Preying On The Private Renter by Les May

THE Government is rightly proud that almost 17 million people have received the first dose of a vaccine which it is hoped will make them safe from Covid 19. It has nothing to be proud of in the fact that almost half that number of people, 8 million, are living in overcrowded, unaffordable or unsuitable housing, according to a recent report by the National Housing Federation. This figure is revealed in a report published today with the title ‘Coming Home: Tackling the housing crisis together’.

The new report describes as 'a national scandal' the fact that eight million people in England live in overcrowded, unaffordable, or unsuitable homes, and says that this is 'neither accidental nor inevitable… The present situation is unjust, and the burden of bad housing is falling unjustly on the poor'.

Among the list of recommendations:

- a 20-year political programme to improve the quality and affordability of the nation’s housing stock, agreed by all parties and thus immune to changing political fortunes;

- a redefinition of 'affordability' that relates to income rather than property prices;

- a short-term reform of the benefits system to meet the shortfall between housing support and the true cost of housing;

- a review of tenancy agreements, redressing the present imbalance, introducing an explicit duty of care of landlords for their tenants, and removing Section 21 (”no fault”) evictions;

- an improvement in the stock of temporary housing;

- new mechanisms for improving the existing housing stock, 11 per cent of which is defined as sub-standard, and making it more sustainable;

There is also a draft charter for new housing, which suggests it should be:

Sustainable: adapt and reuse existing building stock where possible; water, waste and energy designed to minimise impact on the environment: plant one tree per house.

Safe: landowner to maintain an interest and participate in the project; design criteria to be built into partnership agreements to ensure compliance.

Stable: encouragement to people to put down roots through community site-management schemes; reference to the wider community.

Sociable: mixed-use dwellings in walkable neighbourhoods; design to ensure that affordable houses are indistinguishable from private-tenure houses, and 'pepper-potted' throughout the site.

Satisfying: use design to create distinctiveness and encourage a sense of belonging; ensure that the development fits into the natural landscape.

Polly Neate the chief executive of the charity Shelter responded to the report by saying: 'It is brilliant to see the Church of England showing leadership and taking action to tackle our growing housing emergency. Looking at how church land can be best used to fight homelessness is extremely welcome.

'Homelessness isn’t inevitable. It’s the result of decades of political failure to build social homes. This is the reason over a quarter of a million people in England are homeless and trapped in temporary accommodation during the pandemic — half of them children.

'The Church is right that homes have to be affordable to local people and tied to local incomes. This is what social housing does, which is why we want to see the Church, the Government, and other landowners play their part in building a new generation of social homes.'

There may be a shortage of affordable housing but there has never been a shortage of worthy reports about the problem. It will be interesting to see if after all the fanfare it is allowed to fade into the background.

We can pray it does not or we can vote for the politicians who will recognise the fundamental economic forces that work against affordability and do something about it. Sixty per cent of the nation’s wealth is reckoned to be held in property, leading to its being regarded as a financial asset rather than a universal necessity. Are we willing to change that?

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Deja Vu? by Andrew Wastling

HOMES are as we all know far more than concrete and brickwork. Our decision makers need to get things right. Some readers may recall that for all of its issues Ashfield Valley did at least provide easy access accommodation for a generation of Rochdale's youth. Ashfield Valley it's often airbrushed out of local social housing history and despite winning a housing award in the 1967 'Summer of Love', it quickly declined and by the 1980s was a double edged sword which on one hand was a notorious haven for drug users, glue sniffers whilst on the other a vibrant safe haven for a small army of squatters , artists and writers as well as being home to a large number of families, OAP's and single people'. 'Ashy Valley' comprised just over 1,000 flats and it's eventual demolition it can be argued artificially increased rents in the private sector locally by reducing housing unit supply , along with Margaret Thatcher's who passed two pieces of major housing legislation in 1980 & 1989.

The 1980 Housing Act extended the right to buy to tenants with generous discounts following decades more than a million council homes were sold at an estimated cost in today's money of more than £60bn. The majority of sold-off homes were not replaced, leaving social housing as a residual tenure. Since 1990, a further 500,000 Council Houses have been sold off. The 2021 local housing crisis has been manufactured by generations of town planners and politicians from all political parties not arrived at by sheer chance.

