THE PRIVATE PROPERTY PARTY:

Privatisation is the multibillion-pound centrepiece of Osborne's austerity - yet it rarely gets a mention from either politicians or press. The Queen mentioned it in her speech last week, but the headline writers ignored it. And if you don't know that this Thursday is the closing date for consultation on the sale of the Land Registry, our public record of who owns what property, that's hardly your fault - I haven't spotted it in the papers, either.

But without getting rid of prize assets, Osborne's austerity programme falls apart. At a time when tax revenues are more weak stream than healthy flood, those sales bring much-needed cash into the Treasury and make his sums add up. The independent Office for Budget Responsibility has ruled that the only reason the chancellor met his debts target last year was because he flogged off our public assets. And what a fire sale that was, with everything from our last remaining stake in the Royal Mail to shares in Eurostar shoved out the door in the biggest wave of privatisations of any year in British history.

And more, much more, is to come. The all new and mostly grotesque housing bill will force local authorities to sell "high-value" council houses once a family moves out - which will basically hand over whatever remains of social housing in central London to investors. Osborne also wants local authorities "to dispose of potentially surplus assets", of which he calculates they have £60bn "in property not used for schools or housing". That would be property such as our public libraries and swimming pools - but to a government hellbent on asset-stripping such communal necessities are merely unsold inventory.

At Whitehall, ministers plan to sell a big chunk of Channel 4, and the public stake in the national air traffic control. And that's just the start, because here's something else you probably won't have read about: Osborne has bundled up all of our public holdings - in every company from the collapsed banks to the Royal Mint - and put them under the control of a government organisation called UK Government Investments. Its CEO (what else?) is a former doyen of the City called Mark Russell. In a rare interview in 2013, Russell declared: "We don't believe government makes for a particularly good shareholder. Our belief is that unless there is a good policy reason for government to have a shareholding then really we should be seeking to divest those shareholdings." Everything must go is no longer the cry of distressed shopkeepers - it is now public policy.

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