Michael Eavis Donates Land and Funding for Social Housing

Maximum respect to Michael Eavis, the man behind the Glastonbury festival. My mother takes the People’s Friend, and according to that ancient and venerable magazine, Eavis has donated land and promised to pay for the tools and material for the construction of 20 social houses. These are to go to locals who are being priced out of the housing market.

This is a serious issue in Somerset and many other rural areas, as houses are bought up by wealthy outsiders either moving permanently to the country, or picking them up as holiday homes. There’s a desperate need for social housing about the country as whole, as I don’t need to tell anyone reading this blog. It’s therefore really great news to hear that Eavis has stepped in to do his bit for his community.

If only others were the same, but somehow I doubt that another Somerset magnate, Jacob Rees-Mogg, will do anything similar any time soon.

PoliticsJoe Video Showing the Sheer Dementedness of Liz Truss

PoliticsJoe posted this video on YouTube yesterday. Its title declares that its about ‘Just Liz Truss Being Fully Mental’, which I supposed is one way of describing some of the antics and pronouncements of this contender for the Tory leadership. It consists of a series of clips, not edited together to have her singing a stupid, satirical song about herself, as PoliticsJoe has done, but something just as damning: it shows some of her deranged political statements, together with her failing to answer tough interview questions about her broken promises and falsehoods from people like Andrew Neil. And mixed in with that is previous footage from years ago of her speaking at a Lib Dem conference when she was a young activist with them.

The younger Truss seems like a normal, sane, politically idealistic and passionate human being. She praises Paddy Ashdown and the political potential and right to self-government of the British people. A self-government that is being denied by the monarchy, whose abolition she demands. It’s a very radical proposal, and one which you tend to hear from those further left, such as the left-wing of the Labour party. But by the time she’s a Tory MP and cabinet minister, she’s been transformed. The eyes have got madder, though not nearly as bog-eyed as Nicky Morgan, and the voice has taken on a harsher edge, so that at one point she did sound a bit like Anne Widecombe. And instead of radical democratic change, she was wibbling on about having secured a prize deal for exporting pork to China. Just like she steered through a deal to export cheese to Japan, where most of the country is lactose intolerant. And other great results for Brexit.

What should really bring her down is her lies and broken promises. She’s asked by Neil how many of the 200,000 social houses she declared she was going to build were actually put up. She can’t remember. Neil tells her that it’s not hard to know how many: zero. And the end of the video shows her being patiently asked by a female journo about various promises she made when she was in office, one after another, all of which she broke.

This is the woman now trying to get her backside into No. 10, and in many ways a true protege of Boris Johnson and the Tory machine. A woman who ditched democratic idealism for class reaction, Brexit and just telling one lie after another, while gripping desperately at the tiniest success in the Brexit negotiations in order to show it as some kind of magnificent success for Britain.

The Tories are destroying the British economy, and have only succeeded in making this country’s great people desperately poorer. Brexit has actively damaged our industry, agriculture and even the financial sector, which the Tories and New Labour have favoured so much. And Truss has been a vital part of all that under Johnson and before.

Johnson out!

Truss out!

Sunak out!

Tories out!

Left Labour Seminar on the Lessons to Be Learned from Welsh Labour

I also got this interesting piece of information yesterday from a message about their forthcoming events from the Labour Assembly against Austerity. The Socialist Campaign Group are organising a seminar on June 20th about what British socialists can learn from the successful, socialist policies of the Welsh Labour party. The snippet says

‘SCG SEMINAR: Learning from Welsh Labour’s Radical Agenda

Monday 20 June 2022, 7pm. Register here.

Beth Winter MP // Mick Antoniw MS, Welsh Government Counsel-General // Jack Sargeant MS, Chair, Senedd Petitions Committee // Sophie Howe, Welsh Future Generations Commissioner // Darren Williams, Welsh Labour Grassroots

The next SCG online Socialist Policy Forum will look at the lessons we can learn from Welsh Labour’s new radical plan for government – which is helping to build a country that serves the many, not the few. This radical agenda includes: setting up a publicly owned energy company ■ a free National Care Service ■ free school meals for all primary school pupils ■ plans for Net Zero by 2025 – 15 years ahead of the UK-wide 2050 target ■ a national construction company to increase the numbers of social housing ■ and a Basic Income pilot scheme for care leavers.

Come along and learn about these progressive polices and how they can help the wider Labour movement win enough support to kick the Tories out of Downing Street.

