By Sean Benstead (@SigmaAuto420)

 

 

This month is Gypsy, Roma & Traveller (GRT) History Month. The Labour Party have celebrated through the usual lines of communication, with some well-wishing graphics posted across social media. However, on June 1st — day one of the month — Pat Karney, a member of the executive of Manchester City Council, announced on Twitter that a group of travellers had pitched up on an empty field next to an industrial estate in his ward and, he boldly announced, “[t]he authorities have been alerted”. This occurred no longer than 2 months after a front-bench Labour MP, Charlotte Nichols, campaigned to the residents of Warrington on a platform against “traveller incursions” before apologising in a tweet and withdrawing the materials. No disciplinary measures have been taken. GRT History Month, within the context of continued land access revocation and state harassment, is a celebration without liberation. We must use history as a guide to political action.

 

The irony of this is mostly lost on those that view history as a mere recollection of events, or a contemplative exercise in retelling more comfortable stories of cultural confluence. However, for people who witness and experience everyday injustice and wish for a radically different world, we understand history differently. History, for us, is political; it denotes a collective memory of suffering and catastrophe as a method to understand injustice in the present and to guide redemptive action for the future. It is this differing understanding that is why, for example, we did not see any commemoration within the Labour Party for Romani Resistance Day on May 16th; a day that is politically loaded as a call to redeem the losses of the past through contemporary emancipation of those who suffer injustice in the here-and-now. It is also for this reason that it is imperative that we politicise GRT History Month and seize the opportunity to demand political action in the present.

 

Recalling Historical Catastrophe

 

Historical persecution of our GRT communities has always been intertwined with Britain’s historical economic development. Today, many GRT people are non-travelling. However, there was a time in our national history where a larger portion of the population on this island were nomadic, travelling people. That is, until the original sin of capitalist development began to enforce a systematic enclosure and privatisation of common land in a process of accumulation by dispossession. For groups of people that held travelling as a key component of their culture this was an absolute affront which, for some, was not to be given up due to economic and everyday logistical hardship. Many of the existing travelling communities are descendants of those who refused to renounce themselves to cultural negation within the violent economic deluge of the industrial revolution.

 

To enforce enclosure of the commons and a universal resettlement of huge numbers of the emergent proletariat into industrialising areas, the state required a firm legal apparatus- first came the 1554 genocidal Act sentencing Gypsies to the death penalty, then came a wave of less violent laws that consolidated the definition of GRT communities as vagrants with sentences of fines and eviction. For centuries, GRT people then began to travel regimented routes with agreements from local landowners to utilise private land as stopping places, before the 1906 Middlesex County Council Bill imposed penalties on the landowners for such agreements. Since 1980 2/3rds of the remaining traditional stopping places have been sealed off before the 1994 Criminal Justice Act revoked the duty of local authorities to provide sites for GRT communities. GRT people have never had so few places to go.

 

Recalling this uncomfortable history gives us a general framework to understand our contemporary injustices- and we must do this because the battles of yesterday, although they were fought with different weapons and according to different rules, are the same battles fought today. And the enemy has not ceased from being the victor in these battles.

 

Understanding Contemporary Injustice

 

Today, we live in a political economy that has been dominated by neoliberalism as a consolidation of the role that capital has in accumulation by dispossession. It has been written extensively elsewhere that contemporary neoliberal land policy affects seemingly disparate groups within the urban population. Less explored, however, is how this logic affects GRT communities in particular.

 

Contemporary land policy generally follows the same historical trends of restriction and criminalisation. Whilst Manchester City Council boasts of a large traveller site on Dantzic Street in Collyhurst, this site has been deemed unfit for purpose due to environmental risks from flooding of the Irk, in desperate need of repairs and remains under threat after a targeted shotgun attack last year. Furthermore, after years of being eyed by developer hawks, the site is within the development area of the new Victoria North neighbourhoods.

 

Victoria North, a tactical rebranding of the unpopular ‘Victoria Gateway’, is the child of a private-public partnership between the Far East Consortium and Manchester’s local authority. The former is an international real estate company incorporated in the Cayman Islands, whilst the latter has been criticised for providing them with subsidies worth tens of millions and allowing them to roll back on sustainable and affordable housing commitments.

 

The traveller site on Dantzic Street lies within the forthcoming Red Bank neighbourhood, on the meander of the Irk. This particular neighbourhood will consist of “a landmark 37-storey building […] as well as two sister towers, Park View (26 storeys) and City View (18 storeys).”. Given its proximity to the Green Quarter and other luxury residences, we can expect the rent gap produced by speculative land values to be fully exploited on this patch of land. As for a new traveller site to replace the one on Dantzic Street, the future remains unclear. Having reached out to an Executive Member for Housing and Employment within MCC about ecological concerns alongside the worries concerning lack of land access to travellers, the first question was responded to with misplaced enthusiasm whilst the latter was yet to be briefed at all.

 

 

With a recent spike of unauthorised stopping and trespass in Greater Manchester as a result of government policy, we can expect that the GRT community will not renounce their right of access willingly. Nor should they. The Home Office has anticipated general resistance, through mere refusal to move-on, with components of the now-renowned Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The PCSC Bill, vehemently attacked by ‘Kill the Bill’ protests up and down the country, gives fascistic provisions to the police and the courts to seize the homes and property of travellers on unauthorised sites, face up to 3 months in prison and be banned from the area for up to 3 years. The Bill is not only grossly unethical in terms of disproportionality, but also deemed completely ineffective at dealing with the perceived problem by regional police forces.

 

As we have seen, this is not a new frenzy within an increasingly populist Conservative Party to attack the rights of the GRT community, but part of a long historical process of the state to negate the existence of travelling communities on behalf of rent-seeking capital and an intensification of accumulation by dispossession.

 

Acting for Future Redemption

 

A democratic, participatory GM Land Commission would do well to reserve a seat at the table for representatives of the GRT community. This may serve to rebalance the scales of power between the communities and the state-capital machine, but we must also embark on a long, concerted march through the courts too. We must defeat the PCSC Bill and repeal all other existing legislation that exists for the purpose of assaulting the rights and negating the culture of travelling communities on behalf of capital. However, these objectives aren’t achievable overnight, and they require heavy boots-on-the-ground organising as well as strong legal expertise in advocacy roles.

