Tulse Hill ward is a safe Labour seat and part of the parliamentary constituency of Streatham held by Labour MP and front bench spokesperson Chuka Umunna.
The people of Tulse Hill should be rich. Some 5,000 or so of you work between 31 and 48 hours per week. That is, Tulse Hill Ward alone is producing a minimum of 155,000 hours of work a week. There’s a further thousand working more than 49 hours. This is a highly educated workforce: over 800 work in education, 700 in Information and communication and nearly a thousand in professional and scientific activities. So, this is an area that would be called by some “middle class”, with professional office based work predominating. Yet, in such an area, only 600 households own their home outright, and thirteen hundred homes are owner occupied with mortgages. Over two thousand households are in social accommodation, and fifteen hundred rent privately. 2,400 households have one dimension of deprivation (unemployment, overcrowding, lack of education or disability), twelve hundred have two and 490 have three of those four states.
The picture is, that the majority of people in Tulse Hill have to work in order to keep their home, or to keep deprivation away. They may work with their minds or skills, but they are working class non-the-less, selling their ability to work in order to access the means of living. So, they don’t get to use those 155,000 hours of weekly work to make their area better, to look after those unable to work, or anything of the sort. Those 155,000 hours are fed into a system that generates profits for the tiny minority who own the means of living and who demand our labour to get to it.
One statistic that particularly stood out was the number of people stating that they had no religion: at 4298 out of the ward's population of 15771, this is 27.3%, which is higher than both the London average (20.7%) and even the national average (24.7%). See here. The Socialist Party position on religion may still be a minority one but the trend is in our direction.
A TUSC leaflet which made the dubious claim that:
“If even a handful of councils defied the Con-Dems and refused to implement the cuts the government could be made to back down and fund social services properly."
Could they really? Could the government be made to "fund social services properly"? It's not as if the government is imposing cuts because they're bastards (even if some of them could well be) who want to deprive pensioners of their outings or kids of their playgrounds or drive people out of their homes because they've got a spare bedroom. It's because they are in government when capitalism is in one of its slump periods and in slumps government spending has to be cut to help restore profits.
Profits before people that's how capitalism works and can only work. There is no alternative within capitalism and it's misleading and even dishonest to suggest that there could be. The only way out is socialism, the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, with production directly for use not profit and the application of the principle "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".
UKIP is an opportunist, populist party but don't seem to have yet learnt (as all vote-catching parties must if they are going to get anywhere) how to adapt what they say to those whose votes they are chasing. Asking people to help them "End mass immigration" wouldn't seem to find much of an echo in this part of the world. Also UKIP suffered a blow when their flagship policy of withdrawing from the EU but still having access to the Single European Market as a non-member like Norway was rejected by the employers organisation, the CBI. They want Britain to stay in, so UKIP are on their own on this one as far as the major British capitalist corporations are concerned.
Think locally, act globally
Although we make no apology for raising the issue of world socialism in a local election (as it's the workings of world capitalism that are ultimately responsible for the cuts to local services) we don't neglect local issues.
Feeding the Five Thousand
Capitalism is in crisis and they are making us pay for it. 'Austerity' means increased hardship, attacks on the living conditions and wages of the working class, and 'reforms' to Social Security. Here in Lambeth job losses, cuts in housing benefit, and low pay are forcing families to seek free, charity handouts of food from the Food Bank at St Paul's Church in Ferndale Road. The Church has said that it is feeding 5,000 people.
David Cameron likes Food Banks. His Cabinet Minister for Food Caroline Spelman thinks they are an example of good citizenship in Cameron's 'Big Society'. In reality it is a case of the capitalist state saving money by ridding itself of its role of providing basic support for destitute working class families – of, basically, feeding its hungry citizens – and forcing them to rely instead on religious charities.
Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat politicians all accept capitalism and apply its economic law of profit before people. If Labour was in government they would be following the same economic course. In fact Labour is in power in Lambeth and is imposing cuts to benefits and services.
'I was hungry and you fed me,' says the Food Bank’s mission statement, 'thirsty and you gave me a drink.' Socialism, as a society of common ownership and democratic control, will provide food and drink, and much more, to everyone as of right in accordance with the principle 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs'. Nobody should have to rely on charity and nobody would.
Bedroom Tax
As part of making the working class pay for the capitalist crisis, the Coalition government are changing the rules on Housing Benefit from April. The capitalist state will charge you for the bedrooms you have in your council or housing association house. It will be a 'bedroom tax'. The government says it will affect over half a million households.
The capitalist state will be taxing your living space if your children have flown the nest for college or somewhere else to live. If you have one spare room you will face a 14 percent cut in housing benefit, two or more spare rooms and the capitalist state will cut your housing benefit by a quarter ! The capitalist state is making rules on how many bedrooms you can have and who sleeps where. Your kids will have to share a bedroom if they are under 16 and the same gender, and if they are under 10 they have to share whatever gender.
Under capitalism people only get the housing they can afford. The lower your income, the worse your housing. In a socialist society of common ownership, housing will be about what people need to live and not how much rent they have to pay.
Safety Second
Tory Mayor Boris Johnson wants to save £45 million from the Fire Brigade budget. So he plans to close 12 Fire Stations in London. This will affect people in Lambeth as among those he wants to close are the one at the Clapham Old Town and the one in the next-door borough on Southwark Bridge Road. These closures will put in danger the safety of millions of Londoners because people will have to wait longer for a fire engine. Economic considerations not people's safety are the priority in capitalism.
No more adventures
In August last year Lambeth Labour Council 'temporarily' closed four Children's Adventure Playgrounds in Lambeth.
The adventure playgrounds at Bolton Crescent in Camberwell, Lollard Street in Kennington, Loughborough Park on Moorland Road just off Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, and Wilmington Road, off Landor Road near Clapham North Tube Station all remain closed.
These Adventure Playgrounds were free to access for children ages 5 to 16 but are easy targets for the 'economic austerity cuts' required by capitalism and imposed by the Coalition government and Lambeth Labour Council. Former Lambeth Labour leader Steve Reed promised at a Council meeting in April 2011 that no adventure playgrounds would close. He has now moved up the greasy pole into the House of Commons where he can better serve capitalism when it’s Labour’s turn again to run capitalism, in the only way to can be - as a profit-making system against the interests of the majority class of wage and salary workers.
In a socialist society children's lives would be one great adventure playground, education a creative journey, and the free development of each child the condition for the free development of all children.
Down on the farm
Of course, in Tulse Hill we also have the agricultural vote to think of. As can be seen at the Tulse Hill Polytunnel. This is a good example of the local growing out of the global: the polythene for the tunnel has to be refined from hydrocarbons using vast industrial processes, but it does allow residents of Tulse Hill to grow food efficiently and locally. There's no reason why thousands of like projects couldn't happen with all the energy and enthusiasm of this one (especially if instead of having to try and be a commercial 'Social Enterprise' the volunteers could just provide food to other volunteers in restaurants or in their homes). The point is the technology is there not just to feed every human on the planet, but to make effective use of even the most unlikely scraps of land. The labour is there, else people wouldn't be volunteering.
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