This meeting is part of a series of socialist policy events organised by the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs in partnership with the Labour Assembly Against Austerity and Momentum.‘

I’m fully behind this. Welsh Labour are doing – and doing very successfully – what the Labour party in the rest of this great nation should be doing, but isn’t. Because Starmer is too in love with Blair and his legacy. And I expect as a result conditions for ordinary people will improve as they worsen in England. So you can expect the Tories to start complaining about something or other in Wales, which is terribly unfair, in order to divert attention from the failures of Tory laissez-faire capitalism. That’s if Starmer doesn’t help them by finding some way to close Welsh Labour down.
 

Alt Right Hack Milo Yiannopolis Heads Off to America, No-One in UK Bothered

Here’s another piece of cheering news for those on the Left. Milo Yiannopolis, a leading figure in the Alt Right, has declared that he’s leaving these shores and applying for asylum in America. Why? because he’s a gay man, and does not feel safe in an Islamized Britain. Or at least this is what he’s told the American right-wing Front Page magazine. According to Zelo Street’s article about this world-shattering event, Yiannopolis went on

“In 2015, I wrote the column that secured my place in the pantheon of Right-wing hate figures: ‘I’m A Gay Man And Mass Muslim Immigration Terrifies Me.’ Shortly afterwards, I left London, disturbed by the state of my capital city and hoping that with a megaphone in America I could sound the alarm about European Islamization”.

Like the rest of us, Zelo Street doesn’t remotely accept his claim that Britain has been Islamized, saying that they blinked and missed it. They also call bullsh*t on his tale that he left Blighty for America to warn them about the threat of Islam. The truth was that Yiannopolis was hired by Steve Bannon for the extreme right-wing news organization, Breitbart. They also pour scorn on his claim that he’s a member of any pantheon, on the grounds that he simply isn’t important enough to be one. And this same reason applies to his other claim, that despite being married to an American, he’s applying for asylum because, as a gay man, so many people want him dead. And so he goes on about friends of his having been assaulted by Bangladeshis in public parks simply for letting their dogs void their bowels. In east London, he says, you can’t buy booze after a certain time because it will cause the Muslim minority to start a letter writing campaign against anyone selling alcohol. A Muslim minority, he says, who are disproportionately unemployed and living in affordable housing paid for by the taxpayer. He also claims that

“Muslims with extreme, hateful views about gays and horrible opinions about women would be an irritant and not a menace but for the fact that they are routinely insulated from criticism by a politically-correct media elite that scoffs whenever you mention the appalling social problems that spring up, as night follows day, whenever the area hits a certain percentage of Islamic residents”.

Zelo Street is skeptical about these claims as well, noting that he gives no corroborating proof of Bangladeshi Muslims attacking people, nor that there are any Muslim letter-writing campaigns against shops selling alcohol. The commenters on this piece are also highly skeptical about Islam being the sole reason his unnamed friends have been met with anger because of their dogs. Many people get angry when dogs foul the pavement or public parks, not just Muslims. They also have met with zero problems while buying alcohol from Muslim owned shops. A couple of comments say that if Yiannopolis can’t buy booze after a certain time, it’s because of Lloyd George and the licensing laws than angry Muslims. Also, some of those shopkeeper rightly want to go to bed at 11 O’clock. As for living at taxpayer’s expense in ‘affordable housing’, well, no, they’re not. Affordable housing is not social housing.

Yiannopolis also rants about shariah courts and parallel justice systems, which also don’t exist. He also says that he looks forward to Tommy Robinson, formerly of the EDL and Pegida UK, and his ‘army of brave lads to topple the government and close the border themselves’. Zelo Streets says of this statement that it makes grifters heroic. Which is absolutely true. Robinson, unfortunately, has very many fans and followers, but they’re hardly so many that they’re a threat to democracy by organizing a coup or close the border on their own. And Robinson himself is a grifter. According to a recent hang-out between Kevin Logan and Mike Stuchbery, Robinson is raking in about 900,000 pounds a year in donations from his followers, and his house in Luton reflects that. He is not a poor soldier battling valiantly with limited funds against the well-funded hordes of Islam. The Zelo Street article concludes that Yiannopolis’ piece is a ‘crock of crap’, and that Yiannopolis himself wants a drip-feed of money, if only to pay the lawyer for his asylum claim.

See: http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/01/milo-yiannopoulos-leaving-uk-for-good.html

In fact, Zelo Street is entirely correct in calling Yiannopolis’ article a pile of ordure. I doubt very much if it is militant, intolerant Muslims forcing him to live to leave London and Blighty. The real reason is that Yiannopolis is spectacularly broke. A week or so ago he released a video on the Net from Australia laughing at the fact that he was not 2 million pounds or dollars in debt, as people were claiming but four million.

