If your children take part in civil unrest, you will lose your home. And if you can’t find a new home, well, then you “should have thought about that before.”
The Occupied Territories?
Actually, London. It’s the latest response from the Conservative government to the 2011 UK riots that have shook the nation. Councils that oversee public housing (called “council estates”) in the UK will be able to evict proven rioters. Parents of minors who took part in the riots will be held responsible for their children’s actions. Just today, South London’s conservative Wandsworth council launched eviction proceedings against a mother whose son was charged in connection with the riots — and bully for them, according to the British PM, who recently stated that the riots were ultimately caused by “a lack of proper parenting,” a “moral collapse” of a “sick society.” (Not unlike how the “why are there teenage suicide bombers?” debate goes).
Reading The Guardian, we can see that it’s being done for similar reasons as it has been done is the Occupied Territories. The real purpose is not really to discourage future violence (suicide bombing in Israel versus looting in the UK) but to deny the reality that ignited that violence, and to deny that an “undesirable” population has a right to occupy what space it has managed to obtain and to make room for more a more “desirable” population:
Like the similar proposals for taking away housing benefit from miscreants, it is based on an inability to imagine what poverty is like, to think for a second what might happen to a family when it loses its income or its home. Given that the riots were largely concentrated in areas where extreme wealth and poverty rub up against each other . . . it shows the total mutual incomprehension that we have for our literal neighbours. On another level it is of dubious legality – for a council tenancy to be rescinded, the tenant has to have been convicted of an offence on or near the premises, not always the case in these highly mobile riots; and given that so many of the rioters were minors, their parents will be those being evicted. There’s a term for this – collective punishment. It is illegal under international law.
It fits very neatly, however, into a wider agenda on public housing, which is already an emergency remnant of a once-proud institution. The coalition sets time limits on council tenancies and freezes the already meagre levels of social housebuilding; Labour councils embark on massive demolition programmes of large estates and their replacement with developer-led mixed private and supposedly affordable estates. Both have much the same effect – removing the “undeserving” poor from highly profitable inner-city sites.
This is an intensification of that already existing agenda . . . . It will make our cities even more Balkanised and unequal, and it will make the young even more dispossessed and angry. Brutal as these proposals may be, they are hardly inconsistent. Like the long-predicted riots themselves, they have not come out of the blue.
Gross inequality just a few blocks apart. A government expanding housing options for a more select group of people. Collective punishment. Indeed, none of this is inconsistent. Or out of the blue. Just ask a Palestinian.