Writing in the guardian in 2017, Faiza Shaheen, (Director of CLASS Centre for Labour and Social Studies) argued convincingly that thirty years of bad policy have encouraged house hoarding, avarice and the massive accumulation of wealth – to the detriment of the rest of society , pointing out that:

'The richest 1% of adults, some 488,000 people, own 14% of the nation's assets ,– worth about £11tn. At the other end of the financial scale, 15% (7.3 million people) either own no assets at all, or are in debt. And things are potentially about to get a lot worse – house prices are forecast to rise by 50% over the next eight years, according to the National Association of Estate Agents and the Association of Residential Letting Agents.'

Locally we are in danger of repeating the exact same failed solutions to the same problems on local social housing only on a much larger scale.

Despite some of the swearing mandatory viewing of the Tony Wilson narrated documentary Hard-core Valley - Ashfield Valley Flats' (1) might be advisable for those RBH / RMBC making the decisions on College Bank & Lower Falinge. Not least for the nostalgia trip some of us might have seen familiar faces admiring the spiked hair , the dreadlocks ,& colourful punk fashions & music of the time. Readers of Northern Voices will be aware that Cult 1975 novel Rule of the Night, by Rochdale author Trevor Hoyle, is largely based on the estate. (please see Greater Manchester's forgotten Punk Estate : Greater Manchester's forgotten punk estate - Manchester Evening News).

Tragically one of the well known punk squatters , Jon Rimmer, who was a familiar sight once a fortnight carrying a huge bag of spuds over his shoulder bought with his Giro from Ron Chalker 'The Potatoe Mans' warehouse on Mellor Street, walking through town barefoot accompanied by his placid natured alsatian Rebel, was his was murdered in 2019 (Rochdale News | News Headlines | Funeral fundraiser launched for Jon Rimmer - Rochdale Online) whilst the various disparate tribes making up the valley were dispersed locally to Sheffield, Hebden Bridge, Totnes and Brighton and some as far afield as to the anarchist squat in Christiania in the heart of Copenhagen. It was the end of an era for many. The start of a long journey of self-discovery for others.

In Wilson's documentary there is an unfortunate incident of camera photobombing by an unwelcome local politician ( Cyril Smith ) who was renowned for avoiding the estate & its residents like the pneumonic plague when cameras were not present and it came to doing his job as town MP. The documentary is a snap-shot in time from Rochdale's housing archive. To see this vile politician brazenly stand beside the flats and shamelessly say he's been an MP for eighteen years tells it's own story when we are mindful that his brother Norman held a Rochdale Council housing portfolio at the time.

As does some rudimentary investigation of which local establishment politicians who oversaw this social housing scandal who are still unbelievably active in local council politics well past their sell by date?

As with Ashfield Valley asbestos is reportedly present in College Bank. Lower Falinge has taken over the unenviable & undeserved mantle of a 'failed estate' from Ashy Valley - despite having wonderful community initiatives and brilliant residents who struggle to maintain a vibrant community despite being consistently failed by Rochdale Borough Housing and local politicians of all parties over the decades.

Our mainstream media frequently uses social stereotyping images of Lower Falinge when they wish to indulge their penchant for poverty safaris to illustrate numerous & serial articles on 'welfare dependency' & 'broken Britain'. Ashfield Valley was a planning & delivery disaster that could & should have been averted. It was an abject failure & scandal, a 'masterclass' in how not to run social housing. The demolition of Great Howarth by Rochdale Borough Housing and the current state of and proposals for College Bank and Lower Falinge - as well as other Rochdale Borough Housing managed properties - shows that absolutely nothing has been learned by our decision makers who seem intent on making the exact same mistakes, using failed 'solutions' to mediate what appear to be institutionally engrained repeated failures with getting to grips with social housing in Rochdale over half a century.

Proving there's nothing really new under the sun .We can see that Rochdale already has considerable form when it comes to home regeneration, redevelopment, failure & eventual demolition due to years of mismanagement of housing stock by criminal & inept local politicians.

Am I alone in getting a sickening sense of Déjà vu about RBH kamikaze plans to demolish College Bank flats?

What's the betting Rochdale's local propertied class once again trouser private rents hand over fist in the aftermath of this exercise in turbo drived gentrification?

