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      Right to buy is an abuse of public funds for political ends | Letters

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 18:35

    The idea to sell off council houses was Tory bribery, writes Michael Meadowcroft , while Toby Wood laments the decline in state control over housing, and Dr Orest Mulka says Labour should offer private tenants the right to buy

    Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy policy is even more sinister than the rightly critical article by Phineas Harper sets out ( Councils now sell off more houses than they build. Thatcher’s legacy, right to buy, is a failure, 26 March ). Putting it bluntly, it was a brilliant way for the Conservatives to bribe a large sector of mainly Labour voters to switch.

    The significant discounts offered made buying one’s council house a huge bargain. What is more, in terms of housing provision, it did not benefit the sitting tenants as much as giving a substantial gift to their children, who often provided the initial capital knowing that they would inherit the house and make a big gain on its sale or on its subsequent letting for profit.

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      Our lack of affordable, safe housing is a national crisis. Here are three things Labour can do to fix it | Peter Apps

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 12:00

    If it gets to No 10, the party should fund a social housing boom, tackle homelessness – and usher in a post-Grenfell era of safety

    • Our writers and experts name the pledges Labour must include in its manifesto

    The failures in housing policy over several generations are now all too obvious: rising homelessness, families and key workers priced out of cities and a generation unable to move out of their parents’ homes. The next government needs to take radical action to change this picture, rather than make small tweaks to a failed system. These are some of the steps I would take to get there.

    Peter Apps is the author of Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen

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      Councils now sell off more houses than they build. Thatcher’s legacy, right to buy, is a failure

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 07:00

    The right still reveres her flagship policy, but the repercussions are more homelessness, spiralling rents and bankrupt councils

    Of all the policies imposed on Britain by Conservative governments, few have reshaped the country’s fortunes as enduringly as right to buy . For a lucky few, the policy has meant colossal windfalls and the chance to snap up some of the best properties in the country on the cheap. For the rest, right to buy has meant rising homelessness, spiralling rents and local authorities facing bankruptcy as the social housing stock dwindles, year by year.

    In a mere four decades, Margaret Thatcher’s flagship initiative, forcing councils to sell off public housing at huge discounts, has seen two-thirds of British council homes privatised. City halls across the country are now on the brink of insolvency , in large part due to the enormous cost of having to provide temporary accommodation without enough council-owned homes left to go round.

    Phineas Harper is a writer and curator

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      At four, I was kidnapped and sex-trafficked for years. Now I fight for the powerless – and win every case

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 3 days ago - 05:00

    After he was snatched, Antonio Salazar-Hobson didn’t see his family for 24 years. His desire to return to his mother, and his discovery of a higher purpose, helped him navigate a path through hell

    Although it happened more than 60 years ago, Antonio Salazar-Hobson remembers every detail of his kidnapping. He says that if he closes his eyes, he is instantly taken back to that hot Sunday afternoon in 1960 when he was a four-year-old boy standing with his brothers and sisters in the red dust of his back yard on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona.

    Nearby, at the bottom of a short passageway connecting the back yard to the road out of town, a car is idling.

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      The Guardian view on rising poverty levels: political attacks on the poor have produced penury | Editorial

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 4 days ago - 17:30 · 1 minute

    Politicians should say how welfare will support claimants with daily living costs rather than stigmatising recipients

    Poverty is a political choice – one that Conservative governments have much to answer for. Since 2010, Tory administrations have chosen to have a significant percentage of our population impoverished, including, especially, our country’s children. The Child Poverty Action Group’s analysis of official data last week showed that a third of those between infancy and adulthood – 4.3 million children – were in relative poverty, up from 3.6 million in 2010-11. Even by the government’s preferred measure, absolute poverty, the share of children in penury rose in 2022-23 by its highest rate for 30 years .

    No principle of economics says such a degree of immiseration should prevail in one of the richest countries in the world. The reason for this extraordinary rise in poverty ? The most obvious explanation is the low level of benefits and the restrictions on accessing support. Benefit levels have fallen by 8.8% in real terms since 2012. Cutting back on welfare produces more poverty, not less. There is money. But not specifically for the poor. Ministers tout tax cuts worth £9 a week extra for the average worker, while about 3.7m people struggled to feed themselves last year.

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      Thousands of London long-term rental properties at risk from holiday lets plan

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 4 days ago - 10:00

    Government rule changes on Airbnb-style rentals could lead to loss of more than 10,000 long-term rentable properties

    A loophole in government proposals to clamp down on Airbnb-style holiday lets could lead to the loss of thousands of long-term rental properties for families in London.

    The government scrapped tax breaks for holiday homes in the budget and last month unveiled a registration scheme to help councils control the booming holiday let market, which Michael Gove, the levelling-up secretary, claims is denying local people the opportunity to buy or rent a home.

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      Radical pay-what-you-can restaurant faces eviction from mill it refurbished

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 6 days ago - 07:00

    The Long Table says it took thousands of hours of work to turn derelict site into a community space, but landlord has now sold it

    A Gloucestershire restaurant with a radical business model, in that it feeds all comers regardless of their ability to pay, is losing its premises after the owner sold the property.

    The community around The Long Table, featured in the Guardian earlier this month , has been left reeling after it was ordered to move out of the mill it occupies in Stroud – even as it sought to engage with the landlord to buy the building.

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      The Beautiful Game review – Bill Nighy leads line in Homeless World Cup heartwarmer

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 7 days ago - 08:00 · 1 minute

    Nighy is as charming as ever as the manager building a team, but he seems basically miscast and much else misfires in an underdog sports drama

    The inspirational true story of the Homeless World Cup – an international football tournament for homeless people founded in 2001 – would probably be better told as a documentary. Instead, it’s been turned into this well-meaning (and often well-acted) but sugary underdog sports drama where everyone’s the underdog, from screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce and director Thea Sharrock, with composite fictional characters and storylines gleaned from interviews and research.

    It has an eccentric, not to say surreal bit of casting: Bill Nighy plays the football manager with his own standard-issue backstory of emotional pain to go with all the players’ hidden personal dramas. And he performs it with the same elegant dark suit and diffident, quizzical mannerisms that he might use to portray a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, only this time he’s in the dugout shouting. Nighy is always such a likable performer that he gets away with it, though it would make more sense if his character actually was a fellow of All Souls College who’d been pressed into service as a football manager as some kind of community service for drinking too much port and punching someone at high table.

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      ‘Our bills have tripled’: UK’s first Turkish mosque fights to survive in London

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 7 days ago - 06:00

    Young people are slowly stopping attending Dalston mosque that could be forced to accept developers’ offers, says owner

    Nestled among the kebab shops, Caribbean takeaways and flashy new-build flats in Dalston, north-east London, sits the UK’s first Turkish mosque. Like many things built by and for the deep-rooted communities in this heavily gentrified part of London, it is fighting for survival.

    “Our bills have tripled, costs to maintain the building have soared and we are not collecting enough money,” said Erkin Güney, 59, who runs and owns Masjid Ramadan, also known as the Shacklewell Lane mosque. He said the mosque could be forced to close its doors by next Ramadan.

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