen as a prerequisite for opening doors to those from low-income backgrounds. In the same way, student grants, albeit means-tested, ensured that no one would be discouraged from going to university because they couldn't afford it.

In those days, we understood where the main parties were coming from. But now, views and policies have been swapped – arguments once championed by the Tories are now trotted out by Labour ministers, policies once ridiculed as unaffordable are being advocated by today's shadow cabinet.

The Conservatives say they will restore the link between pensions and earnings. They insist it is now affordable and point to savings that will flow from abolishing the government's welfare to work proposals, which they say do not work. Yet it was the Tories who pioneered New Deal ideas such as workfare and conditionality.

Once, we understood where the main parties were coming from. Now, arguments once championed by the Tories are trotted out by Labour

Where does this leave the party of small government? If it was right to target state help on poorer pensioners in the 1990s, why is it not right to do so in the 21st century – when there will, after all, be more of them?

There is, of course, a strong argument that means-tested benefits discourage saving among poor families. But boosting the universal pension and maintaining its value irrespective of prevailing economic conditions is hard to reconcile with what many would regard as traditional Tory values.

It's the same story with university funding. By the time it gained power, New Labour had, in effect, abandoned its commitment to free higher education. It regarded a larger university sector as vital for the economy, and believed this was achievable only by getting students or their parents to pay. Now it plans to allow universities to charge higher fees, transferring the burden to graduates.

Conservatives say they will abolish all fees and restore the principle that higher education should be free. They will pay for it by abandoning Labour's pledge to expand the student population and restrict numbers to what they refer to as "Mickey Mouse" courses.

But as with pensions, you will hear Labour ministers say it is only fair that individuals take more responsibility for their own futures – while leading Tories boast about what the state will pay.

Source

Housing Today

Postscript

Niall Dickson is the BBC's social affairs editor