Joseph to tax sick pay

Scan page 4

Homelessness, soaring rents and a further lurch to recession in the construction industry are the most obvious fruits of the Tory's first 100 days of activity on housing.

£600 mitlion in Tory cuts in local authority spending, including substantial cuts in housing subsidies have come on top of successive rounds of savage cutbacks inflicted by Callaghan's Labour government and an economic slump.

The outcome is a situation of total chaos for working class families and young people seeking a home.

Council housing targets had already plummeted to historic low levels.

Now the Tories, with their determination to force workers into the profitable private sector to rent or buy their houses, have ensured that the current 90,000 council houses built per year will be cut back to around 30,000. 1 As much existing council property as possible is mean. while being take out of the public sector in the Tories' "sale of the century" in which those workers well off enough to afford a mortgage are being urged to buy their council houses.

The result will inevitably be to lengthen the already huge queues for council housingwith all the misery and discomfort that this brings to working class families.

The Tories talk of local authority housing as a "dead duck" and regard the private sector as providing the answer.

Obviously private landlords and developers stand to make a killing as desperate workers are forced to pay extortionate rents and prices to get a roof over their heads..

Rocketing •

But the rocketing cost of houses and the high interest rates on mortgages, running alongside falling working class fiving standards mean that private developers are far from confident that they can sell an unlimited number of new houses.

-'000-400 •200 •100 PUBLIC Since production under capitalism takes place not to fulfil social need but purely for profit, and building firms need to borrow money in advance at high interest rates to build houses the risk is regarded as high.

As a result, even the most optimistic capitalist forecasts do not expect completions. to avnand 11n Ann both public and private sources charges. will fall between 40,000 and assessments, Capitalism, in other words, is incapable of fulfilling one of the most basic social needs of the working population-the provision of adequate housing accomodation.

Rent hike Meanwhile for those lucky enough already to hold tenancies in council accomodation, Tory policies will mean a massive rent hike of £2.50 to £3 during the next year.

This, is due to the cut in housing subsidies. But the money does not go to finance new council building or repairs to existing housing stock: it is siphoned directly into the coffers of the banks and capitalist trusts, which in 1975-6 alone creamed off a staggering £1,400 million in interest charges from local authority housing departments.

Anything up to 90p in the pound of council rent goes straight into the pockets of the bankers.

Interest

As the Tories' latest 0097 Workers, however, will not of socialist policies and abject Heseltine collaboration with the bankers and capitalist trusts have paved the way for the present crisis.

The only way in which the housing crisis can be resolved is through an uncompromising socialist programme based on ine nationalisation, without compensation of the construction industry, the banks, insurance firms, building societies and major trusts, under workers management.

Only a planned, socialist economy can match production to genuine social needs.

To prove the necessity for such a strategy trade unionists and council tenants should form committees on a local level to open the books of local authorities and the construction This would show the real scale of interest payments and the profits made by private capitalists from the public sector.

Workers' inquiries should be established to assess housing needs and put forward a crash programme of public works to remedy the present crisis and provide much needed new jobs.

Such a campaign would also link up with the other struggles currently facing the working class, all of which point to the necessity for united working class action to bring down the Tory government and fight for the removal of the existing Labour leadership and establish a government responsive to the needs of the working class.

Sir Keith Joseph, the Tory minister who advised the thousands of unemployed workers on Clydeside to look for jobs or start up businesses of their own has decided to make it less appealing to be on the dole.

Carefully skating around the abysmally low wages that keep hundreds of thousands of employed workers below tbe government's own poverty line, Joseph has attacked the tax system, which, he says, means that it is "a miracle that millions of people still go to work at all " ', since the benefits of doing so are so low.

Joseph The answer? Not, of course, wage increases for the low paid, but a Tory plan to slap a tax on unemployment benefit and even sick pay.

In other words the most downtrodden and poverty-stricken casualties of the capitalist crisis will find their meagre subsistence benefits slashed in order to provide them with the 'incentive" to work.

Pointing out that it would take the Tories a few months to formulate and enact this vicious policy. Joseph stressed that it had been considered by the previous Labour government.

Meanwhile an indication of the bread line wages that the Tories are keen to force the unemployed to accept was given by the announcement that even after a 25% increase in pay, 750,000 hotel and catering staff face a basic rate of between £41.70 and £50.

As GMWU "negotiator" Fred Cooper tamely commented settlement-railroaded through the reactionary Wages Council set-up by an alliance of employers and so-called "independents"-will leave most workers in the industry claiming supplementary benefits in order to live.

TORY Environment Secretary, millionaire Michael Hesaltine, has appointed a leading property shark, Tom Baron as a special advisor on housing.

Baron is chairman and managing director of Christian Salveson (Properties), which builds houses under the name of Wellmar, and in the name of profit.

----- pull-quotes -----

TOTAL PRIVATE