 

What is more easily achievable though is the beginning of an honest and careful engagement with GRT history throughout all echelons of the Labour movement and the party. An honest engagement reveals a process that leads to the present state of affairs and presents us with a guide to political action through understanding that process, its victims, and its agents. Many of our representatives in the Labour movement and the party will be open to this. Undoubtedly, there will also be some who wish to see the complete negation of GRT ways of life in the name of fascistic understandings of national purity and/or for the greasing of the wheels of capital accumulation. We can expel this to the dustbin of history, and we must start within our own movements and our own party. 

 

Dikh he na bista. Opre!

 

Sean Benstead is an active organiser within Labour for a Green New Deal and an associate member of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC).

By Sean Benstead

 

Our report on public land privatisation published two weeks ago has sparked a political debate across our city on how we might better manage our public assets. Here we publish reflections from an organiser at Greater Manchester Labour for a Green New Deal.

 

Earlier this month, the Labour Party suffered one of the worst local election results in its history, accompanied by the devastating, but predictable, loss of a parliamentary seat in the former heartlands. However, here in Greater Manchester, we can tell a different story. Losses were contained and Andy Burnham increased his mandate after taking buses back into public control and publicly backing rent controls, alongside Salford’s Paul Dennett, a socialist with a commitment to the largest council housing project the city has seen in half a century. Following the election, Greater Manchester Labour for a Green New Deal were also enthused to find a cohort of radical, climate-conscious councillors have been elected in a scatter of wards throughout the councils of Greater Manchester.

 

Yet in Greater Manchester, the local government and city apparatus is failing to act in our collective interests. Our green belt is torn up as the climate and biodiversity crises thunder-on unabated. Landlords and property managers salivate at increasing land values as jobless tenants are evicted. Speculators hoard land as the waiting lists for housing skyrocket. Global financial capital offload surpluses into locally-unaffordable luxury apartments as occupied flats fall into disrepair. Manchester council celebrates the permanent pedestrianisation of a bustling Northern Quarter as disabled and older people lack the basic infrastructure to move freely and live independent, dignified lives.

 

These are not disparate struggles with unrelated causes. There is a common cause to be found among the priced-out renter, the green belt resident, the local first-time buyer and those that lack access to basic infrastructure. The root driver behind many of these struggles is the same; that capital is given free reign over the city, aided and abetted by a compliant local government that is guided by yesterday's neoliberal logic. The basic foundation of that logic holds that human well-being is best advanced by the maximisation of entrepreneurial freedoms, within an institutional framework characterised by unencumbered markets. In the urban context, this means that the economic development of the city-region has been geared towards the exploitation and expansion of particular assets to the end of capturing value for global, unaccountable networks of financial capital.

 

As the recent ‘Who Owns the City’ report reveals, local government has been responsible for the disposal of large tracts of economically, socially and ecologically valuable land to unaccountable international financial firms. One such firm is the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG- owned by the Deputy Prime Minister of the U.A.E), who the council handed over New Islington and many more hectares of Ancoats, including the recent site for a proposed car park, defeated by climate campaigners in the midst of a declared climate emergency. As the patchy data sets released by the council already reveal, much of the land is passed into the hands of developers for as little as £1 (one pound) per lease with no return on extracted rents or local value capture.

 

Despite the turn to interventionist rhetoric, the Tory central government’s planned legislation for Planning Reform is a consolidation of this socially and ecologically dangerous logic on a national scale. Whilst Labour for a Green New Deal have proposals for socially just, green land reform through legislation that facilitates schemes of Community Right-to-Buy, we cannot wait in hope for the Labour Party to take parliamentary power and enact the radical changes we need before 2024. Independent of the Labour Party vehicle, a coalition of movements has formed around our shared struggles to demand the establishment of a Land Commission for the democratic oversight of planning decisions relating to public land disposal. 

 

We must collectively maintain concerted pressure on our local elected representatives, from our ward councillors to the GMCA, to see these commitments enacted on the ground. Greater Manchester Labour for a Green New Deal are proud to join a formidable coalition of 60 organisations to call on Andy Burnham to establish a GM Land Commission this year, in accordance with his manifesto commitments. However our shared struggle to defend our communities and environment goes much further beyond this objective. We can put an end to the zombie of neoliberal urban development through demanding our collective Right to democratic oversight over urban planning decisions that affect our communities, our homes, our livelihoods and our environment.

 

Proclaiming a Right to the City demands nothing short of a complete overhaul of the planning process and rebuilding it into a truly democratic, community-led, deliberative process: with community power over decisions regarding the investment of surplus, the use and sale of public land as well as development plans on ecologically essential tracts. This requires a shared strategy, and we are in no illusions that reconciling some differences and ideas will be easy. So let’s get on with the hard work now and defend our communities for the next generation.

 

Cover images shows a 1945 imagining of what the Manchester urban scape would look like in 2045, sourced from this article.

 

Sean Benstead is an organiser for Greater Manchester Labour for a Green New Deal.

By Alva Gotby 

 

It is hard to deny that we are facing a crisis of evictions and homelessness. Right now we’re in a period of waiting for the crisis to happen, as it’s being temporarily held at bay by some minimal protections for renters. At least until the end of May, most tenants will get a 6 month notice period if they are served an eviction notice. This means that people will be able to stay in their homes for a long period of time after receiving an eviction notice – especially if they wait for their landlord to take them to court for a possession hearing, which can be a lengthy process. This small victory would not have been possible without the joint effort of the housing movement and its allies. Together, housing organisations forced the government to put some measures in place to protect renters, despite long standing Tory loyalty to landlord lobby organisations such as the National Residential Landlords Association.

 

While we should celebrate these victories, they are temporary, and they don’t address the causes of evictions and homelessness. Renters in this country have few legal rights, and an extension of the notice period will do nothing to solve this underlying problem. Perhaps more significantly, the imbalance of power between landlords and renters means that many eviction cases won’t go to a possession hearing or even be based on a valid eviction notice – many renters simply leave when their landlord tells them to do so. Landlords often rely on harassment and intimidation if their tenants don’t leave, which is illegal but often difficult to prove. Police tend to help landlords evict their tenants illegally, perhaps instinctively acting as the protectors of private property even when the law is on the side of tenants.

