Joan Twelves – Page 4

SUPPORT JEREMY CORBYN!

#KEEP CORBYN? – HERE’S WHY!

In the wake of the Brexit vote, the Labour Party is in a state of civil war and its very survival must be in doubt.

Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters are mobilising in his defence. Here are some reasons why his continuing Leadership of the Party is worthy of support.

Won the Leadership with biggest mandate from Party members that any leader has ever won – 59.5% – more than all the other candidates put together.
Placed anti-austerity at the heart of Labour’s policies.
Adopted popular policies such as building public housing and renationalising the railways.
Increased Labour’s membership dramatically – now over 380,000 members.
Won every by-election contested since he became leader, three with increased majorities.
Won all four Mayoral elections in May 2016 – London, Bristol, Salford and Liverpool.
In the 2016 local elections performed as well as 2001 when Labour won a second landslide in the general election.
Repeatedly ahead of the Tories in the polls since the start of 2016.
Fought off cuts to tax credits and benefits, scoring significant blows against the Tories’ austerity agenda.
Delivered 63% of its 2015 voters to vote REMAIN, compared to the SNP’s 64% and the Tories 42%.

ALL this despite constant sniping, undermining and media misrepresentation.

WHAT HE HAS NOT DONE is

Lose the 2010 and 2015 general elections.
Lose 3.9 million voters between 1997 and 2005.
Lose 228,000 Party members between 1997 and 2008.

The coup against Corbyn has absolutely nothing to do with the result of the EU referendum and was reported in the Daily Telegraph on 3 May, 8 weeks before it happened. Despite having been planned for months, the plotters have no agreed candidate, nor policy platform.

Its participants have pursued their plan in total disregard of the seismic shock Brexit is causing the economy, politics and society. When Labour should be seizing the opportunity to destroy the Tories, the coup plotters have seized it to try to destroy their own Party.

It is a political coup against the left of the Party and the policies Corbyn represents– against austerity, war, and Trident; for immigration, nationalisation, a publicly owned NHS and a fully funded welfare state.

Its timing has much to do with the imminent publication of the Chilcot Report and, if it succeeds, Labour Party democracy will be curtailed, Party members will lose their say over policy and representation, and it will mean Labour will continue on its rightward trajectory, alienating its traditional voters and ultimately destroying the Party.

We have been here before – in 1981 when, in opposition to a left-wing leader, the right split and doomed us to 16 more years of Thatcher and Major. Some of the same people are still involved.

The nearly quarter of a million people (235,757 at last count) who have signed 38 Degrees’ petition expressing their confidence in Jeremy Corbyn as Leader need to be listened to by the 176 before they plunge us into an internecine battle where the only winners will be the reactionary right-wing of the Tory Party, the rich and the corporations. The losers will be refugees, migrants, the poor, the sick, the disabled. and the working and middle classes of this country – the very people you were elected to represent.

*******

This is the work of several talented writers and political thinkers. Many thanks to Simon H and James G for sharing their ideas and words.

Part 2 of my Rant – The Carnival of Reaction is Turning the World Upside Down will follow soon.

It’s the Perfect Storm for a Carnival of Reaction

It’s the Perfect Storm for a Carnival of Reaction – or why we must Vote Remain and Stay in Europe to Change Europe!

A few weeks ago I started writing about the importance of the outcome of the EU referendum for housing campaigners

– about how the lack of affordable housing and the ultra-rich’s unoccupied luxury apartments blighting our inner cities had nothing to do with the European Union or migrants and everything to do with successive governments refusing to adequately plan population shifts and growth, and to prefer to pander to property speculators, finance capitalists and the myth of home ownership rather than build and maintain affordable public housing where it was needed and wanted

– how the Blair/Brown governments’ insistence that council housing be transferred away from local authority control before it could be renovated paved the way for property developers to muscle their way into local authority decision making, thus leading to the current obsession with demolishing and semi-privatising estates in the name of regeneration

– how closing borders would not change the Housing Act’s destruction of social housing and social cleansing

– how EU rules and regulations did not prevent rent controls, and

– how it would only be through a radical change of government to one which supported and encouraged public housing would we even begin to see a change.

But I was busy organising campaigning for an IN vote and didn’t get very far with that, so I then started writing about how not talking about the Wars was one of the elephants in the referendum debate and that there were lots of Wars we should be talking about, starting with the Second World War, and

– how it was in the aftermath of that bloody conflagration that six countries had first come together to declare Never Again! and find ways to regulate trade between themselves

– how capitalism thrives on conflict and competition and war and, yes, the EU is a bosses’ club, a capitalist cartel, a bourgeois institution, but that nevertheless it had found a way for a continent of nation states which throughout their existence had been at near continuous war to cohabit the same space without throwing punches – or firing missiles – at each other for over half a century

– how, while that had not prevented intranational independence struggles such as the Six Counties’ Troubles or the Basque conflict or demands for Catalan autonomy, or bloody wars on its borders such as those which erupted as the former Yugoslavia disintegrated and, more currently, Ukraine, it was something we needed to recognise and appreciate and talk about, not shrug our shoulders and assume peace was inevitable

