Mass homelessness is now official UK govt. policy?
housing activist | 06.02.2008 00:28 | Analysis | Other Press | Social Struggles
According to todays Guardian the Government now plan to create mass homelessness by threatening about a million council tenants with eviction if they can't find work. As there are only 0.6 million vacancies, this makes it impossible for more than 60% of these - at the very most - to find work.
Is government policy now to create mass homelessness, using the flimsy cover of "welfare reform"? Are we going to wake up in ten years and find ourselves in a nation of shanty towns? All those council estates would make great gated communities for the yuppies! It would be popular with the right wing, angry masses as well, at least at first, also it would create an army of really screwed up poor people for the middle classes to hate - and yet another problem for the government to "solve" (although after that it would have to be some kind of final solution - what else would you do with a couple of million homeless?)
OK, that was tasteless - and they're already said to be "backtracking", but again, why say it in the first place? It strikes me that the minister let that slip out by mistake, we just weren't supposed to find out about that yet.
Something like this simply has to be in the offing, if only because their economic policies do depend so much on taking from the poor and giving to the rich. I seem to recall that they've been cutting the top rate of tax and corporation tax after every election for decades now - how else is this fiscally sustainable, except via a massive gutting of the welfare state?
Where will it all end? This is scary; none of my friends seem to believe that they could be that heartless, but the public generally have been completely hoodwinked by corporate propaganda into hating claimants; they regularly demand that all benefits are slashed dramatically at every opportunity. The lemmings are baying for this kind of thing much like the Red Staters that voted for Bush on the other side of the Atlantic.
Then there's the recession. There will be pressure to sell council housing, evict poor people and stop their benefits. It's simply all that the UK elites know how to do; they'd rather die than tax the rich and as Camoron has shown, a canny politician can get a lot of good ink, and votes, from ranting about "the underclass". This is a done deal as far as I'm concerned.
When this happens activists should get back into social stuff, start mass squatting up again - because if we don't, people are going to die. And not in Gaza or Mexico, but right here, and sooner than you think.
OK, that was tasteless - and they're already said to be "backtracking", but again, why say it in the first place? It strikes me that the minister let that slip out by mistake, we just weren't supposed to find out about that yet.
Something like this simply has to be in the offing, if only because their economic policies do depend so much on taking from the poor and giving to the rich. I seem to recall that they've been cutting the top rate of tax and corporation tax after every election for decades now - how else is this fiscally sustainable, except via a massive gutting of the welfare state?
Where will it all end? This is scary; none of my friends seem to believe that they could be that heartless, but the public generally have been completely hoodwinked by corporate propaganda into hating claimants; they regularly demand that all benefits are slashed dramatically at every opportunity. The lemmings are baying for this kind of thing much like the Red Staters that voted for Bush on the other side of the Atlantic.
Then there's the recession. There will be pressure to sell council housing, evict poor people and stop their benefits. It's simply all that the UK elites know how to do; they'd rather die than tax the rich and as Camoron has shown, a canny politician can get a lot of good ink, and votes, from ranting about "the underclass". This is a done deal as far as I'm concerned.
When this happens activists should get back into social stuff, start mass squatting up again - because if we don't, people are going to die. And not in Gaza or Mexico, but right here, and sooner than you think.
housing activist
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