After the war, the government oversaw a huge building and rebuilding project, to repair and replace war-damaged infrastructure and, under the banner ‘Homes for Heroes’, to provide council housing in particular for the families of returning soldiers, and more widely to address the housing shortage and make homes available for all who needed them.

This weekend, two women were arrested in one of those ‘homes for heroes’.

We lost a lot of our social housing to Margaret Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ scheme in the 1980s. It sounded like a great idea to many people at the time. In the decades before Thatcher came along, most people in the UK had been getting better off, and it was possible to imagine we were reaching a stage where everyone could own their own home and be secure. Many council tenants bought their homes with special, affordable mortgages from the government.

I don’t know if the politicians of the time actually said they would of course continue to build and provide social housing for those who needed it, I don’t know if they actually said they would ensure councils were funded to do that work, but it didn’t happen. Soon after Thatcher’s policy of selling off public assets got into its stride, people stopped getting wealthier. Unemployment and homelessness started to rise again, and councils did not have the funding to deal with the problem.

In recent years, councils have handed over much of the remaining social housing to companies and associations apparently contracted to continue provision. Meanwhile, as austerity hits more and more people, those whose families bought their council homes have been forced to sell up, and their houses tend to be bought by private renters.

Most of the housing we in and around Hastings still see as ‘council housing’ is actually owned and run by those companies and associations, most notably Southern Housing. They do what all profiteering companies do – they seek the route that gives them least work and most profit which means, when a group of houses reach a stage where refurbishment is going to be necessary, they get rid of them. That is what is happening to this house in Battle. Here, a neighbour tells the story…

Right to protest

The housing crisis is one of many issues that people are getting increasingly angry about, and it’s very hard to know what to do. If you take the standard route, writing to the council, to MPs or government ministers, what tends to come back is councillors saying the government won’t fund them to do anything and MPs and ministers saying it’s down to the council to act, so naturally, we move on to protesting and public campaigns but, just as all these problems we face make protesting necessary, the government and the police are increasingly treating protest as a crime.

After numerous cases of Southern Housing failing to look after their tenants and properties, or selling off what should be public property, people have responded by getting together and staging protests. And then this happens…

It’s notable that no-one from Southern Housing turned up to talk to the protestors, or even to ask them to leave. It seems unlikely that neighbours called the police. You can see from their presence in the videos, they were very much in sympathy with the protestors. The police did not just ask the protestors to leave – they arrested them and carted them away so, as the local Housing Rebellion group ask, why are the police being used as private security to protect Southern Housing? And what are we supposed to do, if we want to protect public housing stock?

At the moment it seems all we can do is keep turning up at the police station in support of those who get arrested for voicing our concerns…

The government can’t help – they’re far too busy trying to protect themselves from all the recent revelations about just how badly ‘the great and the good’ have been behaving. Councils can’t help – it was them who handed our housing over to these organizations, and they still seem very much in thrall to the wishes of big companies and developers.

Let’s hope the police have a bit of time left over to deal with crime (you know, things that actually harm people — like sex trafficking, complicity in genocide, wasting public money) in between scuppering protests that profiteers and corrupt politicians don’t like.

*Video clips by Housing Rebellion

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