 

This means that unless the government takes unprecedented measures to protect renters, undoing the legacy of all governments in this country since at least the 1980s, many renters will be forced to leave their homes. This crisis is but a symptom of several deeper crises – the public health crisis, the economic crisis, and the preexisting housing crisis. We might begin to question the validity of the language of “crisis” when the so-called housing crisis in particular is a more or less permanent condition, one that has marked working-class lives for decades. The term crisis, while helpful in instilling a sense of political urgency, inevitably gestures towards a moment before the crisis – a time of normalcy. In the imagination of the broad left, that time was the moment before neoliberalism and austerity, when the state took responsibility for attending to people’s housing needs. While there is some truth to this account, we cannot let the framing of “crisis” lead us to a politics which simply demands a return to pre-crisis normalcy. Such politics can’t address the fact that housing politics, and welfare politics more broadly, have always been built on very limited ideas of what constitutes “good-enough” homes for the working class, as well as a specific understanding of what constitutes a “good” domestic life.

 

***

 

Perhaps it’s more useful to consider all of these crises as expressions of underlying contradictions of capitalism, and in particular the contradiction of social reproduction. The term social reproduction means the processes through which the working class survives and ensures its own replacement through new generations of workers. Capitalist society relies on the existence of relatively (physically and mentally) healthy workers, where “health” equals the ability to perform a job at an average standard. Yet capitalist accumulation also pushes against this, by routinely placing the wages of many workers below subsistence levels and resisting the funding of reproductive services and resources through taxation on profits.

 

A home is supposedly where we rest and restore our capacity to work. Housing is of great importance for the ability of the working class to reproduce itself, and therefore for the continued existence of capitalism itself. When in the 19th century the British working class became almost incapable of reproducing itself, this was not only because of the conditions of overwork that Marx details in Capital, but also because of the extreme conditions under which they lived. In the slums, malnutrition, contagious diseases and the lack of adequate sanitation led to high levels of infant mortality as well as a low life expectancy for those who survived childhood.

 

The crisis was temporarily resolved through slum clearance and the creation of the working-class housewife. This shift was made possible through bourgeois philanthropy, which aimed to replace slums with more respectable housing and simultaneously impose new norms around health, sexuality, and domestic labour. The increasingly private working-class home became a site of reproductive, feminised labour separated from the sphere of production. In middle- and upper-class homes, working-class servants performed the work of reproduction, while bourgeois housewives were responsible for the ethical and spiritual guidance of their husbands and children. The modern notion of home has always been a site for the exploitation of servant labour, often both feminised and racialised. Today we see this in the employment of live-in carers and nannies – often migrants who suffer extremely low pay and overwork as well as sexual, emotional and physical abuse. The bourgeois construction of the domestic sphere – as a haven in a heartless world – serves to obscure these forms of exploitation.

 

The contradiction of reproduction under capitalism was “solved” through the devaluation of feminised reproductive labour, especially when performed by working-class and/or racialised women. In the 20th century, the creation of the welfare state supplemented the labours of the private household through institutions such as education and health care. That welfare state employed many migrant, black and brown working-class women to perform draining and low-paid forms of reproductive labour within elder care, child care, and health care, while middle-class white women later found employment in more professionalised and managerial positions of the same sectors.

 

The household has always been reliant on the labour of others in order to survive – whether those others be servants, neighbours, relatives, friends, nannies, or public sector workers. And yet the home appears as an intensely private place. Successive British governments throughout most of the 20th century were committed to building homes for the working class – all of which were based on a particular vision of what family and reproductive labour should look like. We are now in a moment where this model of housing and family has almost disappeared. Council homes have been sold off, young people can’t afford to buy homes, and particularly in the larger cities, they can’t afford to start families either. And yet, this political moment continues to rely on ideological notions of the home and the family as the sites of care. As Sophie Lewis has noted, the current crisis has served to reprivatise the household through the imperative to stay at home. The family appears as the natural unit of care and the world outside the house seems threatening, and the private household appears as “the prime location of security in our societies”. But as Lewis insists, the home isn’t a safe place. Other than being a site of the exploitation of reproductive labour, it is also a very violent place for many, who suffer physical, psychological, and sexual violence at the hands of their family members. The current crisis has led to an increase in domestic violence, often aimed at those who have been made responsible for attending to the needs of others. Queer and trans people are also vulnerable to the violence of the heterosexist, nuclear family. Moreover, the idealised notion of the family serves to stigmatise many people, especially migrants and people of colour, who have been systematically excluded from the white, bourgeois ideal of domesticity.

 

This model of the family is closely tied to private property, and especially home ownership. A home is something to aspire to, something to buy for one’s family. Owning a home, preferably a suburban one-family house, is the great sign of being protected, of having made it. It is something that your children can inherit, and which will ensure that they will in turn make it. The home is seen as an asset that never loses value. In turn the rented flat is often seen as a temporary step towards homeownership – where young people live with friends before they settle down and start a family. This idea of a progression from renting to ownership and family life is a fantasy, especially as many people in cities will forever be stuck in a private rented sector, which is built on the legally enforced precariousness of tenants. Rented accommodation often has a sense of being merely temporary, either because you will eventually be one of the lucky ones who can buy property, or because your landlord can decide to evict you at any time.

 

It is not surprising that many people dream of moving out from rented accommodation, and having a home of their own. The unaffordability of renting in itself places very severe limitations on our choices. Renters have little control over our living situations – where we live, with whom, and under what conditions. Only very privileged renters can afford to live under conditions which they have chosen – the rest of us have to pick between more or less undesirable options according to what we can pay for. For many, this means living with strangers in overcrowded flats. The pandemic has also led to increased tensions among renters in shared properties, who often have little say over who they live with. The dream of having a home of one’s own, where you won’t be evicted and no one can disturb you, is in many ways a rational response to the conditions under which we live.

