The Housing and Planning Act was passed in parliament last month, threatening to make the housing crisis much worse for millions of people. The government pushed ahead despite objections from tenant, housing and homeless groups, local authorities, academics, trade unions, faith leaders and community organisations.
The new law will drive up rents, end secure tenancies, break up families, push people into poverty, destroy communities, give more power and profit to developers. After years of not building many council homes, the planning elements of the act will also enable more widespread demolitions of affordable social housing estates and reduce democratic local control of planning decisions.
The new law will not come into effect before April 2017, and many of the new measures require further votes in parliament and are likely to be resisted. There is still time to fight.
There will be a national demonstration over housing on 18 June. 10,000 people attended the last one in March. Let’s make this even bigger.
More info: www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk
In November of last year, there was a brief moment of light amid the darkness that was 2020. Scotland became the first country in the world to make period products free for all. Just as the weekend and the eight-hour-day are now regarded by many as a given, future generations may be in disbelief that...
On 4 November last year, when many of us were watching the aftermath of the American presidential election, the US formally left the Paris Climate Agreement. Written in 2015 at the United Nations’ COP21 climate conference in Paris, the agreement is often considered to be the most significant document of international climate cooperation. Back then,...
To say 2020 was dramatic would be an understatement. The world situation has been completely transformed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the inadequacy of governmental and state responses. As we head into 2021 it feels like we are entering uncharted territory. To make specific predictions would be unwise. But the Covid-19 crisis raises fundamental questions...
The 2020 crisis we’ve endured isn’t an aberration of the system but, as Alex Callinicos argues, an aspect of its permanent crisis.
