Chairman Mao famously said “all power comes out of the barrel of a gun”. A bit blunt, perhaps, but essentially true. Power, no matter how politely dressed up or how well disguised by justifications and rationalisations, is essentially about forcing others to do what you want. Power bullies, power pushes opposition aside. In modern societies, as the great Italian communist Antonio Gramsci argued, governments try hard to get their way through consent – by getting the majority to agree with their viewpoint. But in the end, consent is all too often backed up by coercion. The baton and the bullet usually trump the ballot box.
So for me it’s strange to read a recent article about housing policy in the part of London in which I work, by Aditya Chakrabortty, with the headline “How power operates in modern Britain: with absolute contempt” (3 July). Because that’s how power has always operated, ancient and modern, in Britain and everywhere else. Often, it has to be said, without even a semblance of the sort of democratic accountability and openness to public challenge we have in the UK today.
But of course Aditya Chakrabortty knows this. His words are in fact an attempt to challenge the ideological consensus on which current housing policy is based. He is holding the proponents of public-private partnerships in contempt, castigating them for being immoral, callous and wrong. He is engaging in the power struggle. Mobilising a political counter-attack on the bastions of the establishment. Words are, after all, power.
If he’s going to win he’ll have to persuade me and others of three things which fly against the weight of historical evidence. First, that putting things in public ownership is better than putting them in private ownership, particularly social goods like housing. For anybody familiar with the sprawling council estates of the postwar era this is far from obvious. Council-owned housing was badly built, badly maintained, and created zones of antisocial behaviour and community despair.
Second, that the people who live on the estates due for renewal are happy with their current conditions and don’t want change. Many of them are in fact desperate for better designed and managed estates, and don’t care if the landlord is public or private as long as the service is responsive and good and caring.
Third, that the voters in local councils who for years have repeatedly elected and re-elected the councillors – whom Chakrabortty criticises so resoundingly as “zombie Blairites” – are showing contempt by trying to come up with new solutions to old problems. Maybe the council’s leaders are wrong, but are they contemptuous of their own supporters? That’s quite a claim.
Perhaps Aditya Chakrabortty is unaware that he’s involved in a power struggle, and genuinely believes he stands above the political fray. But I doubt it. I suspect he knows very well what he’s doing and has for some reason decided not to use reasoned argument to make his point. Instead he is exercising the zeal that true believers always show when faced with those they consider heretics. “The power of Christ compels you!” the exorcists of old used to cry when faced with imagined devils.
Maybe now, for those like Aditya Chakrabortty, it is the power of Corbyn being invoked, I don’t know. But I’m afraid I find that just as scary. No reasoning. Just power.
Andy Forbes
Principal, College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London
• David Lammy and Catherine West (MPs move on sell-off, 4 July) fail to mention one fundamental reason for residents’ anger at the Haringey council proposal to establish a 50-50 company with Lendlease: the related issue of the process followed by the council and the behaviour of those making the decision.
Not until now have residents been able to access substantial council information about the proposal. And even those 1,500 pages of information were only released the required five days before the meeting deciding whether to approve the policy. As a PDF. The council claims the full details are confidential, and so the extent of the deal that affects the futures of thousands of people is a secret to a small band of councillors and officials. How can residents hold the council leadership to account, given this imbalance of information?
Even if there was a level playing field, there is unease about the behaviour of the councillors and officials advocating the deal. Haringey council has taken sponsorship funding to send senior councillors and regeneration officials to the annual Mipim gathering in Cannes. Councillors have separately taken extensive hospitality from developers and their PR consultants. While this is all declared, in my view the behaviour of these councillors and officials is below the standards of probity that should be expected of public office holders.
There is something rotten at the heart of Haringey council democracy, and the proposed deal with Lendlease is the latest sign of a sick politics. Residents are disadvantaged in participating in decisions about their homes and businesses, and are cynical about the access developers have bought with their sponsorship and hospitality.
Martin Ball
London
• Aditya Chakrabortty accurately identifies the contempt for tenants that underlies Haringey council’s decision to sell off a substantial chunk of its housing stock, together with schools and libraries, to a private property developer. The same lack of respect is also evident in its recent decision to close down Osborne Grove, the council’s sole remaining nursing home for the frail elderly.
Over the past five years, Haringey’s adult social care department has abandoned virtually all its residential care facilities and day centres for vulnerable adults. When they announced the most recent wave of closures in December 2015, council leaders promised to retain and develop Osborne Grove as a specialist reablement centre. In December a Care Quality Commission inspection found that standards at the home fell below minimum requirements in relation to management, nutrition and basic nursing care. A further review in March found that standards had fallen still further, prompting the council’s brisk decision to opt for closure.
It is clear that, far from delivering a flagship rehabilitation service, Haringey’s department of adult social care cannot deliver even routine nursing care at Osborne Grove. Having already closed services for dementia at the Grange, and for the frail elderly at the Haynes, Haringey will shortly have no provision whatsoever to offer its senior citizens.
Council tenants face the prospect of being forced to move out of their homes and being rehoused in some distant tower block. If they manage to stay in Haringey, now they should also fear growing old and infirm.
Mary Langan
Save Autism Services Haringey
• Aditya Chakrabortty’s excellent article reveals that the power driving housing is finance and profit, with London being the most extreme contemporary illustration. The Grenfell slaughter – for that is what it was – has helped shed a little light on to the social cleansing that underpins London’s “regeneration” practice. And the Labour party is as guilty in this practice as the Conservatives, as Haringey ably illustrates.
But this is hardly new. Remember that London, until the late 1950s, consisted largely of rented houses and flats. Property had long been owned by the landed gentry, and later by the emergent capitalist class.
Then in the “swinging 60s” came refinancing via ready access to mortgage finance and a form of tenure called leasehold, a feudal legal variant of renting. This brought in its wake the mass “winkling out” of the city’s poor, giving birth to “gentrification” and the various property bubbles that now dominate popular understandings of London, ably articulated through Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer’s Location, Location, Location.
Thus we have long witnessed, and some of us have been party to, the social cleansing of the poor who once resided in property located on valuable land. Friedrich Engels wrote about similar processes occurring in Manchester in the 1840s, although then the land inhabited by the poor was desired by railroads, not homeowners or buy-to-let landlords. Financiers were, however, core to both cleansings.
So none of this is new. Power operates in modern Britain as it did in the past, to the benefit of the rich and powerful, at the expense of the weak and powerless. The financial tools and particular focus may change, but the outcomes are all too familiar to those that choose to see.
Douglas Robertson
Honorary professor, University of Stirling
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