Communist youth have successfully occupied the high-rises, in collaboration with the people of Wyndford. This comes as an inevitable consequence of Wheatley Homes’ refusal to negotiate with the Wyndford Residents Union throughout its 14-month campaign to Save the High Flats.
Since the 1960s, the four tower blocks have provided hearth and home to thousands of working-class families. Years of neglect by a series of social landlords has seen the flats deteriorate. Rather than renovate and retrofit the buildings, rather than invest back into the community paying them, Wheatley Homes have resolved to ‘build a bright new future’ for the people of Wyndford, by demolishing the iconic high rises. Glasgow City Council has been complicit in this ongoing attack on our class.
Our city suffers soaring rents, amidst a homelessness crisis. Under the deranged logic of the capitalist system, those who reduce our scarce housing stock are rewarded for it. The skyrocketing cost of accommodation has been precipitated by previous demolitions of the city’s high-rise flats. The fundamental premise of social high-rises is that a large volume of people can be comfortably housed in a limited area of land. This is antithetical to the greedy landlord and developers’ desire to put private profit before the public good. The political and media establishment have effectively maligned high-rise flats as ‘dirty eyesores’, manufacturing the narrative in favour of their destruction and this blatant attack on the working class.
According to Wheatley Homes, the working-class families of Wyndford will be best served by displacement. 600 affordable homes are to make way for 300 unaffordable ones. To anyone with the faintest grasp of numeracy, this ‘solution’ is patently ludicrous. The people of Wyndford know that Wheatley Homes will not offer them ‘better homes, better lives’. Their community is being erased; any new homes will not be built for people like them. We are witnessing the callous uprooting and scattering of families. Today, the people of Wyndford have rejected the forces of gentrification and social cleansing.
They will not lie down as the homes that they were raised in, that they raise their children in, are reduced to a dross of concrete. They will not allow themselves, and what remains of their community, to choke in a lingering cloud of carcinogenic dust in the name of private profit. The struggle of the Wyndford community against Wheatley Homes is totemic of the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class. The YCL calls on the broader labour movement and all progressive forces to show their solidarity with our cause in both word and deed.
This political occupation represents a victory for our class, and a defeat of the capitalist agenda to price us all out of our own lives. Let it serve as a reminder:
The workers built Glasgow. This city is ours.
Young Communist League of Britain
Glasgow Branch
16 January 2023