 

Yet homeownership for all is not the solution to any of the problems outlined above. Not one of the many contradictions that constitute working-class life can be solved by finding “affordable” models of private property. We delude ourselves if we believe that we can remove ourselves from the symptoms of the contradiction inherent in the housing system by participating in that very system. This much is obvious to many people on the left. But what we also need to make clear is that returning to the model of council housing which dominated the 20th century is also not an adequate option for the housing movement. While some Labour councils and more radical architects in the post-war era wanted to create more communal forms of life, none of them fundamentally challenged the privatisation of the household. And while the more affordable rent of council housing made renting more attractive for many than home ownership, they strove for a “fairer” rent rather than the abolition rent extraction. The homes provided by the state during the course of the 20th century were in many cases small, poorly built, and reliant on restrictive notions of domestic labour and the nuclear family. While a council might be a better landlord than your average Buy to Let investor, there’s no such thing as a good landlord. The narrative of the “housing crisis” risks creating a nostalgic vision of post-war council housing, which overlooks the fact that the welfare state and its model of housing were an attempt to solve the problem of capitalist social reproduction – one that continued to rely on very restrictive notions of what a home should look like and what labour should take place within it. It’s easy to create dichotomies of bad private landlords versus good council homes, but there has never been a model of housing under capitalism that has actually served the needs of all parts of the working class.

 

All of this should make us think beyond the merely defensive model of housing activism – one that is focused on resolving the current crisis and returning to “normal”. Of course, if there is a wave of post-COVID evictions, we’ll need to resist. Doing eviction prevention and resistance – defending renters’ ability to stay in their homes even after they have received an eviction notice – will be a key way of protecting the lives of working-class people and building power in the coming months and years. Similarly, rent caps could limit the profitability of being a landlord, making it a less attractive form of exploitation. Housing discrimination against people of colour, migrants, queer people, disabled people and benefit claimants needs to be resisted. The government’s hostile environment policies, which makes landlords act as border guards, must be abolished. All these things are urgent, and means that the housing movement often has its hands full. But in order to truly resist the current state of things we also need to rethink what a home could be. This means going beyond both home ownership and affordable social housing as solutions to the housing crisis – models which have always presumed not only the commodification of housing but normative family models and privatised reproductive labour.

 

In their very design, most of our current homes are built for nuclear families, with 3 or 4 bedrooms. In Britain, many people live in one-family houses with its own garden. Each house or flat has its own kitchen, presuming that reproductive labour such as cooking will happen in private. The current arrangement of the domestic sphere is naturalised – it appears as depoliticised, dehistoricised and inherently good. The very notion of bourgeois domesticity, and the bourgeois idea of a good life, depends on a separation of the private sphere from the public. The household must therefore appear to be something separate from the society around it. This hides the labour and the violence that takes place within the household. It is often assumed, even on the left, that the private family home is what all people aspire to. When there is conflict within house shares or housing cooperatives, that is often taken as a sign that more communal forms of living are not possible, and that communal domestic arrangements are inherently more conflictual than the private nuclear family. But when the private nuclear family home is a site of violence, that is taken to be an aberration from an otherwise healthy and desirable arrangement of our domestic lives.

 

***

 

It’s important that in our struggle against evictions and protections against the worst aspects of the private rented sector, we don’t glamourise the ideal of a safe, private home. The challenge for the housing movement lies in the question of how to do housing activism without glorifying the notion of home, how to struggle both for and against the idea that a stable and secure home is the key to our flourishing. While we build our power to protect ourselves from landlords, we need to remember that the home itself is not an unproblematic place, which should simply be defended. The domestic sphere as we know it is insufficient, sometimes actively harmful, and no amount of control over this space will allow working-class lives to flourish. Neither will a return to post-war social democratic housing policy solve the contradictions of everyday life that we’re facing. While organising to protect each other from evictions, high rents, and disrepair, we also need to dream of a better life for all of us, where home is not a delineated site marked by violence and exploitation. The idea of home as a private space needs to be challenged in everything we do.

 

In our struggle to build a movement around housing, we should aim to foster spaces where we can think collectively about what housing could be, beyond the confines of capitalist models of domesticity. This would be the development of a deeper engagement with housing politics – not only a struggle over the number of homes built and how much they cost to buy or rent, but an exploration of the design of homes and what kind of household structure they presume. The material structures of housing, in terms of its design and modes of ownership, both shape and are shaped by normative models of family and reproductive labour. The housing movement could be a space for breaking down the boundaries of the private/public distinction, expanding housing politics into a broader struggle over daily life. In politicising housing, we can also challenge idealised but violent and exclusionary logics of family and property.

 

 

Alva Gotby is a feminist theorist researching social reproduction, queer Marxism, labour and emotion. She holds a PhD from the University of West London. Her thesis ‘They Call it Love – Wages for Housework and Emotional Reproduction’ explores the writings of the Wages for Housework movement and outlines a theory of the role of emotion in capitalist social reproduction and the reproduction of gendered differences. She is currently working on a book on the same topic. Alva is also active in political struggles related to housing and prison abolition.

By Isaac Rose (@_isaacrose)

 

It has been remarked that one of the best ways to understand the political composition of the grouping within Manchester Labour which control the Council is that they represent the ‘political wing of the construction sector’. This is suggested too by GMHA’s research: from a failure to collect S106 contributions from developers, to opaque disposals of public land, we have revealed a Council which appears to consistently put the interests and profit margins of the real estate lobby first. We see this every day in the rapidly transforming skyline of the city.

 

Manchester is hardly unique in this respect. Across the country, the deep links between Councils and the property lobby is well documented. Property fairs such as MIPIM Cannes allow councillors to escape the humdrum of local government administration, and rub shoulders with a moneyed global elite. Public land is parcelled up and sold off; communities displaced; and our cities handed over to the imperatives of private capital.

 

Though the entanglement of property developers and the higher echelons of the Council is intuitively known by the people of Manchester, rarely has there been a more perfect crystallisation of this relationship than in the latest career move of former Hulme councillor and deputy leader of the council, Nigel Murphy.

 

Last week the news broke that Murphy — fresh out of a job, having not been the Labour candidate in Hulme in the most recent elections, owing to his deselection by the branch two years ago in favour of tenant organiser Ekua Bayunu — had just been hired for PR firm Cratus Communications.

 

Cratus is known for recruiting into its teams former and sitting councillors across the country. The company was named in a report last year from Transparency International, which looked into the revolving door between public officials and developers, concluding that planning decisions by Councils were ‘open to corruption’.

