Open letter to Sir Bill Morris

In 1998, the presenter of BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, Sue Lawley quoted you as saying “I was born a socialist and I will die a socialist” (1).

Put simply, as a not yet dead socialist, you believe poverty has more to do with inequalities of life chances than the poor having a poverty of ambition.  Every citizen should get a fair share of a country’s wealth and opportunities, you would agree.

You will know COPEC’s Prime Focus is just one of the church-based housing associations, rooted deeply in a social equality tradition, which merged in 2006 to form Midland Heart (2).  

A wish to end poverty, caused especially by low wage and high rent, move Christian socialists to set up the “Birmingham COPEC House Improvement Society” on November 5 1925.  

For COPEC’s charity workers, like F. Margaret Fenter, “the wish was father to the deed” (3).

COPEC not only set about transforming the lives of the poor by offering them better housing, it also worked to ease the effects of “social disadvantages” by reducing or not collecting rent when tenants run short of money.

Sir Morris, I know you are able to face-up to inequality, and its evil twin - racism, when it is awkward for you turn to “a blind eye” to the obvious. For example, in 1996 as general secretary of the T&GWU, you played a role in ending what you said was ‘the “callous and systematic failure” of Ford to take equality seriously’ (4).

For years, the T&GWU was one of several unions turning “a blind eye” to an “unspoken” colour-bar stopping black and minority ethnic (BME) getting a job in Ford Dagenham Truck Fleet.

When you became chairman of Midland Heart in 2007, you gave an interview to the Guardian in which it is reported you were “relishing the prospect of offering strategic leadership and influence to a big player in the field of social housing”(5).

However, your six years’ “strategic leadership” of COPEC’s heritage seems to me to be a cruel parody of everything compassionate.

With £18 million surplus - profit, Midland Heart is well placed, as landlord and employer, to change for the better the lives of the poor. Instead, you have chosen to put rent up repeatedly when most tenants have not had a single wage rise since 2008 (6).

Worse, you pay your non-salaried workers a starvation wage of £6.19 per hour, not a living wage hourly rate of £7.45.

Let’s be honest, comrade Bill.  The growth of food banks testify to an awkward truth that in Handsworth, as elsewhere in Britain, there is a sizeable minority of workers living in absolute, rather than relative, poverty(7).

When you put rent up, you snatch bread from the mouth of the poor.

“Bill, the bread snatcher” not only rhythms with “Thatcher, the milk snatcher” but it also echoes her callousness (8).

Such callousness borders on the sadistic when you expect non-salaried workers to starve on £6.19 per hour while you pay Ruth Cooke, Midland Heart’s CEO, £95 per hour.

Midland Heart is a taxpayer-funded charity. In 2009, Unite the Union, expressed outrage about “a culture of greed polluting” charities like Midland Heart (9).

How does brother Bill, a union man and socialist to boot, justify paying Cooke, a charity worker, a £183,000 annual salary and the BME cleaners of her all-white executive director boardroom £6.19 per hour?

Your “leadership” suggests you are blind to ‘the callous and systematic failure” of [Midland Heart] to take equality seriously’.  Since 2006, the number of senior BME managers you employ has whittled to a token few while BME is disproportionately non-salaried workers.

Far from opening Midland Heart to the “sunlit path of racial justice”, your “strategic leadership” reinforces “a wall of racism” barring BME from the executive boardroom of a company headquartered in an ethnically diverse city (10)(11).

Shame on you comrade Bill, shame on you Sir.