[-HESEL TINE COOK THE BOOKS Loss-making Harold Whitlock…]

Scan page 5

-HESEL TINE COOK THE BOOKS Loss-making Harold Whitlock was a fast walker in his time. In 1936' he strolled off with the gold medal at the Berlin Olympics for the 50 kilometre walk (and presumably shook hands politely with Hitler).

At 76 his chances of being selected for the next Olympics are remote and speculation about the chances of him pulling out of the Moscow games has been less than intense.

The Daily Telegraph had no hesitation, however, in rushing us the hot news, on the back page, in one of those fillers normally reserved for telling readers that someone they had i never heard of is dead.

"I wouldn't go" said the headline and underneath was Harold declaring that "if he was still a top athlete he would not go to Moscow unless the Labour spokesman Roy Hattersley last week pledged the next Labour government to repeal the Tory Housing Bill.

The Bill aims to provide council tenants-at massive expensé-with the "right to buy" their houses at knockdown prices.

The Tory plan is to slash the number of houses available for rent in the public sector, in order to boost the rents that can be charged by Tory rack-renting private landlords, and the prices of houses built by Tory developers in the private sector.

Slick

In order to dress up this viciously anti-working class plan as somehow desirable, Heseltine and the Tories' slick campaign managers have had to concoct a completely spurious set of figures to "prove" that selling off council housing will make money for the local authorities.

But of course Heseltine himself has claimed that the "sale of the century" is a major handout to would-be buyers, declaring that:

No single piece of legisla ion has enabled the transier. o so much capital wealth from state to people"

-And indeed a close look at Heseltine's figures shows a concerted attempt to cover up the fact that in almost every likely instance the sale of a council property will, in the lorig term, produce a net loss to the authority concerned.

A number of key fiddles emerge in Heseltine's paper.

*The paper looks only at profit or loss on the sale of houses over a 20-year period:

but those council houses likely to be sold will last much longer than that -at least another 50 years-and would therefore stanians pulled out of Afghan It was good for the Telegraph to know that they had sport on their side. All they have to do now is get Harold into the Olympic squad and this boycott might start to catch on.

So far there have been no reported recantations from Scottish footballers who, played in Chile or Argentina.

Better still would be recantations from English footballers who didn't play in Argentina, but who would have done if England had not been knocked out of the World Cup; and who now would have boycotted Moscow if football was being played there; and if they were picked; and if the Soviet troops did not pull out of Afghanistan (and Militant did not pull out of the Labour Party).

At least that would spare us from the agony of whether potentially bring in 30 years' more rent.

*Heseltine throws in an arbitrary figure of £5,500 for the renovation of council houses: but leaves out of account any projected value for the sites on which they standthus artificially increasing the liabilities to councils without accounting the assets.

*Heseltine works on an average rent figure for all council. houses-ignoring the fact that only the better quality, higher rent council property tends to be sold. In this way he lowers the amount of rent revenue to be expected.

*Despite evidence' that the typical buyer of a council house Prince Philip was going.

As head of the, International Equestrian Federation he travelled to Moscow last year to see if the drains were big enough for his horses' shit. (It is this attention to detail that marks a great world leader and explains why the Daily Mail thinks it would be la major propaganda coup for the Russians" if he attends the Olympics).

Perhaps saddest of all is the case of all those public spirited enterprises which though they would cash in on the Olympics by paying towards the team's expenses and being permitted to boast about having done so.

According to the Sunday Telegraph, Watney's are considering cancelling a plan to send 100 customers and landlords.to Moscow hurriedly removed all while Chiltonian reference to Moscow from an Olympics medal chart this week» is aged 30-40, Heseltine's figures assume' the buyer is 50, and would live to 85-thus reducing the amount of rent he/she would pay and increasing the amount of rent rebate they could claim.

This kind of gross manipulation enables Heseltine 'o claim a profit of £2,185 for every house sold. Yet the original paper on the "sale of the century" predicted losses ranging between £4,550 and €5,530 on each house!

Thus while a handful of people could become houseowners, the working class as a whole as taxpayers and tenants lose out all ways on the Tories' "bargain" package. They face