IT WAS Frederick Engels who said that the housing problem and capitalism were inseparable, and that to get rid of the former you would have to get rid of the latter.
Workers thought that the housing crisis was being solved with the building of millions of council homes after the Second World War, initiated by the 1945 Labour government, but that has proven to be a brief interlude.
Following Thatcher bringing in the ‘right to buy’, hundreds of thousands of council homes were sold off.
The 1997 Blair-Brown regime quickly built on Thatcher’s policies, speeding up the sale of council homes, and then encouraged Labour councils to demolish massive council estates all over the country, selling off the land to Labour’s new friends, the property developers.
Labour in government became the party of the bankers and the property developers. Council estates all over the country, still in mint condition, were demolished, their occupants ‘decanted’ and the land sold off.
Now with the capitalist crisis deepening there is a massive shortage of housing. The middle classes cannot afford mortgages, and there is a massive queue for rented accommodation. There are no no-go areas – the middle classes are even moving into the Peabody Charity homes, at market rents of course, further depriving the poor of places to live.
The coalition with its attacks on benefits, especially housing benefit, has enormously increased the pressure on those seeking rented accommodation. Councils have abolished their housing waiting lists to turn away the poor and the unemployed, while the coalition is seeking to force the middle-aged and the elderly, whose children have left home, to move to smaller accommodation.
These policies have created an horrific housing crisis.
The latest statistics are more than alarming.
The number of homeless households in England has risen by almost a fifth compared with the same period last year. Some 12,830 families and individuals were newly classed as homeless between 1st October and 31 December, 2011. Of the 12,830 new homeless applicants, some 2,620 had dependent children.
Meanwhile, the figures for 2011 as a whole show nearly 50,000 families were newly classed as homeless during the year. This is a 14% rise on 2010.
The chief executive of Crisis, Leslie Morphy, commented: ‘Our worst fears are coming to pass. We face a perfect storm of economic downturn, rising joblessness and soaring demand for limited affordable housing combined with government policy to cut housing benefit plus local cuts to homelessness services…we can only predict that homelessness will continue to rise.’
As well, the number of people sleeping rough in England has risen by 23% in a year.
Coalition Housing minister Shapps cynically commented: ‘Anyone heading here with tales of Dick Whittington in their head needs to realise that the streets of London and our other cities aren’t paved with gold. Those arriving from beyond our shores to try and carve out a future in England should come with a thought-through plan to avoid the risk of sleeping on the streets.’
The new reality is that the average homeless person has a life expectancy of 47 years (with women the average falls to 43), compared with 77 for the rest of the population.
There is much worse to come as the crisis deepens and the housing crisis intensifies. There is only one way out and that is to bring down the coalition with a general strike and bring in a workers government that will put an end to capitalism and bring in socialism. This will include launching a national plan to build millions of new council homes to solve the housing crisis, and also provide millions of unemployed workers and youth with jobs and skilled training at trade union rates of pay.
