Why do I oppose the Housing Bill?

This is what I told the Morning Star at the beginning of January:

“This Tory Housing Bill represents the wholesale privatisation and destruction of all public housing in this country. The Tories are using the housing crisis they have created to declare an underreported, misreported war on social housing tenants, local authorities and housing associations under the guise of encouraging home ownership. Working class communities will be destroyed and essential workers driven out of the cities if this Bill goes through. Homelessness, rents, insecurity and squalor will rocket. This Bill has to be stopped.”
The political is personal – the personal is political.

That’s the political bit. And this is the personal …..

It will destroy the community in which I live and on which I depend.
I have lived on this Estate for 35 years. My son went to school here, my partner died here. His ashes are buried in our Park, as will mine be. I depend on the local NHS for my complex health problems, and receive pioneering treatments not easily available elsewhere. My neighbours support me and I return that support as best I can, by teaching computing, organising activities, representing them when they have problems with our landlord. I chair our Tenants & Residents Association.
Many of the provisions in the Housing Bill could destroy my community – from driving working families away through the Pay To Stay Tax, to short-term tenancies removing any community commitment and taking away any security from people like me when we lose their partners, to plans to bulldoze whole estates without any guarantees of return.
In the time I have lived here my estate has gone from being a hard-to-let riot-prone sink estate to a highly desirable, high value piece of real estate.

The developers are circling. This Bill will open the floodgates for a massive land grab.

As Oscar Wilde nearly said: Tories understand the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I value my home. At any price.