 

Murphy, whose former responsibilities at the Council included overseeing its land portfolio and who was once talked up in the business press as a potential replacement for Richard Leese, has now slid seamlessly into working for the lobbyists who right now are contracted to Curlew Opportunities. Curlew are the developers seeking to turn the former Gamecock pub into a 13 storey Purpose Build Student Accommodation block. The proposals have attracted significant opposition from residents.

 

Across Hulme, the response to Murphy’s new role has been indignation. Sally Casey, chair of the Aquarius Tenants and Residents Association and an organiser of the Block the Block campaign group opposing the PBSA plans for the Gamecock, has expressed her “disgust” at Murphy having “gone from being deputy leader of the Council and representative of Hulme, to being executive of Cratus.”

 

“Cratus, who present themselves as a PR company but are in reality property lobbyists working to procure planning permission for an unnecessary and unwanted thirteen story block of student accommodation, which will damage a long-standing community, and which may never even be filled.”

 

Casey also cast doubt upon Cratus’ claims that Murphy ‘is not and will not be working on any element of the former Gamecock pub application whilst it is being determined by Manchester City Council’. “It seems hard to believe. This appointment raises a number of important questions. How long has this hire been in the pipeline? What conversations has Murphy been having with Cratus and Curlew on the Gamecock Planning Application?”

 

Kim Jocelyn, secretary of the Hulme Labour Party, echoed Casey, saying “I wasn’t greatly surprised at the news that Nigel's new role involved fronting publicly for a lobbying company with an interest in Hulme.”

 

“One of the key reasons that myself and a number of other Labour Party members in Hulme wanted to take the opportunity to replace him as Councillor, during the 2019 selection process, was because he had been neither present for nor supportive of residents in confrontations between the needs of local people and those of developers. It was increasingly being left to Lee-Ann and Annette, Hulme's two other Councillors to stand up and speak up against developers where their plans would impact negatively on local communities.’

 

“Now we have Ekua Bayunu in place of Nigel, as our third Councillor. Ekua has already been openly vocal in support of Block the Block, the campaign against a Curlew proposed development that would see a 13 storey block of student-specific accomodation on the site of the disused Gamecock pub. Whether Nigel is directly involved with this particular development in Hulme or not is besides the point: Curlew focus on Purpose Built Student Accomodation; any other development in Hulme would therefore have the same focus and Curlew Capital are a client of Cratus. Local people are saying in increasing number, loudly and clearly ‘enough is enough when it comes to student blocks in Hulme’. I think it's hugely disappointing when someone uses the experience that had been entrusted to them by their local electorate to furnish their onward career at the expense of that very electorate. It's a betrayal of trust.”

 

Going further, Jocelyn proposed action to tackle the endemic revolving door between local government an the property lobby: “I would like to see imposed a two year gap between politicians, locally and Nationally, ending their political role and being able to take work related to that role within the constituency that they have served.”

 

Isaac Rose is a housing organiser in Manchester.

61 organisations, including housing and climate groups, trade unions and charities, have signed an open letter to Andy Burnham calling for a democratic approach to managing public land in Greater Manchester. We publish the letter in full below.

Email gmhousingaction@gmail.com to add your organisation.

 

To Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester,

 

A new report by researchers from the Universities of Manchester and Sheffield reveals that Manchester City Council is leasing large amounts of public land to developers in order to enable the construction of unaffordable luxury apartments in the city centre.

 

Greater Manchester is facing a housing crisis: there were 98,898 households on the housing waiting list in 2019, an increase of 98% since 1997. Manchester City Council’s own policy states that all new developments should contain 20% affordable units. However, the report reveals that public land in Manchester city centre is being used for private developments that contain no affordable or social housing. 

 

In light of the pandemic, and with the ever-growing threat of climate change, the need for public green space has acquired a new urgency. Central Manchester in particular has a notable shortage of green spaces, with recent disputes over New Islington Green and the former Central Ancoats Retail Park sitting high in the headlines over the last year. But this issue isn’t limited to the city centre — across the region communities have been contesting plans to build on green space.

 

The report calls for greater transparency and accountability over public land ownership and use. It recommends the establishment of a participatory Land Commission to oversee public land use, along the lines of that set out by Liverpool City Region in 2020. This recommendation was also made by the Greater Manchester Independent Inequalities Commission. 

 

We the undersigned welcome the inclusion of a Greater Manchester Land Commission as a policy pledge in your manifesto for this year’s mayoral election. We believe your victory gives you a clear mandate to take this work forward, and we call on you to establish a Land Commission with participation from local housing campaigners and organisations committed to climate justice by the end of December 2021. 

 

Signed,

 

Greater Manchester Housing Action

 

ACORN Manchester

All Black Lives

Aytoun Barks Back

Block the Block

Bolton Against Covid Evictions

Britannia Basin Community Forum

Bury People's Assembly

CORE Independents

Climate Emergency Manchester

Extinction Rebellion Trafford

Friends of Angel Meadow

Friends of Carrington Moss

Friends of Longford Park

Friends of Ryebank Fields

Friends of Tangshutt

Friends of Turn Moss

Greater Manchester Labour for a Green New Deal

Greater Manchester Law Centre

Greater Manchester Socialist Education Association

Greater Manchester Tenants Union

Greater Manchester Unite the Union Community Branch

Hamerton Action Group

Hulme Community Forum

Love Old Trafford Society

Macintosh Village Management Limited

Manchester District National Education Union (NEU)

Manchester Friends of the Earth

Manchester Green Party

Manchester Liberal Democrats

Manchester Momentum

Manchester People’s Assembly

Manchester Trades Union Council

MCFC Fans Foodbank Support

Middleton Cooperating

Moss Side Tenants Union

Myco: Manchester Mushroom Cooperative

NEU Co-op Academy Manchester

Northern Quarter Forum

Partisan Collective

PCS Associate and Retired Members Greater Manchester

Positive Money

Queers Support the Migrants North

Salford Trades Union Council

Save Apethorn & Bowlacre Greenbelt

Save Greater Manchester Greenbelt

Save Manchester’s Greenbelt

Save Our Greenspace

Seymour Grove Allotments, Old Trafford

Shelter Greater Manchester

Sisters Uncut Manchester

SOS - Save Our Slattocks

Steady State Manchester

Stockport and District Momentum

Stockport Tenants Union

Stockport Trades Union Council

The Kindling Trust

Thornham St John Neighbourhood Forum

Trafford Ryebank Residents Association

Trees Not Cars Manchester

Walk Ride Greater Manchester

 

By Greater Manchester Housing Action

 

A new report by researchers from the Universities of Manchester and Sheffield, in collaboration with Greater Manchester Housing Action, raises concerns about the privatisation of Council-owned land in central Manchester.

