EIGHT million people are at risk of ill-health caused by substandard housing that is putting “enormous strain” on an overstretched NHS, a coalition of charities warned today.
Nine charities are backing a national Safe Homes Now campaign, demanding an end to the “scandal” of 3.7 million “dangerous” homes “that pose significant risk to inhabitants’ health” in both the private rented and owner-occupied sectors.
The charities said the “hidden housing crisis” included shocking conditions such as rat infestation, damp, leaks and mould on children’s bedding.
They said that grant support for home repairs has been slashed by more than £2 billion over the past decade, preventing the repair of 600,000 homes.
And they highlighted that 2.2 million owner-occupied homes were now defined as “unsafe” — double the number in the private rented sector.
A survey by campaign founder the Centre for Better Ageing revealed increasing problems with heating costs and home maintenance bills.
The nine charities, including St John Ambulance, Race Equality Foundation and children’s charity Barnardo’s, are calling for a “national strategy to tackle the poor quality of the country’s homes” that includes halving the number of unsafe homes within the next decade to improve the nation’s health.
Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
“Does he think the world is not seeing the horrific reality in Gaza? Does he think we will believe his lies?” said one peace advocate. “No, we won’t.”
Despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations claimed in a televised interview Sunday that “there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” and was swiftly rebuked by people around the world.
Challenged by CNN‘s Dana Bash, Ambassador Gilad Erdan doubled down on his position: “I’m not saying that the life in Gaza is great. And, obviously, Hamas is the only one that should be held accountable for any situation in Gaza. But there’s a standard, due to international humanitarian law.”
“What does it mean, a humanitarian crisis? And I’m saying, again, there is no humanitarian crisis, based on the international humanitarian law, right now in Gaza,” added Erdan, who also cast doubt on the death toll being shared by local officials.
U.S. Congressman Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) called Erdan’s comments “unbelievable,” given the current conditions in Gaza a month into the war Israel launched after a Hamas-led attack on October 7, and urged the ambassador to resign from his position.
Unbelievable response by Israeli Ambassador to UN, claiming there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
No food, water, fuel or telecommunications. Almost 4,000 kids dead since October 7th. 1/4 of buildings in northern Gaza destroyed.
Also responding to Erdan’s appearance on “State of the Union,” Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group CodePink, said: “Does he think the world is not seeing the horrific reality in Gaza? Does he think we will believe his lies? No, we won’t.”
As of Sunday, Israel’s air and ground assault of the besieged enclave—enabled by billions in U.S. military support—has killed at least 9,770 people, including over 4,000 children, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. The ministry last month publicly identified thousands of the dead as Israeli officials and others, including U.S. President Joe Biden, questioned the figures.
Those who have so far survived the Israeli assault are facing limited power, water, and communication services as well as dwindling supplies of food and medicine. The United Nations World Food Program stressed Sunday that the aid entering Gaza “is nowhere near enough to meet the exponentially growing needs.”
“Right now, parents in Gaza do not know whether they can feed their children today and whether they will even survive to see tomorrow,” said Cindy McCain, the U.N. program’s executive director, as she returned from the Rafah border crossing in Egypt. “The suffering just meters away is unfathomable standing on this side of the border.”
Erdan’s interview Sunday was not the first time during the war that the Israeli government has contested conditions in Gaza. During a Sky News appearance in Mid-October, Israeli diplomat Tzipi Hotovely also said that “there is no humanitarian crisis.”
Israel’s agency overseeing policy for the Palestinian territories, known as COGAT, maintained in a statement on Tuesday that there is “currently no humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip” despite the mounting evidence to the contrary from aid agencies, journalists, and people living there.
The statement said the Israeli government was monitoring the supply of water, food, fuel, and energy in Gaza and asserted that “the situation is far from crisis.”
The newspaper added that “asked on Tuesday why Israel had cut off water supplies, in particular, to Gaza, the agency said that ‘according to international law, Israel has no obligation to provide goods and services to the terrorist organization Hamas—especially in cases where the enemy uses them for war purposes (for example, with respect to electricity and fuel).'”
A statement yesterday from the Israeli agency that coordinates government policy in Palestinian territories (COGAT): There is “currently no humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.”
This is all you need to know about the reliability of Israeli government agencies. pic.twitter.com/wl5t2Ns5Pk
Former U.S. Ambassador David Satterfield, recently appointed by Biden as the special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues, told reporters in Jordan on Saturday that “there is no evidence that Hamas is seizing or blocking aid entering the Gaza Strip.”
Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all.
Thatcher dances with Ronald Reagan. Public domain image.
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So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.
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As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.
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The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.
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Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.
MORE than 120,000 children across Britain are living in the most extreme form of poverty, according to charity survey which reveals the situation is worsening.
The devastating rise in levels of destitution was branded “stark and worrying” by Buttle UK, which works with young people in crisis.
Its poll of 1,240 front-line professionals found that six in 10 of the children they work with are experiencing extreme poverty — up from 45 per cent the previous year and 36 per cent in 2021.
The London-based charity, which published its annual State of Child Poverty report yesterday, said: “The families our front-line workers are supporting includes approximately 122,000 children living in destitution.
“The year-on-year change between the last three survey cohorts dramatically illustrates the progressively worsening circumstances for children in poverty.”
The organisation described the term “destitution” as referring to the absolute lowest standard of living any adult, child or young person can experience, leading to a “lived reality which is degrading and unsustainable.”
Specifically, its study said someone is considered destitute if they have gone a month without at least two of the following — shelter, food, lighting, heating, clothing or basic toiletries.
As the NHS turns 75 today, three major health and care research institutes have warned that the future of the service is at risk, amid political short termism and a lack of investment and reform.
The stark warning was made in a letter sent to Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer and Ed Davey by the Health Foundation, Nuffield Trust and The King’s Fund. It stated: “75 years after its creation, the National Health Service is in critical condition. Pressures on services are extreme and public satisfaction is at its lowest since it first began to be tracked 40 years ago. Despite this, public support for the NHS as an institution is rock solid.”
It called on party leaders to develop a long-term plan to address the current underlying causes of the crisis in the NHS.
The think tank chief executives write: “As leaders of three leading independent health and care research institutes, we urge you to make the next election a decisive break point by ending years of short-termism in NHS policy-making. Recovering NHS services and reducing waiting times for treatment should be a key priority for any government. However, our work shows that promising unachievable, unrealistically fast improvements without a long-term plan to address the underlying causes of the current crisis is a strategy doomed to failure. The path back to a stronger health service is through long-term policies that support innovation, boost productivity and provide the resources, capacity and technology it needs over multiple years.”
