Tell that to the people displaced in Anfield, Liverpool, where rows of streets were bought up by councils through the pathfinder scheme and (to my knowledge) remain empty waiting for “new housing” investment to needlessly demolish them and build new more expensive housing on the plot.

The pathfinder projects flaw was that in these areas where “people don’t want to live” it’s because of the poor quality of housing, not because of the area. That doesn’t require houses to be taken off the market and demolished, only to be renovated properly.

If we’re discussing social housing policy more generally, it is worth mentioning the Decent Home Standard, which has transformed the quality of social housing for millions of people.

I wasn’t quite accurate (memory fuzzy) they take them out of the market, demolish them (or wait to demolish them), and then wait for a developer to come along at the right price to build new housing (which wasn’t even necessarily affordable for the local residents). So we see councils, (also including Lib Dem councils, and no doubt Tory councils, money talks after all) displacing communities for something that is completely ill judged and actually takes away an affordable option for those less well off, while keeping the homes empty,

?

Never heard of this, could you give a link or explain a bit more? It sounds like a very garbled reference to Decent Home Standard, but maybe you mean something else?

No one is starving to death for economic reasons in the UK. But if you are cared to make it easier for the poor to eat, the answer is trade liberalisation (food being one of the few commodities that we still have a policy on keeping the price high).

And it is more than the ability to vote. If you can detain people for several weeks, you can tactically shut them up at the time when is the most convenient. When you introduce speech codes, you can arrest public speakers and shut down websites. When there are enough laws such that everyone is a criminal of some sort, you can instruct the police or the CPS to aim a charge in order to discredit someone, seize their assets or shut down their organisation. Of course, these powers are rarely used like that right now. But all the more reason to get rid of them before the Government gets used to what it can do.

If only we could see an alternate reality. Perhaps we could see one without such an economic boom as has happened during Labour’s tenure and see just how much it really did to deal with poverty on it’s own terms.

“I’ve no doubt also that the Tories will stop increasing the minimum wage by above inflation and let its real value decline.”

It’s interesting that while you pick up on this and other things the Tories are “likely” to do (and it is indeed much more likely if we all do as you do and just sit back sulking and cheering your team on regardless) while ignoring the points I’ve raised regarding Labour’s own assault on the income of the poor.

As I will no doubt say again to you, I’m not defending the Tories, I know there is a whole load of shit they’ll bring to the table…but at least it is likely to be less shit than Labour have left there.

“Tory posturing on bringing empty houses back into use”

Posturing? Interesting. At least they’re saying something other than to simply build houses which they also acknowledge needs to happen

“doesn’t disguise the fact that the places where there are no empty houses are the places with the biggest need for more housing. It might have a small effect, but it won’t have as big an effect as the massive (I’d like it to be even bigger) house-building programme Labour has started. ”

Why not do both? That’s what the Tories want to do it would seem (as, of course, the Lib Dem’s do), Labour would rather limit their scope and do nothing in the time being.

And since you’re so against the poorer classes being screwed over (as am I), what do you think to the atrocious situation of help going mainly to the SE and London with the “Homestart” or “Surestart” scheme (whichever it is)? It’s never like Labour to do something that helps the middle classes but not the poor like that is it? Only things like a shifty 10p tax scandal here…top-up fee’s to bleed money out of the poor after the fact where previously they were better off for the future…How about more subtle things like locking up the more likely to be poor parents for their kids truancy, while also increasing truancy and thus decreasing the likelihood of breaking out of that stagnation? Or, I’ll repeat, the making of courts more inaccessible disproportionately to the poor?

So let’s not sit here throwing around accusations at the Tories for screwing over the poor, Labour is perfectly capable of playing that game itself too.

“And where the Tories have got into power in London they’ve abolished quotas to build affordable housing!”

They’ve also built too much housing, as it happens, so it would seem that individual councils and their own inefficiencies and prejudices are the issue…as tends to be the case on such areas.

“Oh, and I don’t know where you got the idea that the 10p rate abolition issue was finally dealt with because Tories raised it as an issue. It was a backbench rebellion that forced the government to provide some redress.”

After both the Tories and Lib Dem’s made a stink about it that actually brought it to media attention. I guess Labour back benchers just don’t read the stuff their leaders bring out, otherwise I wonder why the rebellion didn’t happen a year earlier (when I believe the Lib Dem’s commented on the tax increase then too, though I may be wrong). Maybe because politically they didn’t need to prove themselves as being for the working class a year before?

“Could Labour have done much more? Yes. Could what has been achieved have been achieved less cack-handedly? Quite possibly. But please let’s not buy into the Tories’ attempt at brand detoxification.”

I’m not buying in to the Tories, I’m buying OUT of the Labour party. This whole argument is not about the Tories being better, it’s about your argument of Labour supposedly being better…patently untrue. You can’t sit here and say “well yeah, Labour could be better” while stating “No, the Tories can’t possibly be different from a decade or more ago!”

I’ve no doubt also that the Tories will stop increasing the minimum wage by above inflation and let its real value decline. (But we saw in the other thread that you’d be happy with an opt-out to the minimum wage, for reasons thought unduly optimistic by others including myself.)

