The hurling of paint at the Cereal Killer Café was, when everyone had finished either condemning or cheering it, profoundly depressing. With good reason, no-one likes to be priced out of their town – especially when their replacements are comfortably middle-class, sell cereal and coffee at £4 a pop and indulge in fatuous and expensive pastimes. (With equally good […]
Posts under ‘Housing’
How vested interests are prolonging the housing crisis
Oct 28th, 2015 by Nathan Akehurst and Grace Blakeley.
Now they’re aiming to go back to non-prime mortgage securities which caused crash
Sep 10th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.If you want evidence of how reckless and desperate bankers and investors have now become in search of higher yields, look no further than the widespread decision to return to a variant of the mortgage-backed securities which precipitated the 2008-9 crash. Then it was sub-prime securities which were knowingly sold to households handicapped by low […]
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Would a Rachel Reeves budget yesterday have been much different?
Jul 9th, 2015 by James Elliott.Ahead of yesterday’s budget, in which George Osborne laid out £12bn of welfare cuts, a continued squeeze on public sector pay, the abolition of student maintenance grants and higher tuition fees, Labour’s ‘opposition’ front benchers went out of their way to agree with Osborne’s narrative of austerity. Still reeling from the General Election, or now […]
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Why we need the Living Rent Campaign
Jul 6th, 2015 by Alasdair Clark.In October 2014, The Living Rent Campaign was founded in response to a Scottish Government Consultation on a new tenancy type for the Private Rented Sector (PRS) in Scotland. Put simply, we’re demanding the type of change private tenants in Scotland, and across the UK, have needed for too long now. Security of tenure – […]
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Housing is now financialised, like the rest of market capitalism
Jun 1st, 2015 by Michael Meacher.The enforced sell-off of housing association homes, at the same enormous discounts as under Right to Buy (£70,000+ for a flat and up to £102,000 for a house) is driven by the two Tory goals, not only to act as bribes for voters at election time, but also to bring homes as an asset into […]
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Putting people first : Venezuela builds 700,000 new homes
May 18th, 2015 by Matt Willgress.Despite facing many difficulties, Venezuela’s latest achievements in housing are a timely reminder of why our solidarity with Venezuela remains so important, writes Matt Willgress Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro recently inaugurated the 700,000th house built under a state-led initiative called the Great Housing Mission to provide housing to all Venezuelans, continuing the impressive results of a […]
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Even the Tories’ naked bribery has now gone pear-shaped
Apr 21st, 2015 by Michael Meacher.There is a very noticeable difference between the way that the Tories and Labour have conducted this election. The Tories have used the twin-prong approach: personal vilification which has proved counter-productive and now blatant giveaways (of other people’s money) to try to produce a false feel-good factor. However, no serious policy proposals for the country’s increasingly […]
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Tories make tenants and homeless pay for social housing give away as election bribe
Apr 15th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.The desperate search for shrinking votes has pushed Iain Duncan Smith into yet another spectacular own goal. His latest pet idea is to extend the Right to Buy to Britain’s 2.5m housing association tenants. However, whilst social homes are owned by Councils, this latest Tory brainwave means selling off housing association assets which are private property […]
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The case for fully devolving housing benefit to the Scottish government
Feb 3rd, 2015 by Dave Watson.UNISON’s case for the full devolution of housing benefit has been supported by the respected think tank IPPR. Scotland needs all the policy levers to effectively address our housing crisis. The command paper ‘Scotland in the United Kingdom: An enduring settlement‘, (love an optimistic title!) sets out the legislative provisions to enact the Smith Commission […]
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This government is more class-ridden than Thatcher’s
Feb 3rd, 2015 by Michael Meacher.Yesterday’s report that the government has exempted developers who turn an empty building into private housing from having to build further affordable housing not only gives super-rich investors like the Abu Dhabi investment fund a free windfall of hundreds of millions of pounds, it also deprives some of the poorest families of the affordable housing […]
