In The Guardian

A letter signed by a cross-party group of local authority leaders in England indicates that some town halls in effect face bankruptcy and describes mounting temporary housing bills for homeless households as a “critical risk to the financial sustainability of many local authorities”.

It calls for an immediate cash injection of £100m for councils to provide emergency rent support for families at risk of homelessness, together with an end to the four-year freeze on housing allowance rates and long-term investment in social housing.

“Without urgent intervention, the existence of our safety net is under threat,” says the letter to Hunt, the chancellor. “The danger is that we have no option but to start withdrawing services which currently help so many families to avoid hitting crisis point.”

One senior Labour party member described the resignation of Labour councillors in response to the party’s position on Gaza as “shaking off the fleas”. This approach has broadly characterised Labour’s approach to the dissenting views it has attributed en masse to a cranky left, but it seems increasingly risky when a high-octane political event galvanises people across a demographic profile that is too large to be so easily dismissed. Sulekha, another voter lost to Labour in the past two weeks, tells me of an atmosphere in her local area in Hackney where people are identifying with the Palestine issue through “different intersections” as it draws in “greens, feminists and a broader liberal coalition”. Meanwhile, polling reveals a political establishment dramatically at odds with the country as a whole, in which 76% are in support of a ceasefire. That’s a lot of fleas.

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There are signs that Labour, practised now in the art of figuring out who it can shake off without hurting its re-election chances, is beginning to catch on. In addition to Starmer’s attempt to reverse his position, there have been meetings with Labour MPs and council leaders. But it won’t be enough. Winning over those that have checked out is about more than Gaza. It’s about addressing the growing impression of Labour as a party increasingly out of touch with, and contemptuous of, its grassroots, both in policy offering and tone.

The worst-hit councils are now spending millions of pounds a year – in some cases between a fifth and half of their total available financial resources – to try to cope with an unprecedented and rapid explosion in homelessness caused by rising rents and a shrinking supply of affordable properties.

The scale of the crisis means smaller councils, often in affluent shire counties, are struggling to supply enough emergency homes to meet their legal duty to support homeless families. Homelessness rates in some districts have more than doubled year on year.

I have lived, my whole adult life, through the project known as the property-owning democracy. It was based on the idea that property would make you a better, happier and richer person and responded to the simple, reasonable and powerful desire of very many people to own their home. The property-owning democracy would set you free. For Margaret Thatcher, for whom it was a defining and prodigiously successful concept, it was a “crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic life of the nation”.

So she sold off council houses to their tenants and deregulated and liberalised mortgage markets. From 1980 to 1990 rates of home ownership rose from 55% to 67% of households. At the same time prices rose, almost trebling during her 11-year term. In general Thatcher’s government prided itself on fighting inflation, inflicting heavy costs on employment in an attempt to bring the annual rate down. But with property it was different. Inflation, when it came to homes, was to be celebrated. It was seen as a sign of economic virility, and it made those who had bought feel good. Succeeding governments followed her lead in encouraging both ownership and rising prices. Values more than trebled in the Blair era.

Eventually the inflationary part of the project defeated the ideal of widening enfranchisement. Newcomers to the market just couldn’t afford it, and from the mid-00s rates of ownership started to fall. At the same time the stock of council housing declined. The symptoms of what is now called the “housing crisis” became plainer and plainer – fewer and fewer young people buying, more living with their parents or in rented homes whose prices continue to rise. Private rents are now at their highest level ever, up 20% in some regions over the previous 12 months.

As governments across Australia urgently seek solutions to the housing crisis, a number of councillors, housing groups and urban planners have raised concerns we might be sacrificing living standards and at risk of creating new urban slums.

A surge in people being forced to live in bed and breakfasts and other temporary homes in England is costing the taxpayer £1.7bn a year, “shameful” council data analysed by the Local Government Association has revealed.

The worsening shortage of social housing and increasingly unaffordable private rents are among reasons councils are now paying for 104,000 households to live in temporary accommodation – more than at any time in the past 25 years.

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The LGA, the councils’ umbrella group, is demanding the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, use his coming autumn budget statement to increase housing benefit to make more private rented homes affordable to people on welfare, and to reform housing rules to allow councils to build more social housing.

“Council budgets are being squeezed and the chronic shortage of suitable housing across the country means that councils are increasingly having to turn to alternative options for accommodation at a significant cost,” said Darren Rodwell, the leader of the London borough of Barking and Dagenham and the LGA’s housing spokesperson. “Councils need to be given the powers and resources to build enough social homes for their residents so they can create a more prosperous place to live, with healthier and happier communities.”

In the aftermath of Hamas’s unjustifiable atrocity, Israel’s military onslaught has already slaughtered thousands of civilians, many of them children. That the worst is to come is not supposition, but evident from the public pronouncements of Israel’s political leaders. They have made no effort to disguise their intentions, and thus they have left their cheerleaders with nowhere to hide, no ignorance to plead. “The emphasis is on damage, not accuracy,” declared the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents,” said one IDF official, adding, “There will be no buildings.” Israel’s economy minister, Nir Barkat, told ABC News that hostages and civilian casualties will be secondary to destroying Hamas, “even if takes a year”.

One prominent supporter of Keir Starmer on Labour’s national executive committee claimed that Israel was not in breach of international law on the grounds that its actions were “proportionate”, and that the “command structure involves sign-off by lawyers to ensure conformity with intl law for all IDF actions”. So let’s hear from one such lawyer, Israel’s former chief military advocate general and the country’s former attorney general no less, who declared that to destroy Hamas “then you have to destroy Gaza, because everything in Gaza, almost every building there, is a stronghold of Hamas”.

Across Australia, 3.7m households have experienced food insecurity over the past 12 months, a jump of almost 350,000 on the previous year, Foodbank’s annual hunger report has revealed.

More than 2.3m of those households were “severely food insecure”, meaning they were actively going hungry, reducing food intake, skipping meals or going entire days without eating.

Today, the ownership of digital books is routinely denied to libraries. Many books are offered to libraries in electronic form only, under restrictive temporary licenses; libraries can never own these e-books, but must pay for them over and over, as if they were Netflix movies.

Some publishers have even explicitly named libraries as direct economic competitors.

Digital books have been removed from libraries and edited without librarians’ knowledge or consent. Library patrons who borrow digital books can no longer have the expectation of privacy, with large publishers, distributors and e-book retailers snooping over the shoulder of every reader to build databases that can be sold or shared with advertisers, law enforcement, landlords or immigration agents.