This article appears in the launch edition of 24housing, a new magazine for housing professionals. That's the cover, pictured on the left:
I recently caught Martin Scorcese’s new flick Shine a Light - a straightforward rockumentary treatment of a Rolling Stones gig - at London’s IMAX cinema, which is fitted with the largest screen found anywhere in Britain.
On the way home, I remarked to my partner that a former underpass near Waterloo Station, surrounded on all sides by busy roads, is quite a curious place to build an upmarket entertainment venue.
‘Don’t you remember when it used to be Cardboard City?’ she asked. You housing professionals never let go, even on a Saturday night.
Cardboard City - for those not old enough to remember it - was the flipside of the yuppie 1980s, a visible manifestation of the consequences of Tory housing policy in easy walking distance of Parliament and 10 Downing Street.
The ‘right to buy’ was certainly popular with council tenants able to meet mortgage payments, and helped cohere the Tories’ electoral base. In the London Borough of Westminster, a Conservative local authority openly manipulated housing policy to gerrymander electoral boundaries.
Meanwhile, hundreds of homeless people had nowhere else to live but a cardboard box in a public underpass. As Old Etonian housing minister Sir George Samuel Knatchbull Young, 6th Baronet, famously remarked, one couldn’t even exit the opera without stepping over a rough sleeper.
Fast forward 20 years, and the current set of Old Etonians in charge of the Tories have launched the Homelessness Foundation, and even rounded up the heads of the major homelessness charities to sit on the advisory panel.
Shadow housing minister Grant Shapps admits that ‘homelessness has not classically been considered a right-of-centre issue’. Well, there’s a reason for that, Mr Shapps; for decades now, your party has done a pretty good impression of frankly not giving a damn.
Of course, the Conservative Party insists that everything’s different now, and that under David Cameron, it has essentially reincarnated as the Care Bear Bunch.
Things in politics are never static. Labour is almost unrecognisable by comparison to two decades ago, so automatic identification between the Conservatives then and now cannot be a valid exercise.
Nor do I blame the bosses at the Big Issue, Shelter and Crisis for playing ball with the opposition’s latest initiative. After all, they need to keep in with the party now almost certain to form the next government.
But have the Tories really changed? I’ll believe it when I see it.
Posted at 13:04, 9 June 2008
Comments (9)
Well, there's that Policy Exchange headed by Nick Boles, interim chief of staff at City Hall (and possibly acting as Boris Johnson's brain....)and confidante of fluffy old Dave Cameron. Boles has been instrumental in the old cosmetic surgery on making the Tories look fresh, trendy and attractive to vote for.
But look at the Policy Exchange policies and they are neither fresh nor new but right-wing populism, the Tories we know and loathe. And no matter how many makeovers they have they are still the vile Tory Party who don't give a damn except for their own class interests.
All I need do is look across the rough ground not to far from me to see Polish immigrants building a shanty town, go down to my town center at night and count the people living in shop door ways.
It's back and it's back big.
It is a big, big mistake to allow anyone to equate homelessness with rough sleeping. That's same trick as Iain Duncan Smith's concern for the poor: there are far few poor in his view of the world than in mine.
Most homeless people have not been rough sleepers. Family breakdown and landlords who do not pay off the mortgage are much more common causes of homelessness.
And they happen in places that have a surplus of Council housing.
I recall reading an interview with Alex Masters, author of "Stuart, A Life Lived Backwards" where Masters quotes Stuart saying that having no home is a sign that something is really fucked up.
On its own a supply of housing will not "cure" homelessness. Many homeless people are vulnerable and need care and support to cope with having a home, paying rent, cleaning and all the day to day responsibilities. Homelessness is as much about alienation as it is about having no home.
Tories coming late to the party with their touchy feely "isn't it terrible", "stepping over homeless people on the way from seeing Madge at Wembley" shtick won't wash.
Whatever the homelessness panel will come up with, it will be to the detriment to those struggling to keep up the mortgage payments and tenants who have to make the rent, whereas private landlords, big property developers and housing associations will do very nicely. I wouldn't be surprised if one scheme that's ventured is some kind of shared home ownership safety net, where mortgage payers can stay put, in exchange for converting some of those payments into lower rate rent.
One can only assume that teh Tories see a chance for their supporters to make lots of money from property development. not that NuLabour is any better. I remember Cardborad City, I used to work at County Hall in those days and the stretch of the South Bank surrounding the South Bank Centre was full of 'bashes' (cardboard shacks)as they were know. Occasionally when I venture up that way, I am always surprised that there are none there, and I peer into the dankness under the walkways looking for them. What did happen to all those pfeople who used to sleep in the street?
A bit of thread but I am furious about NuLab's latest posturing over schools. They say they will close schools that fail to live up to some arbitrary standard. What will they do with the kids? Or is the idea ot privatise the schools and give their friends in the educational businss money for doing what has to be done? The schols earmarked in Enfield and Haringey are teh usual suspects, in the poorest parts of the boroughs and full of non-English speakers and any English speakers that are there come from multiply diadvantaged backgrounds. One in Haringey is actually a Church academy, The Grieg Academy, the latest wheeze last year. Creating more uncertainty and wasting billions of reorganisation which should be spent of proviing books and equipment. Look, Labour, FOR GOD'S SAKE GO, AMD GO NOW!!!!
Judging by the shocking child poverty statistics released today, it doesn't look like Labour care about the homeless particularly.
SueR: in multi-ethnic Newhan there is only one School on the list. It is generally believed that it takes about two years for a pupil with no English to learn enough to access the curriculum. Surely in Enfield and Haringey a significant proportion of pupils are multi-lingual Cypriots?