glyn-robbins

17 Articles by:

Glyn Robbins

Glyn Robbins is a housing worker, campaigner, writer and academic.

Inside Gigademia

The last decade has seen a rising tide of casual contracts in universities, with stability and security for workers in freefall. It’s just one of the reasons our marketised higher education system needs an overhaul.

150 Years of ‘The Housing Question’

Friedrich Engels’ 1872 pamphlet ‘The Housing Question’ highlighted the mutual reliance between the housing crisis and the capitalist system in Victorian England. In the years since, that relationship has only deepened.

More Thatcherism Won’t Fix Housing

Boris Johnson’s answer to the problems facing renters is reviving Right to Buy – the very policy that turned millions of public homes into private landlords’ assets and birthed our housing crisis in the first place.

The Landlord Subsidy

Under Margaret Thatcher, the Tories saw housing benefit as a way to prop up private landlords – and today, it does so the tune of billions of pounds per year. It’s time to build public housing instead.

Making Los Angeles

Mike Davis and Jon Wiener’s new book ‘Set the Night on Fire’ chronicles the social struggles that shaped 1960s Los Angeles, from the Watts Rebellion to the Black Panther Party.

The Fight for Housing Goes On

Labour had bold housing policies in the general election – but it failed to build a narrative that got them across. Now, the challenge is to engage with the movements fighting the housing crisis at the grassroots.

It’s Time to Be Honest about Housing

For decades terms like ‘affordable,’ ‘social,’ ‘mixed’ have been used as cover for market failures in housing – it’s time to move on from those schemes and commit to a real solution: council housing.

Jersey City: America in One Place

Jersey City is a microcosm of postindustrial America – where poverty and property development go hand-in-hand. Neglected for decades, places like this could decide the 2020 election.

The Neoliberal City

Housing campaigner Glyn Robbins discusses how the market is remaking the council estate where he works, eroding the bonds that build working class communities.