Resisting and Surviving Organised Politics

The Case of the London Housing Movement

Lisa Mckenzie

It seems that the holy grail of any organised political activist group or professional political campaign is to have a connection and reach into what we might call the 'grass roots'. 'The grass roots' in terms of political campaigning means 'local people', those situated closest to a particular issue. These types of bottom-up campaigns often start out as last-resort attempts to save or change or end local or national government policy and/or practice. Grassroots campaigns can also grow in opposition out of unwanted private industry interference that may be having a negative effect on a community or group. Communities, groups and individuals in society that have little legitimate institutional or political power often start campaigns out of desperation, and through feelings of embattlement when other forms of complaint have come to a dead end. Grassroots campaigners are mostly made up of people who have little to no personal power as individuals and are not practised or confident in fighting against institutional power. Consequently, they come together as a collective, even if it is for only a short period of time in an attempt to make their voices heard together.

This chapter focuses on recent grassroots housing campaigns in London that have been predominantly led by working-class women forced into struggle. These small campaigns took on the daunting position of resisting government and for-profit organisations, global and local institutional power. The chapter uses ethnographic data collected over three years by myself during two campaigns in East London; both campaigns were set up by women attempting to save the communities where they lived. These types of campaigns are not rare, despite 'official' and organised campaigning structures that often complain and report that they cannot engage with local communities, or that local people, particularly those in working-class communities, are difficult to engage in politics. Yet social media is filled with small, local campaigns using Twitter and Facebook, creating their own websites, in addition to the more traditional organising. These small-scale grassroots groups usually start up by engaging their communities and bringing attention to local issues, such as the closing of a community centre, school or hospital; however, not all local grassroots campaigning is seen as 'legitimate'. This follows Stephanie Lawler's research (2002) in relation to working-class women campaigning and protesting in Portsmouth against what they believed was a local government initiative in rehousing convicted sex offenders into their neighbourhood. There had been a widespread national media response to the protests, which Lawler (2002) argued used the narrative of 'the mob' to delegitimise the campaign. Although the protests caused wider debate throughout the general public and media relating to British criminal law and the rehabilitation of sex offenders, Lawler (2002) was not critiquing the protest or aims of the protest. Rather, these are the ways that the women's campaign had been delegitimised:

What I am concerned with here is, first, the way in which the concept of 'the crowd' or 'the mob' is strategically used to legitimate some forms of protest and to pathologize others, and, second, the ways in which class and gender are built into the heart of notions of 'the mob'. (Lawler 2002, 103)

What Lawler (2008) later highlights through her book Identity is the marked class difference between women protesters. Middle-class women are seen as 'concerned', and their concerns are therefore legitimised through their class positions, while working-class women's protests are conversely read as 'not knowing the right things', 'not doing the right things' and not 'looking right' (Lawler 2008, 139–41). Consequently, working-class concerns that are on the outside of a political party or an organised trade union are delegitimised (Mckenzie 2015; Skeggs 1997).

Consequently, very few of the many small-scale local campaigns are picked up by the national media or supported by organised political parties, as their 'local social capital' (Mckenzie 2015) is seldom recognised by professional and party political activists as legitimate. Yet grassroots groups find their 'fight back' has emerged organically out of anger and frustration toward organised and institutional power. This chapter argues that party politics, charities, and NGOs in addition to local and national government are part of the Marxist concept of a cultural and political superstructure that works with the capitalist economic base that creates and maintains unequal and oppressive social structures.

THE GLOBAL CITY: THE NEOLIBERAL LANDSCAPE

At the heart of the campaigns discussed within this chapter is gentrification and displacement, which are vital issues in relation to providing a critical account of whether local campaigns can either win or lose. The concepts of victory and defeat can often be a complicated outcome to decide upon when grassroots movements take on powerful institutions. The centre of contention, and consequently the flashpoints around these conflicts of housing in London, have arisen between local and national government policy and those being displaced by these policies. This chapter argues that the very act of resistance should not be underestimated.

