Right to buy is a right to make all housing even more unaffordable and is yet another short-termist Tory policy that cheats the next generation

First it was an uncosted £8billion NHS funding boost, then a similarly dubious plan to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1million, and now those snake-oil merchant Tories want to sell 1.3million housing association properties off for a song.

This leaves me apoplectic with rage. Make no mistake, this naked vote bribe, which was at the centre of the party’s manifesto launch today, would cost Britain – and especially the next generation - dearly.

Of course home ownership is a good thing, but do we really want to live in a country where there is no social housing and where renting all takes place on the private market – with tenants increasingly relying on already soaring state subsidies?

Because that is the risk if we allow David Cameron’s 1980s tribute act to get back on the stage.

But the thing that should scare you most about extending Margaret Thatcher’s disastrous right-to-buy policy from council homes to housing association properties is that it will make ALL homes even more unaffordable – and all this while Britain is suffering its worst housing crisis since the Second World War.

This is because selling social housing – even when tenants are given discounts of up to 70% like the Tories now propose - always pushes more people into private renting and allows our stagnant stock of houses to become even more lucrative for buy-to-let investors, who push up demand at the expense of first-time buyers.

A third of ex-council homes sold in the 1980s are now owned by private landlords – and many of these properties are rented at exorbitant rates to the old tenants.

So, with a right-to-buy extension, we can expect at least a similar proportion of buyers to soon sell-up – either because they can’t afford their mortgages, or they simply want to turn a profit by selling on at full market rate, or, worse, they become victims to vultures who offer to buy their houses in return for an unfair cut of the proceeds.

But, either way, these are vulnerable people who will probably end up back on the social housing waiting list, which now stands at a record 1.8million families.

In the mean time, with more people faced with steep private rents, the government’s housing-benefit bill will continue to soar – undermining the Tories’ blinkered welfare crackdown and robbing the Treasury of cash it could have spent on reducing the deficit or even, heaven forefend, on vital services.

Already, half a million more people now rely on state handouts to pay their rent than when the Tory-led coalition came to power, with the cost rising by £650million a year, according to Department for Work and Pensions figures.

Yet, in what should be seen as a staggering own goal, if we sell off 1.3million social homes at a heavy discount, we will not only be left paying a burgeoning bill for a growing number of poverty-stricken private renters, but we will also make getting on the housing ladder even harder for traditional middle-class Conservative voters’ children.

Of course, selling social houses for less than they’re worth would matter less if we could build enough new homes to replace them, but of course we won’t.

The Conservatives say they have learned their lesson from the 1980s, when they allowed 1.5million social homes to be sold off but prevented councils from using proceeds to replace them, so now they are willing to plough the sales revenues backing into building more housing association properties.

But their plans to sell to tenants at discounts of up to 70% mean it would be virtually impossible to replace them – unless builders and land sellers also offer discounts, which of course they don’t.

The only way housing associations could come close to replacing them would be if they built exclusively in cheaper brownfield or other fringe sites – assuming they can even get planning permission under the current Nimby-protecting system.

This leads to the nasty possibility of social cleansing - as working-class tenants sell up and move to the outskirts while middle-class speculators move into these often nice homes in central locations.

In the end, selling off our already dwindling stock of social housing betrays staggering short-sightedness from a party that likes to talk about its “long-term economic plan”.

But what kind of long-term plan prefers vote-grabbing gimmicks to tackling the housing crisis by increasing and not decreasing the stock of social homes?

And what kind of long-term plan manages to betray all but the richest members of the next generation into never having the chance to either purchase or rent a decent home of their own?

If ever you wanted evidence that the Tories operate under a banner of narrow self-interest, their latest right-to-buy wheeze is it.