A review of a book by George Lambie.
Those who love Cuba live in fear that what seems an inevitable future change towards a more market-oriented economy will sweep away all that is good about the country – its excellent health system, the absence of extreme poverty, its schools, its largely crime-free streets and the day-to-day solidarity that Cubans show both to each other and to outsiders. Will all this be lost because Cuba succumbs to international capitalism?
‘Make America Great Again’: Trump’s slogan seems both to yearn for a time when the United States had more influence, and to call for its pre-eminence to be restored. In its own way, it asserts that the US is – or should be – different. In fact it was only Trump’s predecessor, Obama, who was the first president to talk regularly about American exceptionalism, yet to Trump it is something that is long lost and it is his job to recover it. Yet belief in the US’s exceptional nature has been a constant feature of the country’s history, whoever has been president, and continues right up to the present day.
Its starting point in the early nineteenth century was the ‘Monroe doctrine’, the assertion of the US’s pre-eminent power in the western hemisphere, replacing the old colonial powers such as Spain and Portugal. Its domestic counterpart was the US’s God-given ‘manifest destiny’, which justified settlement of the whole North American continent, regardless of the presence of the people to whom much of the land already belonged. Whereas the Monroe doctrine at first reflected a degree of respect for the then newly emerging Latin American nations, by the end of the century it only thinly disguised a new kind of imperialism which justified US intervention anywhere in the hemisphere.
An article to celebrate 30 years of the magazine Social Housing.
Social Housing magazine was a child of its time. Created in 1988 just as housing associations’ access to private finance was formalised, it was there both to report on what was happening and to provide guidance to everyone involved. It was a time of expansion. By 1990, Housing Corporation investment reached £1bn for the first time and associations built more than 20,000 new homes. Five years later their building peaked across the UK, with almost 39,000 units completed. In 1998, Chiltern District Council was a pioneer in a process which would lead to 1.3 million council dwellings transferring to associations in England using private finance, eventually accounting for half of associations’ stock in both England and Scotland.
Continue reading “UK social housing performance over the last 30 years”
A fraudulent election one year ago gave Juan Orlando Hernández a second term as president of Honduras. The protests that followed were violently repressed. By the year’s end, 126 demonstrations had been held, leaving 30 people dead, 232 injured and more than 1000 in jail. But on 22 December 2017 the US government congratulated Hernández on his success, referring with no apparent irony to ‘the close election result’ and ignoring a call by the Organisation of American States for a new ballot.
One of the worst stains on Hernández’s first term in office was the murder of Berta Cáceres in March 2016. Cáceres was a leading activist of the indigenous Lenca community and campaigner against dams and mining projects. After a ham-fisted murder investigation, seven men have been found guilty of killing her, but there’s little prospect of those who commissioned the crime being punished.
Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA
Crisis and the National Housing Federation have just published a new report showing that 100,000 social homes are needed across Great Britain. With all but 10,000 of those needed in England, the biggest challenge will be to the Westminster government and will require a step-change in how it delivers housing. The high numbers reflect the backlog of housing need that has built up for those on lower incomes or are homeless, who feature strongly in the Heriot Watt analysis. The study shows that without a substantial increase in provision of social rented housing, the backlog will get progressively worse.
Continue reading “How do we build 100,000 social rented homes each year?”
Which housing tenure receives most subsidy? Inside Housing readers know that the question isn’t a simple one and that the obvious answer – social housing – isn’t necessarily correct. The quest for a full analysis has just been boosted by housing finance experts Peter Williams and Steve Wilcox, whose report Dreams and Reality looks not just at support for housing investment but at all the other ways – benefits, taxation, tax relief and regulation – by which government interacts with the different sectors.
Continue reading “The mess of government intervention in housing”
Irish housing associations (‘approved housing bodies’) have had their finances reclassified so that they are part of local government, causing consternation in the sector at the threat of greater state control. This article is a response to this decision from a UK perspective, where housing associations recently faced a similar problem that has since been resolved.
Continue reading “‘Reclassification’ is the spectre in Irish housing”
Carl David Goette-Luciak at a road barricade in Nicaragua
by Nan McCurdy
There has been a great deal of inaccurate and biased reporting about Nicaragua written in support of regime change and presenting a false narrative of what occurred in the Nicaraguan uprising. The article below is about a self-trained reporter, Carl David Goette-Luciak, who was the source of consistently biased reporting which had an agenda — provide support for the violent US-funded coup. He regularly wrote for The Guardian, an outlet that continues to be biased in its coverage.
Continue reading “Why Didn’t Carl David Goette-Luciak Report on the Torture He Witnessed?”
Theresa May’s announcement that borrowing caps on council housing investment will be removed was a big step in the right direction, and the issuing of draft regulations appears to confirm that the caps will be lifted at the end of this month. With reports of a Treasury fight-back, the concern was that restrictions could have been imposed, as happened when the Autumn Budget announced the now defunct earlier scheme to allow £1 billion of extra borrowing headroom for selected authorities. James Brokenshire’s latest letter to councils aims to set minds at rest.
It was reported that the Treasury believed that councils could soon borrow as much as £1 billion extra each year. The worry is that talk of this level of investment could set councils up to fail. It implies they are able to gear up quickly to produce more than 8,000 new homes annually, but this will take time given that they currently build only a quarter of this number (although there may be some undercounting). And even with the removal of the caps, there are several other obstacles to be overcome.
Continue reading “Lifting the HRA borrowing cap should come with accounting changes”
Despite all the fuss about migration levels, the numbers applying for asylum in the UK are at historically low levels. They ran at over 100,000 annually in the early noughties, then fell to around 30,000 per year and are back near that level again after another short peak linked to the migrant crisis in the rest of Europe. Most people who apply for asylum in the UK are turned down, but the proportion ultimately successful is rising, from consistently under a third a decade ago to over 40% now. The low numbers could have eased pressure on asylum accommodation, where applicants can live while awaiting decisions on their cases, but the Home Office is its own worst enemy in this respect: it has a backlog of nearly 15,000 unresolved cases over six months old (and some very much older than that).
Asylum seekers don’t have to accept accommodation, but those who would otherwise be destitute can apply for it. Before 2000 there were few if any asylum seekers living in Scotland – then Glasgow was chosen as one of the accommodation ‘dispersal areas’ after a change in government policy towards moving asylum seekers away from the south-east of England. At the time, the idea was to use surplus council flats (the same happened in other places, mainly in the Midlands and north of England). The Home Office set up contracts with local authorities to administer ‘dispersal’ and provide housing. From the start, this was on a no-rent basis – the person housed would get a flat, some furniture and white goods, and a very basic subsistence allowance (now £37.75 per week). Councils like Glasgow – still the only one in Scotland – could use surplus funds from the contract to fund community services. Glasgow set up a series of neighbourhood networks to support communities where newcomers were being housed.
Continue reading “Asylum seekers in Scotland – what’s the background to the SERCO contract issues?”
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on