Asset-stripping Tories Axe Housing

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"I KEEP TELLING YOU-YOU HAVE COMPLETE FREEDOM OF CHOICE... and Judge attempted to shift the blame for the series of design problems (which had grown out of the cuts they had administered) onto building workers and architects.

The blatant career building of both Balfe and Judge led to intense rivalry and prevented all efforts to create an integrated housing policy for the whole of London.

This problem was exacerbated by the majority of the Labour-controlled inner boroughs which refused to cooperate on integrated policies.

This was despite the fact that despite SALES their constituents would obviously benefit greatly from integration. The councillors clearly feared they would lose their powers of patronage over council tenancies and their influence in allocating contracts.

The Tory boroughs were therefore able to sit back and watch the Labour boroughs preventing the GLC's attempts to create an overall housing policy for London.

This year's London Regional Labour Party Conference belatedly condemned these obstructions. It called impotently for coordination of lettings policies to eliminate the obvious injustices involved in the largest waiting lists building up in the poorest boroughs while the richest boroughs refuse to take any responsibility for people outside their boundaries.

NOT RESTRICTED The GLC's stock of housing, being distributed all over London and not restricted to one borough, offers the only chance for council tenants and waiting list families to move from one borough to another without being forced into the private sector.

The first part of the Tory attack on this stock of housing is to be the much heralded 'sale of the century' They intend to sell as much of the stock as they can to the existing tenants. at the biggest discount they can get away with-30 There is ongously a characteristact Selling council houses solve: i no problems. Itonly shifts the injustice and magnifies it.

The people on the waiting lists will be denied access to the houses that are sold off-except in the unlikely event that they can raise the mortgages necessary to buy them.

And of course only the best of the council houses will be bought, leaving a crumbling stock of rise blocks, interwar 'walk-up' blocks and unmodernised terraced houses for the next generation of tenants.

The best council houses are out the traditionally Tory suburban COMPLETE FREEDOM result will be that the tenants will again be locked within the borough boundaries for the rest of their lives with no prospect of transferring to the pleasanter housing in the suburbs.

The programmes of rehabiliration of the older houses and of support for housing associations producing housing by building and conversions will show the same pattern of being restricted to inner London, but the Tories have also had another idea which they find attractive.

They call it homesteading' and it means opening up the worst of the unimproved housing stock, rent free, to anyone willing to live in it and make it habitable.

The most astounding scheme all however is the conversion flats to offices and workshops.

There is aircady a great surplus in London of vacant office space and factory space, a symptom of the general economic crisis and also of London's decline as a centre of world capitalism.

How can it make sense therefore housiı To rents thosc We readers.

should possible Close down much needed ig to expand this surplus? recover the conversion costs will have tr › be higher than being asked for City offices.

EVERY LEVEL

These attacks on public services and housing therefore come at every level.

They are typical of Tory plans for cities all over Britain in the coming months, and they will be carried through unless trade unions, Labour Parties and tenants associations fight to mobilize the strength of the working class in a struggle for a socialist programme of house building at the expense of the landiords, property speculators, financiers and building companies.

Today this task goes hand in hand with a fight against the Lib-Lab coalition government which opened the door to the Tories in the first place.

WISE AFTER

THE EVENT sides over he actions of Audrey Wise and Jeff Rooker. The arguments continue to revolve around the question of saving the and letting in the Tories.

Within that context we are able to challenge the supposed opposition to the likes of Callaghan and Healey from their 'left' critics and put forward our idea of the socialist programme on which a general election should be fought.

Audrey Wise's comments make it easier for us to argue that there is an alternative to waiting for the Tories to turn the knife and then accepting the election defeat and what will follow.

We have to employ every haltstep forward of the left reformists if we are to succeed in our policy of breaking the coalition and forging an alternative leadership in the working class.

Fraternally, K. White, Coventry LETTERS welcome letters Letters for publica be kept as brief and sent to:

Socialist Press , Dartmouth Park Hill London NWS 1HR CORRECTION A ry pographical error turned the meanine of the last sentence of the letter in SP 63 into its opposite.

The last sentence should have read:

But :::: willingness to fight *te ine most fertile conditions ::- intersention that

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