The main item on the Today programme this morning on BBC Radio 4, just after the 8 o'clock news, was concerned with the "social cleansing" of benefits-dependant people from the London borough of Newham (the Labour council is hoping to relocate them to Stoke on Trent where the Old Etonian Labour MP Tristram Hunt has said they are not wanted).
Why are there 32,000 homeless people in Newham (on the council waiting list)? Who are these people in terms of age, sex, socio-economic class etc? How has this problem arisen?
"Decanting" problem families from failed estates was a covert New Labour policy (an example is the Woodberry Down estate in Hackney). The theory was that socially mixed environments would benefit all the residents. Instead it seems to have created resentment on all sides.
Also depressing is the on-going gentrification of the East End. You can't move in the area for media-types, creative-types, and poseurs of all kinds thinking that an East End address gives them the cachet of being working-class horny-handed sons of soil and toil. Bethnal Green Town Hall is now a luxury hotel and gourmet restaurant, the old docks are lined with hideous yuppie flats and Shoreditch has become one vast open-air new-media boutique.
My grandparents and their seven children lived in a privately rented two-up two-down house in Tomlins Terrace. No-one helped them or gave them benefits (and they would have scorned any suggestion of charity). If any council official had tried to "decant" them they would have shoved him head-first down a manhole (traditional East End way of dealing with troublesome outsiders).
Why are there 32,000 homeless people in Newham (on the council waiting list)? Who are these people in terms of age, sex, socio-economic class etc? How has this problem arisen?
"Decanting" problem families from failed estates was a covert New Labour policy (an example is the Woodberry Down estate in Hackney). The theory was that socially mixed environments would benefit all the residents. Instead it seems to have created resentment on all sides.
Also depressing is the on-going gentrification of the East End. You can't move in the area for media-types, creative-types, and poseurs of all kinds thinking that an East End address gives them the cachet of being working-class horny-handed sons of soil and toil. Bethnal Green Town Hall is now a luxury hotel and gourmet restaurant, the old docks are lined with hideous yuppie flats and Shoreditch has become one vast open-air new-media boutique.
My grandparents and their seven children lived in a privately rented two-up two-down house in Tomlins Terrace. No-one helped them or gave them benefits (and they would have scorned any suggestion of charity). If any council official had tried to "decant" them they would have shoved him head-first down a manhole (traditional East End way of dealing with troublesome outsiders).
No comments:
Post a Comment