 

The report highlights a lack of transparency around public land deals and questions whether Manchester City Council is getting value for money when disposing of its land assets to private developers. The report estimates that Manchester may be paying nine times more for land in the rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods of Ancoats and New Islington than it has received in revenue for land in the same neighbourhood. In some cases, prime city centre land appears to have been leased to developers for hundreds of years for free, or a nominal amount of £1.

 

The researchers ask additional questions about the use of public land to build luxury apartments that are unaffordable to the majority of Manchester’s residents. Despite the Council’s own policy that all new developments should include 20% affordable units, the report identifies numerous developments on public land that contain no social or affordable housing.

 

One striking case identified by the researchers is ‘Oxygen’: a £82 million, 32-storey luxury apartment complex that includes a gym, cinema room, 25-metre swimming pool and 5-star spa. According to data obtained by the researchers through the Freedom of Information Act, and cross-references with Land Registry data, the Council leased land that matches the address of the Oxygen site to Store Street Developments (a company registered at the address of the Property Alliance Group) for a total of £1. No affordable or social housing provision is included in this development.

 

The report also raises concerns about the Council’s ‘Manchester Life’ partnership with Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), the private equity company owned by Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates. The report estimates that over 4 hectares of public land have been transferred to ADUG in order to build over 1400 housing units, none of which are classed as affordable On top of this, it has been reported in a Sunday Times investigation that the Council receives none of the rental income from Manchester Life’s property portfolio.

 

The report highlights three major issues regarding public land privatisation in Manchester.

• The lack of transparency around public land ownership and use in Manchester. 
• Whether the Council is doing all it can to get value for money for the public when disposing of its land assets. 
• The character of urban development that is enabled by public land privatisation.

 

The report calls for Andy Burnham to use his strong new mandate to follow the example of Liverpool City Region and establish a Greater Manchester Land Commission. This would mean that that representatives of the public, private and voluntary sectors and academia can develop proposals for how best to use public land in order to address social and environmental needs.

 

The research was undertaken by Dr Tom Gillespie (University of Manchester) and Dr Jon Silver (University of Sheffield) in collaboration with Greater Manchester Housing Action.

 

You can download the report here.

 

By Greater Manchester Housing Action

 

On the 15^th April an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Berlin renters took to the streets to protest against the Federal Constitutional Courts decision to void Berlin’s attempt to stop rising rents and community displacement.

 

The ruling was a sad day for those carving out the dialogue and fight for rent controls in cities in the UK. The response in Berlin from the left and the housing movement provides hope, and the importance of multi-faceted solutions to tackle housing inequality.

 

The below statement in response to the rent cap ruling from DIE LINKE (left party) outlines what comes next after the voiding of rent controls.

 

A Bitter Setback for Tenants - Federal Government Must Act

 

Members of the Bundestag from the CDU (conservative party) and FDP (liberal party) have filed a lawsuit against Berlin's rent cap (rent freeze, limitation on new rentals and reduction of overpriced rents) before the Federal Constitutional Court. The Federal Constitutional Court ruled on the 15^th April and announced that the State of Berlin does not have the necessary legal competence in the area of housing and that the Berlin rent cap is therefore invalid.

 

 

1. Initial Situation

 

The rent cap was an act of self-defence against Berlin's rent madness. We broke new legal ground and had good reasons for doing so. In view of the situation of many Berliners and their fear of displacement, we simply could not afford not to try.

 

 

2. On the Decision of the Federal Constitutional Court

 

We note the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court with great regret. For Berlin tenants, but also for the federal states as a whole, the decision is a bitter setback. This is because the Constitutional Court has thus ruled that the possibility of limiting rents does not fall under the state's competence for housing.

 

Berlin is the hotspot on the rental market nationwide; nowhere else have rents exploded so much in recent years. For years, the federal government of the CDU (conservative party) and SPD (social democrats) has refused to react seriously to the rapidly increasing rents. The national federal rent brake (Mietpreisbremse) does not provide adequate protection for tenants against exorbitant rent increases and displacement.

 

The fact that the Federal Constitutional Court has also ruled that it is null and void and that, contrary to the summary court decision, tenants will now have to make repayments is completely incomprehensible against the background of the principle of the welfare state. We will work to ensure that the state of Berlin supports particularly low income tenants in making back payments.

 

 

3. Perspectives and Options for Action

 

In Berlin

 

We do not see the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court as a call to sit back and relax. We will continue to look for creative ways and exhaust all legal options to curb rents in Berlin. We will continue to work to expand the stock of public and public-interest housing through re-municipalization of as many apartments as possible, "milieu protection" (an instrument to protect local neighbourhoods from gentrification) and building of affordable new housing.

 

A part of the city's housing movement has set out on the path to socialize and expropriate back the large real estate corporations in Berlin by means of a referendum ("Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen", find more on the initiative here). There is no reason for us to slacken in all these efforts for an affordable Berlin for all. The direction of our rent policy will not change by a millimetre as a result of the ruling from the Federal Constitutional Court.

 

 

At the Federal Level

 

With the Berlin rent cap, we have shown that rising rents are not a law of nature. Politics can intervene in the market and regulate it instead of capitulating to it. However, it is now clear that this must and can be regulated at the federal level. The CDU and SPD must now finally act. A social tenancy law at the federal level fails again and again because of the politics of the CDU. The fact that the CDU prefers to make deals with the real estate lobby instead of standing up for tenants is also shown by the generous donations from the real estate industry to the Berlin CDU.

 

With the rent cap, DIE LINKE has taken a path that is unique in the Germany and has opposed the profit madness in housing. But the ruling from Federal Constitutional Court says: the state of Berlin may not enact such a regulation, but the federal government could if it wanted to. In the general election in September, therefore, this ruling will also determine whether or not a nationwide rent cap will be introduced in fall.

 

For us it is therefore clear: for a social tenancy law, a nationwide rent cap or an opening clause that allows the states to limit rents, we need a consistent change of policy in the federal government and a strong LEFT party.

