The Socialist 13 January 2016

NHS not safe in Tory hands

Corbyn must lead a fight against the right and for an anti-austerity programme

NHS not safe in Tory hands

Junior doctors' strike: picket photos and reports

Health workers under attack!

Doctors battle burnout as 100 full-up GP surgeries apply to shut their doors

"Shattered but proud", a day in the life of a student nurse

Student nurses march to oppose bursary cut

Bosses 'earn' year's pay in under a week

BBC planned live Labour resignation to damage Corbyn

EU probes power plant for wrongdoing over switch from coal to biomass

What We Saw

Them & Us

Slums, speculation, sell-offs and sardines

Cameron's housing con

Housing staff strike against cuts

Cameron's 10,000 new homes won't hide the problem

476,000 homes in England go unbuilt by speculators

A clear strategy to defeat the Tory cuts

Council uses reserves to stop cuts

Councillors must resist cuts

Southampton people's budget meeting

Victor Jara's revolutionary life, poetry and politics

Letters

Sexual assaults in Cologne exploited by racist establishment and far right

Saudi Arabia mass executions

Honduras: Day of the endangered lawyer

West Dunbartonshire teachers strike

Energy-filled pickets at EDF

Workplace news in brief

"We hope to inspire people to go out and spread their passion for the Socialist"

Report: Socialist Party national women's meeting

Eleanor Marx: a life of struggle, solidarity and socialism

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Cameron's housing con

For a mass programme of council house building

Sam Morecroft, Sheffield

Writing in the Sunday Times on 10 January, Cameron claimed he will end gang culture, drug abuse and poverty - by demolishing sink estates and building new, 'affordable' houses.

Sound too good to be true? Well, that's because it is.

Cameron has announced plans to demolish around 100 decrepit tower block estates in some of the most deprived areas in the country. But he is not doing so to build publicly owned social housing available for rent. He is subsiding private developers to build homes to buy on public land - no doubt mostly luxury flats.

How on earth are people living on some of Britain's most deprived housing estates meant to afford that? Clearly this is just another attempt to push working class communities out of the areas in which they live, and sell off council housing and land to the private sector.

To add insult to injury, former Tory minister Michael Heseltine will oversee the scheme. Papers like the Times and the Metro claim he is the man for the job because he supposedly oversaw the regeneration of Liverpool in the 1980s!

Liverpool council

It wasn't Heseltine or the Thatcher government that sorted out Liverpool's slums. It was Militant, forerunner of the Socialist Party, which led Liverpool council. We stood up to Thatcher's austerity, tore down run-down housing blocks and built 5,000 high-quality council houses.

That's how you defeat poverty - by fighting the cuts to provide publicly owned social housing which people can afford to rent. Not by selling off land to the private sector!

Gang culture, drug abuse and other social ills are not caused by concrete tower blocks, but by poverty. They are the sad but avoidable outcome for communities trapped between low-waged, insecure work and long-term unemployment.

Yes, we should knock down aging tower blocks where they can't be brought up to standard through renovation. But they need to be replaced by high-quality, publicly owned social housing available at genuinely affordable rents.

If Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party would commit to that, it would get a fantastic response from working class communities! It's crucial that we organise to stop the sell-off of council land - and fight for decent homes for all.

In this issue

What we think

Corbyn must lead a fight against the right and for an anti-austerity programme