Well, if he is broke, it’s all his own fault. For a moment it did look as if he was going to be a major figure politically, until he spectacularly managed to torpedo his career with some very disturbing remarks he made on the Joe Rogan Experience, an internet news discussion show.

Yiannopolis is a half-Jewish gay man, whose husband is Black. There’s nothing wrong with that, but he uses his identity as a shield to deny accusations of prejudice when he makes racist, bigoted comments about Blacks, gays and women and feminism. He can’t be prejudiced, the line runs, because he’s gay and attracted to Black men. He’s just telling the truth, which Liberals are determined to silence through accusations of racism and homophobia. As a controversialist for the Alt Right, he was becoming increasingly popular. The other year he launched a tour of American college campuses entitled his ‘Dangerous Faggot’ tour. Obviously and unsurprisingly, this was also met with protests from college feminists and anti-racist protesters. He was so popular that he was offered a very lucrative book deal by the right-wing imprint of Simon and Schuster.

This collapsed with the rest of his career as a political pundit, after he made comments justifying, or appearing to justify, paedophilia on the Joe Rogan show. Milo said that he had been molested when he was 14 by a Roman Catholic priest. However, the priest, who he refused to name, was not the instigator of the relationship. He claimed instead that it had been him, as he was desperate to provoke outrage through relationships with older, adult men. He then went on to claim that such relationships with older men helped gay boys come to terms with their sexuality.

Rogan and his co-host were, like the rest of us, not impressed. They called it was it was: child-abuse. Or at least that’s what it was over in America. They didn’t know about Britain. Well, we can reassure them on that point. It’s called paedophilia over here, where it is also illegal. Yiannopolis also claimed that he had been on boat parties in Hollywood where ‘young boys, very young boys’ were there as prostitutes. He would not, however, say how young, nor who the Hollywood personalities using them were. Commenting on this part of the interview, Kevin Logan stated that it made him feel cold wondering how young these boys were, if Yiannopolis himself was 13 or 14 when he was molested by the priest.

This stopped Yiannopolis’ burgeoning career cold. Simon and Schuster withdrew their promise to publish his book. He had been invited to attend C-SPAN, the big American Conservative gathering. This was also withdrawn. He also found himself sacked from Breitbart, although he claims that he resigned. Apparently several of the staff objected to working with him, and said that they’d leave if he didn’t.

Yiannopolis then made a public apology, stating that he now realized that he was the victim of child abuse. He also denied that his comments support the abuse of children, claiming that gays use the word ‘boy’ to describe other gay men, and he was sorry for not being more careful about using the word to a heterosexual audience, who would not grasp its meaning within gay culture. Kevin Logan, commenting on this part of is apology, stated that Yiannopolis wasn’t telling the truth, as he had clearly talked about ‘boys’, meaning precisely ‘boys’, not adult men.

Yiannopolis had also gone to Australia this winter to do a speaking tour there. This too, however, was a failure, as no-one turned up. And so it seems very much to me that Yiannopolis is leaving the country, not because he’s afraid of homophobic Muslims, but because he’s dead broke and thinks that he might be able to salvage something of his career amongst the American Far Right.

Sweary male feminist and anti-racist vlogger, Kevin Logan, made this video about the collapse of Yiannopolis’ career, which includes clips from the Joe Rogan video.

In another video, Logan says that he was keen to ask Yiannopolis if he had ever acted on his conviction that sex with underage boys was beneficial. Because if he had, then he should just go to the nearest police station and hand himself in. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons he’s really leaving London. Other people have also found out about his vile comments, and don’t want him around. Logan himself doesn’t have much sympathy for Yiannopolis’ treatment after he made his vile remarks on the Joe Rogan show either, despite Yiannopolis recognition that he was a victim of child abuse. This was for the simple reason that Yiannopolis had himself made it abundantly clear that he didn’t care about his opponents’ feelings either, even when they were a woman, who had been raped.

And Yiannopolis is another person, who has exploited his fans and followers for his own greed. When he was touring America, he announced he was setting up a fund to provide money for young white men to go to university, and appealed for donations. It was part of his attack on ‘political correctness’ and affirmative action to get more underprivileged Blacks in higher education. Except that it wasn’t. Yiannopolis didn’t set up a separate account, and all the donations went directly to his normal bank account. To date there have been no disbursements. It all looks very much like it was just another money-making scam.

