I was vulnerable and wanted a home. What I got was a workhouse

Daniel Lavelle in The Guardian


There are many reasons why I became homeless, but no one was surprised it happened. I’m just another care leaver who lost control of their life. Almost every person I lived with in children’s homes and foster placements has since experienced mental health problems, stints in prison, and battles with drug and alcohol addiction. What would make me so special that I could avoid the inevitable breakdown?

Homeless in Britain: ‘I graduated with honours – and ended up on the streets’


I spent periods in a tent on a campsite near Saddleworth Moor, where I was woken up every night by my neighbour, a cantankerous Yorkshireman who would liberate the grievances he had been bottling up all day in a series of piercing screams.

The local housing advice service was no help. I was told that to be considered a priority need, I had to demonstrate that I was more vulnerable than my homeless counterparts. As one adviser put it: “I have to establish that you would be worse off than me, if I were homeless.” It may interest people that local councils are now running a misery contest for housing, a sort of X Factor for the destitute. Maybe my audition would have gone better if I’d had a few more missing teeth, and wet myself while singing Oom-Pah-Pah.

And then I befriended a resident of a residential charity for the homeless. He was far more helpful than the housing advisers, and managed to organise a place for me at the charity.

When I entered its walls, which were inside a converted factory, the place immediately struck me as having similarities with a Victorian workhouse. I was told by the “community leader” that I would receive basic subsistence: a room, food, clothing and a modest weekly allowance, in exchange for 40 hours’ labour.

The word “workhouse” conjures up images of Oliver Twist, and of bleak Victorian institutions populated by bedraggled paupers forced into backbreaking labour in exchange for meagre slops of porridge. At the charity home we were not expected to pick oakum or break boulders, but the work was hard and the returns were meagre.

Part of my job involved delivering furniture. I spent day after day lifting heavy items such as wardrobes and three-piece suites, sometimes up and down several flights of stairs. The work is described as voluntary by the charity, but in reality neither I nor any of my fellow inmates had anywhere else to go, and so had little choice but to do it.

The charity describes itself as a “working community”. But as far as I was concerned this was a workhouse in all but name: a civil prison, and a punishment for poverty. How do such charities manage to require their residents to work up to 40 hours a week without a wage, paying them only a small allowance for food and accommodation?

In 1999 the New Labour government exempted charities and other institutions from paying workers the national minimum wage if prior to entering a work scheme they were homeless or residing in a homeless hostel. There is perhaps no better demonstration that this country is yet to shake off punitive Victorian attitudes towards the “undeserving” poor.

These regulations not only strip homeless people of the right to a decent wage, but of all their other employment rights too. Because residents of such charities are not classed as employees, they cannot claim unfair dismissal or sick pay. Many people have lived and worked at the charity for up to 15 years, yet they can be sacked and evicted with no legal right to appeal.

I accept that residents, some of whom have suffered with long-term alcoholism and drug dependency, are far better off within the charity home’s walls than they would be on the streets or living alone. The environment is predominantly a positive one, where residents are well fed and safe, and are overseen by conscientious staff. The charity does give individuals the chance to participate in meaningful work and contribute to a community, sometimes for the first time in their lives. But none of this alters the fact that residents are forced by poverty to work for no pay.

The homelessness reduction bill, which last week passed its final obstacle in parliament, provides an opportunity to change our approach. It will force local authorities to provide assistance to people threatened with becoming homeless 56 days before they lose their home, ending the misery contest I and others have been subjected to over the years.

This bill represents a very small step in the right direction, but much more needs to be done to address the reasons people find themselves on the streets in the first place. And ending the exploitation of homeless people for their labour should be one of the first goals.

It is ironic that a Labour government created a backdoor for the revival of workhouses when it was Attlee’s government that abolished the workhouse system. The idea that the poor should be forced to work for board and basic subsistence was once universally condemned, but it has been revived without a murmur of public disapproval.

No one else in our society can be mandated to work full time for no pay, with no rights, on pain of being condemned to a life on the streets. So why is it OK to treat homeless people this way?

The BBC is under threat because its success challenges market ideology

Polly Toynbee in The Guardian

'The cuts are so severe that they risk sending the BBC into a downward spiral.' Illustration by Joe Magee


Groping for British emblems to bind together an ever more diverse and fissiparous society, politicians struggle to find cultural and emotional social glue. Make your own list from the Queen to Glastonbury, but overwhelmingly people put the NHS and the BBC right up there near the top, deep-dyed into British DNA.

