November 2022

The government has just repealed the Vagrancy Act of 1824, which made rough sleeping a crime. There are about a million empty homes in England alone with more than a quarter of them empty for more than six months. So there is absolutely no need for anyone to sleep rough.

In London, there are over 47.000 homes that have been empty for more than six months, enough to house the estimated 13,000 people sleeping rough there each year, and the 200,000 living in temporary accommodation.

In this supposedly relatively wealthy country, the possibility of providing decent homes for everyone is perfectly feasible, but capitalism’s profit motive prevents it from happening.

So Keir Starmer has resigned and Andy Burnham is likely to take over. Will it make any difference? It probably will to Labour’s standing with the electorate. For most people, perception of a leader’s personality seems, unfortunately, to be the key element in what passes for political thinking.

But will a new leader be able to do anything different to resolve the problems of the crisis-ridden system we live under? The answer to this has to be a resounding no. There will only be any difference to speak of when we decide collectively to scrap that system and replace it with an entirely different one that uses the abundant resources that already exist to satisfy all our needs the world over.

Workers in China are feeling jaded nowadays. After Tiananmen Square, Deng Xiaoping stopped pretending China was ‘communist’ and pulled the capitalist stops out. In 1980 home ownership was 20%. Today it’s 96%. So a success, right? But wait. 10% own over 70% of wealth (Economist – paywall).

The ‘entrepreneurial’ generation were ‘faced with open roads, you could go far even on a three-wheeled cart’. Now ‘the roads are jammed, and… the [wealthy heirs] can take helicopters’. Seeing nil prospects for success, today’s young people are ‘lying flat’ instead. ‘They think that effort is no longer rewarded… and that the keys to success are connections and being born rich.’

Welcome to our world. Capitalism is pretty dismal for workers, and utopia is only for the rich.

In the coming UK parliamentary by-election in Makerfield, apart from the two confessed jokers, candidates will all be putting out the same message:

‘Trust me, I have a plan that’s guaranteed to make life better for you’

Some will add a rider that there will be challenges ahead, there’ll be sweat and tears, but in the long run it’ll come right.

The plans will differ slightly, of course, but they will all have this in common – they’ll ignore the inescapable reality of the capitalist system, in which the profits of the minority will always take precedence over any other considerations, precedence over any of the needs or desires of working-class voters.