Our House

In the late 1940s, my grandparents moved into a brand new council house in Birmingham. I remember visiting it as a kid in the ‘eighties and Sheldon felt like a pretty run down area by then, but just after the war it was a desirable area. Semi detached and modern, with a garden at the back (albeit still with an outdoor toilet) it was a far cry from what working class people had experienced before the war – not enough housing, exploitative private landlords, and buildings rotting and crumbling even before the efforts of the Luftwaffe. With a Labour government in power, promising a new era of ‘cradle to the grave’ collectivism amid the rubble of the war, housing was firmly on the agenda.

The reason I’m telling you all this is because housing is as much a political issue today as it was when Attlee was prime minister. A serious lack of affordable housing for first time buyers, combined with the post-banking crisis difficulty in obtaining mortgages, means a generation of young people will find it near impossible to get on the property ladder. Meanwhile, councils and housing associations have been building little in the way of social housing, and the age old problems of ‘sink’ estates and poor quality rented accommodation are still very much with us. Politicians know it’s getting worse – the waiting list for council housing is 12% longer now than in the previous quarter. But how did we get into this mess, and what should we do about it?

The Attlee government worked quickly to build new, good quality council houses – the ‘homes fit for heroes’ promised, but never delivered, after the previous world war. The incoming Tory government of 1951 built even more. But this was in a very different context than today – the 1950s and 60s were the post war boom years, supported by full employment, and the role of the state could not be more different to today. It didn’t seem unusual to anyone, except a handful of marginalised right-wingers, that the state had a role in providing most of the basic provisions of life for the majority of people.

Then, somewhere along the line, it all went wrong. In the ‘60s, government strategy moved towards creating new estates on the edge of cities, using new-fangled ‘system building’ to create vast, Modernist tower blocks and flats. This was in keeping with the optimistic, forward looking spirit of the era – remember, this was the age of Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’, when it was widely assumed that futuristic motorways would solve all our transport problems and new nuclear power plants would provide electricity too cheap to meter. Plus, system-building was cheap, and a booming population needed ever more homes. This disaster is well documented, but in brief, it condemned millions of people to being trapped in Eastern Block-like ‘slums in the sky’, riddled with damp, and with seemingly designed-in havens for crime in the estates’ dark corners and underpasses. With insufficient services on the estates, many residents felt isolated from the rest of society.

It didn’t help that it soon became evident that they were shoddily built, culminating in 1968 with the collapse of one tower block, Ronan Point in London, when it was nearly new. Neither did it help that corruption between developers and local councils (notably in Newcastle) gave the impression that local authorities had sold council house dwellers down the river.

All of these things conspired to turn public opinion against the State provision of housing, and the new political establishment were able to seize on this. When, in 1980, the Thatcher government broke with post-war consensus to allow council tenants to buy their council houses at a large discount, the pent-up desire for ownership was clearly in evidence. Plenty of working class people did indeed share Thatcher’s dream of a ‘property owning democracy’. Labour only objected to this initially – being against what was obviously the aspiration of many working people would have been wrong.

However, as we are now painfully aware, the problem with right-to-buy was that councils were left with the worst housing stock that no-one wanted to buy – generally the ‘60s era flats, creating sink estates where councils were forced to house addicts, the mentally ill and ‘problem families’ in the same areas. Once they got into power, rather than building new houses to replace the ones sold by the Tories, New Labour further reduced the ability of councils to do anything about the problem by transferring the responsibility for housing to unaccountable Housing Associations.

In Lynsey Hanley’s excellent book ‘Estates’ she accurately points out that the post war dream of the Attlee government was bound to run into trouble when it was commuted from ‘a council house for everyone that wants one’ to ‘a council flat in a high rise for anyone who can’t afford anything better’. The latter is the notion of council housing that I was aware of, growing up in the Thatcher era. There was no such stigma to being in a council house when my grandparents moved into that house in Sheldon, 60 years ago.

Moving back to the mass provision of housing by the State is unlikely in this day and age – society has moved on from that, irreversibly. Over 60% of homes are now owner-occupied. But that doesn’t justify Thatcherite ‘I’m alright Jack’ attitudes – the government should still have the same moral obligation to provide for people that it did in the Attlee era. Serious action needs to be taken to ensure that today’s young people have places to move into that are good quality and affordable, whether that’s through helping people get mortgages, or by providing more social housing. The free market won’t do it for us – just like in the 1940s, the government is going to have to take responsibility for the task at hand.

Of course, brown-field sites should be used first, but if we have to build on new land – so be it. It’s all very well for the baby-boomers to bleat about the aesthetics of new developments – they’re the ones who had no problem buying houses cheap and then watching as their values skyrocketed. We mustn’t repeat the mistakes of the 1960s and 70s, where people were left isolated from jobs, shops and transport. We must recognise that demographics have changed, and provide not just family homes but also homes for single people and childless couples. But more than anything, we just need to get building. Britain has built its way out of recession at least once before, and, maybe, we can do it again.

