OBSESSING ABOUT HOW MANY HOMES ARE BEING BUILT IS A SIMILAR MINDSET TO GDP-GAZING—IT FAILS TO UNDERSTAND THE TRUE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM ~ Rob Ray ~ The Freedom publishing group has, for the last few years, been refreshing some of the works of Colin Ward, one of the most influential British anarchist writers of the late 20th century. Ward wrote extensively for Freedom Press over many years, across many topics, focusing on the idea of “everyday” anarchism—the ways in which society already incorporates anarchist ideas, and how we as anarchists interact with it. Among his preoccupations, perhaps foremost was the debate around housing. An urban planner by trade, he applied anarchist theory to the sector through his analysis of squatting (Cotters and Squatters), architecture (Talking to Architects) and provision (Housing: an Anarchist Approach). A dedicated voice for decentralisation, open access and public interaction throughout the development process, he was an admirer of Walter Segal and the self build movement, who passionately advocated for a freeing of people to be participants in their homes, rather than passive consumers. It would be interesting to hear his perspective on the current mess.  Labour’s attempt to “fix” the housing crisis by “tearing down barriers and red tape” and commissioning a set of 12 new towns, if you squint really hard, looks almost a little bit like Ward’s injunction to let people build. He was a pioneering voice in the thinking behind the New Towns of the 1960s (particularly Milton Keynes) and a promoter of DIY building, critical of the ways in which council housing attempted a clunky one-size-fits-all solution to people’s living needs. We are, however, long out of the time in which such a viewpoint connected to the ways land, bricks and mortar were organised then and in many ways, his writing is at its most important as a record of how foreshortened the horizons of discussion have become. Rather than the State building homes, power has been handed wholesale to corporate developers, overseen by a bewildering and overbearing array of rules, compered by the power of the rich to see off infringements of their land while the rest of us see nearby green spaces gobbled up piecemeal. This has led, inevitably, to an orgy of profiteering and construction based on what the market will bear, rather than what the populace might need, or the environment might benefit from.  On the edges of every market town huge new estates have been slammed down using barely-modified schemes from the databases of Barrett, Persimmon, or Taylor Wimpey. These characterless builds are a failure in every conceivable sense. The build quality is notoriously poor, postage-stamp gardens and communal zones are nothing but a perfunctory nod to the endless research showing how vital green space is to mental health. New amenities are rarely if ever included, simply adding pressure to existing services, while distance from said services turns the new estate almost instantly into a source of car traffic and pollution.  Forced to jump through endless hoops (placed because otherwise these cartels would cheap out to the point of serious public danger), the production of a maximised profit results in homes that are totally unsuited in placement, design and price for where need actually lies, stranding people away from family and opportunity in alienated, isolated zones still mimicking (or at this point parodying) the ridiculous and unsustainable dream of 1950s suburban America. So when Starmer talks of taking on the NIMBYs and of unleashing new construction, or Sadiq Khan suggests allowing building on the London green belt, what we very much aren’t talking about is a solution to the housing crisis. And not just because in bald numbers, there isn’t one (the number of long-term empty homes actually rose in Britain last year to 265,000, compared to 354,000 homeless people, while the average density per house has remained around 2.36).  What we have is a capitalism crisis, in which many of these houses are being kept empty deliberately, or are in unloved areas where people haven’t built job-creating industries. Meanwhile the “solution” of Labour’s neoliberal ideologues is to hand the rampantly corrupt, self-dealing development industry a free hand to concrete over whatever they like in the pursuit of profit. Followed by nearly all that new stock being snapped up by buy to let firms and rented out at “market” (ie. unaffordable) rates.  Starmer and co. don’t have solutions to these issues because they barely even recognise them as a problem. For this (possibly last) generation of hands-off-the-wheel capitalist dogmatists the market will, in the face of all these decades of evidence, provide.  But what could we do differently? Ward offers many useful possibilities in his writing, including his work charting the 20th century’s two major waves of squatting, his emphasis on self-directed building and co-operative approaches to housing, and his refusal to retreat into simplistic “council houses solve it all” thinking.  Anarchists actually have a number of concrete examples of grassroots alternatives, in particular through the hugely underestimated Radical Routes, which has quietly helped so many people buy and control their own, truly social housing. Its small scale notwithstanding, the potential is there to continue expanding such projects, keeping the landlords’ hands out of people’s pockets and the houses themselves in much better nick, because the folk living there have a sense of ownership. Land and its use is at the core of everything, as our very first major philosopher Proudhon identified in What is Property? Much effort has been expended by the ruling classes to put it beyond our reach. But that doesn’t mean we can’t fight to regain that control, both piecemeal and through campaigning to push government out of this mindset where Corporates Know Best and into one that works with people, rather than over their heads. The post Labour’s housing solution is doomed to fail appeared first on Freedom News.