Yiannopolis’ departure across the Atlantic is not that of a persecuted gay man fleeing Muslim persecution in a Britain overrun and dominated by militant Islam. It’s simply a far right propagandist going to try to get rich again after wrecking his career with vile and disgusting comments about the sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

Zelo Street is right that few people here know about him, or care that he’s going. And given his squalid views and behavior, this country has lost zilch from his departure.

Owen Jones Talks to Rebecca Long-Bailey: Neoliberalism Has Fallen Apart

In this video, Owen Jones, the author of Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class and The Establishment, talks to Rebecca Long-Bailey, one of the people responsible for the Labour manifesto and close ally of Jeremy Corbyn. He states that she has been pretty central to the whole Corbyn project. And he particularly likes her because she’s a ‘scamp’ from Manchester like him.

He begins by stating that Clement Attlee established the post-War consensus of a strong welfare state, state intervention in industry and labour and trade union rights. This fell apart under Margaret Thatcher. He asks her if Thatcher’s neoliberalism is now falling apart in its turn.

She replies very positively that it definitely is, and that more orthodox economists are stating that we need a Keynsian approach to the economy. She says that when they began promoting Keynsianism, they were attacked as very much out of touch. Now the Financial Times and another major economic journal has come out and supported state interventionism. The FT even said that we need to renationalise water. This left her absolutely speechless with surprise when she read it, as it was a Labour idea.

She was the Shadow Minister in charge of business and industrial strategy. Jones notes that the hostile press would immediately attack Labour’s policies as destructive and compare them to Venezuela. He asks how she responds to that. She replies with a very clear answer: ‘Rubbish’. She points out that, under neoliberalism, Britain has become one of the least productive nations in the developed world. Indeed, productivity is at its lowest for 20 years. And thanks to wage restraint, wages are also lower than they were before the Crash of 2008.

She states we need an investment bank for England to encourage investment, as private industry won’t invest unless government does so. She also states that we need to reform industry so that it represents everyone involved in a firm, including workers and stakeholders. When Jones asks her what she considers socialism to be, she simply responds ‘Fairness’, and talks about giving employees rights at work, protecting their jobs. She also makes it clear that she believes it is very important to show people that voting Labour will make a difference to their lives. She wants to show people in the north that Labour will tackle homelessness, not just by building more homes, but by building more social housing, so that people, who can’t afford a house will get one. It will be a radical transformation of society, just like it was in the 1940s.

She also talks about how difficult it is being an MP. As a Member of Parliament, you just want to talk about your policies and the issues, but you have to be aware that every time you give an interview, the media are trying to lead you into a trap by getting you to say the wrong thing, or criticise a Labour colleague.

Long-Bailey clearly has a deep grasp not only of the abstract economic issues involved, but also of the personal dimension as people are driven in debt, misery and despair through neoliberalism’s destruction of the British economy for the enrichment of the small number of extremely rich and privileged. And she is inspired by the same ideas as those of Clement Attlee and the great labour politicians, who forged the post-War consensus and gave Britain it’s longest period of economic growth, as well as expanding opportunities for ordinary working women and men.

And it can only be brilliant that the FT, that great pillar of financial capitalism, has come on board to support a return to Keynsianism.

As for the pet Thatcherite policies of Monetarism and neoliberalism, Robin Ramsay has spoken of Monetarism that when he studied economics in the late 60s and ’70s, it was considered such as a nutty idea that his professors didn’t bother to argue against it. He has suggested that it’s possible the Tories, who embraced it also knew it to be a load of rubbish. But they adopted it because it provided an ideological justification for what they wanted to do anyway: privatise industry and smash the organised working class.

Now Thatcherite neoliberalism is falling apart very obviously, and the elite are panicking. Hence the non-story about Clive Lewis and his supposed ‘misogyny’, which is a complete non-story. It’s being used by the Tories to try to distract people from their continuing failures over Brexit, the privatisation of the health and education services. And, of course, the sheer mass of seething misogyny and racism in their own party.

Short Video of Jeremy Corbyn Talking to the Victims of Grenfell Tower Fire

This is a short video from RT I found on YouTube of Jeremy Corbyn’s visit to one of the community centres housing the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. Corbyn states that this is a time of great stress, but promises that he will do everything to get to the bottom of it, and says that he will leave them to raise questions about it in parliament. He also praises the community spirit which pulled everyone there together.

And shortly before the end, he talks to a little girl with purple dreadlocks, who’s come up to see him.

