High flats in Craigmillar.

Cost of greed crisis still hitting Edinburgh

While local news outlets say Edinburgh is booming and a wonderful place to live, rs21 interviewed a community worker in Edinburgh, who highlights the harsh disparities between Leith and Craigmillar / Niddrie. While we’re told the cost of living crisis is over because the rate of inflation is going down, it is manifestly still going on, and communities have taken a big hit in uneven ways. 

I work in one of the most deprived communities in Scotland, Craigmillar and Niddrie. It’s a huge community in the east of the city, there’s charities there, but in terms of mobilising, fighting back against the social injustice, there’s not a lot going on. Over the last two decades a lot of older housing has been demolished and replaced by a mix of housing association and privately-owned flats and houses. Some of the older multis (high rise flats) remain.

The prime factors causing people’s destitution are the costs of energy and rent. During the pandemic there was some safeguarding – there was a moratorium on evictions, a rent freeze, and a relaxation of the rules around debt. Landlords evicted despite the moratorium, and increased rents despite the cap. These housing safeguards have just been taken away, but the crisis hadn’t gone away. After the covid pandemic, the fuel prices went up. We’re still seeing the cost of greed crisis hitting. UK government funding, like cost of living grants issued to people on certain benefits have also stopped, including the grants that helped pay a portion of peoples electricity bills. 

This is exacerbated by the astronomical food prices. People have been making choices between heating and eating since the early 2010s, but I’ve seen firsthand the huge increase of people using food banks. Poverty now impacts a whole different cohort of people. The majority of workers are on low income, minimum wage or living wage, in some cases with families, having to pay huge shortfalls in rent because there’s a housing crisis alongside this rise in the cost of food and fuel. 

With all that going on and you throw in the hostile welfare benefits system, these policies of two child limit or the new mixed age couples rule, wherein one person reaches state pension age but the other is still working age, and the retiree’s state pension is taken off the joint maximum Universal Credit. There’s a misconception that Social Security Scotland (SSS) is a sweet happy-clappy organisation unlike the DWP. That’s not true. The regulations for adult disability payment are the same, the law is exactly the same, the decision makers use the same methods. You see pretty draconian, strict decision-making from SSS as well. 

I don’t expect anything to change, I expect it to get steadily worse. The Tories are already talking about changing criteria for disability benefits with PIP. It’s all blowhard stuff, hot air, banging the drums for the Tory faithful for votes. Having said that, it’s more likely Starmer will get into power, and it’ll make no difference – he’ll cut back as much as possible on the welfare bill. 

Discrimination by household composition

Because of how the benefits system works, the likelihood of destitution becomes less about gender or race than it is about household circumstances: do you have any dependents, do you have any health conditions? Single people are oftentimes penalised, especially those who don’t necessarily have a health condition or dependents. They’re living on less income: the standard allowance for someone aged 25 is £440 a month. Assume they are getting some housing costs covered as well. To be able to pay bills, gas, electric, council tax, mobile phone, and be expected to look for work, it’s damn near impossible, and impossible to eat healthy.

I’ve come across quite a lot of older people who’ve deferred their state pension because they can’t afford to retire. They’re in their 70s working in Tesco or Sainsbury’s but they’re not prepared to give up their job. Occupational pension will be pretty meagre, state pension is under-resourced as well – £216 a week, £880 a month. Some people might have an occupational pension on top of their state pension, £500 a month. In private accommodation most likely won’t qualify for housing benefit. They say, ‘I did the right thing all my life and worked for my pension only for it to be handed to my landlord.’

Housing is a massive massive issue. Across the city so many are staying in privately run hostels. These used to be hotels for tourists, they’re now cashing in on the lucrative business of homelessness: they get paid through the tax system and housing benefit, but they don’t provide any services.

There’s no way there should be 35,000 households living in homeless hostels in Edinburgh, in the 4th richest country in the world. We’ve missed opportunities for a robust campaign there, which is not confined to single issues. 

Folk are so beaten down, so consumed with just trying to survive, and there is a stark contrast between working class communities.  Less than four miles to the north of Craigmillar lies Leith, the port area of Edinburgh, once the home for a large and vibrant working class community.  But now it has been Disneyfied and gentrified. There are folks tripping about in Leith like it’s New York when just up the road wee Josie is leaving her house at 11 at night to go to the convenience shop to get a hot drink, because the hostel doesn’t even have a kettle.

Gentrification in Leith

In more recent years Leith has been gentrified with huge amounts of investment. The bottom line is that it has marginalised the working classes in Leith. I can see me on a Friday evening leaving work at Niddrie, I arrive at Leith and its night and day. They’ve all bought into the lifestyle, the ‘riviera of the North’, the people are minted. All the regeneration has been earmarked for Leith as opposed to Niddrie, where there’s not even a pub or community space. Leith is rammed with hipster bistros. It’s all about class. The working classes in Edinburgh have been abandoned by the council, and it’s too late for Leith. 

The big problem with this city council is it’s hellbent on selling off every brownfield site going, every public building going, to private developers for a song. The developers say they’ll build affordable housing which is not affordable for me or you. It’s invited a whole raft of younger millennials – that have got income, because they’ve got inherited wealth, coming in from everywhere. Along the waterfront, it’s got a lot of feelings of social cleansing.

Particularly in Leith and affluent areas, you can walk along any street and see these keysafes for Airbnbs. Every street you walk down, tied to public railings on the street, half a dozen keysafes for one stair.

If we’re living in a system that won’t pay you, where house prices are exorbitant and totally out of reach, we need public housing. Housing campaigns under a banner of ‘housing is a human right’, and not a mode of making profit for the rentier class. 

Where is the fightback?

In the past, I fought back with school campaigns and housing campaigns. We stopped the rollout of stock transfer in 2005 and managed to galvanise a huge amount of support in working class areas across the city, persuaded tenants to vote against stock transfer. 

From my point of view as an older person it saddens me to think that back then there was a community fightback that was political and vibrant. We won, we stopped them in their tracks and it culminated in a whole new policy for Scotland when SNP stopped stock transfer in 2007.

It’s hard to see my fellow class treading water, just trying to keep their head above water. I meet a lot of folk who’ll descend into floods of tears, it’s not just one thing it’s about 40 things at the same time, it’s trying to pay the bills and not being able to do so and what little income they’ve got coming in, and being treated like shit by local services, councils, police, ignored by those in the corridors of power. 

I’ve got preppers in Craigmillar – storing tins of food for Armageddon. Where’s the solidarity, the community, the fightback? People are on their own looking at the internet, getting all their information from YouTube, learning conspiracy theories. Where is that simple idea of collectivism and social solidarity and fighting against a common enemy, which is the state and the ruling class? It frightens me and I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s really sad.

I haven’t seen new forms of working class organisation. What I see now is isolation, a lot of it, folk just trying to do their best. Some families will look out for each other. You get folks who help their neighbours with a cup of sugar, but it’s not a fightback.

What’s stopped people from fighting back is this feeling of hopelessness. It’s pretty obvious that there’s so much money coming into Edinburgh as a whole. But any sort of protest from local groups is overridden by the council in favour of property developers. 

There’s a feeling of ‘what’s the point’, and that’s a real shame because I know if you stand up you can fight, and you’d probably win. 

I meet folk who are concerned about Gaza, Scottish independence, the cost of living – very intelligent, politically sound and articulate people. It does sadden me that there’s nothing kicked off in Craigmillar Niddrie, because there should be!