But not this government. Whatever Conservatism once meant, it’s no longer about conserving precious things. The NHS staggers under the fragmenting Lansley act and the BBC is under more severe assault than ever before,threatened with licence fee cuts – and perilous charter renewal ahead. Is it payback time for Rupert Murdoch’s election support? According to BBC political editor Nick Robinson, Cameron on his battle-bus said of the BBC: “I’m going to close them down.” Joke or threat, it’s too close to what many in his party want to be laughed off. Many of the newer Tory MPs, Thatcher’s children, detest the very existence of the BBC – its phenomenal success an affront to market ideology.

Threats come thick and fast. John Whittingdale, newly promoted culture secretary, called the £145 licence fee “worse than the poll tax” in his former role as head of the culture select committee. Sajid Javid, the business secretary,complained this month that the licence fee was “a large amount for many families” and “needs looking at”. Other Tories shed crocodile tears for the poor who can’t afford the TV licence, calling for non-payment to be decriminalised – a compassion not shown to twice as many prosecuted for not paying council tax.

Decriminalisation would lose the BBC an estimated £200m a year – and that’s deliberate. The BBC may lose £600m if forced to carry the Department for Work and Pensions’ cost of exempting over-75s from the licence fee. And there’s a proposed five more static years to add to the current seven-year licence fee freeze.

The risk is that these become seen as “moderate” cuts, a “compromise” with the factions that want the BBC killed off. Yet they are so severe that they risk sending the BBC into a downward spiral, where fewer good programmes mean weakened public support, allowing yet more cuts. The loss of the Olympics to Eurosport from 2022, for an unaffordable £920m, is exactly what the BBC’s head of sport warned recently: as BBC income shrivels it can’t compete – and the licence fee looks less good value.

Barely a day goes by without the Mail, Telegraph and Rupert Murdoch’s papers attacking the BBC. This week’s Sunday Times had a full page of gleeful, barely veiled encouragement to the young not to pay their licence fee if they only watch catch-up TV on iPads or smartphones. It reported 150,000 more households in the past three months abandoned traditional TV and the licence fee, claiming not to watch it live. Everyone admits there’s a growing problem with attaching the licence fee to a TV set – but that’s easily fixed with a household fee or by bringing iPlayer under the licence.

Murdoch bullies ceaselessly for a subscription system, to shrink the BBC to the tiny size of America’s PBS. His paper’s poll shows apparent “waning” public support, with only 48% saying the licence fee is value for money, slightly more preferring funding by advertising. Left out was the inconvenient answer to one poll question which found only 9% want it funded by subscription. The BBC quotes 11 other polls showing that support for the licence fee at 42% is higher than for any other form of funding. What’s astonishing is that 96% of people use the BBC every week, spending an average of 18.5 hours watching, listening or online.

This week BBC Radio 4 launched its new season with a special celebration. With strong emphasis, its director general, Tony Hall, warned in a speech: “It’s something none of us should take for granted – there’s nothing else like it in the world.” He’s right, the station is the soundtrack to the nation, a never-ending conversation of remarkable intelligence and pleasure, reaching deep among Sun and Mirror readers, defying accusations that it’s a middle-class silo. By rights, this Reithian relic should have died out long ago: instead its listeners keep growing – up from 9 million a decade ago to 11 million now.

In the kitchen, in the car or out jogging with an iPod, I can’t imagine life without it. On a desert island, isn’t the entire back catalogue what you’d choose? The Now Show, More or Less, Neil Macgregor’s History of the World in a 100 Objects – only God and gardening have me reaching for the off button. Now here comes a whole day of poetry. Even the awfulness of the Archer family has me gripped.

Those 11 million Radio 4 adherents listen for an average of 12 hours a week – and each shining hour costs just 1.4p per listener. Nothing was ever such good value. The entire BBC has half the budget of Sky and a quarter of BT’s – which offer a fraction of the quantity or quality.

Choice busts out of every new provider – Amazon, Netflix and many more to come – yet the BBC, at £12 a month, dominates the British airwaves, while Sky charges an average £47.

The other line of attack will be on BBC governance – even though its every move is already over-policed by governors, trust and all the acronyms: Ofcom, NAO,PAC, DCLG, plus many parliamentary committees. From millions of BBC words, blunders and scandals are relatively few.

The BBC’s success infuriates its enemies because it defies Hayekian laws of gravity; the market ought to offer better value but it doesn’t. Attacks on BBC “bias” rain down: James Harding, head of BBC News, protested at the “hell on wheels” “ferocity” of attacks during the election – a little faux-naive, perhaps, from a former Murdoch editor who knows the agenda from the other side.

