Over the weekend the government minister Margaret Hodge has said that British families should be given priority for council housing, over the claims of economic migrants. Her comments have been supported by that arch-panderer Hazel Blears.
Essentially what Mrs Hodge is advocating is a re-introduction of discrimination in the provision of council housing, taking us back to the dark days of the 1950s when the first large scale immigration from the West Indies, Pakistan and India began. In the days after the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, when West Indian residents were sought out and attacked by white men who had come into the area specifically to target the immigrants, the local Labour MP George Rogers complained ‘that white people in the area felt that they had been subjected to long provocation by coloured people living disreputable lives in appalling conditions’.* In fact, it was the immigrants that were subject to over-charging in housing and were forced to live in over-crowded conditions with several families living in just one house.
This is the situation we are again seeing in Britain. You just have to visit places like Slough, where Polish and other Eastern European immigrants are being forced into the same cramped and over-crowded conditions that were experienced by the immigrants in the 1950s.
No one can deny that the situation isn’t serious and needs urgent government attention. However, all Mrs Hodge is doing is pandering to far-right elements in her own constituency. It was her blunder that legitimised the BNP candidates standing in her constituency in 2006, which led to them winning enough seats to make them the second largest party on the council. And now, instead of standing up to these people she is pandering to those who preach hatred and advocate discrimination.
Only one criterion should be used for providing council housing – need. In the meantime, the government should pull its finger out and build more council houses, perhaps a new chancellor could do something to stop the explosion in house prices that has forced so many people out of the market (so they can get out of rented accommodation), and perhaps, just perhaps, Mrs Hodge (an immigrant herself) can try and take on the racists in her constituency instead of pandering to them.
*Quoted from The National Archives, PREM 11/2920, minute of meeting between David Renton and George Rogers, 4 September 1958.
1 comment:
I agree generally with your comments on Hodge; as I said here she is pandering to racists because they are a direct electoral threat in her constituency. But I disagree with your solution. Encouraging more people to depend on the state for a roof over their head cannot help in the long run.
Post a Comment