by Joe Anderson
This is the eighth winter of Tory austerity and it must be the last.
The legacy of a decade’s worth of Tory public service cuts and rampant economic inequality is right there on our high streets for all to see.
Food banks, credit unions and pawn shops.
The poor have been abandoned in the clamour to clear up the mess left behind by the bankers and George Osborne’s ideological obsession with cuts.
His successor, Philip Hammond, didn’t even know the unemployment figures when he was asked on television on Sunday morning.
All of us dealing with the fallout of his disastrous austerity policies know only too well that we have 1.4 million people unemployed and as many again working in the ‘gig economy’ of insecure, part-time and short-term work.
Against such a backdrop, it’s no wonder that young people cannot get a foothold on the housing ladder.
Councils like mine are doing everything possible as a council to work with housing associations and developers to build homes that are so desperately needed, but we are doing so in the face of sheer indifference from ministers about the scale of the crisis.
