Profits NEXT to Housing

According the Leicester Mercury, Tory peer Simon Wolfson, who is the chief executive of the Enderby-based retail giant Next, is happy for two reasons. The first owes to the fact that Eleanor, his new wife (of 2012) — who happens to be George Osborne’s economic adviser — has recently given birth to the couple’s first heir apparent. The second reason for his broad smile is because Next “has just announced record profits for the fifth consecutive year”; with pre-tax profits for the 12 months to January rising 11.8 per cent to £695 million.

Unfortunately the thousands of underpaid employees exploited by Wolfson’ have less to be joyous about. This is because the majority of Next’s workers don’t make enough money to make ends meet, with a trade union study published last year by GMB demonstrating that the average wages for Wolfson’s staff were less than £9,571 per worker per year. Mick Rix, GMB National Officer for retail staff observed at the time that: “NEXT makes huge profits from clothing made in the third world. NEXT should employ workers in the UK on proper working hours and pay a living wage.”

But if we are to believe the Leicester Mercury, Wolfson really does care about his poor underpaid staff. As the Mercury writes: “His latest project, The Wolfson Economics Prize 2014, aims to help solve Britain’s housing crisis by asking applicants to design a viable garden city which can be replicated across the country.”

Of course one need not turn to Wolfson nor the Tory think-tanks he works with to come up with solutions to help people in the same dire position as many of Wolfson’s employees. As the housing crisis could quickly be solved if the Government simply committed to building cheap affordable council homes, something that the Leicester City Council is certainly not ready to do.

Instead all the main political party’s refuse to build adequate social housing. Instead they all seem quite content passing hundreds of billions of pounds worth of public funds over to private landlords: with a recent GMB study putting this figure at £411 billion in payouts to rich landlords since the date that Margaret Thatcher “changed the labour movement traditional policy of spending money on bricks to spending the money on rents.”

Any political representative worth their salt would work to remedy this tragic situation and build a campaign to build quality council housing to meet the social needs of the majority of Britain’s citizens. None of the major parties are however capable of taking such a necessary and principled stance.

The Socialist Party and activists in the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition are therefore fighting to play a key role in establishing an alternative now. We campaign and fight for:

• Rent controls – a cap on rents in the private sector as an emergency measure
• Council run, not-for-profit letting agencies and full use of council powers to regulate the private rented sector
• House building and renovation – campaign for the government to divert its private developer subsidies to a mass programme of building quality council housing. For councils to use reserves and borrowing powers to build and renovate public housing now
• Bring all housing association stock and housing services back in-house – privatisation has driven up costs
• Axe the bedroom tax and reverse all housing benefit cuts
• Nationalise the banking system and mobilise the finance for a massive council house building programme.
• Nationalise the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy under democratic workers’ control and management – the basis of a socialist plan to ensure resources are directed to meet people’s needs.