Labour's #HomelessTax

Today 1000s of Labour party members, members of the SWP and many receiving a housing subsidy in some form or another are out on the streets. There aren't that many of them to be fair. Downing Street Received about 1000 people which is pretty pathetic as big protests go and in Doncaster this was the result:

But this 'Bedroom Tax' is probably one of the biggest things Labour have been going on about so far this year. However, there are so many lies about this I want to dispel and show what the #AxeTheBedroomTax actually means.

Firstly, and this is the obvious one, this is NOT a tax. The government is cutting forms of subsidies for rents. Taxation is taking people's money away; cutting subsidies is not giving them the money any more.

Secondly, Labour actually supports this. Labour has come out on a number of occasions and said they will support a Bedroom Tax if they win in 2015. They are just kicking up a fuss. It's this sort of two faced politics that actually discredits their party even more. I'm not surprised that polls actually show support for the so called 'Bedroom Tax'.

Lastly, forgetting that Labour supports the 'Bedroom Tax' itself, what they are actually doing is creating a #HomlessTax. They are forcing an estimated 53,660 households* to be homeless.  They are forcing hundreds of thousands of people to pay to live in temporary accommodation and are thus, if we use Labour lingo, taxing them. We have a housing crisis in this country because the last Labour government built less than 20,000 new homes from 1997 to 2010, a disgraceful record. The coalition is now stepping up this rate of production and is getting on with the job of looking after those who are homeless. One of the methods to help ease the temporary pressure is to encourage through removing the subsidies people to move. This is not new it was a Labour initiative in the 1960s to do Council Housing swaps if too few people lived in a house, this is encouraging precisely this.

What Labour are doing is telling Hundreds of Thousands people that they are not going to get homes to live in and they must suffer their #HomlessTax. This is all whilst people there are people living in council houses with unfilled rooms. If they owned their own houses fine, it's private property and they can do what they like. But as we are paying for them to live with extra space in a crisis situation they should muck in and help or take the hit.

Start Trending Labour's #HomlessTax because that is what they are really doing. 

Hundreds of Thousands of people are homeless in the UK if the Government didn't take action they will remain so.

* Figures from the Department of Communities and Local Government.