In today’s post we return to the issues underpinning our recent coverage of the MIPIM protests at Olympia. This will be short on words and is intended to remind our readers that the housing issues we face at Lancaster West, throughout Kensington & Chelsea, and across London and the rest of the UK, are not ours alone. We share our plight, and the many dangers and threats we face, with a great many others across the world.
The picture illustrating today’s blog shows a camp of homeless people at Nickelsville, Seattle, USA. This is typical of the many ramshackle encampments and tent cities that have sprung up across the USA as the last resort of many of the victims of the financial crash of recent years. Many of the inhabitants of these encampments had the great misfortune to lose their jobs, and then inevitably had their mortgages foreclosed. All of this in the “Land of the Free” where the poor lack even basic social and medical care. In the USA it seems that to be homeless and poor is to suffer a special form of stigma, accompanied by extreme econonic and social exclusion.
All animals, as Orwell famously said, are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Below we present a couple of Utube clips to illustrate the worldwide nature of the threat to social housing, or as the Thought Police now prefer to call it “affordable housing”, and the growing international resistance to the injustice and cruelty which is meted out to those of us who can’t afford to buy the luxury housing which is fast becoming the only remaining choice. The first clip is from Spain, and the second from the Irish Republic.
We must leave it to our readers to form their own opinions about what, if anything, can be done to curb the apparently limitless power of the banks and the class of oligarchs in whose interests the so-called democratic governments of the so-called free world perpetrate, with such impunity, such crimes against the powerless populations on whose behalf they are allegedly elected to govern.
Grenfell Action Group 