During his career, Corbyn has always shown his solidarity with the poor, marginalised and oppressed, and I have absolutely no doubt that he will indeed do his utmost for those poor souls.

His dignified words and quiet solidarity shame Theresa May, who really didn’t want to meet the fire’s victims. She was happy, though, to go to see the council, whose penny pinching savings resulted in the seriously unsafe building that finally burst into flames so horrifically.

I’m not really surprised. May does not like speaking to or meeting the general public. She far prefers closed meetings, like those she held during the election, where all the individuals are picked members of the local Tory community association. And where all the questions from the press have been vetted beforehand.

When she was finally shamed into going to see the victims, they terrified her with their sheer anger, and she more or less ran to her car.

But these people have every right to be furious. They’ve lost everything – family, friends, neighbours, their homes and possessions. They’re social housing tenants and among the poorest people in London. They have been shabbily treated by a Conservative-led council in one of London’s wealthiest boroughs, who were apparently hoping to clear them out to gentrify the area.

There are serious questions which need to be asked about the multiple failures of government, that resulted in this horrific disaster. Not least among them should be Boris Johnson’s decision to close ten fire stations, and waste public money buying two water cannons, which cannot be used in Britain.

And just as Theresa May and the Tories are doing everything they can to wriggle out answering them, I have every faith that Jeremy Corbyn will do everything he can to give them and their supporters up and down the country the answers they need.

As for May, the best thing she and her government can now do is accept complete responsibility and resign.

Weak and Wobbly Theresa May’s Contradictory and Crap Housing Policy

The leak last Thursday of the Labour party manifesto, with its promise to nationalise the railways and parts of the energy network, clearly has rattled the Tory party. Mike over at Vox Political remarked that leak was probably intended to discredit these policies, but instead they have proved massively popular.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/11/labours-manifesto-approved-unanimously-by-nec-and-shadow-cabinet-after-leaked-version-wins-huge-public-support/

I’m not surprised. The Tory party, of course, started shrieking that this would drag us all back to the 1970s – actually not a bad thing, as Mike has also pointed out, considering that the gulf between rich and poor was at its lowest during that decade. The Torygraph also went berserk, and plastered all over the front page of its Friday edition a headline claiming that Labour MPs were ‘disowning’ it. I don’t know how true this was. It could be the Blairites trying their best to undermine their own party again, in order to shore up virtuous neoliberalism. Or it could be just more rumour and scaremongering put out, as usual, by the rag and its owners, the weirdo Barclay twins. The Telegraph has been in the forefront of the newspapers attacking Corbyn since he was elected to the Labour leadership. So many of its stories are just scaremongering or, at best, the fevered imaginings of a frightened capitalist class, that you can’t really believe anything the newspaper actually writes about the Labour party or its leader. Ken Surin, in an article for Counterpunch, quoted statistics by media analysts that said that only 11 per cent of reports about the party presented the facts accurately.

But the fact that the railways do need to be renationalised was ironically shown again that day, as a train I wanted to catch was delayed by 15 minutes. Because a train had broken down. The British taxpayer now pays far more subsidies to the private rail companies for a worse train service than in the 1970s. So once again, we’re back to showing that rather than being a decade of uniform disaster and imminent social collapse, it was better in some ways than the present.

So May has decided to unveil a few radical policies of her own. In order to counter Labour’s promise to build a million new homes, half of which will be social housing, in the next five years, May has announced that her government will boost the number of social housing being built, and included a special right to buy clause. Which sounds good, until you realise that they’re not going to release any more money for it.

Without that extra money, the promise is meaningless.
It’s more Tory lies.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/14/theresa-may-has-actually-announced-a-policy-and-its-rubbish/

The Tory party has absolutely no intention of building any more social housing. Mike has put up in his article a table of the Tories’ abysmal record on housing. These include a 43 per cent increase in homelessness, a 166 per cent jump in the number of people sleeping rough, private rents have gone up by over £1,700 since 2010, and the cost of owning a home for first-time buyers has risen by £65,000. But this won’t worry the Tory party, as 1/3 of them are private landlords. And I distinctly remember Johnny Void posting a number of articles about they sought to profit by the dearth of housing in London.

And this is quite apart from the fact that the Tory press, such as the Daily Mail, is aimed very much at the kind of people, who buy to rent, and endlessly applauds high house prices even though they make homes unaffordable to an increasing number of people in 21st century England. Of course they see such prices as a good thing, as it means even greater profits for them.

So they won’t want to undermine the housing bubble they’ve created, and cause prices to fall by building any more.

