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Cathy clear off
The High Court has ruled that Tower Hamlets council was wrong to deny homeless Bangladeshi families long term council housing. But the practice of denying permanent housing to those in desperate need will become general if new Tory housing proposals become law.
Currently, priority for council housing is given to those who are homeless or threatened with homelessness. But this is no fast track. Half those applying as homeless are turned away. The most desperate may be found temporary accommodation, investigated and then allocated permanent housing. In future it is intended that only temporary accommodation shall be provided after investigations have been carried out. No secure accommodation will be provided except via waiting lists.
Emergency help will only go to the roofless. Recently the House of Lords ruled against Wandsworth Council who had refused to regard short term hostel accommodation as homelessness. This legal ruling is to be reversed. Families being thrown out by relatives or friends will have to produce a court order as proof of threatened homelessness. More families will spend years in hostels or bed and breakfast or will be passed to and from social services and housing departments.
The only route into council or housing association housing will be via the waiting lists and these will be tailored in a leap back to workhouse values. Local authorities will be required to specify who 'may or may not appear on waiting lists' and 'balance the intensity of housing need with the length of time spent in need.' Government regulations may keep people off the lists because of age or length of residence in the area.
Residence qualification will increase racial discrimination. British citizens will not be considered homeless if they have lived overseas and 'still have accommodation there which they can be reasonably expected to occupy'. There will be no duty to provide even emergency accommodation for anyone who has entered the country promising to have 'no recourse to public funds'.
The proposals are sexist and hypocritical. Irresponsibility of lone parents is implied, with emphasis placed on deserving couples. The ministers want supervised hostels for young single parents (presumably with a red light outside).
Like Westminster, authorities will be able to push their homeless out to other areas and then decide whether or not to take them back.
At least two million new homes are needed according to the Faculty of Public Medicine figures. Lord Archer sits in his penthouse flat converted from a corner of the 32 million square feet of empty office space in London. But the Tories don't even mention unprofitable office to flat conversion as an option. For them 'social housing' is capital assets to be seized or a mean gift to be handed to the deserving poor.
Audrey Farrell
White male European
There is a persistent movement within academic circles to castigate Marxism as Eurocentric--only concerned with European culture and politics. Marx's writings on India are used and often misquoted or misunderstood.
The most famous line used against Marx is from his writings in the New York Tribune: 'whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution'. But if we want to understand Marx's views we have to place the sentence in its context: 'England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan was activated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution'.
Colonialism did not bring about a revolution in India, but it did bring a resolution to the crisis of Indian society, which was stagnant in technology and production. This backwardness, coupled with dynastic wars, had left India unable to unite against encroaching colonialism. Though Marx criticised pre-colonial society in India, he was equally critical of European feudalism. His comments on the Indian caste system restraining the human mind, making it the 'unresisting tool of superstition', are mirrored by Marx's statements on the European peasantry, which he described as 'mired in the idiocy of rural life'. Marx was commenting on how peasant life sapped human potential.
Any attempt to portray Marx as an enthusiastic colonialist would have to demonstrate that he was an ardent supporter of capitalism.
Marx's idea that a transplanted European society could bring about a fundamental change in Indian society might appear today as strange and exaggerated, but it is worth remembering that the difference in material prosperity between India and Britain in 1835 was not that great--certainly in comparison to the gap between the two in 1947, on the eve of Indian independence.
His analysis of Indian society was to demonstrate those structures that impeded and distorted Indian development in its move towards a capitalist revolution. Uppermost in his mind was the dead weight of the baggage of Indian pre-capitalist society.
The letters to the New York Tribune were penned before either Grundrisse or Capital were written. Marx wrote in a letter in 1881:
'In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, are in store for the British government. What these British take from them annually in the form of rent dividends, for railways useless for the Hindus, pensions for the military and civil servicemen, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc, etc--what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India--speaking only of the value of the commodities that Indians have to gratuitously and annually send over to England--it amounts to more than the total sum of the income of the 60 million of agricultural and industrial labourers of India. This is a bleeding process with a vengeance.'
Such views hardly reveal a racist attitude.
Marx also welcomed the Indian National Revolt of 1857, seeing it as part of an Asian revolt against Europe. Engels too had nothing but praise for the Chinese struggles against Europeans, accusing the Western nations of being 'civilisation mongers who throw hot shells on defenceless cities and add rape to murder.' Thus neither Marx nor Engels saw resistance to colonialism as misdirected.
Barry McLaughlin
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