– how the ending of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, had allowed right wing governments to rapidly absorb the assets, resources and people of the former Stalinist states of Eastern Europe into the EU, enriching themselves and their favoured oligarchs through the wholesale expropriation of whole countries’ assets, and how their beloved free movement of capital by necessity has to be accompanied by the free movement of labour and that it has only been where trade unions and the labour movement is strong, and where it can come together across nation boundaries, that capital will be restricted from exploiting that labour to the extent it otherwise would

– how together we are stronger

– how Bush and Blair’s Wars opened the door for the current conflagrations across the Middle East and consequential refugee and migrant crises

– how people do not risk all to reach the comparative safety of EU countries unless they are desperate and fleeing for their lives

– how migration is a normal part of human existence and needs to be recognised and planned for, not blocked and banned

– how Fortress Europe policies have not just caused untold human misery and death but encouraged the growth of right wing movements across every country

– how migrants and refugees are human beings with needs and desires and rights….

And then I thought I couldn’t write about Wars without writing about the Class War….

But Janine Booth, the left’s wonderful poet, has put that far more succinctly than I can –

REFERENDUM GUIDANCE

Finding your decision tough?

Remember where the war is.

Don’t blame migrants for the stuff

That’s mostly caused by Tories

So, while I wasn’t getting very far with my writing (described the other day as not just slow, but glacial) I was talking, and I was talking about

– democracy and the lack of it in the UK and climate change having no borders and how the EU’s redistribution from the richer to the poorer regions should be supported (we do not want our money back!) and human rights and workers’ rights and how there was no Exit Left, no Lexit, that it was an illusion that somehow leaving the EU would open up opportunities for the Left, that Boris and Gove and Farage were not the Lenin, Trotsky and Mao of our time and would not do what groups like the SWP and the SP and the CP had singularly failed to do over the last however many years they’ve been fighting Labourism and trying to get the British working class to rise up and follow their particular vanguardist sect

– and about how my enthusiasm for campaigning for an IN vote wasn’t just about the positives but also about the negatives and how we need to change Europe and the world for the better

– but most fundamentally it was about how the way this debate wasn’t actually about the EU at all, but about migration and immigration and benefit scroungers, and that if the UK voted to leave the EU then that would mean that a majority of the people of this country had been conned by a nasty, right-wing, racist campaign based on falsehoods and downright lies, which could lead to one of the most hard right governments we had ever seen in this country

– how the Leave campaign and their friends in the right-wing press were capitalising on working class disillusionment and alienation, in particular in those areas deindustrialised by Thatcher and neglected by the neo-liberal policies pursued by both Labour and Tory governments for the last 30 odd years, which had been exacerbated since the 2008 crash by Tory austerity leading amongst other things to a massive shift of wealth from the poor to the already rich and enormously increased inequality, and whipping up resentment towards, not the rich, but those who could be characterised as ‘alien’, ‘the other’, ‘different’. As Yanis Varoufakis has said:

“Lest we forget, turning the native poor against the migrants is a variant of the old divide-and-rule trick that the British establishment honed ages ago to dominate the empire. Today it uses the same strategy to dominate the domestic “natives”, hide austerity’s effects, and deflect anger toward the other – the foreigner, the migrant”

– how during its years in government Labour lost touch with its heartlands, first in Scotland and now across swathes of the north, by failing to defend or be perceived to be on the side of the working class, and

– how the UK leaving the EU will have implications across Europe not just in terms of the future of the EU but because it will signal the legitimacy and acceptance of far right policies which will be rapidly taken up by those forces already on the march across the continent.

For the hard right – who had already scored a victory by forcing the referendum in the first place – it has become the Perfect Storm

– with anti-immigrant and anti-migrant feelings running high across Europe (the Tories’ xenophobic London Mayoral campaign may not have worked in metropolitan London but it would have resonated elsewhere, and yesterday’s election of a Five Star Mayor in Rome has to be added to the mix),

– the government rapidly forcing through draconian anti-working class policies on housing, education, health and benefits as they seek to destroy the welfare state and privatise our public services,

– the EU in crisis over its panicked and cruel mishandling of the increasing number of desperate refugees running from bombs and hunger,

– the electorates of Spain and Portugal rejecting austerity in favour of newly emerging parties of the left,

– the failure of neo-liberal policies to protect Greece or create the growth needed to sustain the original social democratic project of a social Europe

– and here – the Labour Party’s opposition to all this weak and divided (sorry Jeremy!).

The hard right have been allowed to dictate the agenda and the terms of the debate.

They have been aided and abetted by the tabloids daily dose of front pages depicting marauding, swarming migrants and the rest of the media’s failure to challenge their lies. They have been aided and abetted by the BBC’s notion of ‘balance’ being to allow charlatans to challenge all and every statement about the EU (even to the extent of reputable academics being denigrated for receiving funding from the EU as though it’s some kind of mafia outfit) and to encourage a form of anti-intellectualism to permeate discussions under the guise of ‘anti-establishmentism’ – “kill all the experts!”. They have been aided and abetted by social media enabling them to spread their lies around the world before the truth has had time to even start looking for her knickers. They have been aided and abetted by a refusal from other politicians, with a very few honourable and unpublicised exceptions, to call them out on their racism and to support free movement and to welcome migrants and refugees. Xenophobia has become acceptable and a discussion that should be about humanity, decency, empathy has degenerated into a numbers game.