But they can’t be seen to be doing that, with Corbyn and Labour hot on this issue.

So they’ve concocted this rubbish, self-contradictory policy, hoping that people will be deceived by the meaningless promise. They hope people will remember the first part, and forget that without any more money, it won’t happen.

Don’t let them fool you.
Vote Labour for a decent housing solution on June 8th.

Ken Surin’s List of Theresa ‘Goody-Two Shoes’ May’s Lies and Attacks on the Poor and the Welfare State

More from a contributor to Counterpunch, though this time it isn’t about the lies, smears and bullying of the Israel lobby.

Ken Surin is a British academic, who now lives and teaches in America. He’s written a list of articles attacking Theresa May for her lies, U-turns and her attacks on the poor, working people and the welfare state. And her plans to sell off whatever remains of the NHS to private American healthcare companies as part of a Brexit deal.

He calls her ‘Goody-Two Shoes’, because that’s how May described herself: she says she was a ‘goody-two shoes’ in school.

Her first U-turn affected him personally. He lost his right to vote in 2002 when Blair decided that Brits who had been away for more than 15 years shouldn’t have the right to vote in British elections. May then declared that if she got in, she’d repeal it. Now that she’s in power, she hasn’t. She’s a liar. But then, what do you expect from the Tories?

He also states that he’s not surprised the Tories have got a 17 point lead over Labour. They’ve been undermined by the antics of the Blairites, the Zionist lobby’s maligning him as a anti-Semite, because he’s a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the loss of northern working class voters to UKIP, and, most significantly, the massive right-wing bias of the media.

A study by the LSE showed that on average, only 11 per cent of newspaper articles accurately reflected Labour policies. And in the case of the Daily Heil and Express, that ratio falls to zero.

He states that May is simply an opportunist, as shown by the way she voted Remain in the Brexit referendum, but to stay in power has turned her party into ‘UKIP-lite’.

And then he gives the following list of some her lies and U-turns.

The Tories were fined £70,000 last month by the Electoral Commission for failing to declare more than £275,000 in election-spending in the 2015 election. A dozen police forces have passed files relating to these expenses to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The CPS had intended to decide by the end of May if there were to be prosecutions for these violations, but an election in 2017 would probably take the wind out of attempts to prosecute 20 Tory MPs (or thereabouts) for their fraudulent activity in the 2015 election– “that’s history now”, many are likely to say.

If May called an early election for this reason, it would only demonstrate the flexibility of her principles.

May’s most recent budget dissolved into chaos when an increase in national insurance for the self-employed broke a 2015 election manifesto pledge. The ensuing public outcry panicked May and her colleagues into a U-turn, and the proposed increase was rescinded.

Since 2010 the Tories have promised to increase spending on the National Health Service every year, and that funding for schools would increase per student. In its report card after the most recent budget, The Independent said:

The public sector has been another loser. The NHS, which was in the black in 2010, faced a £1.85 billion deficit in 2016, the largest deficit in its history. As a result, waiting times are up, and the NHS is facing, what the British Red Cross have described as a ‘humanitarian crisis.’ Conditions in the NHS have led to an exodus of doctors. A third of Accident and Emergency doctors left the UK to work abroad between 2010 and 2015. There is a similar pattern in education, where 10,000 teachers left the profession in Cameron’s first term. In both sectors, real terms cuts in spending has increased workloads to a point where many professionals are no longer willing to continue.

Running down public services has hit some groups much harder than others. Austerity has hit women’s incomes twice as hard as men’s. Cuts to lone parent benefits since 2010, for example, have fallen disproportionality on women, for the simple reason that women make up 90 per cent of lone parents. At the same time, as women tend to be low earners they have benefited far less from tax cuts than men.

This is followed by a list of motions she has voted for, in which she has consistently supported the rich, and attacked the poor.

As home secretary, May introduced laws forcing internet service providers to help the UK’s spy agencies hack into computers.

Despite moving her party to the right so it can campaign as UKIP lite, May’s record on immigration when she was home secretary prior to becoming prime minister would certainly not please UKIP voters. May vowed to cut net immigration down to the “tens of thousands”, only to have it increase to a record high of 330,000.

May voted for the notorious “bedroom tax”, which reduced housing benefit for social-housing tenants deemed to have unoccupied bedrooms.

She voted against raising welfare benefits so they remained in line with inflation.

She voted against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work because of illness or disability.

She voted for making local councils reduce the amount spent on helping those in financial need pay their council taxes.

She voted for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits.

She voted against smoking bans and the hunting ban.

