This is another story about unrest in the metropolis that somehow doesn’t seem to have been reported elsewhere in the country. It doesn’t seem to have been in any of the papers. More evidence of the deliberate under-reporting of demonstrations against the Condem regime.
I don’t agree with the violence nor the vandalism, but I can well sympathise with the despair and anger behind it. The developers and elite letting agents like Foxtons should have expected it. After all, there has been considerable anger at the way Notting Hill, a predominantly working class Black area, has been colonised by the middle class White media set. There have been similar campaigns against the gentrification of poor Black areas in America, most notably around the brownstone properties in New York.
And when people in a poor community like Brixton with a deep-seated resentment at the poverty and racial injustice they’ve suffered, are faced with losing their homes to the extremely rich, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the situation would become explosive.
As for Tessa Jowell and her plans to enable people to negotiate a three year tenancy with their landlords, this is Labour trying its best not to alarm the middle classes before the election, and give more ammunition to the Daily Mail, the Torygraph and the Murdoch press. This really won’t make much difference, as these papers are all aligned against them anyway. Murdoch has even said that if Miliband gets in, his papers are finished. Which in its own way, is as good an endorsement of the Labour leader as any other.
On the Sunday Politics show yesterday Labour’s Tessa Jowell admitted that her party’s proposed three year tenancies are voluntary. Tenants will be able to ‘negotiate’ a three year contract but landlords will be under no obligation to provide one.
What a fucking joke, and one that shows the Labour Party are every bit as out of touch as the chinless toffs they pretend to oppose. According to one property firm there are currently 5 tenants chasing each private rental property on the market across the UK and in London that jumps to 8 people desperately competing for every home. If Jowell thinks that tenants have any bargaining power at all when the odds are so heavily stacked against them then she is living in a dream world – or at least a world where she doesn’t ever have to worry about having no home.
When one of our most basic…
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Beastrabban\'s Weblog 
April 27, 2015 at 9:54 pm |
BRIXTON
This is within the voting area on your poll card of VAUXHALL
for Thursday 7 May.
Left Unity MP candidate – Simon Hardy
Simon Hardy
Vauxhall MP constituency (voting area)
Simon, 33, works as a teacher and is an NUT rep in a secondary school in West London.
Facebook link – https://www.facebook.com/leftunityforvauxhall
VAUXHALL
21,498 Labour win in 2010
31,620 did not vote in 2010
Total Voters 74,811
LEFT UNITY HOUSING POLICIES
http://leftunity.org/housing-policy/
Includes:
Vacant accommodation should be brought into use, by compulsory purchase if necessary.
Accommodation to be allocated on the basis of need, with right to life-long tenure and rents set at an affordable level within the living wage.
The rights of short-term tenants in both public and private sector housing be protected with respect to length of rental contract and termination of tenancy.
To pilot the return of local authority building and renovation teams.
Rent control to be introduced on private landlords with rent increases only where necessity, in the context of repairing and refitting the rented property, can be demonstrated.
Housing rights and benefits for under-25 year olds to be respected and previous caps reversed.
The legal right to rent strikes to be reintroduced and tenants organisations to be facilitated.
To work with co-ops within an overall local housing strategy.
In the short run we want a crash course in house building and appropriation and renovation of empty properties, which will revive communities.
In the longer term, a determined program of building good houses for cheap rents will bring us up against the heart of the property relations of capital, mainly the private ownership of land and the commodification of property
Left Unity recognises that there is much more than housebuilding needed to humanise and truly civilise our cities and wishes to work with international political campaign ‘The Right to the City’.
NO SUCH THING AS A SMALL PARTY
An old saying informs us:
If you think small can’t make a difference,
try sleeping with a mosquito.
http://www.anastasia-england.me.uk