Stormont unleashes savage housing cuts

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Thousands of people will be forced into poverty and homelessness as Stormont imposes the latest cut backs. Government changes mean young people aged between 24 and 35, who live alone and receive housing benefit face cuts of up to £40 a week, resulting in homelessness or forced into shared housing. These housing cuts are compounded by the lack of social and affordable housing while slum landlords and property developers continue to be subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of millions every year. 

These latest welfare reforms in housing are a direct assault on all of us as working people and should be opposed on this basis. The latest in a serious of save cuts in social welfare, cuts to wages and salaries, attacks on the public services such as our pensions that we all depend on, ever lengthening dole queues and slave labour workfare schemes.

Stormont continues to be  an active administer of the neo-liberal offensive. Militant working class resistance to these cuts needs to be built in every street, community and workplace as part of building a real alternative to the rotten status-quo and not rely on empty promises from our local green and orange Tories because the reality is change comes from below. The defeat of the proposed introduction of water charges here through the threat of mass-payment and the Poll Tax; to the recent liberation of the former Bank of Ireland building in Belfast city centre provides a small glimpse in confidence of what is possible if we stand together based on direct action, self-managment and solidarity.