And then Jo Cox was murdered.

Killed by a fascist extremist.

A British Labour MP assassinated by a Nazi.

Now I can’t just write. I need to rant. I need to scream.

That Perfect Storm has whirled into a Carnival of Reaction before one vote has been counted.

The politicians have frozen. Campaigning suspended. Except it’s not. How can it be? The storm is rising still.

The lone wolf with ‘mental health issues’ (since when has epilepsy been a ‘mental health issue’? as my favourite person with epilepsy would say: “that really is fuckwittery gone mad”) is fast turning into the ‘Death to Traitors, Freedom for Britain’ neo-Nazi lone wolf with ‘mental health issues’ who may have held the occasional Britain First banner and may have been on Farage’s contact list, but “nuffink to do with us, guv”. Let’s lay a wreath and pretend nobody saw it coming. Pretend it’s the fault of the foreigners, the migrants. They’re the ones who whipped up the storm, not us, not the Sun, the Mail, the Express, with their daily headlines of thousands and thousands of migrants (not to forget the 75 million Turks) heading our way, not the Today programme, not Cameron smearing Sadiq Khan one week and crying crocodile tears the next. It’s their fault for trying to come here. “Nuffink to do with us, guv.”

Except it is. Because when hatred is preached, when bigotry is legitimised, then that gives permission for hate and bigotry to become commonplace, to become acceptable – and for murder and assassination to be carried out in their name.

Brendan Cox – in the midst of his grief – has beautifully articulated what is happening “Petrified by the rise of the populists, [mainstream politicians] try to neuter them by taking their ground and aping their rhetoric. Far from closing down the debates, these steps legitimise their views….” and “All this has meant that the populist right have shifted the politics and the public debate of the issue far more that their actual numbers dictate.” (Guardian, 18 June 2016)

Societal change can take place very quickly – after all, that’s what happens when there’s a revolution. But revolutions can come from the right, not just the left.

Voting on Thursday may not seem a big deal – after all, we’re only voting on whether or not this country should be part of a trading bloc, a capitalist trading bloc pursuing neo-liberal, austerity policies, a group of nation states which we’ve only ever been half-heartedly part of anyway, and about which there are lots of reasonable arguments either way – and it wouldn’t have been a big deal if we’d actually debated the pros and cons of EU membership in a reasonable way. But we haven’t. We haven’t had a debate. We’ve had an angry tirade of vitriol. We’ve had lies and exaggerations and threats. And, in response, we’ve had an incoherent splutter of rage.

As a consequence, the symbolism of what will be decided on Thursday is enormous. Victory for the Leavers will be the victory of racist reactionaries and those who want to divide us – it will mean a Carnival of Reaction.

Winning Remain even by the slightest margin won’t be a victory – the racists and reactionaries aren’t going to melt into thin air on Friday morning. But the fact that a majority – even a majority of one – have turned their backs on that Carnival of Reaction means we will have a way forward if we have the strength and determination to seize it. Please, please vote Remain on Thursday and support the fight for a better world, another Europe, a better Europe.

Another Europe is Possible is at http://www.anothereurope.org

The Great London Clearances: Decision Time

The House of Lords’ Amendments to the Housing Bill

Such is the perversion of democracy in this country that the fate of working class homes is now in the hand of unelected peers and bishops.

And such are the peculiarities of the British class system that, while our old Etonian elected leaders sell off our land and homes to the highest bidders, it is lords and ladies born and bred on council estates who are leading the battle against them.

These lords and ladies have spent some weeks in Committee scrutinising the Housing and Planning Bill passed with such haste by the House of Commons on the night of 12 January and they are now reporting back. Despite having discussed a myriad amendments, only some will get voted on by the full House as only five sessions have been timetabled with the third (final) reading of the bill scheduled for 27 April.

Of the three days of report so far, some major amendments have already been passed by the Lords, defeating the Government by substantial majorities. Faced with the prospect of further defeats, the Government has also made a number of small but significant concessions.

After the third reading in the Lords, the Government can either accept their amendments or start what is known as ‘ping pong’, sending the Bill back for the Lords to try again. Both Houses have to agree the exact wording of the Bill and it could go back and forth several times. This is where we will see how determined our ermined friends are to block the destruction of our homes and lives. The Tories do not have a majority in the Lords – and their current Brin-Brexit civil war over Europe – as well as a few other little difficulties – makes it hard to predict their actions. But they used their English Votes for English Laws (EVEL) laws to push the Bill through the Commons first time round – much to the anger of the SNP – and will undoubtedly continue to use this artificially large anti-working class majority to try to reject anything coming out of the Lords.

Time may be against them. The passage of the Bill has to be completed before Parliament is prorogued in advance of the Queen’s Speech on 18 May. If the Bill hasn’t been done and dusted – and carved into the skin of a baby goat – before that day, then it falls and they have to start all over again.

This would Kill the Bill! Fingers crossed!

The Government has made it clear that they consider the amendments to Pay to Stay to be wrecking amendments and that they will attempt to overturn them when the Bill returns to the Commons. Let ping-pong commence!

To be continued……….

