Back to the 1950s

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.

Six vying for deputy spot.

Six candidates have managed to muster the 45 nominations needed to run for the deputy leadership of the Labour party. Harriet Harman, Hazel Blears, Hilary Benn, Alan Johnson, Peter Hain and John Cruddas have all been nominated.

Apart from Cruddas, there really isn’t much between the candidates. He seems to be the only one saying anything interesting – and he has made it clear that he doesn’t want to be in the Cabinet should he be elected. As a former special adviser Cruddas certainly isn’t a trouble-maker and, if elected, would give Gordon Brown much greater freedom in choosing his Cabinet while freeing him from some of his party responsibilities.

There really isn’t much between the other candidates. Harriet Harman’s sole pitch is that she is a woman, and a woman should get the job. She seems to forget she was a lousy Cabinet minister, sacked from the Department of Social Security in 1998 and has been rattling around junior minister positions since she was restored to office in 2001. She is also completely accident prone. The Labour MP Austen Mitchell brilliant summed up her obsession for political correctness when he called her Harriet Harperson.

Of the remaining candidates, Hazel Blears is the most irritating person in the government, is too close to John Reid for my liking and is a member of the Labour party’s tap dancing squad. Peter Hain has gone from radical freedom campaigner to sycophantic Blairite – plus he is orange. Alan Johnson made is reputation from doing Blair’s dirty work, whereas Hilary Benn is an amiable bloke with a famous father who has done alright as International Development Secretary.

If I was a Labour member I think that I would plump for either Cruddas or Benn. But I’m nowhere close to being a Labour supporter – so I would love either Harman or Blears to get the job.