The BBC has a near impossible task in finding unbiased truths in an ideological world – and sometimes it splits the difference to stay on the safe side when forced to choose between sense and nonsense. The establishment leans heavily, the weight of an 85% Tory and europhobic press breathes hard to push it off its foothold. There is too often a blandifying of essential arguments when intimidation by bullies drains life out of reporting on the NHS, benefits, austerity or Europe.

Pinko bias is an illusion of the right – and voters gave Cameron his win. Before wielding axes, Tory MPs should think hard about constituents who spend 18.5 hours a week with the BBC – and of its place in national life as an unmatched cultural treasure.

'We would evict Queen from Buckingham Palace and allocate her council house,' say Greens

LAMIAT SABIN in The Independent

Saturday 24 January 2015

Queen Elizabeth II would be evicted from Buckingham Palace and moved into a council house in plans to abolish the monarchy and build more social housing, as suggested by the Greens leader.

The party would move the royal family out of the 775-room mega-mansion, complete with tennis court, lake and heli-pad amid 40 acres of land nestled in the leafy St James’ Park area of Westminster.

However there are no plans that Her Majesty and Prince Philip would be turfed out in the cold, like the estimated 2,500 people sleeping rough in England alone, as Green leader Natalie Bennett said she would not be short of potential places to live.

She said in an interview with The Times: “I can’t see that the Queen is ever going to be really poor, but I’m sure we can find a council house for her — we’re going to build lots more.”

This would mean, under the Greens’ suggestions, that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince George and the unborn baby would also be served an eviction notice from Kensington Palace and would have to shell out for private rent, buy their own house or join the chronically over-subscribed social housing register. 

Ms Bennett said that the party is planning to expand on the country’s dwindling social housing stock as “GDP is a lousy tool for progress” compared to people having a “better quality life”.

The housing crisis and lack of universally-affordable properties has been attributed to the Tory policy of allowing council and housing association tenants to buy their homes at heavily discounted prices. It has also been blamed on foreign investors buying up land for luxury developments while mortgages and private rents go through the roof.

Ms Bennett also criticised “parasitical” global companies who do not pay their fair share of tax by basing their businesses in tax-havens such as the Cayman Islands, even though they rely on public assets such as roads and the NHS to make a tidy profit.

The Greens, with branches in different regions of the UK, plan to “restructure society with the rich paying their way and multinationals paying taxes” with the top band of tax increasing to more than the current 50p rate.

Their rising popularity, as shown by rapidly increasing numbers of memberships, has catapulted Ms Bennett to being invited to take part in two televised political debates ahead of the general election on 7 May.

Prime Minister David Cameron had insisted that he would not take part unless Ms Bennett was included if Ukip’s Nigel Farage was invited, despite the Greens having announced a total of 43,829 memberships across the UK compared to the latter’s 41,966 members as of last week.

Ms Bennett said: “People are really hungry for something different. There is an element of us being fresh and new, but we are also talking about ideas, optimism and changing things.”

The Greens also plan to raise the minimum hourly wage to £10, with a guaranteed £71 a week universal basic income for all adults, with half of the £280 billion cost of the policy to come from tax, she indicated, with the rest made up of money already paid out in benefits like jobseekers’ allowance.

A tax of 1 or 2 per cent on people worth more than £3 million would also be implemented and the party suggested that the state could have powers to seize assets from the wealthy.

She said: “People say to me that the rich will dodge [the tax], but in some of the countries that already have it there is a simple rule that says if you haven’t declared something on your wealth tax, you don't own it.”

Cricket to become a private club

Daniel Brettig in Cricinfo

Melbourne is something of a Mecca for private members clubs. From the Melbourne Club and the Australian Club to the Kelvin Club and the Melbourne Cricket Club itself, the private meetings of well-heeled businessmen in wood-panelled dining rooms by open fires, all members by invitation only, are part of the fabric of the city. On Albert Street in East Melbourne the United Grand Lodge of Victoria stares forbiddingly down towards the MCG - who can forget that Sir Donald Bradman was himself a Freemason?

So it is entirely fitting that international cricket's redefinition as a private club, with the BCCI's banned board president N Srinivasan crowned as its omnipotent chairman, will take place in the MCC Members Dining Room this week. Since 1877 the MCG has hosted all manner of cricketing feats, but not since that first Test match between Australia and England has it been the scene of a more significant moment than this.

A re-shaping of the international game that began more or less in secret, during meetings between Srinivasan, the ECB chairman Giles Clarke and the Cricket Australia chairman Wally Edwards over the past two years, will reach fruition at the ICC's annual conference. While the broad resolutions for the new landscape have been known since January, their inking into law will be the point of completion, and some contemplation. There can be no going back from here.

