Remember the boom years, the 'nice decade' as the Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King described it? It certainly was a nice decade for the so-called 'masters of the universe', who benefited to the tune of billions from the neoliberal counterrevolution that begun 30 years ago. Meanwhile, real wages for workers froze or declined, and public services were privatised and scaled back. Now, in the death throes of neoliberalism, the ones who made the mess are assured a soft landing by Governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
They will keep their mansions, and holiday homes. Meanwhile, ordinary workers in America and Britain are losing their homes. A report in today's Guardian revealed that the amount of repossessions of homes in the south west has recently increased dramatically. The report states that
"One repossession and eviction court in Penzance, west Cornwall, raced through 50 cases in one morning recently. In Barnstaple, north Devon, the last repossession court heard 26 cases - more than double the number before the credit crunch."We would agree with Stephen Davis, of Torridge and Bude Citizens Advice Bureau, who blames "lower than average wages and above-average
house prices". But the picture is much worse than suggested by even the outrageous ratios of average house price to average wage. The average wage given is heavily skewed by a small number of very high earners.
We have very high house prices in the south west (and nationally) for a number of reasons. Firstly, the amount of social housing has shrunk dramatically over the past 25 years, due to the Thatcher government's 'Right to Buy' scheme, the privatisation of council housing in many areas, and lack of funding and legal oportunities for local authorities to build new houses. Secondly, the availability of cheap and easy credit enabled certain parasites to buy up lots of housing and rent it out to recoup the mortgage costs and make some profit. This has led to the quality of private rented accommodation falling as the cost of it increases. Thirdly, the attractiveness of the area, and the enrichment of a small section of the population in the Thatcher-Major-Blair years has led to a boom in second home ownership, further reducing the amount of houses available, allowing sellers and estate agents to hike up prices.
The lack of availability of social housing and undesirability and expensiveness of private rented accommodation has led many people to buy their own homes. Many will have decided to buy for security, which obviously is absent in the private rental sector. The consequence of low wages, high house (and flat) prices, and the (now ended) willingness of the banks and other financial institutions to lend a large amount of money to people (the so-called 'sub-prime' mortgages), is now that ever higher numbers of people are losing their homes, and are now either living with relatives, in temporary accommodation or are homeless.
The solutions to the crisis will not be found in the City, Wall Street, the US Congress or the Houses of Parliament. The class war was long ago declared dead by the likes of the newly resurrected Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, but the Tories and New Labour have been waging it fiercely, in the interests of capitalists and their rotten system. The measures taken in these early stages of the economic crisis show that clearly. Nothing is done to help people turfed out of their own homes, yet the financial wizards are bailed out. Banks are nationalised as they are deemed 'too important to fall'. Yet MG Rover wasn't. Nor was Ford Dagenham. Or the many other businesses whose closures over the coming months will put thousands of workers out of work.
We must demand that all the banks and financial institutions are nationalised, with compensation provided only on the basis of proven need. People struggling to pay their mortgages will have their debt cancelled, and their house transferred to the ownership of the local authority, who will be obliged to rent the house at a minimal rate to them with absolute security of tenure, and be able to pass on the tenancy to a child. Bureaucratic restrictions placed on council tenants should be scrapped.
The restrictions on councils building houses should be removed. The housing associations, and homes belonging to private landlords, should be nationalised also, and those homes transferred to the local housing stock.
There should be a national council house building programme, funded from central government but carried out by local authorities. Local people should have a democratic say in how the new housing developments should take shape, and community facilities should be provided, including transport links, general stores, a Post Office, GP surgeries, health centres, schools and amenities.
The building and construction industries will need to be nationalised under the democratic control of the workers in that industry and the public as a whole. In a break from current practice, the new houses and flats would be built according to people's various needs, not to make vast profits.
Fundamental to all this is the need to replace the profit obsessed system of capitalism, which leads to perpetual crisis, and which on the upswing gives the wealthy all the lolly, and on the downswing, makes workers pay for the bosses folly.
Venue: Exeter Community Centre, Heavitree Room, St Davids Hill, Exeter
