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...