Housing

Grenfell: Capitalism kills

Around 1am on Wednesday 13 June a fire tore through 24-storey Grenfell Tower in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, killing a currently unknown number of people. Firefighters have told people the number will be in triple figures. Many hundreds of people have had family members, friends, neighbours, and homes taken from them. Survivors and local residents are angry. ″This symbolises the divide between rich and poor in this area″. ″They don′t care″. ″They put human beings in pigeon holes. Just because you can′t afford anything doesn′t mean you should be dumped in somewhere like that″....

Corbyn is right: occupy the palaces of the rich to help the homeless!

Jeremy Corbyn has demanded that the empty houses of the rich in Kensington be requisitioned to house the victims of the Grenfell fire. Why is the basic human need of shelter privatised? Why is land distributed so that some have large homes with many spare rooms, or multiple homes, and others are packed into overcrowded death-traps? How can we have empty homes when 170,000 people are homeless in London alone? Councils should be given the power to requisition property left empty and put it to social use. And, as Corbyn also said, if councils won't do that, people should simply occupy the empty...

Justice for Grenfell!

Late at night on Tuesday 13 June, a fire gutted Grenfell Tower in west London. It is likely that a large number of people have died: firefighters have told people the number will be in triple figures. Many hundreds of people's lives have been destroyed as their family members, friends, neighbours, and homes have been taken from them. Our solidarity is with those families and with the emergency service workers who battled to save them whilst witnessing harrowing scenes. There is no doubt that this was a criminal act. Whether due to the flammable cladding; the lack of sprinklers or fire alarms...

Labour: rebuild the welfare state

The welfare state created by the 1945 Labour government was a little bit of the “political economy of the working class” carved out of a still capitalist economy (a phrase Karl Marx first used to describe the victory of the fight for a ten-hour working day). To some extent the ruling class has been forced to accept a minimal level of state provision. There is a constant battle over what proportion of profits is redirected, over who should receive support, and what sort of support is given. The ruling class has been winning that battle for some time. The space carved out of capitalism by the...

Stop council give-away

Local community and Labour Party resistance is growing to Labour-led Haringey Council’s plans to put £2 billion of public assets in a Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV) — a body half-owned by the council and half by a private developer. The proposed scheme, the largest of its kind ever attempted by a local authority, will see homes, schools, libraries and land handed over to the new HDV. Previous similar schemes were on a smaller scale but did not end well. Croydon Council pulled out after a dispute with the developer, and Tory-controlled Tunbridge Wells paid substantial initial outlays to set...

Lots of “old” cuts still to come

Theresa May’s Tory government has said that it will decide no new welfare cuts. What makes this a half-truth, or even an outright untruth, is that big cuts, maybe even bigger cuts than the government can realistically manage, have already been programmed by previous Tory decisions. “We will meet the previous commitments we’ve made”, as Tory minister Damian Green put it. For example, over three million people currently claim a total of £14 billion disability benefits in the UK. The programme of replacing Disability Living Allowance by Personal Independence Payment is still rolling out. By 2018...

£1,000 rent rise

70,000 households will face a rent rise of over £1,000 a year from next April, imposed by the government. The Housing Act, passed into law last year, forces councils to levy 15p extra rent for every £1 a household’s income is above £31,000, or £40,000 in London. It defines every household with two earners on £15,500, or £20,000 in London, as “high income”. That affects 9.3% of all council households in the south-east. According to research commissioned by the local authorities’ umbrella group, the LGA, average monthly rent rises will be £72 outside London and £132 inside. Councils are already...

Rents spiral: up 48% since 2007

Even on the mean average income — which is quite a bit higher than the median income, the income of the worker halfway up the income range — a young worker now has to pay out 57% of her or his income to rent an average one-bedroom home in London. A 13 June report from the property services firm Countrywide found that even relatively well-off workers can’t afford to rent on their own in London. Two young full-time workers splitting the rent of a two-bedroom home might scrape by, spending 35% of their post-tax income on rent in London, and a high proportion elsewhere too: an average of 27%...

Rents spiral, especially in London

Even on the mean average income - which is quite a bit higher than the median income, the income of the worker halfway up the income range - a young worker now has to pay out 57% of her or his income to rent an average one-bedroom home in London. A 13 June report from the property services firm Countrywide found that even relatively well-off workers can't afford to rent on their own in London. Two young full-time workers splitting the rent of a two-bedroom home might scrape by, spending 35% of their post-tax income on rent in London, and a high proportion elsewhere too: an average of 27%...

Don’t let the Tories recover!

A rising mood that cuts are not inevitable, a rising anger against economic inequality, and a rising confidence that alternatives are possible, has damaged the Tories in recent months. Ian Duncan Smith resigned, demagogically spilling the truth that the Tories have been victimising the worst-off to benefit the rich. That was one of the side-products of the Tories’ splits over Europe, which have seen Tory right-wingers suddenly “discovering” that the NHS is underfunded and suggesting Britain’s EU budget contributions could fill the gap. The Tories were forced to retreat on disabled benefits...

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