Before Tory and Labour austerity, Basildon was a great place to live

Dave Murray, Essex Socialist Party

Plentiful, good quality, social housing, available for genuinely affordable rents. Lots of green space and access to the countryside. Plenty of jobs in manufacturing. Local schools, and a hospital, all this made Basildon a great place for working-class families – until Thatcher and her successors declared the experiment a failure.

The partial deindustrialisation of Britain, the great council housing sell-off, plus decades of privatisation and cuts means that, like the rest of the country, life here is a lot harder for working-class people than it needs to be, or used to be.

Many of the sold-off council houses now belong to landlords, who often charge three times what a council tenant would pay for an identical property. It’s particularly galling that the private landlords are squeezing their tenants, using housing that was built with public money on public land.

Big name manufacturers have shut up shop. Public investment has also dried up.

The ‘new town’ no longer feels new. You can see signs of neglect and decay everywhere.

What is most remarkable, though, is that in recent times the local Labour Party has gleefully and publicly shat on its own legacy. Like the Tories, they have worked hand-in-glove with landlords and property developers to pass public assets over to the private sector, and build on green spaces.

They have enabled the ‘build to rent’ buccaneers to have a free hand in redeveloping our town into a future ghetto – building monstrous high rises, full of low-grade flats, built with no regard for the quality of life of the tenants, or the sustainability of heating and transport.

Basildon people are very capable of fighting back though. One of the first people jailed for non-payment of the unfair poll tax was a fiery grandmother from Basildon.

Production workers at the tractor plant are currently on strike over pay. I’m standing to give a political expression to that fighting spirit.

Dave Murray is the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) candidate in Basildon & Billericay