Remember Lady Porter?

Published: 22 October, 2010

• WHAT Shirley Porter started in 1986, Westminster’s Housing chief, Councillor Philippa Roe, wants to finish in 2011. 

Twenty-five years ago Shirley Porter just concentrated on moving out poor people living in a few marginal wards. However Philippa Roe’s support for the new housing benefit cap will affect 84 per cent of Westminster residents currently claiming housing benefit. And just as in the 1980s, when Westminster Conservatives embarked on their illegal Homes for Votes electoral strategy, this latest attack on low-income residents is more about creating large Conservative majorities than sorting out the public finances.

Moving low-income families out of Westminster will not only create an even more unequal society, it will also deprive Westminster of its vitality, its economic strength and its unique atmosphere.

The Conservatives want to cleanse Westminster of poor people who they believe have no right to live close to those wealthy people who have paid a lot of money for their homes – and who inconveniently don’t vote Tory.

It appears, too, that the gerrymandering policies adopted by Shirley Porter all those years ago are now part of the mainstream Conservative approach to our inner-cities.

So much for David Cameron’s “Big Society”!

CLLR PAUL DIMOLDENBERG
Leader of the Labour Group