Housing

Rents crunch hits students

Report after report has pointed to a rapid rise in rents for students, and poor levels of maintenance. Universities have added to the housing crisis, with a move to private providers rather than in-house accommodation, so direct control over rents is removed. In any case, university-owned accommodation rents have risen more than maintenance support. A report from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) on ten university cities found rents up 14.6% 2021-22 to 2023-4, and private sector rents up 19%. Meanwhile the maximum student maintenance loan in England rose 5.2%. In 2023-4 in England...

Labour, democracy, and Rosebank

Activists from Workers' Liberty and supporters of Solidarity will be at Labour Party conference and women's conference, 7-11 October in Liverpool. We'll be there to help the efforts of Free Our Unions, the Labour Campaign for Free Movement, the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, India Labour Solidarity, and other campaigns; to sell literature, seek discussions and contacts. There will be demonstrations for the NHS and for abortion rights on Saturday, for free education on Sunday. And agitation for a block on new North Sea oil and gas fields, following the Tories' decision to "max out" licences in...

Labour’s NPF, certainty, and class

The “final” National Policy Forum report going to Labour Party conference in Liverpool, 8-11 October 2023, is mostly 112 pages of warm words evading clear commitments. The conference Delegates’ Briefing says that the facility to “refer back” items from the NPF report, established since 2017, will not be available, on the pretext that (for the first time since 2017) this is a “final” report and so there is nowhere to “refer back” to. Delegates will still seek to remonstrate by voting against sections of the report and passing motions stating clear commitments or contradicting the report. The...

Punishing families is no cure

Darren Rodwell, the Labour leader of Barking and Dagenham council and parliamentary candidate for Barking, has threatened to evict council-tenant families not working with the police over knife crime. “If your child is involved in an incident and knows who the perpetrators are, and refuses to speak out, we will look at reviewing your housing agreement,” Rodwell said. “Everyone must play their part in stopping these crimes. As parents, it is up to us to know where our children are, and that we play an active role.” He added: “If families know their relatives are linked to crime, they must speak...

Pages from a militant life: The suburbs from the 1980s to now

It’s 21:00 hours in suburban Brisbane on 6 October, and I’m working on a traffic-control job in Brisbane’s north west, in the suburb of Mitchelton where I have some of the strongest memories of my childhood. Mitchelton in the 1960s was a working-class suburb with numerous state-owned Housing Commission homes, all three-bedroom, built of wood, on 540 sq metre allotments. They certainly were not palaces, but they left enough room in the backyard to play a game of “backyard cricket” where one of the rules were if you hit a six over the neighbour’s fence you lost your wicket. Today, and from the...

Freeze rents, expand council housing

The Scottish Government has announced a rent freeze for both private and social housing tenants, and a ban on evictions over the winter. Some of the details are still unclear, but this is a major victory for housing campaigners in Scotland. Gordon Maloney, an activist in Scotland’s Living Rent tenants’ union, has described in Huck magazine how these concessions — until the announcement resisted by the SNP government — were won, what the limitations and questions are, but also a wider perspective for transforming housing: “Living Rent has called for a comprehensive, national system of rent...

Pages from a militant life: Why are there homeless in a rich society?

In my last article I touched on housing. I want to explore the issue more. I was born and have spent most of my life in Queensland, Australia. It is a big place, seven times the size of Great Britain and two and a half times the size of Texas. For most of its history it has been governed by very conservative conservatives and very conservative social democrats. It is a conservative state today, ruled by the Labor Party for most of the last 30 years. That conservatism has held sway over housing policy for many decades, with the result that in a state which in many ways is very wealthy, there...

Pages from a militant life: Richer and more predatory

One of my first observations, as I look back over decades as a workplace and union activist, is a societal and class observation. Society and the working class overall are much, much richer in material goods than I could have imagined as a child in Brisbane, Australia, in the sixties and early seventies. There were four children in my family, two boys and two girls. Mum was full-time stay-at-home (as most married women were then) and Dad was a merchant seafarer. We were not poor, nor were we “well off”. We were average in many respects. Mum was adamant that the invention of the washing machine...

Women's Fightback: Secure housing for Ukrainian refugees

The UN refugee agency has called on the UK government to intervene to stop single British men from being matched up with lone Ukrainian women fleeing the Russian invasion. Following claims that men are using the Homes for Ukraine scheme to target the vulnerable, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) called for a more appropriate matching process in a statement: “[The] UNHCR believes that a more appropriate matching process could be put in place by ensuring that women and women with children are matched with families or couples, rather than with single men.” “Matching done...

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