THE proposal to blow up five blocks of flats in Glasgow’s Red Road, as part of the opening ceremony for the Commonwealth Games, has been reversed following an outcry from local people and an on-line petition that attracted over 15,000 supporters within days of its announcement.
Contrary to the organiser’s stated belief – a belief shared by the SNP and local politicians – that this act would ‘commemorate an important part of the city’s social history’, the vast majority of workers and their families correctly saw it as a celebration of the destruction of social housing.
With nearby local residents refusing to leave their houses during this repulsive exercise in demolishing the five tower blocks and with a wave of revulsion at such a ‘celebration’ the games organisers and ruling SNP administration had no option but to back down on the grounds of health and safety.
What most people found entirely objectionable, apart from this, was the off-hand dismissal of any consideration to the rights of asylum seekers.
The sixth block of flats on the estate is used to home asylum seekers and there are no proposals to demolish this block on the grounds that it is not fit for human habitation!
This monstrous debacle serves to highlight the crisis in council housing, a crisis that is daily seeing entire blocks of habitable social houses and flats being demolished as a direct result of the policies being carried out by the Tory-led coalition.
Last November, housing association chiefs revealed that, despite a desperate need for affordable houses, the bedroom tax had made three-bedroom flats too expensive for people to rent. As a result, the Coast and Country housing association, which has over 10,000 homes in the north-east, announced that demolishing these properties will be the most ‘cost effective’ step, a view echoed in Liverpool where another association announced that a block of flats will be ‘emptied with a view to subsequent demolition’ due to the tax.
Demolishing council flats is virtually an official Tory party policy following a report last year from a ‘think tank’ set up by the Tory planning minister Nick Boles. In this report, they advocated demolishing all ‘modernist tower blocks’, even those perfectly maintained, and replacing them with streets of terraced houses and low rise flats ‘that people actually want to live in’.
The Tories’ concern has nothing to do with providing affordable social housing that people want to live in, but with the wholesale destruction of social housing and driving working class families into the position where they have no option but to enter the property market and buy the new build homes that speculators are rushing to build, encouraged by the government’s Help to Buy scheme.
The alternative is being to try and pay the vastly inflated and unaffordable rents being charged by private landlords. For people buying or renting in the private sector the future is extremely perilous.
A report this week by the housing charity, Shelter, reveals that four million families are in such a perilous financial state that they are ‘just one pay cheque away from losing their homes’.
They have so little savings that if their pay stopped just for one month they would lose their homes – over half these have no savings whatsoever and could not last even one month. This is the future capitalism has for the working class, the destruction of affordable social housing, forcing families into the arms of the property speculators and banks and when they are unable to pay the inflated mortgages and rents, just turn them out onto the streets.
The only way to stop this abomination is to bring down this government of speculators and profiteers and go forward to a workers government and socialism where decent, affordable housing for everyone will be treated as a basic human right.