Linkage

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.”

Most of the revenue lost in Victoria due to fare evasion comes from the career evaders, who were the smallest group of the four. These people were found to be typically wealthy and chose to evade for the challenge rather than being unable to afford the ride. Of this group, Currie said, “We’ve got this archetypal, old view that it’s a young person or a drop-out that’s doing bad stuff. No, that’s not what’s going on.”

What is going on, though, is that despite research showing the majority of fare evaders not having criminal intent, they are still being treated as though they do by the Victorian government’s authorised officers.

Other reports include requests for “data related to menstruation tracking applications” as part of the police’s investigations.

It’s understood these requests have been taking place for at least the past three years. Dr Jonathan Lord, co-chair of the British Society of Abortion Care Providers and an NHS consultant gynaecologist, called searching women’s phones for menstrual data “chilling and deeply intrusive”.

“We already know that police routinely remove phones and computers from women suspected of having an [illegal] abortion and it’s even happening following miscarriage and pregnancy loss,” Lord said. “This is damaging enough as it leaves women frightened and isolated immediately after suffering a substantial trauma.” 

Lord told Tortoise he was aware of cases of blood tests being taken with the woman’s consent by NHS staff at the request of police, including, he said, “when women knew they were innocent after suffering an unexpected premature delivery”.

Even when the test finds no trace of abortion medication women can continue to remain under suspicion “as a negative test does not exclude earlier use of drugs”, he said. In that event, he argued, “the only motivation for testing is entrapment”. 

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.

Successive governments that failed to build social housing whilst selling off social housing stock are partly to blame for this.

So, too, are the actions of some unscrupulous landlords.

But the real problem can be laid fairly and squarely at the door of the Bank of England. They forced interest rates up without any evidence that doing so would reduce inflation. So far, the contrary is likely to be the case. And now they are using quantitative tightening to keep those rates artificially high - and well above those that markets might otherwise settle on given the state of the economy.

The result is not just a cost of living crisis.

Nor is it just a massive decline in the financial well-being of millions in this country.

It is also an alarming hike in rents, which are, however, insufficient to cover the costs of some highly-geared (over-borrowed) landlords who are selling their properties as quickly as they can, so increasing the scale of homelessness and disruption, whilst also removing property from the rental housing stock, at least temporarily. It's a perfect storm for the councils involved, and it can only get worse since it is the policy of the Bank of England to maintain high interest rates as inflation declines, which can only make rents increasingly unaffordable whilst forcing more landlords out of business.

More children have now been killed in Gaza in the last three weeks than the total killed in conflicts around the world in every year since 2019, the nongovernmental organisation Save the Children has said.

Figures released by the NGO on Sunday, referencing Palestinian health authorities, show that at least 3,324 children have been killed in Gaza since October 7, while 36 have died in the West Bank.

According to reports from the UN Secretary-General on children and armed conflict, a total of 2,985 children were killed across 24 countries in 2022, 2,515 in 2021, and 2,674 in 2020 across 22 countries, Save the Children said.

“One child’s death is one too many, but these are grave violations of epic proportions,” said Jason Lee, Save the Children’s country director for the occupied Palestinian territory. “A ceasefire is the only way to ensure their safety. The international community must put people before politics – every day spent debating is leaving children killed and injured. Children must be protected at all times, especially when they are seeking safety in schools and hospitals.”

For the past three weeks, since Hamas's atrocities of October 7th, settlers have been exploiting the lack of public attention to the West Bank, as well as the general atmosphere of rage against Palestinians, to escalate their campaign of violent attacks in an attempt to forcibly transfer Palestinian communities. During this period, no fewer than thirteen herding communities have been displaced. Many more are in danger of being forced to flee in the coming days if immediate action is not taken.

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.

Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the “inferior” races of the earth. We give these “inferior” races names that embody evil. ISIS. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. Hamas. We use racist slurs to dehumanize them. “Haji” “Sand Nigger” “Camel Jockey” “Ali Baba” “Dung Shoveler” And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel licensed, as Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party said, to erase “the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”

Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former Prime Minister, in an interview on Sky News on Oct. 12 said, “We’re fighting Nazis,” in other words, absolute evil.

Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as “the new Nazis”.

Think about that. A people, imprisoned in the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis?