Defend homeless services in Leicester!

Leicester City Council are currently “consulting” on how to cut a third of the budget of homelessness services for the city over the next two years. This will involve the closure of homeless shelters, like the Dawn Centre (one proposal is for it to be turned into an ‘assessment centre’, whatever that means), Upper Tichbourne St and Lower Hastings St Hostels. Please support the online petition against these cuts:

http://www.causes.com/actions/1726233

Leicester Socialist Party are currently supporting the campaign to keep much-needed homeless shelters open. We hold stalls every Saturday near the clocktower or the market in the town centre, from 12-2pm. We are part of Leicestershire Against The Cuts, which seeks to unite trade unionists and community campaigners against all cuts.

Some reasons why we need our homeless shelters:

Leicester has the highest rate of rough sleepers outside of the capital, London, per head of population in 2012.

The Con-Dems are capping benefits, which will have a knock-on effect on housing benefit, forcing people into expensive and largely poor quality private accommodation or onto the street.

Attacks to benefits and the “bedroom tax” will hit the poorly-paid, unemployed and council tenants.

There is a projected rise in demand for homelessness services.

The economy continues to stagnate and Leicester has seen firms such as Dunelm Mills, Comet, Jessops, HMV and RF Brookes close. With high unemployment, some people will be unable to afford mortgages and be forced into temporary accommodation or onto the street.

But there is an alternative – the council could build council housing, providing much-needed construction work. There is also no need to make these cuts. The Labour council is making swingeing cuts to services without a whimper of protest – yet it has reserves, which it could use to buy time in order to build a campaign, along with other Labour councils across the country, to force the government to back down. Instead, the council is disgracefully earmarking reserves to make people redundant.

There is a powerful argument for building a new workers’ party to represent ordinary people. Labour are no different, in reality to the Tories or the Lib Dems – all the main parties are making the most vulnerable in society pay for the crisis which was caused by their capitalist policies of boom and bust. In this case homeless people are affected, but cuts are being made to our NHS, our schools, benefits, and disability allowance.

Yet MPs have the gall to award themselves a 32% pay rise! We are part of TUSC (the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition). The Socialist Party has always held the principled position of having elected representatives on the same wages as working-class people.

Join us and help us build a radical, socialist alternative to cuts, privatisation and austerity.