After Thursday's centrepiece conference meeting the ICC's constitution will be changed drastically, setting up the boards of the "big three" nations as commercially-motivated navigators for cricket, and abandoning much of the expansionist vision favoured by ICC management in recent years. Instead the game's current balance of power will be definitively entrenched, as India, England and Australia take a larger slice of revenue from ICC events in addition to their existing windfalls from bilateral tours.

The game's most influential decision-making will no longer take place at the executive board table but at the more exclusive meetings of ExCo, the five-member working group that will have UN security council-styled permanent membership for the BCCI, ECB and CA. Edwards will chair ExCo for one year and his CA successor David Peever, the next. Clarke is already head of the ICC's finance committee, and Srinivasan's coronation will complete the triumvirate.

Srinivasan's ascension will take place despite the reservations of many. The Supreme Court of India has barred Srinivasan from his duties as BCCI president while the investigation into corrupt activities around the IPL and Chennai Super Kings is ongoing: members of the ICC's executive board have personally expressed to him their preference for Srinivasan to refrain from taking the international post until it has concluded. The conflict of interest inherent in Srinivasan's ownership of Super Kings alongside his cricket administration has also been mentioned, but always excused by the fact the BCCI allowed it.

Chief among those expressing caution has been Edwards, an architect of vast governance change at CA but compelled to work more pragmatically at the ICC. Earlier this month he reportedly called Srinivasan to discuss the implications of his appointment as chairman while still under investigation, and to seek reassurance that there would be no surprises later on if he did take up the post this week. The image of President Nixon's second inauguration playing on a newsroom television at the Washington Post while Woodward and Bernstein tap out the stories that will lead to his resignation spring to mind.

"We respect the right of each nation to nominate their representative on the ICC," Edwards said ahead of the conference. "With that comes great responsibility to ensure representatives comply with the standards required to govern the game. I have been assured by Mr Srinivasan, legally and by ICC management that there is nothing preventing the BCCI putting him forward as a candidate for chairman. I accept that and am confident that Mr Srinivasan can play an important role in strengthening world cricket."

Edwards is well aware of said standards as the primary author of a new ethics code for the ICC board and administration, a document broader in some senses but more restrictive in others. Accusations against members can now only be made by fellow signatories of the code, a change that underlines the shift to private membership values as much as anything else. The responsibilities of members to act in the best interests of the ICC itself have been stripped away, instead they will be freed up to do whatever their own countries would best prefer, formalising a mindset of self-interest that has long existed. Should Srinivasan be removed in the future, it will be under the terms of this code.

But Srinivasan is nothing if not determined, and in repeatedly asserting his innocence of any wrongdoing has persuaded the executive board, the BCCI and the Supreme Court that allegations of major impropriety should not stop him from taking the role. India's administrators seem largely content to allow Srinivasan to represent them overseas, while there appears to be little will to prevent his coronation in Melbourne - a repeat of the John Howard coup de'tat at the 2010 conference in Singapore looks unlikely.

As significant as the unveiling of the new chairman will be the long-delayed and much debated signing of the Members Participation Agreement for ICC events. This document, and the BCCI's refusal to sign it until the shape of the game was changed to reflect its view of the world and financial contribution to it, was the catalyst for cricket's current direction. There will be little fanfare around the boards putting pen to paper, but the gravity of the moment will not be lost on those in the room.

Elsewhere the game's Associate and Affiliate members will be forced to swallow numerous changes, including a raising of the bar in terms of membership criteria, and the loss of the revenue they will gain from ICC events relative to the old structure. The carrot of Test match participation will be dangled, but only over the course of an eight-year cycle. World Cup participation is also set to be restricted, as the tournament reverts to a 10-team model after next year's edition in Australia and New Zealand.

Other vestiges of earlier attempts by ICC management to broaden the game will be removed. A report into the possibility of cricket at the Olympics will be tabled, confirming why it will never happen so long as India and England have anything to do with the decision. The ACSU, cricket's independent watchdog for corruption, will soon be asked to report not to the ICC chief executive but to ExCo and the executive board. Whatever the current chairman Sir Ronnie Flanagan has said about preserving the unit's independence, the new model cannot be said to have done so.

Finally, after the conference concludes, members will sit down to the serious business of their first committee and board meetings under the new structure. Friday and Saturday will be taken up by the first acts of the new order, as Srinivasan, Edwards and Clarke chair the meetings of the private members club they have created. There will be no funny hats or ancient robes, but the tone, form and function of cricket's governance will reflect nothing so much as the clubs of Melbourne and beyond. The words of the Stonecutters' anthem immortalised by The Simpsons will seem a fitting accompaniment:

Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do, we do!

Who keeps Atlantis off the maps? Who keeps the Martians under wraps? We do, we do!