Urban working-class resistance movements have been set up in all global and large cities in opposition to the gentrification process as a form of class cleansing, displacement and dispossession (Watt 2010; Watt and Minton 2016). The debates around gentrification have been around for more than fifty years since Ruth Glass (1964) linked housing and class struggle together in London during the early 1960s where she lived in Islington, North London. Glass's research focused on her concerns over the rehabilitation of Victorian lodging houses, but also how the community was moving away from renting and towards owning of property, leading to property price increases and the displacement of working-class occupiers by middle-class incomers. Hence, she created the term gentrification with the intention of capturing the class inequalities and injustices created by capitalist urban land markets and policies that lead to the rising house expense burden for low-income and working-class households. At the same time, this captures the devastating experiences of displacement, eviction and homelessness that she argues are the outcomes when capital accumulation is priority over family and community.

Tom Slater (2014) has argued for the importance in retaining this level of critical commitment in studying gentrification and also in retaining its focus on class inequality, which over time has begun to disappear from the debate. Slater (2014) responded to an article in the Guardian newspaper (Ball 2014) that suggested gentrification was a 'natural process' in an urban environment. Slater was indignant in his response that 'there is nothing natural about gentrification', arguing vociferously why we need to ensure that the language of gentrification stays true to Glass's original concept centred upon class struggle.

However, Tim Butler and Chris Hamnett (2009) have put forward the notion that processes of deindustrialisation and professionalisation have had an intense impact upon working-class Londoners, as London's 'old' traditional, industrial, manual working class is being replaced, not displaced, by professional and managerial groups with the concomitant effect that 'the middle class is the biggest (but not the only) class in town' (Butler and Hamnett 2009, 226).

Others, including Slater (2006, 2009), Davidson (2008) and Watt (2008), have challenged this 'evolutionary narrative' by 'attacking the way "professionalisation" downplays ongoing social and political struggles over space in contemporary London' (Davidson and Wyly 2012, 404). London remains a city with extensive multiethnic, working-class areas and populations, while class struggles over the uses and appropriation of space in London continue, even if the notion of an ethnically homogenous, manual working class is anachronistic: 'We should not mistake the changing appearance of class structure with the disappearance of class antagonism' (Davidson and Wyly 2012, 396). Gentrification is, however, increasingly noticeable in East London, partly caused via the 'collective social action' of clusters of middleclass gentrifiers in areas such as London Fields in Hackney (Butler and Robson 2003), but also via large-scale capitalist processes of new-build developments connected to rounds of regeneration, as in London Docklands (Foster 1999; Butler and Robson 2003; Bernstock 2009; Minton 2012). This logic has had severe consequences for working-class people in contemporary Britain through the current crisis of underfunding in social housing, deals between local councils and property development companies and social cleansing – the process that removes poorer residents from a community in favour of higher-earning people.

Recent research undertaken by the estate agent Savills (Emmett 2016) has calculated that London is now the most expensive city to live and work in the world. This research by a leading estate agent has measured the cost of space an individual needs for accommodation, together with the space needed to work in office rental costs, totalling a figure of £80,700 a year per person. This reduces people to a market-value figure of their wealth; as Skeggs says, only seeing value from within the blinkers of capital's logic and removing all recognition of the values that live beyond value (Skeggs 2014).

This connection between an individual's market value and their moral and social value have been central in producing new ways of exploitation through the fields of culture and media, strengthening established forms of class differentiation but also inventing new forms of class prejudice. Consequently, even the ways working-class people try to organise themselves against power are judged as legitimate or illegitimate, depending upon who, or what, they have on their side.

The poorest people and the neighbourhoods where they live within the UK have already been established and been conceptualised and known through many forms, and the definitions constantly shift. Those definitions have led to specific and often negative understandings of those communities, and it is through this negative baptism that there has been a growing stigmatisation of the poorest people in the UK. Levels of symbolic violence towards working-class people, and in particular those that live in council housing, are unprecedented.

