DERTON'S NEW SLUMS

In Liverpool thousands of working-class families are famili faced with a crisis in housing, but none more so than those living in the Everton area. There are two parts to this story. Tenants in council flats, like those all over the country, are threatened with a £l-a-week rent increase under the Tory 'fair rents' Bill.

In the new Everton housing estates they live in an environment which has been denuded of all the old facilities which went with the old tenement housing. In place of the public houses and the shops, there are boardedup properties or else there are vast areas of devastation, piled with rubble awaiting development by the council. But tenants will have to wait some time because the council says there is little money to build the promised parks and recreation areas.

On the other side of the housing estate, however, there are people' lıvıng in absolute despair, in the most wretched conditions. Five hundred people in the Starfield Rd and Priory Grove areas live in streets which, although nominally described as a clearance area, are more appropriately. identified as disaster areas.

John and Shirley Bird have been on a rent and rates strike for three weeks now demanding one simple, justified thing: rehouse us! You have to see their street to imagine what it's like to live down there.

The roadside is strewn with bricks falling down. It looks like houses are boarded up; it has been the scene of bitter street-to-street fighting.

Young Carol Smith has lived with her parents for over a year in the last house in a street where all the others are pulled down or boarded up. They still have had no offer of a flat in the area. She says someone has to be in the house all the time or vandals will break in. Yet the council has told the Smiths and hundreds of families like them the earliest time for rehousing is two years off.

Time after time the tenants have marched down into town to complain to the city council. It seems to have had no effect.

Meanwhile people are supposed to live in conditions which must seem the same as those of 100 years ago when the houses were first built, where even the toilets have been demolished by council workers.

There can be no doubt that the prospects of these tenants being rehoused been worsened by the introduction of the hated Tory Housing Finance Bill.

This is the measure which aims to double the council house rents of 51 million tenants in England and Wales, subjecting every one to the despised means test of the 1930s.

It will, if passed, force thousands of tenants out of their homes and on to the private market which in cities like have only glass-strewn sti play in. Top right: Huge of waste ground, resultin cut-back in money for Department. Left: Joh Shirley Bird who with nea others are demanding to housed. Above: Mr MI who is fighting for his rig against rent increases. reets to = areas 1g from Parks n and arly 500 • be recGreary hts and in the middle of Everton.

• AnIS rent DIll speculators' measure. It will fill their coffers. As far as the working class is concerned it doesn't bear thinking of. 'We are tenants fighting our rights. We must bring to notice of others that things happening underneath that one knows about. a total rent of £3.89. Another them and at the same time the Tories are having a tea party. Greece, ruling under the guise of ULILCIS 11 LUMLIUL democracy?' asked David. "The "fair rents" Bill is an extra notch in the belt, but you can't pull it in any further. It could come to the point where we will be pushed to using extreme measures to defend our

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