I wrote to my local Labour candidate about the shortage of affordable housing and I actually got a considered and detailed reply back! I am so voting Labour at the local elections next month! I promptly wrote back expanding on the strange situation I and most of my contemporaries find ourselves in, often surviving rather than living, through what is supposed to be the prime of our (earning potential) lives. In spite of our considerable efforts, to educate ourselves, gain and retain employment, a lot of us are finding it hard to afford the most basic of human requirements for a decent living. I explained how I thought the Welfare State was being obliterated with nothing to replace it and how this was leaving and creating a huge gap between the haves and have nots of our society, generating media-fuelled misconceptions among the classes whereby we are encouraged to detest the poorest members of our society and normalising hate-mongering and stereotyping of those who least deserve it and who are often the victims of those that most do. I have been the beneficiary of free education and healthcare for most of my life and explained that I thought future generations deserved the same and that I felt passionately about protecting and preserving what is left of it before most of us forget what was once possible, in the good old days. Losing ground on this means not only losing an entire way of life, but an entire ideology that dates back centuries. Despite the deterioration of the socialist or at least socially conscious state, many of us are still benefiting from its ruins. I concluded my reply stating that the ex-council flat that I am temporarily living in, even in this state of transition and transformation into what will be luxury apartments, with all its plumbing problems and acrobatic pests (the high-rise squirrel that regularly eats out of our rubbish bin) and chronic housing crisis on terms of living from month to month in the very real anticipation of eviction, is still preferable to the alternative: an overpriced, privately rented, shared accommodation managed by a dodgy estate agency definitely several zones outside of London from which I might be required to move three times in as many months as was the case last year. Something is not right with this picture. And on that note, I cannot overstate how important it is to have a room with a view, for all of us, especially those who have never had one before.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 22:28:23 +0000
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