FROM DESTROYING THE ENVIRONMENT TO BETRAYING THE DISABLED, THE GOVERNMENT IS RUNNING THE SAME PLAY—WILL PEOPLE FALL FOR IT? ~ punkacademic ~ There’s the old adage that goes: the first time people show you who they are, believe them. Over a decade ago, Rachel Reeves, today the Chancellor of the Exchequer, then Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, proudly boasted that she’d be ‘tougher on benefits than the Tories’. Fast forward twelve years and the story remains the same, one which Labour’s Wes Streeting proudly celebrated as he goaded the Tory opposition in Parliament—we are doing things you wanted to, but never could, on welfare, he claimed. There’s no doubt that the garbage served up in the government’s Pathways to Work Green Paper is a Tory fantasy.  A sentiment of ‘punish those cripples’, all shrouded in some nineteenth century moralising bullshit about helping people help themselves. We anarchists do believe in a particular form of self-help, but ‘direct action gets the goods’ doesn’t seem to be what Whitehall PPE drones or their Labour confederates have in mind. The key planks of it are by now well-known, and have drawn an outcry, all the more impressive to centrist pundits because the outcry isn’t just coming from ‘the Left’ (which BBC house style now sees fit to capitalise as some sort of mortal enemy). Cuts to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) by ‘tightening’ eligibility criteria (namely raising the scoring threshold for award on the daily living component) and denying Universal Credit’s health element altogether to younger people (and reducing the value of it for new claimants) are central to the government’s real ambition—to save money. Having imposed ‘fiscal rules’ to buy off the media, Reeves and Liz Kendall now want to sacrifice the disabled for the sake of their own political aspirations. But that was also true in 2013, when Reeves made her statement that she’s now bringing into practice. The truth is, despite the brief Corbyn interregnum when Labour had a leader (but not a party apparatus) that genuinely did want something demonstrably different, this is who Labour are. It’s who they have been since at least the mid-1990s. And yet, in 2024, at least some voters chose to live in a land of make-believe and think otherwise. Why? It’s hard not to think at times that sections of the electorate actively want to be lied to. It saves having to do anything difficult, like stand up for people in your workplace against the employer trying to ‘manage out’ a disabled member of staff, for instance, or object to a new policy dehumanising trans people imposed by management to ‘avoid legal risk’. It’s to that constituency that Labour still appeals with a sop; we’ll put more money into Access to Work, they say, a scheme that doesn’t work as it stands and which some employers choose to ignore. Besides, it’s also being reported that they are actually cutting it. But the people Labour are appealing to here don’t use it, don’t know what it is (as with PIP) and can salve their consciences with it. Ditto for the environment. Labour’s going to tear up planning restrictions and the local planning approval system in its ‘dash for growth’, because apparently bats and newts are the new ‘enemies within’. At first glance, planning regulations might seem an odd hill for an anarchist to die on but they’re not. You don’t have to follow Murray Bookchin’s ideas about libertarian municipalism to their conclusion to get that the highly-imperfect planning system at least affords a veneer of engagement with both the needs of actual people and the environment, over the whispers (or shouts) of the CEOs from whom Starmer takes his lead. And besides, Murray Bookchin’s point was always about the evils of domination, and that social ecology properly implemented meant a rejection of dominance and hierarchy in all spaces. Needs need to be considered. Even those of newts, Keir. But there’s a sop for that too. Whilst eradicating environmental concerns in the particular, specific, cases of actual schemes being built and landscapes destroyed, they tell us there’ll be money for environmental remediation in general through a ‘nature levy’. Again, this should help those who are still Labour apologists sleep at night. The list goes on. Freeports and enterprise zones, but expanded workers’ rights too (that are being watered down as we speak). Keep that conscience water trickling on to eager lips. Tell me lies. For anarchists, it’s