16.05.1996

Homeless scandal runs deep

Dame Shirley may have been found out, but what of the crime of homelessness itself?

It is difficult to shock the population today. The endless list of scandal sagas has been unremitting, as the defunct Tories slide into exhaustion. After 17 years of rule they are trying desperately to grab the reins of an economic system spiralling into disaster.

Nevertheless, Dame Shirley Porter and her Westminster council chums’ ‘homes for votes’ gerrymandering is up there in the top twenty stomach-churning exposés.

Luckily for the Dame she has a fortune estimated at £60 million to fall back on. She plans to engage two firms of accountants and a new barrister to fight the ruling of John Magill’s inquiry.

The scandal was first uncovered in 1988. Since 1991 she has been languishing in a £1.3 million apartment in Tel Aviv overlooking the Mediterranean. Rough justice ... for some.

For those gaily tossed aside, not just by the Dame, but by the whole corrupt capitalist system, life is not so rosy. Hundreds of council properties were boarded up and then sold. The homeless in Westminster were left in bed and breakfast, and later many were moved to asbestos-ridden flats.

Council properties were sold while Westminster appealed to 60 other local authorities to ‘take’ its homeless. Many who were wooed into buying the properties are now stuck with huge repair bills and unable to sell. They are trapped in the constant terror of unemployment and wage cuts that hangs over the vast mass of society.

Whilst the Westminster mafia have exposed themselves as the dregs of the capitalist scavengers, their Tory chums are closing ranks and refusing to condemn them until the case is ‘proven’.

Our anger must be directed not just against this one individual, but the whole system it exposes. We live in a society where individual power and profit ride roughshod over any concern for the quality of life of the mass of the population. Where unemployment and homelessness are seen as natural consequences of the only ‘natural’ market economy. Though Dame Shirley may turn out to have gone a wee bit too far for even some of her Tory chums to stomach, the frightening consequences of this system have been exposed.

The fact that there is still some doubt as to the ‘legitimacy’ of her actions speaks volumes about the morality of capitalism.

Helen Ellis