Balancing the Council Books on the Backs of the Poorest Tenants in Cheltenham.
Welcome back! Watch Professor Richard Murphy expose the common myths about money But this is not just some distant, abstract theory debated by professors in university lecture halls.
This is happening right here, right now, on our very own doorstep in Cheltenham.
If you want to understand why our local services are squeezed, why our high street is struggling, and why renters in this town are being pushed to the brink, you have to look at the political ideology driving the decision-making inside Cheltenham Borough Council. Specifically, we need to talk about the Liberal Democrats.
Now, they might wear yellow rosettes and talk a good game about community, but when you look at their actual policies, their priorities tell a completely different story. In reality, the Liberal Democrats in Cheltenham and across Gloucestershire operate as the direct children and grandchildren of Margaret Thatcher. They are devout advocates of neoliberal, Thatcherite, trickle-down economics.
Let us pop the bonnet on Cheltenham’s local governance and look at the actual machinery of how these priorities are playing out.
1. The Golden Valley Project: Debt for the Many, Profits for the Few
Let us start with the crown jewel of the council's strategy: the massive Golden Valley development. This is a colossal, high-tech cyber project designed to bring international tech companies and cyber security firms to the edge of town.
On paper, it sounds incredibly glamorous. But let us look at the financial plumbing of how it is actually structured.
This project lumbers an immense mountain of debt straight onto the shoulders of the existing residents of Cheltenham. And who gets the immediate payoff? The private developers and the big banks. They receive their lucrative payouts, their fees, and their guaranteed corporate profits right at the very beginning of the cycle. They are completely insulated from risk.
Meanwhile, regular local people are left holding the financial bag. The entire project is built on the speculative promise of future wealth that is supposed to trickle down to the town eventually. But worse than that, it prioritizes infrastructure and support for a corporate workforce that does not even live in Cheltenham yet, while completely ignoring the urgent, pressing needs of the people who live here today.
2. Balancing the Books on the Backs of the Poorest
Because local leadership is stuck in the outdated, non-MMT mindset that a local authority must run itself exactly like a household or a private business, they are obsessed with balancing their ledgers. But because their finances are incredibly shaky and opaque, they choose to balance those books on the backs of the lowest-income residents in Cheltenham today.
Look at what they did with Cheltenham Borough Homes. By bringing social housing management back in-house, they dismantled an arm's-length organization, centralizing control under a council framework that is fundamentally driven by austerity-style book-balancing rather than the direct, expansive welfare of the tenants.
When it comes to the private rental sector, the situation is even more damning. The council has completely abandoned private renters to the whims of a predatory rental market. Even with the new powers available under the rental reform bill, their approach to enforcement is entirely reactive. They do absolutely nothing to proactively police rogue landlords, inspect sub-standard properties, or enforce fair conditions.
Instead, they place the entire, exhausting onus onto the individual renter to complain, to fight, and to try and improve their own lot. Good luck with that on your own.
3. The Thatcherite Wealth Extraction Strategy That expolits Tenants: Isolation vs Organisation
Why do they leave renters to fight these battles entirely on their own? Because that is exactly how property businesses and institutional landlords want the game to be played.
Property companies and cynical landlords want individual tenants completely isolated. They do not want people organizing together, sharing information, forming tenant unions, or building collective power, because collective power threatens corporate profit margins. And the Liberal Democrats, trapped in their Thatcherite ideology of individualism, are completely happy to facilitate that isolation. They treat housing as a speculative asset and a personal consumer choice, rather than a fundamental human utility.
By focusing on corporate megaprojects and speculative financial deals, their policies directly exacerbate the local cost of living crisis and worsen the ecological emergency. They are starving our local high street of the very thing it needs to survive: secure residents with money in their pockets who can afford to make local, ethical choices.
Summary
What is happening in Cheltenham is a textbook example of what happens when you apply failed trickle-down economic theories to local government.
We do not build a thriving, resilient town by racking up public debt for immediate corporate payoffs while leaving our poorest residents to sink or swim. We build it from the ground up. By recognizing that housing is a basic utility, we can protect renters, lower the cost of living, and stop wealth from being extracted from our communities. It is time to stop prioritizing speculative corporate profits for tomorrow, and start prioritizing the health, security, and wealth of the people who actually live in Cheltenham today.