Blogging while London burns

As I write this Londoners are knuckling under for a third night of rioting and looting. The full details of the weekend's disturbances are already plastered across the news and I won’t waste time repeating them here. I will add that as a resident of Tottenham living a few hundred yards from where a police car was burnt and a supporter of recent student demonstrations, rioting against the oppressive establishment is a lot less romantic when it is going on in your postcode.

To be frank it was a frightening experience. I spent the majority of Saturday night endlessly refreshing the #tottenham hash tag on twitter to see how close the violence was to my house. Police helicopters circled the neighbourhood constantly and I become convinced that every creak in the house was the beginning of a home invasion.

Now with a little perspective and calm I can see that there were two main issues at play on Saturday night in northeast London; a legitimate protest on the part of an angry community who felt downtrodden and persecuted, and the beginning of a citywide crime wave that the police failed to deter, contain or even hamper.

The moment Saturday's events boiled over is alleged to have been when a sixteen year old girl, at a protest outside Tottenham High Road police station, was hit by a police officer. This spilled over into the destruction of property and widespread looting. The scale and ferocity of the events hint at the deep social tension associated with the high level of poverty in the area. The residents of Tottenham, particular the Afro-Caribbean community feel disenfranchised by society, their political voice muzzled and victimised by the police, especially through Operation Trident's attempts to tackle gun crime in the area. Many residents, particularly the young and unemployed, feel alienated from society and that the police have used stop and search powers excessively against them.

People in neighbouring communities (particularly the more affluent Crouch End, Islington, and Enfield areas) are concerned by how the police allowed a peaceful protest to get so dramatically out of hand. They are also concerned as to how so many police resources where consumed in a single area that looting went on unchecked half a mile away in the Tottenham Hale retail park. Undeniable the police handed the situation badly but I do have to add on a personal level that I am extremely grateful the riot and especially the burning of buildings was kept away from my street. I am grateful that the police kept me safe but also angry that so much damage to property and persons took place. Clearly mistakes where made.

The looting that has taken place is more than the “opportunistic criminality” that police authorities have dubbed it. Looting is an expression of anger at poverty. Personally I would love a new Mac Book but comfortable in my middle-class status, I would not steal one regardless of how easily I thought it was to get away with. I cannot understand what is like to spend your life seeing others with games consoles, computers and new trainers yet never being able to afford them myself. In the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn “can a man who is warm understand one who is freezing?”

Those who have cannot understand the desires of those who have not; it is quit simply not a problem I have ever had to deal with. Also of note is the fact that no bookshops were targeted. This is not a comment on the intelligence of the people of Tottenham but more a reflection of the desires of the people who live there to possess the same consumer goods as their neighbours in Highgate and Crouch End. It must be very difficult for the poor in London to be pressed up against their rich neighbours who have so much and be constantly reminded of what they lack. Consumer status symbols are an inherent part of our lives and lacking these symbols places you at great social disadvantage. I can understand why people would take advantage of the general lawlessness to attain what they cannot through conventional means.

Personally I cannot support rioting and looting as a form of protest, mainly because the general public (rightly or wrongly) will see injured police officers and burnt out buildings and these powerful images will overshadow any points about over policing and poverty in the area. David Cameron and Boris Johnson would do well to spend what available money they have tackling the massive inequalities that exist between neighbouring areas in London. Tottenham is badly in need of some urban development.

What is also needed is a discussion of the role the police had to play in the riots. Many questions will be asked about how the police allowed a legitimate peaceful protest to go so horribly awry. Should there be a review of the police’s use of deadly force? Are current police tactics too heavy handed? Should the police be given discretionary powers to prematurely arrest rioters? These are questions for when the riots have died down. One thing is for certain, these riots are not over yet and that real social change is necessary to deal with the deep problems caused by such poverty adjacent to such wealth.

We need to talk about gas

Gas is not a popular topic of conversation. When it comes to energy, most businesses or politicians prefer to talk about their plans to invest in green energy. This is usually steeped in the familiar rhetoric of reducing our carbon footprint or severing our dependency on the increasingly unstable Persian Gulf. We are familiar with the state of the public debate on energy and most people are tired of oxymorons about clean coal or the whining of NIMBYs about how unsightly wind farms are. However, I feel we need to talk more about gas.

Whether we like it or not we are a country addicted to gas. Most homes in this country use gas in their boilers and gas expenditure makes up a significant proportion of many peoples' household budget. We are so used to stumbling into the kitchen, bleary-eyed each morning, turning on the hob and pressing the ignition button to boil an egg that we scarcely give a second thought about where gas comes from and who’s hands we putting our hard earned wages into.

Like any other dwindling resource, the price of natural gas has risen exponentially as our demand has blossomed and deposits have been drained. The production and export of natural gas almost entirely props up the bank accounts of some of the world’s richest countries and people. Without the wealth stream generated by the West’s huge thirst for gas, nations like Qatar would simply be another Middle Eastern Emirate with an overbearing monarchy and alienated citizens.