Historical Archive:

Tony Wilson's 1990's documentary : Harcore Valley from Granada and Simon Armitages ' Xanadu from 1992 both give powerful insights into a community about to be demolished and can be seen on YouTube.

In Hardcore Valley : Tony Wilson focuses on the marginalsied voices from the Estate both old and new in Granada TV documentary made during the demolition of the infamous Ashfield Valley estate, Rochdale. early 1990s The piece now stands as a fascinating piece of social history into an era in the history of Social Housing which has been airbrushed almost completely from history by local Town Planners intent on seeing history repeats itself

In Xanadu : Simon Armitage focuses on housing problems on the notorious Ashfield Valley Estate in Rochdale, Lancashire. To the background sound of the estate being demolished, Armitage discovers that life is continuing there in gentle and surprising ways. The only remaining caretaker is a survivor of the 1956 uprising in Budapest, while a neighbour rescues local stranded cats. One couple are not looking forward to moving from their immaculate flat, and another resident is cultivating a forest in his home.

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Rochdale Housing: Covid 19 & BAME Community

  Editorial Note:  NV was sent the e-mail below
from John Wilkins a friend of Zulfiqar Ali, who is
a former Rochdale Mayor.  We publish this without
comment, but we anticipate more information.  
Mr. Zulfiqar Ali writes:

Hi,

I am writing this email in concern to the high numbers of deaths within the black and minority ethnic community (BAME) due to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Amongst the numerous factors that may have contributed to the high number of deaths within this group.  One main factor that has been highlighted is overcrowding and poor housing situations. 

The government is uncertain on how to address these issues and improve the well being of the BAME community.  If these issues are not addressed in the near future it will have severe consequences for the communities. 

15 years ago, in the Manchester Metropolitan Borough the local council was given a golden opportunity to address the issue of poor housing and overcrowding within one of its wards that was identified as being one of the most deprived areas in Rochdale. 

The local council was given the European Regeneration SRBS funding to invest in community housing to resolve overcrowding and poor housing. 

Old housing and mill sites were allocated following numerous planning and consultations, it was proposed that affordable low cost right to buy homes would be built. 

Families in the community desired to live in the same community due to easily accessible amenities/ facilities i.e. school, healthcare and places of worship. 

Allocated sites included Nile Street, Edward Road and Gower Street. 

The local community was eagerly awaiting these developments.  In 2012 the proposal for the development was finalized.  But then the development project was given to ‘countryside housing’ who built the houses ‘to let’ for those in employment which was a major disappointment for the locals.

This would have been a good opportunity to tackle the issues of poor housing and over crowding by offering and affordable right to buy scheme rather than ‘to let’. This would have tackled the issue of over crowding and poor housing which is a main factor of transmission of disease during the pandemic. 

The WHO (World Health Organisation) identifies inadequate housing and overcrowding as one of the major factors in transmission of the disease. 

The local community is wanting answers to the issues raised in this email.

Regards,

Zulfiqar Ali

Former Mayor of Rochdale

A Northern Spin Town!

by  Andrew Wastling

THIS year's Empty Homes Week (23rd September 2019 - 29th September 2019) has raised national awareness of the latest Government data showing that over 216,000 homes in England have been empty for over six months. In all, over 600,000 homes are currently vacant. We of course all know that we live in the midst of a local and national affordable housing and homelessness crisis. The report ‘Empty Homes in England’ the 2019 edition was published on Monday September 23rd without a solitary mention in our local media outlets.   That in itself tells it's own story of the Mainstream Medias reluctance to speak truth to power or even to maintain the pretence of investigative journalism free of editorial compromise or content filtering at the behest of their advertisers corporate sponsors & invested vested interests.   I could go on but am sure I don't need to especially to readers of Northern Voices.

For those who might have missed it in the local Press the  latest public statistics for Rochdale showing  that there were in 2017 858 long term empty properties.

In 2018 there were 854 long term empty properties , a reduction of just six in twelve months out of a total of available 93,986 properties .

I would just like to ask Rochdale Council how long these properties are likely to remain empty before they are brought back into use to meet the chronic housing need for local families waiting to be re-housed but feel almost certain a reply will not be sent anytime soon. In fact in Rochdale there is not even a mandatory time period for local councillors to reply to a question from their constituents. This tells you all that is needed about local democratic accountability  - There isn't any!

