“Our message to countries continues to be: you must take a comprehensive approach. Not testing alone. Not contact tracing alone.…
2020 Budget: where’s the grant for council house building?
The 2020 budget indicates that the new Affordable Homes Programme starting in 2021 would have £12.2 billion funding. This is…
Only 5% of new homes funded by Homes England grant are ‘social rent’
“Affordable rent is a new funding model, which involves three main changes: housing providers can charge higher rents for affordable…
Councils need some serious funding if they are to return to large-scale housebuilding
This is an article for Inside Housing magazine A week after the General Election Swindon Council leader David Renard wrote…
A lesson in the ruthlessness of the British ruling class
Whilst there will be no shortage of efforts to apportion blame for the electoral defeat of Labour an indisputable factor…
Labour should reject the McCarthyite 10 Pledges – defend freedom of speech on Israeli
In a video of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, an ecstatic Joe Glassman, drunk on his ‘victory’ in the General Election,…
War and democracy in the Middle East
Martin Luther King famously said that “The Vietnamese must look upon us strange liberators.” So must the Iranians in the…
Rent increase: tenants should not pay the cost of government underfunding of council housing
Swindon council will argue that their proposed above inflation 2.7% rent increase for council tenants in 2020-21 is acceptable because…
2019 General Election – what happened?
Hasty conclusions on the scale of Labour’s general election defeat and preordained ‘solutions’ are worthless. Sweeping generalisations are being substituted…
Swindon as dormitory town?
According to government statistics not a single ‘social rent’ home was added to Swindon’s housing stock over the last five…
Martin Wicks 