She voted for increasing the rate of the highly regressive Value Added Tax (VAT)

She voted against increasing the tax rate applied to income over £150,000.

She voted against a banker’s bonus tax.

While she voted for the bedroom tax to be imposed on people in social housing, May voted against the mansion tax, i.e. the annual tax on the value of expensive homes.

She voted for more restrictions on trade union activity.

May voted against restricting the provision of services to private patients by the NHS.

She voted for raising England’s undergraduate tuition fees to £9,000 per year.

She has always voted for academy (i.e. private) schools.

While all the above has been transpiring, a massive upwards transfer of wealth from lower-tiered income earners to the top has been occurring. According to the Social Market Foundation, in the UK:

… the average wealth of the best-off one-fifth of families rose by 64 per cent between 2005 and 2012-13.

However, the SMF found the poorest 20 per cent are less financially secure than they were in 2005, with their net wealth falling by 57 per cent and levels of debt and use of overdrafts increasing. Homeowners have raced ahead of people in rented accommodation….

The Equality Trust, citing 2014 data from the Office for National Statistics, said the majority of the UK population (66%) hold no positive financial assets at all, while the remaining 34% hold £9trillion in such assets.

He also cites a report that May wishes to sell off the NHS by the Independent.

The Independent has just reported that May, who is desperate for trade deals to replace those made under the auspices of the EU, which will of course no longer exist after Brexit, is willing, as part of a deal with Trump, to sell-off the NHS to those most villainous of business enterprises, the American “healthcare” corporations.

Surin states that ‘this is class war by another name’, a sentiment expressed by Owen Jones in his book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class.

Surin says about May herself

Going solely by the immense distance between what she professes in public and how she votes, Theresa May is an absolutely bare-faced phony. Her voting record, displayed above, confirms her fundamental and vital support for Tory austerity policy.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/08/with-theresa-goody-two-shoes-may-what-you-see-on-tv-wont-be-what-you-get/

Don’t be deceived by the media and the Tories. May will kill off the welfare state and the NHS, just as Margaret Thatcher wanted and the Tories and Blairites have been conspiring to do over the past forty years.

Vote Labour, and vote for Corbyn.

The Conservatives and the Sale of Council Housing in Britain and Sweden

I’ve put up a couple of pieces, one today and one yesterday, which attempt to expand an article Mike put up on his blog, Vox Political, about the housing shortage and the scandalous rise in evictions. These have now doubled. This ultimately comes back to the Tory sale of council houses under Maggie Thatcher in the 1980s. This was deliberately designed to turn Britain into a home-owning democracy. The stock of council housing was deliberately reduced, and over the years former council houses have been bought up by housing associations and private landlords. As a result, rents in some areas have risen to the point where they are unaffordable.

Michael Sullivan in his book, The Development of the British Welfare State, notes that the Tories took their ideas for Housing Association, as a non-state solution to the housing crisis at the beginning of the ’60s, from Sweden and the Scandinavian countries.

In 1961 the Conservative government, struggling with evidence that the crisis was deepening not tapering out re-introduced substantial subsidies for new build, but, under Joseph, the Ministry of Housing was already turning to new ideas about housing for the poor. Officials seeking non-state solutions to the housing problem visited Scandinavia to investigate their not-for-profit housing association. Sir Keith, already an innovator, invested £25 million in a pilot project in 1961. In 1963, the fruit of that investment twelve two-bedroomed flats in Birmingham, took their first housing association tenants. Here, then, though from social democratic Scandinavia, was an idea that was to take root 20 years later in education and health: the publicly funded but independently managed provider of services. In the dog days of the Conservative government, a jubilant Sir Keith announced a £100 million grant to the newly formed Housing Corporation so that the idea of housing associations could spread. (P. 215).

It is therefore ironic that Sweden is also facing a housing crisis of its own, due to the importation of British Conservative housing policies in the 1990s under a Conservative administration. In 2013 riots erupted in an ethnically mixed sink estate, the product of the government’s abandonment of the social housing policies of Social Democratic administrations. This resulted in the creation of nearly all-White, affluent areas from which the poor were excluded through high rents. Owen Hatherley of the Guardian reported:

Under conservative governments in the 1990s and 2000s, housing began to be privatised, with predictable results, especially given the British experience. Flats in the most desirable areas – here, the city centre – rocketed in price. Yet Stockholm has kept building, and British architects and planners have kept visiting. The “success story” is Hammarby Sjöstad, a waterside scheme which shames the likes of Salford Quays. As much as Vällingby, it shows the virtues of long-term planning over speculation.