Also to be continued is the Campaign against the Housing Bill.

The Bill is now scheduled to return to the Commons on 3 May. There will be an emergency protest and lobby from 12-2 Old Palace Yard, SW1 3JY, and a meeting inside Parliament in Committee Room 12 from 3pm-7pm.

https://www.facebook.com/events/221362291559078/

While all these amendments are welcome, and we thank those peers who have worked so hard to build such a strong alliance of opposition to the Bill, they are no more than scraps – scraps from the high table. The fact that this Tory Government is likely to try to overturn even these scraps shows with what deep contempt they hold those of us who live in social housing and whose work creates the wealth they so flagrantly enjoy.

Whose Homes? Our Homes!

Whose streets? Our streets!

Whose homes? Our homes!

Thousands of angry tenants, housing workers, squatters, travellers, private renters, students and political activists were joined by MPs and councillors as we marched through London on a sunny March Sunday to protest the Tories’ plans to destroy public housing.

Kill the Bill! Kill the Housing Bill!

And a surprise re-entry into the top of the demo playlist, that ’40s anthem,

Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner!

Not surprisingly the national demo organised by the Kill the Housing Bill campaign was a tad London-centric – but then it is homes in London which are most threatened if the Tories get their way in hollowing out the city by forcing the working class out of the centre. One of the challenges for the campaign must be to build outside the capital. This Bill will affect everyone, everywhere.

The Bill is still progressing through the Lords, and crucial votes will take place soon. And there are signs that, as part of their current ‘let’s-not-scare-the-voters-too-much’ EU Remain strategy, the Tories are watering down some of the proposals such as the Pay to Stay limits and Housing Benefit caps which are leading to hostel and sheltered housing closures.

In London the mayoral election on 5 May is crucial with housing such a hot topic. A Labour Mayor with planning and building powers determined to stem the gentrification of our great working class districts can make a massive difference. Will Sadiq? I don’t know. But Labour’s Manifesto opposes the Bill and pledges “that estate regeneration only takes place where there is resident support … and that demolition is only permitted where it does not result in a loss of social housing.” The trouble is these words ring hollow to tenants in London’s Labour boroughs fighting to save their homes from demolition. The Labour leadership needs to step in and heal the rifts which have built up between councillors and residents and their supporters if we are to unite to fight the Bill.

Calls are going out from tenants’ groups that councillors should refuse to implement the Bill. Because the Bill is such a compendium of measures, there is a lot of scope for councils to investigate what they can and can’t do and share information and legal advice. As a start they can pledge not to evict anyone who refuses to Pay to Stay. Many of the measures are ‘voluntary’ for housing association landlords which have become increasingly corporate bodies in recent years and lack any real democratic or accountable ways for tenants’ voices to be heard. In my book, this means we just need to shout louder! Councillors can help us do that by bringing together council and housing association tenants.

It will be up to us to defend our homes. The march was just the beginning. Tenants are getting organised and we will Kill the Housing Bill!

for Labour Briefing, March 2016

The Great London Clearances

The Tories want to clear the working class out of London. The people who built our city, who create its wealth, who turned it into one of the greatest cities in the world are to be evicted so that the Tories and their friends can turn it into a heartless, soulless ghetto for the rich and useless.

Nye Bevan’s vision of council housing when, as a key member of the post-war Attlee government, he led the building of a million homes was of a living tapestry of a mixed community where “the working man [sic], doctor and clergyman live in close proximity to each other”. His vision had at its heart a desire not only to provide decent homes, but also to enhance people’s life chances and help them make the most of their talents and abilities. It’s no surprise that the founder of the National Health Service should have understood only too well how people’s living conditions and their health and wellbeing are inextricably linked, that slums, poverty and squalor breed disease.

The estate where I live is no longer just public housing – Thatcher’s right to buy drove a wedge through that. But all generations, many races, many cultures, many faiths, many nationalities, many occupations and none, live side by side, most renting, some owning. My neighbours are pensioners and children, care home workers, lecturers, child minders, computer programmers, architects, bank clerks, artists, rail workers, gardeners, plumbers, cleaners, taxi drivers and some it’s best not to ask. Probably no doctors, but plenty of health professionals. No clergymen that I know of, but plenty of working women. It is a rich, diverse, living tapestry. It is a community.

David Cameron’s misconceived, ill-informed vision of public housing is of “sink estates”, of “brutal high-rise towers” that breed “criminals and drug dealers”. He would have us believe that public housing has failed, that it needs to be razed to the ground and what little remains should only be made available for short periods of time to those “on low incomes or otherwise disadvantaged who would find it particularly difficult to find a home on the open market”. In other words, sod that diverse, mixed, creative, stable community – let’s create some really grim, really brutal, really ‘sink’ estates where we can warehouse the criminals and drug dealers, but make sure they’re as far away from where we want to live as possible. In particular, we have to stop the lower classes living on that prime real estate in inner and central London that we want for our own.

And this is what will happen if the Housing Bill isn’t stopped.

Because the Tories’ Housing and Planning Bill marks the end of public housing in this country, the demolition of Nye’s vision. It will mean

The end of secure lifetime tenancies
The end of low rents
The end of family homes in the inner city
The end of working class communities

It will have its most devastating effect on our great working class capital. London is to be socially cleansed, its land offered up for grabs to the highest bidder.

