Letters: everyone deserves a decent home

Your report gave a compelling account of the effects of part of Britain’s housing crisis (“Housing the homeless: private profits, public squalor”, Special report). Even more hair-raising stories can be told about street or “surfing” homelessness, though perhaps of slightly lower numbers. Poor or no housing has an obvious effect on health and on children’s educational prospects.

A real reform of housing would have transformational effects on most major aspects of life, especially the NHS and schools. In his Queen’s speech, the prime minister said that people “want their NHS to be stronger, their streets safer, their wifi faster, the air they breathe cleaner, their kids’ schools better funded”. There was no mention of housing. A new housing regulator is to be created but my guess is that it would be captured by the big housing firms (building and renting) within five minutes of inception. A Conservative government will bow to whatever the lobby wants, and George Osborne famously said that building more social housing just creates more Labour voters.

What is extraordinary, however, is that Labour seems barely more enthusiastic. The Labour policy document on housing is entirely unconvincing and lacking in any clear statement of aim. This ought to be to house every citizen decently by the end of the first Labour parliament, full stop.
Jeremy Cushing
Taddyforde, Exeter

It is pointless to blame private companies for exploiting people needing homes; the problems have been building for decades, ever since Margaret Thatcher’s “right-to-buy” policy gave away millions of decent homes, more than a third of which are now owned by, you guessed it, private companies. The 13 wasted years of New Labour failed to change even that mad policy.

So here we are, after decades of successive governments’ failure to act, with a dysfunctional housing market. Despite thousands of flats in the dozens of “cash boxes in the sky” across London, homelessness is at its highest level for decades. Almost every family has been hit by the fact that even the cheapest flats in London are beyond the reach of even highly paid workers: a two-bed flat costing about 20 times the average salary!

Local authorities have done little to change things. Here in Camden, north-west London, a solid Labour council has allowed several appalling developments with almost no affordable accommodation, despite a policy requiring half of any major new housing to do so. We need government actions to control the basic issues, but local government has a role.

As most metropolitan districts are Labour controlled, surely they can coordinate to force this government to stop cutting their budgets, which is having impacts on every aspect of their duties, including the provision of affordable homes? Then we might see some progress towards a society in which everyone has a decent place to live.
David Reed
London NW3

Grenfell victims still waiting

The housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, proclaims that “we must never see a tragic incident like the fire at Grenfell Tower happen again’’ (“Grenfell Tower law and NHS will be at the heart of domestic agenda in Queen’s speech”, News). It is now over two years since Jenrick’s predecessor, Sajid Javid, promised on national television that his government would ‘’do whatever it takes’’ to provide redress for the disaster’s victims and survivors.

So why are so many of the victims and their families still forced to go on waiting for the homes and other support that they need?
Francis Prideaux
London W9

Beyond Extinction Rebellion

Professor Lucy Robinson says that “different approaches – mass arrests, blockades, citizens’ assemblies, carnivals – are all ways to imagine a different world” (“Climate protests have roots that go deep into the rich history of British social change”, Comment). But let’s not get carried away. Extinction Rebellion is a necessary, but not sufficient, step on the path to a better future. In the end, it remains a single-issue movement.

XR is necessary because its strategy and tactics are a refreshing, well-designed fit between ends and means, based on research about what might actually work. It is designed to create a different zeitgeist. It chooses to do this by non-violent direct action. XR shows us that non-violence is a strategic choice, not just a tactic, and is opening up many exiting new possibilities. Many XR supporters (me included) want a lot more social change than that. But, and it’s a big but, XR isn’t designed to do that. Alternative politics needs a rejection of party and hard work to build inclusive institutions that don’t yet exist. This may even be a tougher challenge than the climate emergency the rebellion is successfully highlighting.
Brian Fish
Chapel Allerton, Leeds

The art of noise

The art of cinema projection as a skilled profession has been dying since the evolution of the multiplex and replacement of celluloid film by digital formats (“‘It’s loud, actually’: fans back Hugh Grant over cinema decibels”, News). As “old-school” projectionists, my colleagues and I would, in practice, always play films at a much lower level than that recommended by Dolby. Additionally, if the soundtrack mix made the spoken word inaudible, we would cheat the sound processor by lowering the levels on the surround sound amplifiers, creating the effect of increasing the speech levels through the front speakers.

Discussing “safe” levels is to miss the point. No one would set the picture focus using anything other than their eyes, so why slavishly follow recommended levels and set the sound using anything other than the human ear? Hugh Grant was correct: if he felt that the audio level was uncomfortably loud, then it was and the film should have been played at a lower level.
John Kirk
Clifton, Otley
North Yorks

Tolerance is alive in Scotland

I completely agree with Stan Labovitch about the tragedy of Europeans feeling unwelcome in Britain (Letters). However, while this may be the case in England, it is not quite such a problem in Scotland. Remember, we voted 62-38 to remain and this is one of the reasons that the idea of independence is becoming more attractive to many Scots.

The necessity of remaining within the EU and being part of something bigger, rather than a northern satellite of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage’s Little England, seems a much more appealing long-term prospect to many people. One wonders why two countries that are so close to one another can be so far apart politically and culturally.
Dougie Mitchell
Edinburgh

So much for loyalty

In his review of Leo McKinstry’s book, Attlee and Churchill: Allies in War, Adversaries in Peace, (New Review), Andrew Rawnsley states that, while “Tory intriguers schemed to replace Churchill, Attlee was staunchly loyal”. And how was that loyalty repaid? In the first radio broadcast of the postwar election, on 4 June 1945, Churchill informed listeners that, if the Labour party won, Britain “would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance”.

Of course, Labour won by a landslide, but I don’t think there were many goose-stepping policemen on our streets afterwards.
Jack Critchlow
Torquay, Devon