THE housing crisis in the UK has reached explosion point.
There is no new council housing being built, rents are being driven sky-high, while housing benefits are being slashed, and rogue landlords, latter-day Rachmans, are appearing onto the scene once again to make tenants’ lives a misery until they force them out onto the streets!
Whole areas of London are now being cleared of workers to make way for luxury housing for the super rich, not just of the UK but of the planet. This is Boris Johnson’s special gift to the workers of London!
The way that the capital is being cleansed is reminiscent of the way that the common land was cleared in the 16th and 17th centuries to create the conditions for capitalism to develop. With the system in terminal decline, the inner cities of the UK are being cleansed of workers now to make way for rich parasites.
Yesterday, the charity Crisis reported that 100,000 children are living in temporary accommodation in England after being made homeless. On 30 June, 66,980 individuals or families were registered homeless and awaiting a settled home – an increase of 12% from the same date in 2014. Almost a third of the households, which included 99,080 children, had lost a home in the private rented sector. Crisis added that housing benefit had failed to keep up with rent rises.
The figures showed the most common reason for becoming homeless was the ending of a short-term tenancy with a private landlord. At the end of June, most of the families with children, 88%, were living in self-contained accommodation, a property where the household has sole use of the kitchen and bathroom.
But more than 2,500 families with children were living in bed and breakfast accommodation – 25% higher than a year earlier. Of those households, 830 had been in B&Bs for more than six weeks, 36% higher than a year earlier. Campbell Robb, chief executive of the charity Shelter, said: ‘These figures paint a grim picture of the devastating impact welfare changes and sky-high housing costs are having on thousands of families in England.
‘With cuts to welfare taking their toll, coupled with a dramatic shortage of genuinely affordable homes forcing millions into unstable private renting, it’s little surprise that so many are losing the fight to stay in their home.’
First, there was the selling off of council housing. Now, there is the plan to privatise the properties of the Housing Associations. The right-wing Policy Exchange think tank has said that nationalisation of housing associations, followed by a state sell-off into the private sector, could become ‘a serious option’, and bring into the capitalist state up to £60bn, putting 2.5 million households and more than five million people across England into the grip of rapacious private landlords.
This policy is going hand-in-hand with the forced clearances of entire estates, to make way for luxury housing. On Wednesday morning, there was a pitched battle to clear the Sweets Way estate in Whetstone, London. More than 50 bailiffs, plus police and dog handlers, with firefighters and ambulance staff in attendance, battled to eject tenants and their supporters who had barricaded themselves inside their homes.
Tenants on the receiving end described a situation where: ‘They’re smashing into the houses with a battering ram through the front window to drive us out. It’s chaos. It’s tension. They have hard hats and shields.’ Enforcement officers were yesterday working in conjunction with the police to complete the ending of the ‘illegal occupation’ of the estate prior to demolition and the development of new luxury properties.
These state attacks are making the situation crystal clear. A decent home, a decent job, a decent education and a decent life for children can only be achieved by getting rid of this rotten, decaying capitalist system and its replacement with a socialist society. That this will require a mass movement of many millions of workers, a general strike and a socialist revolution is obvious.
Forward to the British socialist revolution!