 

This is a translation from the Statement from the Berlin section of the left Party (DIE LINKE) in response to the rent cap ruling.

 

Special thanks for edits & translation from Die Linke Berlin Board Member - Moritz Warnke.

 

Last year we published a piece exploring the Berlin rent controls in depth. You can read that here.

By Vik Chechi-Ribeiro (@VikCR86)

 

In October, Vik wrote a piece for GMHA titled ‘Trade Unions, workers and the housing struggle’ where he outlined the need for joint organising between trade unions and renter unions. Here we publish a follow up piece, reflecting on activity that has taken place since that article; and sketching further avenues of activity and inquiry. While the range of his analysis extends beyond the renters movement, the arguments deserve careful consideration by organisers in renter unions, trade unions and beyond.

 

Introduction

 

In this piece I will outline three strategies to advance class struggles: whole worker organising, a militant minority strategy and building an organisation of organisers. I conclude by positing the need for a party form capable of cohering and consolidating power through organised struggle.  

 

These are organisational questions that must be addressed if we’re serious about building class power. The lessons of the last four years are our weaknesses as a movement within our institutions — the lack of socialist presence in the workplace and community or organisation to develop and unite struggles. How do we reflect and respond to these challenges?

 

Whole worker organising

 

Whole worker organising, whilst popularised by Jane McAlevey’s ‘Strike school’ training, is a form of explicitly political organising with its roots in socialist and communist movements. This is the concept that organising should develop workers politically through struggle in all its forms. The role of organisers is not inventing struggles out of thin air but cohering and amplifying struggles. The ones at the sharp end of oppression such as in the workplace, housing or policing should be the ones leading it. 

 

For example there is a growing organised movement against policing and state violence in Manchester including Sisters Uncut, Northern Police Monitoring Project, Kids of Colour and Resistance Lab. While it’s not for trade union organisers to supplant grassroots organising but to provide a platform, they should seek to use their unions’ reach and resources to build a coalition.

 

There is an increasingly confident and politicised housing movement in Manchester with organisations such as GMHA, Acorn Manchester and the Greater Manchester Tenants Union building membership, capacity and political education over the last 12 months. Therefore any whole worker organising engaged by my trade union (Manchester National Education Union) should seek to engage education workers through collective struggle on policing and housing.

 

Any discussion on organising out of necessity must include the climate crisis and environment. In our city, Trees Not Cars, Climate Emergency Manchester, Extinction Rebellion (though we must be critical of their politics and attitudes to policing) and Labour for the Green New Deal have all led mass actions and campaigns. 

 

But how can trade unions joint organise with social movements? Workers are exploited in multiple ways particularly in the workplace, housing and policing. We can develop stronger trade unionists by understanding liberation from the boss, landlord and police officer only comes through collective and politicised struggle. 

 

The first question our trade union would need to answer is: what are the benefits of whole worker organising when there’s a health & safety crisis in schools with pay and contracts to collectively bargain on? 

 

To answer that question we must reflect on the challenges faced by the trade union movement and ask if we’re satisfied. It’s vital we’re not complacent with increases in membership during the pandemic as too many workplaces are not organised with the relationship between workers and trade unions passive and disconnected. 

 

Significant numbers of workers consider their union a service and insurance policy to protect individuals at times of need. If we’re truly to challenge the injustices in society, our trade unions must be the ‘school of struggle’ for workers, a site of radical political education, a collective organ for the democratic running of workplaces. 

 

Furthermore there is a disconnect between trade unionism and social movements in a period increasingly defined by authoritarianism, racism, exploitative housing and the climate crisis. A trade union cannot collectively bargain on a dying planet or in a society without the freedom of assembly. 

 

To build the trade union movement into what it should be — a rank and file organisation of the working class capable of leveraging and winning power — it must unite with social movements currently stronger and more energetic than itself in order to gain confidence and build its own militancy.

 

To borrow from Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the greater the understanding of the oppression surrounding you and reimagining of ourselves as part of a collective struggle, the deeper the commitment and confidence to dismantle it.

 

Organising since October

 

In the piece I had written in October I had identified the need for joint work between trade and tenants unions. I had spent that period learning from comrades in the housing movements about their demands and organising activities — eviction resistance, student rent strikes and the financialisation of housing. These are clearly also pressing issues for education workers: commuting long distances to work due to gentrification, paying extortionate amounts to parasitic landlords, working with children living in poverty and cramped accommodation due to the housing market

 

A trade union is an organisation for the workers and led by the workers. For it to ignore the salient issue of housing is poor organising and reflects a movement not serious about winning. A trade union movement in cities and towns with strong renters and social housing organisations is more likely to be composed of more militant and confident members. Therefore a whole worker organising approach uniting trade union and social movements is the serious path to ‘winning in the workplace’ more than vaguely encouraging workers to ‘join a union’. 

 

Furthermore whole worker organising brings in wider and younger layers of the trade union into workplace meetings. This strengthens the capacity to collectively bargain on more traditional issues. 

 

To launch this stream of work, we organised a ‘Housing and education’ political education event bringing together comrades from our trade union, Acorn and Greater Manchester Tenants Union. This aimed to: educate workers about housing organising activities, gain confidence and belief in militant action, encourage workers to join housing organisations and finally setting up a NEU housing committee. 

 

Since then our newly formed housing committee is planning a further political education event on the GMHA pamphlet, ‘The Myth of a Good Landlord’.

 

Organisation of organisers

 

During the same period as meeting with housing organisers to develop a sense of shared struggle, it was clear the need for organisers across the movement in Manchester to do likewise. The last four years has seen a layer of organisers developed politically as socialists that understood the need to build class power that spanned across workplace and community. 

 

There are several questions on building what can be described as ‘organisation of organisers’ that is centred on whole worker organising. What potential was there for collaboration between trade unions and community organisations? What training and resources are needed to upscale joint organising across the city? Could an organisation eventually have the capacity to act independently to intervene and lead struggles?

 

Our first step was mapping and having conversations with rank & file and staff organisers in trade unions and community groups across Manchester. This was followed by setting up an ‘organisers summit’. The aim of the summit was to develop a network that could:

 

• Highlight the need for grassroots and rank and file co-ordination across our movement
• Develop a socialist organisers network across Greater Manchester
• Explore commonality in struggles in order to unite workplace and community organising 
• Develop the organising capacity of individual organisations through sharing and developing organising methods and grassroots coalition building  
• Encourage affiliation and developing the capacity of Trades Councils 

 

The event brought together comrades from across the movement including trade unions, housing and anti-racist organisations to identify joint organising opportunities and training. 