The local housing crisis has got steadily worse and yet those councillors tasked with standing up for their constituents have never been held to account for their serial failures to address the chronic housing shortage . This despite , most reasonable people would think have thought, having a roof over ones head, being a basic expectation from the voters of their council representatives ?

Currently if all of the people currently on Rochdale Councils waiting lists stood one person per step on St.Chads 122 stone steps they would now go up and down our towns historic landmark almost 54 times! That's a total failure of housing policy in my book.

Where precisely are Rochdale Councils priorities in spending over £250 million on town centre regeneration which is supposed to produce a 'magic trickle' down effect to our local citizens many of whom are reliant on food banks to simply ward of malnutrition or becoming increasingly dependent on GP prescribed opiates disparagingly referred to in some quarters as ' hillbilly heroin to numb the pain and blur them into a sense of false well-being?

We are seeing all around us the collapsing failed experiment of Neo Liberalism begun in the 1980's under Thatcher & Regan & transformed under Cameron, May , & Johnson into the kind insane Kamikaze turbo charged disaster capitalism of the present.

Proof, if proof be needed that this spectacularly and repeatedly spun fake regeneration is little more than insidious creeping regeneration is found in the latest publication this week of the indices of deprivation which placed Rochdale as the twentieth in the UK for poverty. It is no accident surely that a staggering 19 out of 20 of local authorities with the highest proportion of neighbourhoods among the most deprived in England are based in the north of the country. Little was made in out local media of the fact that despite millions spent on Rochdale by succeeding councils that The English Indices of Deprivation report, compiled by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, assessed the level to which local authorities lack income, employment, education, and adequate housing, as well as the level of crime and services in across the UK and found Rochdale sadly languishing behind once again.

Were Rochdale a state and not a town it would be difficult not to describe it as a 'Failed State' using Chomsky's definition: they suffer from a serious 'democratic deficit' that deprives their formal democratic institutions of real substance. One of the hardest tasks that anyone can undertake, and among the most important, is to look honestly in the mirror.  If we allow ourselves to do so, we should have little difficulty in finding the characteristics of 'failed states' right at home.'

Sound familiar? It does to me. This is a town where many things  people and institutions are quite simply broken.

Fot the official recorded the top twenty areas with the most deprived neighbourhoods in England are:

1. Middlesbrough 2. Liverpool 3. Knowsley 4. Kingston upon Hull 5. Manchester 6. Blackpool 7. Birmingham 8. Burnley 9. Blackburn with Darwen 10. Hartlepool 11. Bradford 12. Stoke-on-Trent 13. Halton 14. Pendle 15. Nottingham 16. Oldham 17. North East Lincolnshire 18. Hastings 19. Salford

20. Rochdale.

These are deeply inconvenient facts for our councillors who would much rather they were discreetly wept under the carpet along with the beggars on our streets who are a glaring testimony to their abject failure as policy makers in our town each and every time one of them engages in conversation with a local voter or shopper.  They all of course as do we all have background stories.  Stories which when you trouble to listen do not paint our council who implemented Tory Austerity though the back door of our Town Hall without even token resistance or our councillors who capitulated without dissent, then voted through cuts to essential front line services  without any real understanding of how those closed local services would eventually impact on community cohesion.  They after all would in most cases not be personally dependent on such public services, be on the receiving end of such hatchet jobs to the social infrastructure and were in any case financially cushioned from penury by over the odds publicly subsidised councillor expenses.  Indeed whilst voting in harsh cuts for the rest of us one  of their first steps to protect themselves in the hard times they knew were coming was to feather their own nests and vote in an inflation busting pay rise in their councillor expenses for themselves. Nice work if you can get it comrades !

Many of our street beggars however were on  the receiving end of over a decade of tory austerity.  Its no surprise they are there on our pavements to anyone who has been follow political and economic events since the corporate elites crashed the economy and then paid off their cocaine bills and balanced their accounts on the backs of the poor .

Whilst  vital Public Services being butchered we simultaneously witness  expensively financed utopian shopping units intrude into the Rochdale skyline ad nauseum across the town centre  clearly someone has found a magic Money tree?  We also see  or more accurately those who bother to look can see  , dystopian near Victorian poverty & homelessness levels increase locally and people in despair frozen like zombies on the new psychoactive substances  (or 'Spice' ) hidden away in the  ginnels alleyways and shadows where the Council spin merchants never go or more to the point don't even know exist . 