easy to see that electoral politics is bankrupt, that promises are cheap and lies are easy (though few of us were born anarchists and took more or less time to realise). One point to note, however, regarding the constituency for whom these lies are designed is that it’s shrinking all the time. People are increasingly aware that solutions to the problems we face aren’t available through parliamentary politics. The government is also aware of this growing awareness, hence the ongoing criminalisation of protest. And yet resistance is not futile, but as ever it has to be collective. As the editorial in the latest print edition of Freedom asks, how are we powerful today? As a queer cripple who regularly feels powerless, I feel power-in-action every time we are ungovernable. When I become we. When we refuse, and we create. When we tell our truths, and reject their lies. In an era where the bankruptcy of electoral politics is playing a role in the rise of the far right, it’s critical that we talk – one-to-one if necessary – with those who will listen. That we work together in our shared struggles. That we fight to share joy even in these bitter times. That might seem trite, but it isn’t. The privatisation of the self that digital social media encourages can be soul-destroying. Often, talking to people isn’t. Joy on our terms. Life on our terms. Now and always. That is part of how we come together, heal, and build a power free of hierarchy, domination, and lies. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Bart Hawkins Kreps (public domain) The post Labour’s sweet little lies appeared first on Freedom News.

Andy, Rhiannon, Sam and Simon discuss the UK Supreme Court’s ruling, what it means legally and what it actually means for trans people, as well as the solidarity demonstrations that took place over the weekend. We also look at the evictions in Greece and the Brazilian government’s continued repression of native peoples. Finally finishing off with Kier Starmer’s Labour Government’s ongoing identity crisis and what anarchists might do in the face of continued government cuts and austerity. The post Anarchist News Review: Trans rights in court, evictions in Greece and Labour’s latest mess appeared first on Freedom News.

OR COULD THIS ALL BE AN UNDERCOVER ANARCHIST JOKE TO SHOW THE SYSTEM’S BANKRUPTCY? ~ Tabitha Troughton ~ Cheerily kicking kittens, earnestly pulling wings off flies, making the difficult choice to slam the freezer shut on next door’s puppies: has the government gone mad? We demand to know, but answer comes there none, unless it’s in the rictus of  ‘Liz’ Kendall’s face, or the staring eyes of ‘Wes’ Streeting, lit up from inside by an unholy glare, like a demonic pumpkin’s. True, very little this government has done has sounded sane, in the casual sense of the word, which it is why it is so easy and pleasant to memory-hole its short and pungent history. Every so often people still mutter “Peter Mandelson is the ambassador to the US”, but this is largely residual trauma. Straight off the blocks with an astonishingly snappy immiseration of our poorest children and pensioners, the government have shot through selling off the country to Blackrock, rejected attempts to ameliorate Brexit, consigned nature and wildlife to the devil, trashed local democracy, eviscerated struggling farmers, and almost every week thrown up a new spectacle to throw up to. If ‘Bojo’ perfected the art of the dead cat, this administration has perfected the exhumation and exhibition of its month old, now glutinous, corpse. Streeting and Kendall were spearheading, almost literally, the government’s latest actionable plan for the disabled: £5 billions worth of welfare cuts.  So Downing Street provides political and practical cover for genocidal war criminals, while the silence of the ever-increasing dead mingles with cries of desperation and incredulity from a UK where millions have already been mugged to their knees, hundreds of thousands have died prematurely thanks to slightly less terrible Conservative policies, and the rest are realising it’s only a matter of time before they can’t escape from the place either. The British public have always been for a ceasefire, against arms to Israel, against being used by these murderous freaks: it’s no good pointing out that what their ‘leaders’ can condone abroad is hardly likely to result in decency at home. They know. Nevertheless, the latest punishment aimed directly at the disabled is