They are very likely to abolish or reduce the real value of many forms of tax credits (replacing them with reactionary measures benefiting mainly middle class couples like marriage allowances, just as they have said they would reduce SureStart provision and increase health visitors instead). I agree that they’re not an ideal way of getting money to people but they have helped hundreds of thousands of people

Tory posturing on bringing empty houses back into use doesn’t disguise the fact that the places where there are no empty houses are the places with the biggest need for more housing. It might have a small effect, but it won’t have as big an effect as the massive (I’d like it to be even bigger) house-building programme Labour has started. And where the Tories have got into power in London they’ve abolished quotas to build affordable housing!

Oh, and I don’t know where you got the idea that the 10p rate abolition issue was finally dealt with because Tories raised it as an issue. It was a backbench rebellion that forced the government to provide some redress.

Could Labour have done much more? Yes. Could what has been achieved have been achieved less cack-handedly? Quite possibly. But please let’s not buy into the Tories’ attempt at brand detoxification.

The Tories are talking about getting empty housing back on the market, Labour are disgustingly quiet on the issue…mostly because they and their councils have spent a lot of money buying up old houses and taking them out of the market so that they can renovate and make money on them later. So much for the needy first, right?

What about the amount of money that Labour siphons out of socially housed people to pump in to central funds, and not in to the housing they live in?

I’m not even going to go in to the critcisms that are frequently levied against the tax credit system and the abject failure of any child support service they have introduced.

10p tax rate abolition, anyone? Stuffing the most vulnerable right in to issues, and only addressing it when the opposition parties made enough of a fuss A YEAR AFTER they announced it originally?

Increasing the cost of civil proceedings, as noted in a blog post not far from the top now?

Increasing the cost of taxation on cars retrospectively, a tax that is unlikely to affect the middle classes that can simply upgrade their car, but WILL affect the poor who are not in a position to upgrade and have to lump the increase.

Labour having done nothing to a) ensure that Ofgem or other such companies actually manage the effective monopoly that several companies have over consumers and b) are still painfully silent on the issue of pre-payment meters while the Tories at least have and do stood against them.

Perhaps most tellingly the fact Labour have done nothing to stop the increase of the divide between the rich and the poor with the poorest relatively poorer than they were under the Tories.

Not to mention all the BILLIONS of pounds that could be spent on welfare and poverty that are instead going in to these civil liberty infringing measures.

If you honestly think Labour are the best people to tackle poverty going forward then I am surprised, and repeat my earlier assertion.

In fact, if you’re going to make the analogy so extreme, the opposite is also true. Civil liberties mean nothing if you’re starving to death.

Freedom and equality needn’t be mutually exclusive (unless you have the kind of worldview that Newmania has), and most of us would probably see them as interlinked. There’s no reason why we can’t campaign for both ideals. But if we’re talking about which is the most important battle right now, for me it has to be the fight against poverty, and a Labour government is always a better condition for that struggle than a Tory government.

I’m not trying to convince anyone, I’m just stating the fact. Nick did a good job on the convincing front though, his thoughts echo mine almost exactly.

Lee: then you’re an absolute moron.
Nice way to convince others of your argument, Lee

No government, no matter how benign, can be trusted with the powers ours has.

You made me think about an old idea about government.

That we live in UK plc.

That it does not really matter whether the Board of Directors are replaced by Conservatives, because the dynamic is similar. Neither Labour nor Tories are capable of letting go of the power that they wield when in office. Whichever monster occupies the boardroom they are seduced by the need to ‘do something’. Which, inevitably means legislate. Which is increasingly restrictive.

On the civil liberties front it seems to me that the broadest possible coalition is required to counteract that.

Sadly, I am not holding my breath.

That explains a lot. I’m the complete opposite.”

If you vote in successive governments that fail to protect civil liberties, their commitment to tackle equality won’t really mean much. Basic civil liberties are the sine qua non of having an operational democracy, the pre-requisite for developing any other programme. It is a shame that so many governments (left and right) think that they can solve problems like poverty just so long as they aggregate more powers to the state and remove checks on how they are exerted. They want just want more legislative, executive and judicial efficiency, especially when they have a big social engineering project to roll out. But as soon as you lose those checks and balances, the ability of marginalised people to challenge government decisions diminishes, and with that the hope that their interests could really be served.

You would have thought that all egalitarians would realise this by now.

I’m surprised this got let through, as many people round here seem to thing the SCA was a miserable failure.

Eh? At the start of our dissemination campaign we set ourselves a target of getting 75 councils to agree to use the Act by the end of July 2009. As of now, we have 74 councils undertaking to use it with at least a dozen currently actively considering it (that we know of). We’ve even managed to persuade councils such as Cornwall who are currently in the process of going unitary and thus were tempted to sit the process out during the first round.

We had to turn away more than 100 people from our meeting in Parliament last week because, despite the fact we had almost no budget to promote the event, people turned up in swathes to attend.

We are starting to hear back from councils now actively drawing up their plans with local people; meanwhile the LGA is gearing up to play its role at the end of the process.

Everything is going better than we had planned. How do you quantify “miserable failure”?

Who the fuck are you to complain about misuse of language when you can’t spell simple words, you illiterate div?

Yeah, but is listening to them more dangerous than going horse riding?