A  Freedom of Information Request showed that in 2017 know Rochdale Council recorded 945 homelessness presentations ,205 homelessness advice presentations from people age 16-25yrs for the same period. Whilst in the last quarter the Council recorded 65 homelessness presentations from people aged 16-25yrs. 

We also know that the number of people waiting on the current waiting list for Social Housing is in 2017 now 6,374 households  - this is a crisis that is getting steadily worse , not better. It can not be logical , morally justifiable , or economically viable to have so many properties remain unused for so long,  or to have highly controversial proposals to demolish at least four of the College Bank Tower Blocks whilst we still have so many local families waiting to be housed languishing on waiting list for years.   This simply does not make any kind of sense.

It does however make economic  and environmental sense to bring empty properties into public use since creating homes from empty properties saves substantial amounts of material compared to building new homes, minimises the amount of land used for development and avoids wasting embedded carbon; helping to combat climate change and providing a proactive step our council can take immediately to give some credibility to their recent declaration of a Climate Emergency at the Town Hall. 

Another immediate proactive step our Council could take could take would be  to restore the Council Environmental Sustainability Team they axed due to Austerity measures , retain some of the largest solar panels in the North of England currently on top of the Seven Sisters instead of demolition them and finally recognise and admit publicly that one of the worlds largest & most toxic asbestos dumps in the world on our doorstep should  have alone merited the calling of an environmental emergency in Rochdale several decades ago.

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Claim that Burnley Council lacks serious intent!

GREEN COUNCILLOR FEWINGS MAKES APPEAL 

ON the 4th, May 2018, the news reporter Ciaran Duggan wrote in The Lancashire Telegraph:

'THE Green Party has been elected onto Burnley Council for the first time in its 28 year history. Members described the election result as "momentous" and "historic" after Green Party candidate Andrew Fewings was named the councillor for Trinity ward.'
It was also reported that   'He (Green Party Councillor Fewings) received 789 votes, nearly 500 more than the second placed Labour candidate and outgoing mayor Howard Baker' 

Below Councillor Fewings writes an appeal following last month's Burnley Council meeting:

'I have been working hard since being elected in May 2018 to get Green issues on the Agenda.

'At my council meeting on Wednesday 26 September, I left feeling that the Labour run council are not taking Fuel Poverty or empty properties seriously. They suggested leaving housing "to the market".

'Please help me to get the council to take this issue seriously and introduce energy efficiency standards for new homes by sharing and signing my petition on the Burnley council website. https://your.burnley.gov.uk/Petitions

'Apologies to those Local Party members who live outside the borough. Perhaps you could start a petition in your own council?'

Best wishes,

Cllr Andy Fewings

Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale Green Party

Homeless Squat Eviction in Bristol

by Kevin 'B'

AT 2.30pm today (Friday 11th, August 2017),. I was on my way to Bristol Central Library and noticed a large crowd of people watching an Eviction.

The Police where there in Riot  Gear and lots of private Bailiffs with battering rams, night goggles to examine dark areas of the building etc..

'The Music Shop' on College Green closed a good while ago and has been discretely squatted.

The crowd which was mainly young students did not protest they just passively watched from the other side of the road.

I said to one group of students that don't you think its wrong to treat evicting homeless people as a public spectacle?

Homelessness is getting worse in Bristol because accommodation is expensive to rent. Social Housing is scarce.

Its not unusual for me to see 3 or 4 people sleeping on College Green during the daytime as its safer for them to do so. Safer than rough sleeping at night. 

