ACCORDING to the housing charity Shelter, more than 1.7 million people are homeless.
This includes people out on the streets, in "bed and breakfast' accommodation and the hidden homeless - families and individuals forced to live with relatives or friends, when they need somewhere of their own to live.
Now new government rules throw thousands more onto the streets. The Tories plan to cut back on statutory council duties to the homeless, but also to play off different sections of homeless people against one another.
The effect of the new rules is worsened by the new trespass law, which threatens to evict up to 50,000 squatters.
The changes will mean thạt people with any sort of temporary accommodation will not be regarded as homeless, and those with nowhere to live because of domestic rows will also not be deemed homeless.
Young people thrown out by their parents will not be 'homeless', nor wives and partners thrown out, or who leave because of domestic violence.
And if you're renting a room with friends and they throw you out, then you're not homeless either!
Single mothers living with parents will also not be defined as homeless.
The attempt to cause divisions among the poor and homeless comes in with the greater priority apparently given to families who have been on waiting lists for a long time.
Resentment is often caused by people on waiting lists for a long time seeing others given greater priority. This is one of the factors underlying resentment among council tenants on the Isle of Dogs.
According to Shelter, there are more than 1.2 million people forced to live with family and friends, who desperately need re-housing. Millions more live in sub-standard and decaying houses.
But the problem for people awaiting rehousing is not that single mothers or other people in desperate need are "jumping the queue'.
Destruction
The problem is the lack of cheap, socially-owned housing. This is caused by the insane policies of successive governments, and especially by the Tories 'right to buy' destruction of council housing stocks.
Private rents have sky-rocketed. Those unable to get a mortgage are often in a chronically difficult position.
It is worsened by the failure THIS DOOR COSTS YOU €50 WEEK TORY MASTE to build new houses of any kind, and to renovate existing housing.
Britain's housing stock is among the most dilapidated -and amongst the most expensive - in any major country.
Tens of thousands of houses and flats are being left empty for want of buyers who can afford them, for the money to renovate them, or - as the Westminster scandal showed - simply because they are council properties waiting to be sold.
Housing costs an astronomic part of the income of working people, whether they are renting or buying. For the overwhelming majority of workers, buying or renting, housing is a millstone round their neck for life.
Meanwhile something like Tory Westminster council prefers to spend money keeping out the homeless on the dole!
The market policies which lead to this are not just cruel and oppressive - they are insane. Tens of thousands are homeless, millions live in run-down houses, building workers are on the dole - so who profits?
Only the banks, financial institutions and the private landlords and builders.
Money lenders
A real solution to capitalism's housing crisis can only be finally achieved by smashing the grip of the money-lenders and racketeers.
This means a programme of building tens of thousands of council houses every year, of nationalising the building industry, banks, and building societies, of putting the racketeers who trade on human misery out of business.
A final irony. The argument against building new council houses is often 'cost'.
But recent figures have shown that on an annualised basis it costs nearly twice as much per household to keep people in bed and breakfast than it does to build new council houses -£13,500 a year as opposed to £7000.
And that doesn't include the saving of putting building workers back to work!
There is only one kind of insanity which prefers to pay out twice as much not to house people - it's called capitalism.
Many progressive teachers will think it is the wrong approach to try to stop children being exposed to material -especially in the classics -which has racist or sexist overtones.
William Shakespeare would be definitely off limits by such criteria, as would a vast amount of the artistic production of western society.
The point is to be able to freely discuss this aspect of these works, and to point out alternatives. But in the Jane Brown case, this is a side issue.
You don't have to want to stop kids seeing 'Romeo and Juliet' to see the main issue in this affair. Stop the witch hunt against Jane Brown!