It is the Great London Clearances.

Those of us who live here can feel the vultures circling, just waiting for their chance to snatch the spoils.

But it’s not just London. Across the country thousands are threatened with being thrown out of their homes, no longer able to afford the rent, no longer sure how long they will have a roof over their heads, forced away from their friends, their families, their communities.

The Bedroom Tax has already caused untold misery – including driving people to suicide. The Benefit Cap has driven hundreds out of London. How many more victims do the Tories want?

The Tories are racing to get their plans through before opposition can build. They rushed the Bill through the Commons using EVEL (how appropriate!) in the middle of the night. Now it is in the Lords where attempts are being made – led, oxymoronically, by peers brought up on council estates – to ameliorate its worst effects, but time for debate has already been cut short.

So, what exactly does this complicated Bill involve? Why is it so destructive?

It removes secure lifetime tenancies, limiting them to two to five years. This won’t just affect new tenants. Anyone needing to move home – domestic violence victims, overcrowded families, job changers – will get this new short-term tenancy, as may those whose partner dies or moves out. Tenants will be subjected to regular ‘needs tests’ to check whether they still deserve a home.
It imposes means testing and ‘pay to stay’ market-linked rents for nearly a quarter of a million households. In London this ‘Tenant Tax’ could mean overnight rent rises from £6,000 pa to £24,000 pa. There are no tapers, no exemptions.
It forces councils to sell their ‘high value’ property to the highest bidder. 113,000 homes in England are likely to be above the ‘high value’ threshold. Seven boroughs in central London alone could lose over 30,000 homes at a time when over 150,000 families are on waiting lists in the 20 councils likely to be hardest hit. Local authorities will be sent an annual bill by the Government regardless of whether or not anything has been sold or at what price. And where will all that money go? Will it be spent on homes, hospitals, schools? No. It will used to bribe housing association tenants to buy their properties.
It privatises public housing even further by extending Right to Buy to housing associations, selling off often charitably endowed properties at knock-down prices, bribing London buyers with a massive £104,000 handout to go and buy somewhere else – somewhere not-London – and encouraging Buy to Let absentee slum landlords.
It replaces the duty on developers to build affordable homes for rent with an obligation to build unaffordable, state-subsidised ‘starter’ homes for sale.
It massively cuts the money available for investing in public housing, both new build and maintenance and repairs, with nearly all social housing funding ended after 2018.
It opens the way for the wholesale privatisation and demolition of housing estates by designating them ‘brownfield’ (a designation previously used to mean a contaminated site), with no guarantees for existing tenants of being able to return and inadequate compensation for leaseholders.
It reduces travellers’ rights to have their housing needs properly assessed.
It will force millions more into private renting, into damp, overcrowded housing with no long term security and with no guarantee it is even fit for human habitation.

Nobody will be exempt – pensioners, single parents, families with children, those in work, those on benefits, domestic violence victims, people with disabilities and/or special needs – all will be hit one way or another.

What will it not do?

Solve the housing crisis – 1.8 million homes have been privatised since Thatcher introduced Right to Buy in the early 1980s – almost the same figure as the number of families currently on the waiting list. The lowest estimate of the effect of the measures in the Housing Bill is the loss of a further 80,000 council houses over the next four years.
Reduce the housing benefit bill – it is estimated it will add more than £200 million pa to the bill.
Help more first time buyers – to buy a starter home, costing nearly half a million in London, you will need an income of double the average wage, while increased rents will reduce any chance of saving for a deposit.

The table below from Shelter shows the different types of household who can (green) and those who can’t (orange) afford an average Starter Home. This just looks at whether their income is enough to secure a mortgage, not whether they have the deposit saved up. And it shows that London homes are out of reach to anyone but the very rich.

*Earnings of couples, families and single people in England and London by 2020 (Earnings except national living wage from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings) Source: Shelter*

Housing Benefit and Welfare Cuts

And while the Housing Bill is doing all this, George Osborne is busy imposing cuts to housing benefit to finish the job.

If the Housing Bill is underpublicised and little understood, then housing benefit rules are even more so.

The Local Housing Allowance maxima is used to work out how much private renters should get in HB based on locality and household size. It is being extended to the public sector because “that’s the fair thing to do”…. What this will mean is that pensioners will be bedroom taxed by the back door – they will now only receive HB for a one-bed flat instead of the rent for that 2/3 bed flat in which they brought up their family.

And up and down the country hostels for the homeless, domestic violence refuges and supported housing schemes are closing because no account is being taken of the additional costs of staff and support in HB payments. So embarrassed have the Tories become about this, they’ve delayed its implementation for a year to carry out “impact assessments”, something they are meant to do before they legislate.

But that’s not all.

The Benefit Cap is being reduced to £442 a week in London and £385 a week outside, making even temporary accommodation rents unaffordable.
The Shared Accommodation Rate will be extended to social housing so that single under 35s (previously under 25s) will only receive HB for a room in a shared house. And that room will invariably be privately rented as most social housing was built as homes for families, not multi-occupied bedsits.

