can lead it. They also know that since 1990 successive governments have siphoned more than €13 billion of tenants' rents, dawing it back from councils Housing Revenue Accounts This is enough to pay for two-thirds of the total national backlog of repairs and improvements.
Housing is a basic human need. One that a government elected by working class people seems to have no intention of meeting. Homelessness levels are higher now than in 1997 when New Labour were elected.
Thousands of tenants, trade unionists and socialists are going to Westminster on 29 January to lobby their MPs. They are saying that they want an end to privatisation and investment in council housing with no strings attached. Join them!
Rally 1-3pm Central Hall, Westminster, January 29.
For more info contact Defend Council Housing on 020 7987 9989 or e-mail:
Opens: of thousands of university stuexcess of E21,000 when they graduate, as a result of yet another shoddy New Labour compromise with the interests of the rich.
This latest deal, hatched up by Blairite hard-man, Education Secretary Charles Clarke, is effectivety the introduction of "top-up fees" under another name
To make matters worse, cheap student loans will also be scrapped, meaning that all of the money borrowed will have to be repaid with interest.
Although the payments would not begin until the graduate reached a "higher" income level (the figure of £15,000 has been mentioned they would continue as a long-term liability: at the £60 per month repayment suggested by Clarke students could be repaying their fees over 35 years! W hile this may seem like a neat
way of stretching out the repayments and keeping them comparatively low, it also means that as a means of raising funds for cash-strapped Universities the scheme is a complete waste of time.
By contrast an increase in income tax for all those on higher rates of pay (say in excess of £35,00 a year) would generate instant additional cash for the Treasury.
In a desperate effort to window dress the new higher fees, Clarke has coupled his ties to increase their intake of students from poorer families as a precondition for permission to charge up to an extra €3,000 a year for their most prestigious courses.
In doing so Clarke has again set the cat amongst the pigeons among New Labour's chosen "middle England" constituency, who will see this as a two-pronged attack on them, while working class students are likely to remain reluctant to saddle themselves with the debts involved in studying for a degree with no guarantee of a better job at the end of it.
The stratification of university prestige (with top-up fees) and bog standard (without) is likely to compound the rampant problems of inequality in higher education.
Whether New Labour's dozy platoons of back-bench MPs are ready to endorse this half-baked parody of proletarian class politics remains to be seen, though at least one has warned that "If you end up with a system where the poor kids go to the ex-polytechnics and the rich kids go to Cambridge it will be a disaster".
The fight for the restoration of free higher education, the scrapping of fees, the restoration of the grant and the introduc tion of progressive taxation to pay for it did. n't seem that radical a few years ago
But with Tony Blair's team at the helm, it is a fight that calls for the Socialist Alliance.