But although some of Hammarby was built by the municipality, it’s a wealthy and overwhelmingly white area, and rents are high. It offers little to those exiled to the peripheral million programmes. Hammarby implies that in Sweden, social democracy was only abandoned for the poor. Its innovations were retained for a bourgeoisie whose new areas are far more humane than those provided for them by British developers.

In Stockholm, the centre was cleared of the poor – the likely consequences in London of coalition’s housing policies. The stark segregation visible there means that for the first time, it should stand as an example to London’s planners of what not to do.

To read the Guardian’s article, go to: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/16/sweden-housing-programme-privatisation

The newspaper, The Swedish Wire, also carried a piece about the recommendations of the Swedish building workers’ union and its leader, Hans Tilly in 2010. It stated clearly that the Conservative government’s free market policies had failed. More new homes needed to be built, existing homes renovated and improved, especially for the needs of the elderly and handicapped.

Among the unions’ recommendations were the following points:

Do something tangible about the housing situation of young people. Today’s youth is the first generation that is having greater problems finding somewhere to live compared to their parents’ generation. Therefore we should invest in more rental housing….

Pursue a social housing policy. Everyone must have the right to their own home and this right is often a prerequisite when it comes to giving our children a good environment to grow up in.

• Establish a new Ministry for Community Development. For far too long, these issues have been divided between different policy areas. Hence, what is required is a firm grasp of construction, housing and living environment, infrastructure etc.

The present government’s housing policy is frightening. The coalition government is, however, obviously quite satisfied with what it has achieved when it comes to housing policy. Its motto is choice. The housing policy is to a large extent a non-issue for the present government. The government’s Spring Budget for 2010 gives a summary of what the government itself claims to have done as regards housing policy since 2006. 19 lines describe how the government has worked to achieve a better functioning housing market, how those living in the Million Homes Programme areas have been given the opportunity to buy their homes and how the government has introduced a system of owner occupancy in newly built blocks of flats.

See the article at: http://www.swedishwire.com/opinion/4987-swedens-housing-policy-has-failed

Across the world, Conservative housing policies have failed. They are only creating poverty, social exclusion and homelessness. The time is long past that they should be abandoned.

The Canary on Lambeth Council Using Psychiatry to Evict Elderly Tenant

The Canary has published a piece about how Lambeth council had an elderly resident sectioning an elderly artist, Tony Healy, so they could evict him from his home. This was despite protests from all four parliamentary candidates against moves to remove him. The sectioning was carried out without the knowledge or support of Mr Healy’s own GP.

The Canary writes

An 81-year-old social housing tenant has been forcibly removed from his home in South London, despite public and political opposition. Artist Tony Healy had been fighting against the eviction from his housing co-op, where he has lived for more than 30 years. Until, that is, Lambeth council made an unexpected move: sectioning him under the Mental Health Act.

Lambeth council began eviction proceedings against Healy in 2012. His ‘short-life‘ property is owned by the council, which lets them to tenants for fixed-term periods. However, in 2015 all four Vauxhall parliamentary candidates fought against the eviction of vulnerable tenants from these properties.

Despite this unified political opposition, Healy received another eviction notice dated 5 February 2016. The council then visited him on 2 March to persuade him to move voluntarily. According to Lambeth United Housing Co-op, the council were accompanied by medical health professionals.

On 3 March, Healy received a note saying he would be sectioned. Around 1am on the morning of 4 March he was taken to hospital, reportedly as a result of a second section order. He has also sustained a broken arm and hip for which he is being treated. Neighbours who have visited Healy say “these injuries appeared to have happened accidentally”. Campaigners against Healy’s eviction claim that Lambeth Council officers and bailiffs then tried to seize his house on 4 March, after he was removed. This effort was thwarted by his supporters.

For further information, see http://www.thecanary.co/2016/03/10/council-found-despicable-way-forcibly-remove-elderly-tenants/

The article also has links to a petition against Mr Healy’s eviction. There was also to be a demonstration today on the Housing and Social Care bill, which threatens to exacerbate the shortage of social housing.

This is chilling, because it so closely resembles the political abuse of psychiatry in the former Soviet Union to imprison dissidents in psychiatric wards. It was described by Solzhenitsyn. It’s victims included not just Christians, but also Communists, who genuinely believed that Socialism should represent the poor and ministers and public servants should be accountable to those they govern. It’s another way the politics of the 21st century is becoming more authoritarian as Britain becomes a Thatcherite police state.