And just to add to the misery – David Cameron’s much vaunted ‘negotiations’ in respect of the European Union include changing residency requirements so that anyone applying for social housing will need to have lived in the local area for four years instead of the current two. This won’t just apply to those coming to the UK from another EU country, but also to anyone moving within Britain.

Subsidies? What subsidies?

One of the myths we have to challenge is that public housing is subsidised.

There are two ways in which social housing is subsidised. One is the cost of building it in the first place – although it is arguable that this is not a subsidy but capital infrastructure investment, no different to spending on roads, railways or hospitals. In any case, the cost of building council homes in Harlow New Town in the 1950s was £2,000 each – how many times over has that been paid off from rental income? And so little social housing has been built in the last three decades that the bulk of any costs would have been paid off in rents years ago.

The other form of subsidy is housing benefit – which is paid to renters, in work and out, in both the public and private rental sectors. The suggestion that all social housing tenants are in receipt of housing benefit is, of course, yet another way of perpetuating the council house/benefit scrounger myth. Not only are many social renters not HB claimants, but over 20% of those who do claim are in work (a percentage that has doubled since 2010), and over a third are pensioners.

The sector where HB is rising fastest is the private rental sector, which receives 40% of the £25 billion HB bill. In 2014/15 it was £9.5 billion; it is expected to rise to £10.8 billion by 2018/19. Not that it’s the tenants who are subsidised – it’s their landlords. Just as working tax credits subsidise low paying employers, so housing benefit subsidises both high charging landlords and low paying employers.

Which is why the most effective way to reduce the housing benefit bill is not the bedroom tax or the benefit cap but increased wages and pensions and private sector rent controls.

The Tories like the ‘big lie’. They do it all the time. Remember when nurses, teachers and street cleaners bust the banks? No, neither do I. But many people believe they did. The Pay to Stay Tenant Tax is based on another of these big lies – that there are ‘rich’ tenants who are being subsidised at taxpayer expense and who can afford to pay super-rents. These are the tenants who go out to work, do not receive housing benefit and therefore do not receive any subsidy.

It is like UKIP’s Schrödinger’s immigrant – the one who’s both lazing around on benefits whilst simultaneously out there stealing British jobs.

The Schrödinger’s tenant – the lazy benefit scrounger who simultaneously earns enough to pay the Tenant Tax.

Who will be subsidised?

At the same time as denouncing benefit-scrounging-subsidised-social housing tenants, the Tories are introducing two massive new subsidies in the Housing Bill – the £100,000+ bribe to housing association tenants who buy, and the 20% taxpayer-funded discount on starter homes which wealthy first-time buyers will be able to pocket when they sell on at full market price just five years’ later (that’s a cool £90,000 on one of those London £450,000 oh so affordable homes).

As with the bankers, it’s socialism for the rich, austerity for the rest.

There is real fear growing amongst tenants as more and more learn about the Bill. Where will we live?

Will that fear turn into anger? Can we Kill the Housing Bill? Will ‘Pay to Stay’ become ‘Won’t Pay, Will Stay’?

Labour’s wringing hands approach to this Bill needs to toughen up. Years of demonising council tenants as benefit scroungers (including by some of Labour’s former frontbenchers) need to be challenged – the case for council housing has to be made afresh, which means confronting the fetish of home ownership and the widespread view that only the most ‘needy’ should be housed by the state. We want to be able to stay in our homes, not have them demolished without replacement. We want genuinely diverse, stable communities, we want to replace undemocratic, unresponsive housing managements with tenant-led bodies. We want quality homes built to high standards. We want to be able to live in our capital city.

2 March 2016

(a shorter version of this appears in Labour Briefing, March 2016)

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.

Lambeth March Against the Housing Bill – Saturday 30 January

More on the Housing and Planning Bill….

Since the ‘Pay to Stay’ provisions in the Bill are now voluntary for Housing Associations, my Tenants Association in Kennington has joined with others in Stockwell to write to the Board of our HA, the Hyde Group, calling on them not to implement it. Our letter and Hyde’s reply can be found here.

It’s worth all HA tenants’ reps doing the same. You don’t win anything if you don’t try!

*******************

The Kill the Housing Bill campaign has produced an excellent briefing on the Bill – click here

and Vivienne Lewis has written this note about the effect of the forced sale of ‘high value’ housing in Lambeth –

The forced sale of Council housing means there will be less housing for people who need it

The forced sale of empty Council homes to finance the housing association right to buy means there will be fewer lettings available for people on the Council’s housing register and for existing council tenants who need to move to another home

Lambeth Council have estimated that they will be forced to sell 120 properties every year on the open market simply to meet the Government’s demand for cash

They also estimate that most of the homes (approximately 3/5 of the total) that they will have to sell will be family homes with two or more bedrooms

Last year Lambeth was able to provide housing to 1,200 households – so the forced sale of 120 properties means a reduction of 10% in the number of properties they will be able to offer to tenants

However, reduction in the number of homes becoming available for letting to new tenants could be even more than 10%.

This is because the changes being introduced by the Government are likely to reduce the number of lettings which become available as a result of tenant transfer.