QUESTIONS OF VALUE

Defining working-class people as valueless has taken on new forms in recent years, in often very negative ways. Since the 2008 banking crash and especially since 2010 there has been a development in working-class women's representation. This has manifested itself into a growing genre of popular television programmes that 'watch the poor' in pseudo-documentary formats, a phenomenon known as 'Poverty Porn'. This trend of 'watching the poor' has produced programmes like Channel 4's Benefit Street; my favourite, Dogs on the Dole; and even the BBC has cashed in with We Pay Your Benefits. There is also a whole host of the genre on Channel 5 that is shown nightly at prime time. This genre of television has become an outlet for those 'hard-working families' that Westminster politicians have helpfully differentiated for us against 'Benefits Britain' to vent their anger, and it has given them someone to blame for the rising inequalities in Britain and the continued precarity that millions of families are experiencing. These are based on simple but well-used narratives – the benefit-claiming, young, single mother taking too much from the state, or the lazy benefit family with no intention of ever working. These are myths and stories rather than coherent narratives, but they are still extremely damaging and hurtful to these communities and individuals – a type of violence that is not physical but symbolic. Symbolic violence hurts families and has severe consequences for communities because the removal of social goods either through 'brownfield' regeneration or through austerity measures can be justified because the poor can be blamed for their poverty.

However, recent and rigorous research by Shildrick et al. (2012) shows clearly that poverty in the UK is caused by an insecure employment market where people move from no pay to low pay, to zero-hours contracts and to welfare benefits. In addition, the crisis for homes that has been purposefully orchestrated by successive government policy on housing has meant that there has been an inflated property market and a lack of genuine affordable rented accommodation and a rise in 'buy to let' private landlords (Dorling 2014). Consequently, social goods that the poorest in society have needed and relied upon are being removed and justified through the narrative of value: who is of value and who is not.

However, for the local working-class communities that live within these spaces that are highly valued as investment interests to global capital, what they see are multimillion-pound housing developments rising from familiar places that seem to be inexhaustible in their grab for space and creating a place that is foreign to them. This process of gentrification that is dispossessing local and established communities in London works on two levels: by forcibly removing existing communities, and also by making them feel unwelcome in a community they have lived in for generations. Many residents who are suffering this form of dispossession describe themselves as living on 'reservations' or on 'islands', as one elderly woman told me, in 'a sea of hipsters'.

It seems that social cleansing, social apartheid and social inequality have been accepted as 'common sense' by the political elites of London. There is the notion that London is a special place where the special people live, and if you cannot afford to live in London, you need to leave. However, the unintended consequences of this hard-line neoliberal thinking are that political movements are growing in working-class communities around a class consciousness of struggling in London. This grassroots activism is thriving amongst those groups that are being treated harshly and have very little or no power; they are fighting for their lives and the futures of their children, as we did in 1984 against pit closures. This fight has become especially apparent amongst working-class mothers, who were not politically active until faced with eviction, like the Focus E15 women. There are now campaigns all over London – from Hendon to Lewisham – fighting forced evictions and the unfair inequality and struggles that Londoners are now experiencing in their everyday lives.

2013: THE YEAR OF HOUSING ACTIVISM

During 2013, I wrote a blog for the London School of Economics that was full of hope. I had recently moved to London and become engaged in the London housing movement. I wrote, 'A spectre is haunting London and that spectre is the rumble of grass roots civil disobedience, activism and dare I say a people's anarchism'. I believed this at the time – London on one level was and still is an oppressive, aggressive and hard-to-survive-in place. The global elite had set up camp in London. London had become their playground. Rents are sky high, wages are being pushed down by austerity measures and global competition, and the actual incomes amongst working-class people were falling because of new welfare benefit changes. Yet there was a sense of hope and a real resistance coming from the grass roots, and they were led by young, working-class women. I believed the sense of solidarity and hope during 2013 was connected to being two years away from a general election, and different communities and organisations were forming out of a sense of social justice rather than being divided on party and political lines.