John Prescott, that Les Dawson - only without the humour - of the Blair Cabinet, is to destroy more of Liverpool than the Luftwaffe ever did.

Some 20,000 Victorian houses on Merseyside are to be demolished and the people resettled in some hastily built New Labour gulag.

Say a prayer for the poor Scousers, then. Having just got over the snobbish jibes of Boris "bonker" Johnson, they must have thought they were due for some respite. Not so: the socialist central planning juggernaut rolls ever onwards and people will be uprooted and shifted to where the commissars want them to live - whether they like it or not.

Don't get too smug. You might be next. There are another eight so-called "pathfinder" areas across the country which are being prepared for "housing market renewal".

Socialists always find smarmy phrases like that when they mean to do something nasty to you. It's like saying "in care" - which actually means no-one cares.

These ideological apparatchiks always think they know what's best for us. It's nothing to do with what's best for us, but only an opportunity for self-serving local councils to get their hands on the £500m provided by the EU to pay for this wanton destruction.

I have seen it all before - twice. I was raised in Armley, Leeds, in what would be called the slums. Behind us was Lower Wortley gas station. In front stood Armley jail, like a decaying castle. To one side was Greenwoods and Batleys munitions factory and to the other side Copley Hill railway goods yard. They were always going to "improve" our neighbourhood too - by knocking it down and despatching us all to the outskirts. Never mind that we loved it where we were. We were a close community in those dilapidated back-to-backs. We had the pub, the greengrocers, the local butcher and the tripe shop - and my grandad's newsagents. What more could you want?

Well, we could have done with a few repairs, some fresh paintwork and an inside loo. We didn't want pulling down and shoving out beyond the ring road to windy desolation in Seacroft. None of us did. But our views didn't count. Seacroft and Gipton - the "new estates" - are now cesspits of drugs and crime.

Second time round, I was curate at Oldham Parish Church in the 1970s and they pulled down the mill town cottages and built three sets of "luxury public housing" - flats with no coal fires but central heating that didn't work. Oldham is very hilly, so they re-housed old folk in this brash new paradise on the other side of Oldham Edge - a great cliff half a mile away from the town centre. So the old folk had no shops. The playgrounds were strewn with broken glass and the walkways among the flats were disfigured with graffiti.

And how long did that brave new world last? I drove through Oldham 15 years later and found that the new flat where I used to live had been pulled down. In fact, the whole new development was defunct, smashed up like a bomb site. The Oldham community - like the Armley community before it - was destroyed. People who had lived in those parts all their lives were heartbroken and estranged. Oh go away, Prescott!

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.