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Coalition’s housing strategy will not work
THE Lib-Dem-Tory coalition’s strategy to tackle the borough’s housing crisis won’t work.
Faced with the need to find £300 million to rejuvenate council estates, the coalition intends to redevelop selected estates in harmony with housing associations.
To help achieve this goal the coalition have earmarked 500 council-owned street properties to go under the hammer.
Some members of the coalition no doubt sense that one manoeuvre may well contradict the other but feel there is no alternative given the government’s blank refusal to loosen their purse strings.
In the past year, various housing ministers appear to have been listening to a band of MPs, partly led by Austin Mitchell, pleading for the restoration of a nationwide building programme of council houses. There have even been moments when it seemed ministers were about to relent.
But hopes raised among MPs as well as the Defend Council Housing campaigners have soon been dashed.
Implacably, the government refuses to abandon its reliance on the private market to meet the needs of local authorities.
This week yet another attempt has been made by MPs to reverse policy by amendments to the present Housing and Regeneration Bill.
Among the rebels is Holborn MP Frank Dobson.
They argue it makes no sense to discriminate against councils and tenants when council housing is cheap to build, manage and maintain.
But, unfortunately, Gordon Brown, bent on his neo-liberal economic policies, is hardly likely to listen.
Qualities of tolerance and faith in socialism
JOCK Stallard, who died on Saturday, belonged to an almost extinct breed of Labourites who rose from the “shop floor” to become MPs.
Now, Labour in the Commons is dominated by the professional class.
Very few of today’s Labour MPs started out as manual workers.But when Jock entered Parliament in the late 1960s Labour’s ranks were still full of men who had worked, like Jock, not only as craftsmen on the “shop floor” of factories – in his case as a precision engineer – but had also developed deep-rooted beliefs in the power of collectivism drawn from the solidarity of trade union activity.
Jock’s qualities of tolerance, compassion and faith in socialism as a solution to society’s ills never wavered.
He was loved and admired first as a St Pancras councillor in the 1950s and 1960s, then as an MP, and later as a member of the Lords where he championed the cause of Britain’s pensioners.
We mourn a man whose public service has few equals. |
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