serving to repulse even the few government hacks who remain loyal. The proposals may be economically illiterate, but they’re also a mix of pettiness, stupidity, mindless exhortation, and casual cruelty. “You don’t necessarily get enough points to live on if you need help washing below the waist” and “If you’re under 22 and disabled, you’re probably screwed” are impossible to defend, but that didn’t stop the government from trying, by calling them ‘moral’, in an interesting example of manufactured contronym,. Meanwhile, propaganda viciously pumps out the message that disabled people are scroungers, shirkers, fraudsters. Calls to suicide helplines soar. At the same time Kim Leadbeater is, at Starmer’s behest, rushing through the Assisted Suicide Bill, which now, after the majority of safeguarding amendments have been discarded, or voted down by a stacked committee, has almost unlimited potential to provide a new income stream for Serco. Despised by the Reform supporters they are trying both feebly and cynically to attract, with this latest hit the government has now alienated even more of their own, apart from those who don’t object so very much to kitten kicking. And still they continue to fawn on the rich and the corporations, refusing (even against the pleas of ‘patriotic millionaires’) to introduce a wealth tax, which even in a feeble Spanish iteration recently raised enough to stop children plunging further into poverty; while bailing out Thames Water and arms dealers with more of our billions, as their polling continues to plummet. Is this, one could wonder, some kind of undercover anarchist joke? Are the malignant cult who’ve taken over Labour really there to demonstrate the utter bankruptcy of the system? Or, more realistically, are they now deliberately trying to throw the next election—and if that’s to Reform, so be it? Consider that they triumphantly stole power with no ideas, no care for the people, no conscience, no scruples, no understanding, and no plan. Eight months later they’re loathed across an impressive spectrum, and they all look terrible, like ghastly cut-outs of their former selves reflected in a Hall of Mirrors.  As the public waits for the next pointless, violent attack on our better natures, it’s difficult to avoid concluding that these people are not simply mad, bad, incompetent, corrupt, or hapless, but are now deliberately shooting themselves in the foot. And why wouldn’t you? If Starmer loses in 2029, he will, as is traditional, go straight to the Lords, which he has strangely failed to abolish. Reeves will spend her time lecturing lucky audiences across the US. Streeting—well, either heading up Reform’s deportation squads, or recanting and becoming a librarian. Anything is possible. Even that community organising and cohesion will surf the rising tide of fury at these injustices. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: House of Commons on Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 The post Welfare cuts: Labour’s political suicide appeared first on Freedom News.

IT’S WAS INEVITABLE THAT STARMERITE LABOUR WOULD COME FOR WELFARE IN A VAIN ATTEMPT TO LOOK TOUGH ON THE POOR ~ We discuss the implications of that, talk about the factors which make the sort of international solidarity of the IWD marches so important, and on the (somewhat related) shameful behaviour of the State as it attempts to sideline testimony on spycops’ abuse. The post Anarchist News Review: Spycops victims, IWD and protest sentencing results appeared first on Freedom News.

URI GORDON HOSTS A FREEDOM DISCUSSION ON WHY IT IS LABOUR HAS ACCELERATED ITS RIGHTWARDS JOURNEY ON TOPICS AS WIDERANGING AS DEFENCE, MIGRATION AND OVERSIGHT IN THE WAKE OF CHAOTIC US CHANGE. With Rojava, Ukraine and Palestine all seeming to be targets for a new, blunter foreign policy from Trump, geopolitics seems darker than ever, and following Blade Runner’s recent thoughts on ecocide we have a think about the state of eco-fascism today. The post Anarchist News Review: Labour mirrors Trump and the US gets blunt over geopolitics appeared first on Freedom News.

Items discussed in this program: German antifascist arrests and deportations • Valencia square occupation for decent housing • Lisbon riots after police racist killing • Escalation in Chiapas • UK budget and Labour’s capitalist cult of growth • Tommy Robinson sentencing and the threat of fascist “victimhood” The post Freedom News Review 29.10.2024 appeared first on Freedom News.