New Labour is pressing ahead with demolishing inner city houses in favour of its goal of more modern housing despite feirce local opposition and an official inquiry:
John Prescott’s heavily criticised £5 billion scheme to regenerate the inner cities by demolishing thousands of Victorian terrace homes is to be the subject of an official inquiry.
The National Audit Office is to examine the Pathfinder regeneration scheme after Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, last week unleashed the bulldozers on 1,000 terrace homes in Liverpool.
This demonstrates the contempt the managerial approach to government has towards those that government is supposed to represent. We are to have “modern” (read “more efficient”) housing because in the view of the managerialists, it is “for our own good” and, like naughty children, we are incapable of working out for ourselves what is in our own best interests.
The swathe of Victorian terraces that will be demolished is the largest clearance in Liverpool since the 1960s.
It is the first phase in the city’s plans to clear more than 6,800 Victorian and Edwardian terraces, which is more than the Luftwaffe achieved in five years of war.
The little matter of these houses being places where people want to live, are well built and perfectly capable of being modernised without demolishing them, matters not one jot to the managerialists; they do not fit with their view of what modern Britain should look like, so let’s finish the job the Luftwaffe started.
Some of the areas where the houses are due to be demolished are still 80 per cent occupied pitching the Government into a potential battle with those unwilling to move. There have already been successful moves in the High Court to block evictions.
Good luck to those willing to dig their heels in and resist the evil that is the smiling face of our benevolent masters. Your house may be yours, but if it is in the way of Prescott’s or Kelly’s plans for “regeneration” then too bad, it has to go. That it is a part of the city’s heritage is irrelevant to these Philistines. This is the same breed of halfwits as those who gave us the tenement blocks – and subsequent slums – of the sixties.
Cath Green, the assistant director for neighbourhoods and housing at Liverpool council, said Miss Kelly’s approval of demolitions was welcome “because it means we can move forward with investment that will improve the environment and increase housing choice”.
It’s just too bad if you have already chosen your nice little two up, two down, Victorian terraced home. You need more choice and your house is going to be demolished to give it to you.
They don’t learn; they never do.