Housing Crisis Hustings

Hustings last night in Peckham, organised by the Southwark Group of Tenants Organisations, with speakers from Labour, LibDems, Greens and us. The Tories were invited but apparently are boycotting all hustings. About 40 people present. The main theme was housing, a major problem in Southwark due to demand for housing near the Thames with easy and quick access to central London driving up land prices, so making it profitable even for the council to encourage up-market housing projects proposed by developers. This has given rise to criticism of "social cleansing". In fact the hustings was filmed by someone making a film on the subject.

Our candidate, Kevin Parkin, said that we had nothing against tenants association -- he himself was vice-president of his local one -- anymore than we were against trade unions; but they were only defensive organisations for workers under capitalism; the solution to problems workers faced could only be found within socialism; the housing problem, for instance, arose because under capitalism houses were built for profit.

Councillor Peter John, the Labour Leader of the Council, conceded at one point that councils could only tinker with the problem as long as they had to rely on profit-seeking businesses to build houses; to get (so-called) "affordable housing" (80 percent of the market rate, still unaffordable for most people in an area of rising land prices) they had to do deals with developers which allowed these to make a profit.

This is true. Having to provide social housing reduces their profits, so if pushed to provide too much the "developer" can simply walk away, resulting in no "affordable housing". Peter John said this could only be rectified by national legislation to allow councils to build houses themselves. This of course (though he didn't say so) would still involve paying money to capitalists as the money to finance this would have to be borrowed from the money market.

The LibDem representative, Tim McNally, billed as "a former Councillor and Cabinet Member" was completely demagogic, promising to stand up to the developers and accusing Councillor John of being in bed with them, as if the LibDem/Tory coalition, of which he was a Cabinet Member, that had run the council from 2006 to 2010 hadn't had to behave in the same way. For instance, here is what a what a Tory former Cabinet Member of that coalition, the one in charge of Housing, Kim Humphries (now, incidentally, himself a Developer -- the revolving door operates at local council level too),said at a hustings for the 2008 Greater London Assembly election in April 2008:

Councillor Humphries was surprisingly honest. He was against having a quota of "affordable housing" in all new housing developments as this could sabotage such schemes. In other words, would reduce the profits of the developers who would take their money and invest it somewhere else where they could make a bigger profit.

The Green representative wanted people to be nice to each other.

The SWP were selling "Socialist Worker" outside the venue.