Manchester Housing Plan or 'Social Cleansing'

One Man Liberal Democrat Opposition: Cllr. John Leech

MANCHESTER Council has been accused of social cleansing* as it refuses to guarantee affordable homes in a development involving up to 2,500 houses.
Today (20th, Jan. 2017), in another of Manchester's heated council meetings, the sole opposition member, Liberal Democrat John Leech, unravelled the council's plans to build 2,500 homes in the city centre, not a single one of which is guaranteed to be affordable.
The Manchester North development, recently approved without a single Labour councillor questioning the lack of affordable homes, is one of several large developments in the city.  Yet not a single one of the proposed homes is certain to be affordable.  This plan has now been labeled 'Labour-style social cleansing.'
When the sole opposition councilor, Lib Dem. John Leech asked Councillor Bernard Priest if he could guarantee that any of the 2,500 homes would be affordable.  Mr Priest said he 'could not give that guarantee'.
Councillor Priest added that he 'anticipated the council would continue to be led by Labour politicians for a considerable number of years', but still wouldn't commit to making any of the 2,500 new homes affordable.
The Liberal Democrat councillor John Leech, has challenged the proposals, accusing the council of 'Labour-style social cleansing based on who can afford to live in the most desirable parts of the city.'
He said:  'This council continues to put profit before people. It is unacceptable that so many people have got their life on hold while this council continues to prioritise expensive houses for sale and making profit from land instead of genuinely affordable homes.'
As South Manchester's MP of ten years, John Leech, criticised decisions in 2013 when plots in Chorlton on Darley Avenue for 86 homes were sold off by the council to private companies for profit, rather than saved for affordable housing.

Councilor Leech then added: 
'This city is in desperate need of good quality, genuinely affordable family homes near existing public transport links and infrastructure, and we need to start taking this seriously. To build 2,500 new unaffordable houses is an insult to the 14,000 people currently on waiting lists across the city.
'If this council is committed to building genuinely affordable homes then why are they refusing to guarantee even one of these 2,500 houses will be affordable?
'This council put effort into help for first-time buyers but has shown little interest in affordable homes to rent. Why, in a development as large as these in West Didsbury and the City Centre, should not a single home, not one, be up for affordable rent?
'We need a balance of affordable homes to rent and buy across all of our communities in the whole of this city, not a Labour-style social cleansing based on who can afford to live in the most desirable parts.'
 The councillor, who was on fierce form despite receiving a barrage of personal comments and mocking from the 95 strong Labour group, also criticised the council for recently approving a housing development on Cavendish Road, West Didsbury without insisting on any houses being available for affordable rent.

*  Social cleansing (Spanish: limpieza social) is class-based killing that consists of elimination of members of society considered "undesirable," including but not limited to the homeless, criminals, street children, the elderly, sex workers, and sexual minorities^{[clarification needed]}.^[1][2][3] This phenomenon is caused by a combination of economic and social factors, but killings are notably present in regions with high levels of poverty and disparities of wealth.^[1][4] Perpetrators are usually of the same community as the victims and are often motivated by the idea that the victims are a drain on the resources of society.

Housing, People & Regionalism in the UK

by Brian Bamford  

AT the Green Gathering in the Methodist Hall Oldham Street in Manchester, last Saturday, Dr. Roz Fox from Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), a qualitative analyst, said: 

'The city of Manchester is the fastest growing city outside of London, and there have been interim talks about the city needing 200,000 homes by 2030.'  The academic  argued that 'housing is not just about bricks and mortar, but more importantly 'about people; the local labour market; land availability and social facilities.'   

This all has now to be accomplished in an era of public service cuts and an increasingly ageing population.  

This has to happen at a time when devolution is becoming fashionable.  According to Dr. Fox, the challenges now are what type of properties are required, and most important how do with involve people in the decision-making.   

Meanwhile, last Tuesday, in Haringey civic centre councillors were heckled while debating plans to rip communities apart, and hand control to a private entity.  Aditya Chakrabortty wrote about the Haringey case on Friday 20th, January 2017:  'At its heart is a programme that is among the most audacious I've ever seen.  Haringey wants to privatise huge swaths of public property: family homes, school buildings, its biggest library.  All of it will be stuck in a private fund worth £2bn.'  The fear is that areas of north Manchester between Bury, Rochdale and Oldham something rather similar is in danger of happening as armies of protesters gather to protect what they perceive as the threat to the Green Belt. 
In an article about anti-social behavior in the North East, Neil Tweedie in the Mail on Saturday last November, claimed that 'Grimsby is a long way from the oak-paneled conference rooms of the government departments in Whitehall...' but that 'Cameron's project to "cure" Broken Britain (started in 2011) ' had cost '£450m' and it had 'achieved nothing-apart from exposing Whitehall incompetence, deceitful councils, the vanity of politicians... and how they squander YOUR money'.

