“
When the Conservatives privatised the contracts for housing asylum seekers in 2012, the companies sought housing where land was the cheapest – in deprived areas, places already suffering from neglect and the stranglehold of austerity. In 2016, in Middlesbrough, one in every 152 people was an asylum seeker; in Rochdale, one in every 204 and in Bolton, one in 271. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these towns all voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. While the feeling of being swamped was blamed on an external threat, it was in fact caused by internal inequality, organised from deep within the system of England: the price of land.
”
”