More gloomy news re. Britain's Housing Crisis

[Walkie]

Well, it's not exactly news, but at least it's making headlines Hey! People might actually start noticing that our Government are a bunch of cynical, uncaring bastards at this rate

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/13/government-rebuked-for-failing-to-address-homelessness-crisis

[Walkie]

This program aired on Channel 4 this week:

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/george-clarkes-council-house-scandal

it's a pity that it's just on British TV (presumably) cos I think that the rest of the world really needs to know what happened to our once-admirable social housing.

For the Brits amongst amongst us: well, you probably know already that most of our erstwhile  social housing has wound up in private hands (all-too-often private landlords) ubnder the Right to Buy scheme.  But  did you know that when a house is sold on the Right toBuy scheme, only 20% of the money goes to the local council and 80% to the Treasury? No wonder they don't get replaced.

Here's a pithy review of the program, from the Lancashire Post:

From the title of George Clarke’s Council House Scandal (Channel 4, Wednesdays, 9pm), you might have thought the genial self-build botherer was setting himself up as a slum landlord. However, it became clear the Mackem Frank Lloyd Wright was on a different mission.

In 1919, the Addison Act was passed, the first law which saw central Government building social housing. Built to high standards, with indoor plumbing and their own hot water supply, these homes were a model for decades to come.

By the early 1980s, 6m council houses were putting roofs over the heads the most vulnerable in Britain. But then came Thatcherism, boom and bust, Right to Buy and austerity, and now there are only 2m council houses and the number is shrinking.

Clarke, who spent the programme getting progessively angrier, grew up in a council house, and is determined that social housing should lose its stigma as the modern workhouse – the last resort for the undeserving poor – and actually be restored to its original purpose.

He wants clean, well-built homes so people can go out to work, their children can be educated and they can add to their community. A pinko Leftie Corbynite

utopia right?

Well, judging by that has been achieved elsewhere, no. In Vienna, there are beautiful council blocks, with gyms and swimming pools, where people in jobs are safe, secure and happy. Meanwhile, in towns like Harlow, Essex, developers are turning office buildings into tiny studio flats and charging £600 a month for the pleasure.

Clarke might become the Jamie Oliver of houses – annoying the nation with his drive to improve ourselves – but if, by the end of this programme, you weren’t as angry as him, there’s something wrong with you.

( https://www.lep.co.uk/whats-on/entertainment/why-george-clarke-s-council-house-scandal-should-have-made-you-angry-about-the-housing-state-we-re-in-1-9912929 )

Those Viennese council estates are amazing! Worth watching, just to see those.

[Fun With Matches]

Damn I missed that programme.

Thanks Thatcher.

[Walkie]

Thatcher just set the ball rolling. Sucessive Blairite and Tory governments, up to and including the present -day bastards  have done everything they can to increase the momentum.

Aside from fuelling homelessness, and shoving yet more money in the Landlords'direction, notice that Right to Buy represents yet another means of sneakily siphoning money out of the Local Authorities coffers? Like it isn;t enough to  viciously slash their income year after year, whilst heaping further responsibilites onto them.

 Yet still the Councils are not exactly  rebelling. Why not? because they're nearly all Tories or Blairites themselves. 

Meantime, asylum seekers still struggle to get into the UK, by preference because (amongst other, more fanciful notions) "they give you a house". Well, yeah, but chances are it won't be any better than the kind of housing that the rest of us have to put up with,  chances are some people will hate them for jumping the queue, and chances are their long-term=prospects are bleak.  Trouble is , these are people just like us, and many of them  had a decent standard of living in the past, and fully expect to recover that decent standard of living, in time...with dividends  Give them a little bit of time to asess their situation, and they're no more grateful for what they actually get than we are/would be.  They often come to believe that the system is discriminating  against them, because  this isn;'t the Britain they expected: the land that presents golden opprtunities for entrepreneurs (well, yeah, just a few, but those few require  millions  of losers  to exploit) ; the land that rewards a willingness to work hard ; the land that looks after it's people; the land that offers everbody decent housing.   Actually, that land is long dead, but the myth is still out there.  And the disparity between the myth and reality is apt to make everybody grudgeful, natives and newcomers alike.  So what do they do? Blame each other  if they're dumb and can't see beyond the end of their nose. Too many people are dumb. *sigh *

PS Asylum seekers can get evicted , same as the rest of us,  too
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/26/glasgow-asylum-seeker-evictions-serco-homelessness-crisis

[Walkie]

PS. just thought to add,  lest it appear that I'm calling FWM dumb, I do agree that we need to curtail immigration (as I recall you saying on another thread. FWM) and EU migration, because it makes no sense to have everybody crowding aboard an already overcrowded lifeboat. especially not when it's got a bloody great hole in the hull.    The people who call that kind of logic "racist" are either stupid, disingenuous, or too comfortable on board their private yacht to think about  the hole in the hull. Which is precisely what I think you were saying, right? 

But let me repeat, just in case some others don't get it: there's a bloody great hole in the hull. The lifeboat is sinking.  the immigrants didn't bash a hole in the hull, the Tories and the Junior Tories did.  And, yet, strangely enough, those of us who are going under would rather no more people jumped aboard right now.  No offence. And no, that won't , in itself, stop the boat sinking, of course it won't, but do feel free to clutch at the nearest straw man, if you must.

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

Walkie, it is nice to see a larger proportion of "woke" topics.

Living in suburbia it's easy for some people to fall into the trap of thinking that this lifestyle is available to anyone who wants a job, works reasonably hard, and so on. The usual bollocks. But I was walking down the main street of the CBD around midnight about a week ago and the increasing number of people sleeping rough, in the middle of winter, on the footpath and in doorways etc, breaks my heart. This is not the sort of unfair society I want to be part of.

I don't blame right wing ideology or left wing ideology for what is happening. The problem is that this heartless attitude has come to dominate the centre of politics. It is the centre that has become extreme now, not the fringes. Even those who want to make a difference are forced into making deals and ending up as part of the problem.

[Walkie]

thanks i often feel glad that i failed so miserably at so many crucial exams as well as almost every means of earning a living (which is by no means  synonymous with failing as a human being, in my book) that life swiftly and permanently propelled me into the underclass; i get much more realistic view of society  from down here, i do believe. a more human view. i could all too easily have lived out  my life as an academic in an ivory tower, otherwise

..well sort-of,  i think, like iris murdoch, i would always have developed an intense interest in the hearts and minds of my fellow human-beings, but... i mean, poverty, in our western, industrialised  society  is an enormous drag on the psyche. and i'm not sure you can comprehend  just how destructive  this thing is  without experiencing, or at least understanding that drag. at the same time it seems seems to me that the bourgois world which  murdoch inhabited is having the life sucked out of it by this intense focus on profit, so  it's not even a good place to be any more, not unless you're really shallow.  Middle-class people are more comfortable,from a purely materialistic POV,  but who the hell wants comfort above all else? Not anybody i know. Even the academics amongst my aquaintance have had their souls half-destroyed  by the drive to force academia to justify its existence 'by turning a profit, and feel they might as well have sold out to Industry instead. 

We've all been impoverished, not just the poor people.

Hmmph. I really like Iris Murdoch, as you can probably tell. And  I hope this doesn't sound like so much pretentious bollox. Citing Murdoch might be taken for a bad sign there  Heck, even i suspect myself of talking pretentious bollox, or some other sort of drunken self-indugence  still ot's 6.am, my judgement is prolly slightly wonky by now, Since i gave up drinking half-a-lifetime ago, sleep-deprivation is the nearest i get to being drunk.  Better sign off before I start seeing pink elephants, hmm?