Regions of the UK

In England, the culture of centralism dominates in a strange way of a kind of surburban relationship and attachment to London.  In 1905, the novelist Henry James declared:  'All England is in suburban relation (to London).'  
Since the beginning of the 20th Century the south and particularly London have come to dominate the English economy and culture.  The historian, Tristram Hunt, in concluding his book 'Building Jerusalem' (2004) wrote:  'The corporate and financial stampede southward was quickly followed by the political parties, the media (including the Manchester Guardian), the professional establishment (from lawyers to doctors to accountants to architects), the cultural elite, even the representatives of organised labour.' 
Centralisation is the problem confronting this country.  One or two comments last week, on this NV Blog suggested that DevoManc, as it is now being presented, is a top-down phenomena.  
The regions and localities of the England, unlike Scotland, lack the self-confidence and imagination required to promote a bold self-identity that could compare with provinces in France or the regionalism on the Spanish peninsular.  Notions of federalism seem alien in the English regions. 
I think that in Northern Voices' we have identified a broad North-South dichotomy, but the various particular regions lack confidence and up to now have had a provincial insecurity in relation to the metropolis that is London. 
This has not always been the case, Tristram Hunt again in 'Building Jerusalem' wrote:  'In the Victorian era, that metropolitan imperialism appeared out-dated as the great northern civilisations established themselves as core components of the cultural firmament.' 
Neither the Green Gathering last Saturday nor the Andy Burnham Manifesto Meeting last Thursday tackled this problem of building an awareness of regional identity, although in the workshops of the Burnham meeting it was asked 'How do we change mind-sets?'.

The Future of Federalism in the UK?

In France the French Revolution finished off the work of Louis XIV and gave France a powerful highly centralised state.  In Spain the Liberal Revolution imitated this development.  Then in both countries came a reaction to this centralisation with movements for greater local and municipal liberty. 
In France this reaction was best expressed by Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who put forward those ideas which, he believed, the French Revolution had come into existence to fulfil, but which had been diverted by the ruthless political action of the Jacobins. 
In Spain, with its intense provincial feelings and local patriotisms, one would have expected the movement towards decentralisation to be even greater,but because of the consequences for Spain after the Napoleonic Wars and the fact that Carlism drew into its ranks many of the forces of resistance to Liberal centralism, these feelings didn't for some time make their appearance among the parties of the Left.  Only as an result of the work of Pi y Margall, a Catalan, who knew and understood the social and political ideas of Proudhon, did he grasp that these ideas best suited the aspirations of his countrymen.  It was through the efforts of Pi y Margall that the Federal movement in Spain grew in the 1860s.  
Unlike France and Spain, no such popular radical movement to express the local and regional spirit in a federalist manner has yet developed in England.  This may be because as an island we have been isolated from the continental currents which are still prevalent in Europe.  It may be because anarchism and organised regionalism, have been half-baked traditions.  Marxism, even though the Communist Party itself has never caught on in Britain, has had a wider influence in the universities than anarchism or federalism.

'The Estate We're In'

Introducing a powerful new documentary about the UK housing crisis

by Fran RobertsonMonday, 14 March 2016

SITUATED next to the beautiful Welsh Harp reservoir in North London, the West Hendon council estate was built in the 1960s to provide 680 homes to low income families. I first went there in November 2014. I had been following various housing stories around London and had heard about an estate where residents were fighting a multi-million pound regeneration which was forcing them out of their homes and where land valued at £12 million had been sold to developers for just £3.

The day I went to the estate, representatives of the private developers, the architects and the council had set up a mini-exhibition in the estate's community centre, with graphic representations of the new buildings and architects’ models showing the plans for the new development, But the centre was also full of protesting residents, angry at the way they were being treated. As a local councillor explained to me, many of them were being evicted from the estate, and the homes on display were ones that they would never be able to live in (pictured below: Barnet council are forcing Joe to sell the maisonette that he bought through right to buy).

I decided to start filming on the estate and in January 2015 I was commissioned by the BBC to make a one-hour film. At that time I envisaged making a programme that would show all sides to the regeneration story, because it's a complex one. Councils argue that while there is huge demand for new homes there is no public money to build them, which is why they have to team up with private developers.

