We cannot afford to let our own working class families be thrown out of their homes to make way for asylum HMOs.
Gavin Callaghan is a Labour councillor and leader of Basildon Council
On Friday night, Basildon made national news. And not for the right reasons.
Three idiots decided to spray the St. George’s Cross across people’s homes on a parade of shops in one of our busiest estates. Not content with criminal damage, one of them decided to hurl racist abuse at an Asian mother as she walked with her son to the local shop. It was disgusting. It was embarrassing. It is not the Basildon I represent.
That incident happened just hours after I had been on a call with the Home Office and Yvette Cooper’s special advisers to discuss what is happening on the frontline in communities like mine. The contrast could not have been sharper. On one hand, government officials are trying sincerely to manage a broken asylum system. On the other, a minority of thugs taking out their anger on innocent neighbours. As I warned, it will get worse.
The truth is that the public know Labour can’t fix everything in 12 months. However unless Labour finds its voice and shows the same raw emotion about the housing scandal fuelling this anger that Reform and Tommy Robinson have found, we will lose trust and continue to appear out of touch.
It starts with getting tough on charlatan operators like Mears, Serco and Clearsprings who right now are going door to door in our towns, approaching private landlords and asking them to evict families. Families who have lived in their homes for 10 or 15 years. Families who have raised their kids there, paid their rent on time, built their lives in those communities. These companies tell the landlord to turf them out so the property can be converted into a House in Multiple Occupation for asylum seekers. Overnight a landlord can go from earning £22,000 per year in rent to £60,000 a year in rent.
But imagine what that does to people and their neighbours. When landlords choose cash over compassion, whole streets pay the price. That family of four or five that’s lived there for a decade or more, suddenly finds themselves homeless. They turn up at the council, desperate. We stick them in temporary accommodation, often a single hotel room miles away from the schools, jobs and community they know. And meanwhile, they watch their family home handed over to six, seven, eight men who have just got off a small boat and are awaiting an asylum decision.
If that does not make your blood boil, I do not know what will. We have to understand how unfair that system is for British people and it’s been allowed to happen for too long. Our working class neighbours did not ask for wars to be undertaken in foreign lands. Why should they lose their homes in Basildon as a result?
I am sympathetic to the plight of people fleeing and seeking asylum. In recent years I have spent time in Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt working on human trafficking issues. The horrors these people have seen are unimaginable to anything we have seen or will ever see in our country, thankfully. But if politics is to choose, Labour must choose the British working classes. It is why we exist.
And this is not happening evenly across the country. These properties are not being snapped up in leafy Tory wards. They are being carved out of working class Labour wards. The same communities that are already carrying the heaviest load of deprivation, job insecurity and crumbling public services. It is ripping the fabric out of those neighbourhoods.
So yes, I want Labour to be pragmatic and fair on immigration. But I also want Labour to be furious about this scandal. Because our people are furious. And they are right to be.
I do not care if the contracts that allow this madness have 12 month break clauses signed off under the Tories. Labour ministers and Labour council leaders should be grabbing the nearest microphone to condemn it. We should be saying loud and clear, we will not tolerate our families being evicted in the name of a failed asylum system. We will not tolerate our communities being broken apart by the cynical profiteering of private contractors.
There is a dark underbelly to all of this. I monitor local social media every single day. My councillors do too. We cannot always get people to a council meeting, or even convince some families to send their kids to school. But in the space of 72 hours last week, people mobilised. They bought flags, they bought red paint, and they plastered them across the borough. Where is that organisation coming from? Who is funding it? If we are not awake to it, what else is being coordinated under our noses?
I do not have an issue with flags. I quite like seeing them. When I have campaigned in America, I have always admired the way the Stars and Stripes hangs from every house, regardless of political affiliation. But here in Basildon, people are not just flying flags because they are proud. They are doing it because they are angry. And I cannot say I do not understand why.
Labour is right to close hotels. Labour is right to speed up asylum decisions. Labour is right that where deportations are necessary, they should happen. But none of that means a damn thing if we let our own working class families be thrown out of their homes to make way for asylum HMOs. That is immoral. It is indefensible. And it is a betrayal of the very people we were founded to stand up for.
Labour must close down the HMO scandal. Not tomorrow. Not in a year when contracts expire. Now. We must act decisively to stop private companies profiteering off human misery at the expense of ordinary British families. Because if we do not, we will not only have failed those families, we will have surrendered our communities to the extremists who are weaponising this crisis for their own ugly ends.
Basildon deserves better. Britain deserves better. Labour must be the party that delivers it.
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