Lettings which result from the transfer of the previous tenant account for around 30% of new lettings and include lettings of family-sized homes which become available for let as a result of local policies which encourage tenants to move to smaller homes after their families leave

The bad news, both for council tenants who want to transfer to another home and to overcrowded families on the Housing Register, is that these kinds of relets are likely to dry up as a result of the Government’s proposals.

This will happen for two reasons

– Firstly, because tenants who transfer to a new tenancy will have poorer terms and conditions than they do now so will be less willing to move and

– Secondly Councils will think twice about offering transfers to tenants if they required to sell the vacated property and hand over the money to the Government

(NB at Committee Stage the Government refused to accept an amendment which would have excluded properties becoming vacant as a result of tenant transfer from the enforced sale of high value Council properties)

The End of Public Housing? Kill the Housing Bill!

The Housing and Planning Bill will spell the end of public housing in this country.

It is easily forgotten that council housing – more usually now known as social housing to include housing association homes – was one of the pillars of the post-war Welfare State.

And it is being destroyed.

Along with scores of working class communities up and down the country, with London hardest hit.

The Housing and Planning Bill does not stand alone. Benefit cuts will also play their part in destroying our communities and forcing families out of their homes.

The Bill involves different constituencies of interest who need to be brought together to oppose it. Each of its major provisions is an attack on public housing; taken together the whole signals total destruction.

The suppliers of public housing

All existing housing estates will be designated as ‘brownfield’ sites for redevelopment – for which in principle planning permission will be automatically granted and local planners won’t be able to demand anything other than technical conditions. This opens the way to the wholesale redevelopment, demolition and privatisation of all existing housing estates. (The designation ‘brownfield’ was previously used to describe contaminated, polluted sites – is this what the Government thinks of housing estates and their tenants?)

Planning authorities will no longer be able to oblige property developers to build/fund homes for social rent. Section 106 of existing planning laws (which has already been substantially watered down) will be replaced with a duty to build discounted starter homes for sale (to first time buyers under 40), capped at £450,000 in Greater London and £250,000 elsewhere. Buyers would need to be on double the average wage to afford these homes. This is a state subsidy to private investors who can then sell at full market value within 5 years.

Local authorities will be obliged to sell their ‘high value’ property as they become vacant, thereby transferring up to a third of public housing and land into private hands. There is no guarantee that the money raised will be used to build new houses in the same area/region. There are no exemptions (eg. specially modified homes) and there is no definition of high value in the Bill – that will be define in later regulations.

Local authorities will be levied to pay for the discounts of Housing Association Right to Buy tenants regardless of whether they have sold their ‘high value’ properties.

Housing Association income will be reduced by £3.85bn. over 4 years through the 1% reduction in rents, which has ripped up business plans and jeopardised secured loans. The OBR estimates this will result in 14,000 fewer affordable homes being built.

Existing tenants

Pay to Stay – tenants with a gross household income of £40,000 London, £30,000 elsewhere, will be means tested and charged market rents. Landlords will have access to tax records. This will be compulsory for local authorities, and the receipts will go to the Treasury. It will be voluntary for housing associations, who will be able to keep the receipts, thus giving them an incentive to implement it. Pay to Stay will hit working families on as little as the London Living Wage. It will drive essential workers out of our cities. (See also here.)

Right to Buy – still compulsory for local authorities, with a duty to replace the homes they sell (not that this happens). It will be voluntary for housing associations, who will have no duty to replace locally and, where they do, can replace with the misnamed ‘affordable 80% of market’ rents, shared ownership or for sale. HA discounts will be paid for by that compulsory sale of local authority ‘high value’ housing. Any shortfall will come from the taxpayer. The discounts of up to £104,000 in London, £77,000 elsewhere, will be ‘portable’ and can be used to buy property elsewhere (such is the inequality in prices, the London discount will be more than the total cost of buying a house on Merseyside). Yet another state subsidy to private buyers.

Rents will be cut by 1% (unless you’re hit by Pay to Stay). Service charges will undoubtedly rise to compensate.

Potential tenants

Secure tenancies will be phased out and changed to fixed term tenancies of between 2-5 years. Compulsory for local authorities, voluntary for housing associations.

This will also apply to all new tenancies, including existing tenants who transfer, mutually exchange, or inherit (including widow(er)s).

Tenure will be reviewed at the end of the period which means that the smallest change in circumstances could lead to the loss of your home. There’ll be little point in looking after it, being involved in your community or getting promoted.

The differences between voluntary and compulsory in respect of local authorities and housing associations comes down to the fact that the Treasury wants to reverse the recent ONS classification of housing associations as public sector bodies, whose £60bn debt must be added to government debt, by deregulating them and then privatising them by selling off the £44bn in capital grants they have received from the taxpayer over the past three decades. This would amount to a decrease in public sector debt (‘the deficit’) of more than £100bn. (Applying the compulsory rent reduction to HAs suggests George Osborne hasn’t quite worked out this deregulation thingy yet!)

Housing Benefit

Bedroom Tax (spare room subsidy) means HB is reduced by 14% for one spare bedroom, 25% for two or more, and is unchanged.

The Benefit Cap will be reduced from April 2016 to £442 a week in London and £385 a week outside London, making social housing and even temporary accommodation rents unaffordable for families with several children.

