Earlier this week the Coalition government’s Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, unveiled the government’s plans to destroy the last vestige of affordable social housing.
In what housing charities have described as being ‘like a deliberate attack on the poor’, Shapps announced the introduction of a new ‘local authority flexible tenancy’.
Under this scheme the right to council housing for life will disappear and be replaced with fixed short-term tenancy agreements for as little as two years.
A sinister aspect of these proposals is the requirement of local councils to ‘assess’ tenants on a regular basis to monitor any changes in their circumstances.
If a family’s financial circumstances have improved, through wage increases, then it would be open to the council to evict that family should they refuse to move voluntarily.
Councils will now also have the right to evict tenants who fall behind with rent or who have a history of problems paying.
In addition, councils will have the power to determine who can apply for social housing, opening up the possibility that anyone with a record of struggling to make rent payments in the past would be automatically excluded from applying, or those on low pay or benefits being ‘assessed’ as a bad risk.
The right of parents to hand on their council house to their children is also destined to be scrapped.
The other prong in this onslaught on working class families is the intention to raise council rents to 80 per cent of the market rate.
The plan of the coalition government is quite clear: rip up all protection for workers in social housing, allowing them to be either evicted or moved against their will, while at the same time driving up rents to unaffordable levels.
Already local councils in cities like London have been exploring the possibilities of providing bed and breakfast accommodation in towns outside the capital where those unable to afford the massive increase in rents can be dumped.
The future, as far as the coalition government is concerned, is one where working class families are ghettoised in slums on the periphery of cities and towns, all the better to police them and keep them under control – an absolute requirement of capitalism faced with an insurrectionary working class.
But this dream of driving the working class back to the slums of the 19th century comes up against a working class that will never accept the destruction of one of its great gains.
At the end of World war II, capitalism was forced to retreat before a working class determined not to be forced back into these slums.
The Labour government of 1945 was forced to embark on a massive council house building programme, one that many felt had solved the housing crisis forever.
It is clear today that capitalism in its acute crisis can no longer afford any concession or reform, whether it be housing or health, and that all the gains made by reformism in the past cannot be defended except through the overthrow of capitalism.
The right to decent affordable housing has always been something that capitalism has hated.
Under the period of inflationary ‘boom’ after the war it was forced to accept it to keep the working class from rising up.
With the banks collapsing and capitalist profits evaporating, social housing is seen as a luxury that simply cannot be afforded.
For the working class it is equally clear, the housing crisis cannot be solved through reforms of capitalism, the gains of the 1940s can only be preserved through the abolition of capitalism itself.
This means strike action by the working class to bring this government down and then going forward to a workers government and socialism.
