[The desk in the British Museum where Marx…]

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The desk in the British Museum where Marx worked on of owner occupation has alsc helped to distort tenure preferences. The "preference" for owner. occupation has also been fueled by rising inflation and unequal social and legal benefits. As a result, those young and well off enough to make a choice have inevitably opted for purchase. In consequence public housing has increas ingly catered for those unable to take advantage of the artificially created benefits of home purchase.

The Tory view of the role of council housing is unequivocal - that it should cater only for the needs of those unable to make their own way in the sector. Since whole thrust of Tory hous ing policy - higher rents, cuts in public sector investment and compulsory council house sales - has been the relentless pursuit of this objective, the "residual ¡sation" of council housing Labour's approach, contrast, has been confused Labour has paid lip service to the idea of public hous ing catering for all those wishing to rent but has helped to create the con ditions in which public hous ing is drifting slowly towards residual, welfare catering largely for lower and disadvantaged groups.

What changes could be made?

Two alternative proposals are examined:

1) The replacement of tax relief on mortgage interest payments with interest rate subsidies, phased out gradually over the life of the mortgage. This would concentrate help where needed, on first time and lower income buyers.

2) The re-introduction of a tax on the imputed rental income from ownership (ie. if you own a house which would rent at £50 per week you are taxed as if you had £50 extra income.

Both proposals could be combined with the ending of the present effective tax exemption of the pesonal wealth accumulation enjoyed by owner occupiers, parallel reforms in the public sector, and the abolition of stamp duty and reduced costs of buying and selling aimed at improving access to home ownership.

The second could also be combined with a system of universal housing allowances to both tenants and owners in place of the existing system of means tested benefits for tenants.

"Housing Finance - New Policies for Labour". 75p including postage from M. Hudson, 1 Westmead Close, Cheshunt, Waltham Cross, EN7 6JP.

Contact: Labour Housing Group, Anne Sullivan, 84 Turney Rd., London SE21. Affiliations £10 per year, individual membership, f5. ERNIE STUBBINS reviews 'Marx in London', by Asa Briggs (produced by BBC publications):

THE author of this little book is not by any means a Marxist, and this fact shows through strongly in his text and his approach to his subject. A much better book on Marx in London could have been written by a serious Marxist scholar interested in placing Marx and Marxism in their historic context.

Briggs provides a guide to the places in and around London where Marx and his family lived and worked. Some years ago the Marx Memorial Library produced a similar but less comprehensive pamphlet, which in addition referred to other revolutionaries passing through London.

Briggs provides more detail, and brings the information up to date, dealing with demolitions of places where the Marx family lived.

Directions and travel information are clearly presented, the illustrations are well chosen and the layout attractive. Some of the historical photographs are exceptionally interesting, most notable being a daguerrotype of the great Chartist rally Kennington Common in 1848.

If you want to find your way to the places where Marx lived and worked, then you will find Briggs' booklet useful, although you may well find Briggs' refusal to give sources or references frustrating.

But really something more is needed to do justice to the subject and Briggs fails to provide this.

Marxists will scan Briggs' pamphlet for evidence of how Marx, Engels and the other revolutionaries of the time connected with the Living struggies of the working class in London. They will be to a large degree disappointed. The work of Marx and Engels with the left wing of the Chartist movement is virtually ignored, and Briggs' view on the alleged "backwardness' of this movement in the London area is recited once The work of the First International, led by Marx, in a wide range of trade union and other fights in the London area, is well documented in the papers and minutes of the First Inter'Capital' national, but disregarded entirely by Briggs.

Briggs is more interested in commenting on Marx's links with the other exiled revolutionaries in London, but even this is hard to do without a serious assessment of the First International. (The absence of references to the literature could deny the reader the pleasure of E.H. Carr's The Romantic Exiles, on the extraordinary lives of Herzen and other Russian exiles in London).

Sometimes, Briggs is forced to extremely bizarre lengths to establish the 'links'. Thus we are treated to the knowledge that the exiled Italian revolutionary Panizzi fled from the Duchy of Modena, whereas Marx later went to live in a street in Kentish Town called Modena Villas! Can this be the flower of decadent bourgeois scholarship?

Briggs treats his sections on Marx's home and family life less as occasions to illustrate the social conditions of the revolutionary exiles and more as opportunities to deploy totally ahistorical arguments ad hominem. We learn for example, in the Mards habits be drinking, of a smoking and worse yet, of sleeping fully clothed on a sofa!

Academic How rarefied must be the atmosphere of Worcester College, Oxford, for 130 year old tobacco smoke to obscure from academic view the fact that this disreputable foreigner changed the course of human history by providing a true armoury of insights into the world that can never be extinguished. It takes a skilled historian indeed to miss this historical fact.

But assertions that Trotsky led the Mensheviks in the 1903 split in the RSDLP and that "There is no evidence that Lenin interested himself in the details of British politics' might cause eyebrows to be raised, even in the Oxford common rooms.

It is not only socialists who would take issue with some of Briggs' assertions.

Enthusiasts of good food will be astonished to find Manzi's, which was once the German Hotel and accommodated the Marx family until they could no longer afford the rent, described as 'a fish restaurant" . Surely an academic of Briggs' reputation could have been expected to venture past Wheelers to discover that Manzi's is the fish restaurant.

This reviewer recommends it more highly than Briggs' booklet.

Bma