Come on Jeremy raise the stakes: get tough, get leading
The Tory Party is seriously on the back foot. The Brexit wing needs no help from us, though it might get plenty from traditional Labour voters, but the Cameron “mainstream” desperately needs Labour help for this crazy referendum campaign.
Here we are the largest party in the country, by a country mile, and we are being shafted by a Government, which assumes that Labour will do the right thing. We are always doing the “right thing”; we are always taking the “one nation”, “all in this together” approach whilst the Tories stuff the pockets of the rich and the rentier class.
I can’t be the only Labour activist who seriously wonders whether the future of this country isn’t more dependent upon defeating the Tories, possibly for a generation, than it is on staying in the, let’s face it, struggling EU. Its pretty much an “on balance” decision for me and many other party sympathisers.
Now what would swing it for me would be a few concessions from Cameron. Take your pick from attacking “welfare”, abolishing Bedroom Tax, scrapping the Trade Union Bill, opening real discussions about boundary redistribution, stopping “right to buy” housing association properties, ending so-called schools reforms and NHS restructuring, ending the continual and vicious attack on immigration and immigrants.
Jeremy: this is a wonderful opportunity to get the Tories talking some sensible politics. You have a great opportunity to earn their respect, grudging though of course it will of necessity be, and to win the support of the country. Your best bet for winning support in the PLP is by winning respect from the Tories and you will never have a better opportunity than when Cameron is down, with his face in the sand.
Tory Housing Policy – Wandsworth style
Wandsworth Tories, along with quite a few other Councils, some Labour as well as Tory, I am afraid, continue to attack the security and stability of council housing. Only last week (17/10/12) they decided to introduce short-term tenancies. Short-term is defined as 5 year limited tenancy agreements.
There are many problems with this policy, which superficially is designed to increase mobility on council estates and free up properties for those in genuine housing need. After all, it is argued, the housing is allocated in the first place on the basis of need, usually lack of money or overcrowding of families, and the only case for moving tenants out after 5 years is that their need might have become less.
The argument presumably goes that if family circumstances have changed then the family no longer needs the letting and the letting should be freed up for new, deserving cases. But this creates some very perverse incentives. Assuming the tenants have established themselves and are putting down roots in their community and don’t want to be evicted from their homes for the last 5 years, then their logical course of action would be to ensure that they do not earn any more money or they increase their family size.
We have all heard the standard Tory complaint that working class girls only get pregnant so that they can get a council house and that many tenants are in effect work-shy layabouts. But right now in Wandsworth, and across the country, policies are being introduced, which almost demand pregnancies or avoidance of promotion or overtime working, in order to avoid eviction.
In order to carry out the policy, the Council will require staff, whose main function will be to check that tenants are not getting too wealthy. The Tory claim that Labour encourages the nanny state will look pathetic in comparison with the snooping, busy-bodying council they wish to create. And the objective? To create a transient population with no incentive to develop within their local community or a pauperised one with no ability or maybe desire to do so? Surely not!
Jobless Too Busy Shopping To Look For Work, Says Tory.
Yes, that was the headline over a story in the Evening Standard on 16 November 2011. What followed was a poisonous diatribe from Balham Councillor Paul Ellis. Look it up, if you can, on the ES website; I must admit I have not found the link!
But the article was so irresponsible that I intend to make the following speech at the 7 December Council Meeting.
“Marie Antoinette was tasteless enough to advise that French peasants should eat cake if they could not find enough bread. Jeremy Clarkson was vulgar enough to suggest that strikers should be taken out and shot in front of their families, but at least Antoinette was not the Minister for Wheat production and Clarkson not the Minister in charge of Industrial Relations.
Councillor Ellis was vulgar enough and tasteless enough to make the outrageous assertion that the Jobless in a Battersea estate were too busy shopping to look for work – and he is Chairman of the Housing Committee and responsible for tenant relationships. Louis XVI may have had some marital reasons for not chopping off Antoinette’s head and Cameron does not have any official role in terms of Clarkson’s employment at the BBC, but Wandsworth’s Leader does have the power and certainly has the grounds for guillotining his Chair of Housing.
Put to one side the comparison of an estate, which one I wonder, with the Oxford Street sales; forget the absurd generalisation about people in their 20s, 30s and 40s (his phrase – not mine), who after all have a 40% chance of being leaseholders rather than tenants and are probably employed rather than not – after all nowhere has unemployment rates higher than 50%; putting all that to one side he completely ignores the fact that this Council’s policies are to some extent based on the fact that some of our estates contain some of the most multi-deprived people in the UK.
Now I don’t want to make the same kind of ludicrous assertions about the residents of Balham, those whom Ellis represents, as he does about some unnamed estate but the grotesque assumption that in some ways more will be spent on Christmas on our estates than in the comfortable streets of Balham beggars belief. There is a class war starting in Wandsworth and it is the Tory party that is firing the first shots.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 