The same is true in this country. The former state owned British Gas still controls a huge section of the British energy market and millions of people rely on the company to heat their homes in winter and provide their hot water. Each year British Gas and the other suppliers raise the cost to the consumer and then post record profits a few months later. This is partly due to rising costs from the firm’s suppliers but after a few years of price rises followed by increased profits one cannot help but draw conclusions.

Recently, British Gas announced that they will be raising their domestic gas prices by 18% in August and the other home suppliers are expected to follow with similar price hikes. This is alarming in the context of the BBC reporting that the division of British Gas which oversees domestic supply posted £740m in profit last year and, that for the same period, a 22% rise in fuel poverty was recorded.

Fuel poverty is when 10% or more of your budget is spent on heating your home. This means that a rise in gas prices whilst average income and other expenditure remains constant will cause the number of households who are fuel poor to rise. At Christmas this year over 4 million homes in the UK will be classed as fuel poor with obvious effects on personal health and comfort. If economics is the science of satisfying our material needs and wants then we are clearly failing to satisfy the need to keep warm of over 4 million families across the country.

Ballooning fuel prices also has a macro effect on our economy. Senior economists at the Bank of England have largely attributed the recent high levels of inflation (currently at 4.2% on the Consumer Price Index) to rising fuel costs. Energy prices push up the costs of production of our domestic industry which in turn is passed on the consumer in the form of higher retail prices. Transport costs and the cost of raw materials are linked to fuel prices and a clear pattern has emerged recently of rising inflation and rising price of oil and gas. Rising fuel prices also have a knock on effect on the cost of food. Food prices are highly sensitive to changes in transport costs and the Bank of England has stated that recent food prices rises are greater than to be expected. In the second quarter of 2011 inflation has fallen back from 4.5% to its current level on the CIP scale, although the Bank of England attributed this to falling high street prices and noted that fuel and food costs remained high for the same period.

It is mine and others' beliefs that the government and the energy regulator body Ofgem need to do more to curb the rise in gas prices. Run-away price rises are squeezing the budgets of too many households and pushing more families into poverty. Rising fuel costs are also pushing up inflation and stunting our economic recovery, this is partly due to foreign suppliers raising their price but a government subsidy could be used to prevent this rise being passed on to the consumer. Calling for government intervention in the domestic energy market will not be popular with the political centre, or with alarmists who will conjure up memories of the coal board, the 3 day week and poorly-run, tax absorbing state owned utility companies. That said, we cannot stand idly by and wait until having warmth in the winter becomes a luxury commodity while a former public owned industry continues to post record profits.

There are not many topics of conversation in politics that can be termed as sexy but gas surely is not one of them. Energy policy has focused on (the very important issue of) moving our dependency away from fossil fuels rather than how can we distribute the remaining non-renewable resources more fairly. In short we need to talk more about gas because, unpopular as it may be, it remains an important issue.

In the beginning

Personally, I find there’s nothing scarier than a blank page. Rewriting and editing I am fine with, but to go from the point of having nothing to the point of having something is the hardest part of the task.  So it is in the spirit of struggling with beginnings that we start.

I would like to make a few remarks on what to expect from these pages; in essence, the news. What follows is not about my life but the wider world and – that most undescriptive of phrases – current events. There will be opinion, interpretation and analysis – and, most likely, more than a hint of bias. I will not strive for objectivity and or simply reporting the facts. On the contrary, I will be subjective and provide personal reflections.

These pages will not be entirely given over to whatever are the significant events of the last few days.  There will be ideas about society and the individual, and my personal musings on how we live and what we should strive for (or what we should make all efforts to avoid). The writing might slant more towards the business and economic aspects of the news, mainly because that is my current area of interest, but I aim to discuss as much as possible and not simply one area.

Before we begin, I would like to state that my political alignment is to the left and what you will read here will have a definite left-wing slant. The opinions hereafter will (hopefully) be quite upsetting to anyone who agrees with what they read in The Daily Mail.

It will come as no great revelation that it is easy to be selfish and cynical, but still this needs to be said again. Ultimately, we need to look after each other, which is why I call myself a leftist. We aim for a more equal and tolerant society. We are against those who, however good their intentions are, would turn us against each other, punish the poor for desiring more, women for expressing their sexuality, homosexuals for being gay and the people who disagree for speaking out. Being on the left is important because we need to make the world a better place for us all to live in. All this may seem hopelessly vague, but I hope that future posts will clarify my position.

I hope to reach others out there like your good self, and reassure you that you are not alone. Many blogs of a left-wing slant which I have read have consoled me in dark moments of political isolation. Those of us with left-wing progressive views need to be reminded that others share our deeply-held convictions. We all think differently and disagree from time to time, which is one of the reasons the left is described as fractal and woolly. We have sympathy for people who hold similar beliefs to us, and we want to encourage others to take up the pen and write what they believe in.

I aim to make a difference.