Housing Benefit is to be capped at the Local Housing Allowance maxima for social housing tenants as well as private tenants. This means HB for all social tenants (including pensioners) will be capped at the level of housing need, so someone in a 3 bed who only ‘needs’ a 1 bed will have HB capped (thus pensioners will now get bedroom taxed by the back door). No account will be taken of support costs in refuges and hostels, which are already closing.

Shared Accommodation Rate will be extended to social housing so that single under 35s (previously under 25s) will only receive HB for a room in a shared house/1 bed.

It is worth noting that cuts in housing benefit have a twofold effect: (i) for the claimant they mean the choice between eating, heating or paying the rent, getting into arrears and then facing eviction, being deemed intentionally homeless and then ending up on the street; and (ii) the landlord who loses a substantial amount of previously guaranteed income/subsidy which could have been invested in the provision of more social housing.

None of this will do anything for the 1.3 million households on housing waiting lists. It will not increase the stock of available housing – not family homes at reasonable rents, nor specially adapted flats, nor sheltered housing, nor warden supported refuges or hostels – none of which are provided by the private sector – and it could throw millions onto the streets. Homelessness has risen by a third under Cameron’s premiership. How much higher will it go?

Where are the screams of outrage?

The Government’s answer to the increase in private renters suffering exploitation at the hands of Buy to Rent and Right to Buy landlords is not to deal with it by capping rents and providing secure tenancies but to make social housing tenants suffer the same unaffordable rents, insecure, overcrowded and squalid conditions; not to build the decent homes we so desperately need to be able to rent, but to sell off and demolish what social housing we currently have.

Since Thatcher introduced Right to Buy in the 1980s four out of ten council homes sold under the policy are now in the hands of private landlords. How many more homes will be privatised?

The demonisation of council tenants as benefit scroungers and criminals has been going on for decades and we have few allies beyond the world of housing professionals.

The Tories know this and are taking full advantage. The ‘scum of the earth’ are to be driven out of our cities so that the space we are taking up can become yet another piece of profitable real estate, for sale to the highest bidder.

But it doesn’t have to be like this!

We can Kill the Housing Bill! It potentially affects millions – not just the 4 million social renters, but the millions waiting for public housing, on the waiting lists – 22,000+ here in Lambeth – or stuck in crap private rentals, young people – and now the not so young – who can’t afford to leave home or start a family – and their parents!

Let’s join together to demand truly affordable, decent and secure housing for everyone.

And let’s start by demanding the Labour Party makes as big a fuss about this as they did about tax credits. They won that one! They can win this!

“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” (Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Joan Twelves, 31 December 2015

Joe Halewood has blogged more on all this at https://speye.wordpress.com/2015/12/31/social-housing-in-2016/

The end of social housing?

You probably haven’t heard of Pay To Stay. It’s part of the Housing & Planning Bill and of all the nasty, divisive policies the Tories have come up with this is one of the nastiest. If you have heard of it, you probably think it’s only going to affect a tiny number of ‘rich’ tenants. And those ‘rich’ tenants probably shouldn’t be living in social housing in the first place, should they? People like the late Bob Crow, like former MP Frank Dobson – oh, and people like nurses, teachers, tube and train drivers, social workers, electricians, carpenters, administrators, lorry drivers, cab drivers, paramedics, probation officers, opticians, police and prison officers – ordinary working families, in fact.

If your household income is more than £30,000 per year, then the social rent will increase to the market rent. In Bristol, this means from £440 per month to £845 – an increase of £4,860 p.a; in Brighton, from £480 to £1,220, £8,880 p.a more. And in London where the income level is set at £40,000, from £520 p.m to £2,200, £19,760 p.a more. Because household income will be based on gross earnings (including child benefit and child tax credits), a couple earning the London Living Wage will be hit. As will some housing benefit recipients.

And pensioners on fixed incomes are not excluded.

Rich? No. In work? Yes. Trade unionist? Probably. Public sector worker? Probably. Hard working family? Definitely!

The cuts to tax credits (an average loss of £1,300 p.a) pale into insignificance compared to Pay To Stay’s potential loss of a staggering £20,000 p.a!

There’ll be no escape into the private sector – the rent will be the same. Right To Buy? But, like market rents, market house prices are out of reach, even with discounts. You need to earn £77,000 to buy in London. For many, the only option will be to leave the city. Or go on the dole.

All sense of community will disappear as the only social renters will be those scrapping by on benefits. Only the rich and childless will be able to live in our great cities, especially London.

One of the factors fuelling soaring market rents is Right To Buy. More than a third of RTB properties in London are now private rentals, let by room, not by house/flat. £200 p.w per room is normal – a slumlord can rake in £800+ p.w for a 3 bed. Homes built for families are being turned into multi-occupied, childless, unrepaired slums.

Policies like the bedroom tax and benefit cap have already led to the beginning of social cleansing in our cities. Pay To Stay, the abolition of secure tenancies and s106 ‘affordable’ rentals, the forced sale of ‘high value’ council properties and cuts to housing benefit, will finish the job.

Council housing is one of the pillars of the welfare state. Along with Poverty, Disease, Ignorance and Idleness, Squalor is back.

(written for Labour Briefing www.labourbriefing.org)

18 November 2015

Tag: Joan Twelves