I approached Barnet council and the development partners Barratt London and Metropolitan Housing Association to see if they would be prepared to take part in the programme. At first they seemed open to the idea, and over many months of communications, they never completely refused. But it became increasingly clear that access would be blocked by the development partners whenever I requested permission to film.

Every three months the development partners met with residents at the community centre to talk through the regeneration. We were continually refused permission to film at these meetings (in spite of the residents’ clear wishes for us to be there) and were told that no employees would appear in the programme. My suspicion that this was encouraged by those in charge was strengthened when a Barratt workman informed me that he had been told he would be sacked if he spoke to us. And so it became clear that I would be making a film that would reflect the perspective of the tenants and homeowners on the estate who had been told that they would have to leave their homes.

What struck me most in the year of filming was the chasm between the residents’ view of the estate and that of the developers and local politicians. In January this year, Barnet MP Matthew Offord appeared on the BBC's Sunday Politics and used West Hendon as a classic example of a “sink estate”, one which he claimed the police had described as a “no-go place at night”. The Conservative council leader Richard Cornelius described the buildings as “grotty” and “something ghastly for people to moulder in” (residents on the West Hendon Estate have been living surrounded by building works for 18 months, pictured below.)

In contrast, most of the residents, while acknowledging that the estate had become very run down, described living there in almost utopian terms – a wonderful place to bring up children, where they could run free surrounded by nature and with an amazing community spirit. I saw how vital support networks had been established – shopping for the elderly, looking after one another’s children and help for the vulnerable and disabled. For people on low incomes this kind of support is invaluable, and so when they are evicted from these communities they are losing much more than just their homes.

The story of West Hendon, and the demolition of the estate to make way for a multi-million pound development of luxury flats, is a microcosm of the UK housing crisis, which is forcing families out of their homes into an uncertain future. I hope that the documentary raises awareness of how these housing policies are affecting people's lives and makes us question what kind of cities we want to live in, and whether the rights of poorer families are simply being ignored.

• The Estate We're In (Two Step Films) is on BBC One on Tuesday 15 March at 10.45pm

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    SAVE THE HONEY BEEs!  Honey bees are essential to mankind's survival, our very lives depend on them. Without 

this tiny creature our Planet would die! Einstein said, "If the bees go, then humans will follow four years later…!”    
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Ferengi Rules of Acquisition: Rule #76: Every once in a while declare peace. It confuses the hell out of your enemies...

Ms Sylvia Wilson
Director/Coordinator:
Homes Under Threat (HUT National Network)
01282 604749
sylvia@homesunderthreat.co.uk

Housing & Communication Worker's Union

CWU housing campaign: Housing for All

 

THE Communications Worker's Union (CWU) has today (Wednesday) launched the next phase of its housing campaign 'Homes for All'.

The campaign compliments and strengthens other initiatives such as Generation Rent’s Queen’s Speech for Housing and the TUC Young Workers Housing Charter, both endorsed by the CWU.
General secretary Dave Ward said; “The housing crisis has become a humanitarian issue for our society and a whole generation of young people. We have seen this coming for years and the current situation will take no-one by surprise – the question now is whether there is the political will to address it.

'The CWU is calling for action to deal with all of the different aspects of the problem. In particular we need to see more homes being built – not for people to let, but for people to live in – and time should be called on bad landlords and letting agents when homes aren’t fit to live in.'

The union is calling on members to support the campaign by sharing their housing details and horror stories on a campaign website.  'We last surveyed our members at the end of 2012,' said national officer Simon Sapper, 'so we need to see to what extent the national pattern of increasing dependence on rented accommodation, especially for younger workers, is reflected in our members.'

The CWU campaign also asks members to lobby their MPs to support Karen Buck, Labour MP for Westminster North’s,  Private Members’ Bill which is due to have its second reading in the House of Commons on 16^th October. The Homes (Fit For Human Habitation) Bill aims to drag the consumer protection rights of tenants into the 21^st century.

Dave Ward added:

'There is a now widespread recognition that we need to deal with what is now a national emergency. Our young members need homes to live in and our older ones need homes for their children and grandchildren.  This is not revolutionary politics - just common sense.'

 

For more information and to get involved, visit Housing for All. (http://www.cwu.org/housing4all.html)