 

There was a clear sense to focus on organising outside electoral politics. This resulted in the formation of the ‘Greater Manchester Socialist Organisers Network’.

 

Strike school training

 

Myself and other comrades in Manchester had attended Jane McAlevy’s international strike school in October. This had a significant impact on merging socialist politics with a strong worker led organising philosophy. To build socialism as organisers we must focus on developing cadre and the democratic capacities of workers particularly trusting, empowering and developing the rank and file through politicised struggle. As CLR James once said, ‘every cook can govern’. 

 

In order to do so, our union branch decided to follow NEU Bristol and run a local‘ strike school’ - we had the resources, platform and institutional reputation across the city. However we invited organisers across other trade unions and community groups. This explicit ‘whole worker organising’ training benefited our trade union members being in proximity with workers in community struggles. Furthermore a strong working class movement benefits every organisation and their organisers. 

 

The training was publicised across the ‘Greater Manchester Socialist Organisers Network’, and labour movement. Our cohort of thirty organisers participated in three sessions covering structured organising conversations, use of empowering language, organic leader identification, mapping, charting, big bargaining and whole worker organising. 

 

Critical pedagogical techniques were used with training delivered by fellow organisers, plenty of opportunities for dialogue and materials adapted to reflect the organising backgrounds of the participants. The outcome were organisers across Manchester with an increased capacity to shape struggles in workplaces, communities, housing and transport. 

 

Next steps

 

The strategies I’ve outlined provide a model for organisers outside our city to follow. The trade union movement should use its resources, training capacity and reach across workplaces to support cohering a movement united in struggle. There is particular space for coalition building in housing, policing and the climate crisis.

 

However, what is to be done now? What are the next steps?

 

After success in developing an ‘organisation of organisers’ and delivering deep organising training across Manchester, the next logical step is strategising and cohering struggles in order to build political power. 

 

To answer this question I spent the Christmas holidays engaging in a lot of political education on organisation and leadership. Two books particularly inspired me. 

 

‘Our Flag Stays Red’ written by Communist MP and organiser Phil Piratin was written during a period of huge working class mobilisation and organisation. Here was a political figure that emerged from social movements and through his local Communist Party branch engaged in whole worker organising on housing and anti-fascism. The result was an organisation strong and co-ordinated enough to deliver mass mobilisation at the Battle of Cable Street. What lessons can be drawn today? That political leverage will develop through uniting struggles in policing, housing and the climate crisis. And developing movements will result in class confidence and militancy capable of its own independent political expression.

 

 

Whole worker organising and building commonality through struggle will organically present the opportunities for building working class organisations (‘putting a name’ to those in struggle coming together) and in turn political power. However it cannot be nebulous or diffuse — structure must exist to track development, co-learn, discuss and reflect on strategy across various sites of struggle. 

 

But how to build class power and strategise organising during a period of neoliberalism defined by hollowed out working class institutions? The second book I read was ‘Red State Revolt’ detailing the teacher strikes in the US. The book through worker inquiry detailed the huge potential and significance of a militant minority strategy in our movements.  

 

The militant minority strategy is where highly politicised socialist organisers are capable through tightly controlled planning to lead struggles and build organisations.

 

Red State Revolt describes comrades first politicised through the Bernie Sanders campaigns entering the DSA and the same teaching union. The formation of militant minority led caucuses had a huge impact moving US teaching unions towards rank and file organising methods characterised by huge strike turnouts and bargaining for the common good demands. This is where collectively bargaining is strong enough to expand beyond traditional issues into community ones including housing and policing. 

 

In the wake of the Corbyn years with a similar demographic of politicised workers who recognise the need for workplace and community organising there is a clear space for a similar militant minority strategy in unions and organisations at a local and national level. Such joint working and thinking between organisers to pull together different struggles in a co-ordinated and strategic manner. However a militant minority strategy reaches its limitations when faced with spontaneous movements of the unorganised, i.e. mass protests. 

 

Conclusion: Crowds and Party

 

The last month in Manchester has seen an upsurge in sustained political protests not seen in years — thousands of people marching against gendered and state violence, in opposition to increased police powers and in support of striking bus drivers. How do we consolidate and politicise those taking to the streets into our movements? Developing short term anger into organised long term political struggle? How do we connect organisers to the workers? This poses the question of ‘the party’. The political theorist Jodi Dean describes in ‘Crowds and Party’: ‘The party is the bearer of the lessons of the uprising.' It is both the perspective from which the uprising is assessed and is itself, as an organisation capable of responding, an effect of the uprising. The party is the only form capable of responding and consolidating to energetic but politically unformed movements.

 

 

The party is the logical conclusion of the strategies I’ve outlined in this essay. A form that develops ‘an organisation of organisers’ by engaging a deeper and more unorganised layer of workers and community through united political struggle (also known as ‘whole worker organising’) and education. A party form that builds on the militant minority strategy by ‘concentrating disruption in a process in order to produce political power’ through coalition building on housing, policing and the climate crisis. As Huey P. Newton (one of the founding members of the Black Panthers Party) once said, ‘the main thing is to organise people, so that the people will have a clear view of what road to take in order to transform society’. 

 

At a local level and in times of low political consciousness we should be organisationally creative and not afraid to view existing structures as finite party instruments to build class power through organised struggle: a party could be an ‘organisation of organisers’ amplifying mass struggles, a trade union branch uniting workplace and community organising, a trades council with strong links to rank and file workers across a city or a local Momentum group unencumbered by the millstone of Labourism using its reach and platform to cohere movements. 

 

These are organisational questions we should be attempting to answer through praxis. The necessity for ‘a party’ far outweighs obsessing over hypothetical internal structures. Where there are people, there is power. And we should aim to build working class power wherever it is, unite struggles wherever we find them and fight our enemies wherever they are. 

 

Whole worker organising our strategy, a party the instrument, class power the goal, socialism the horizon.

 

 

 

Vik Chechi-Ribeiro is the Vice-President of the Manchester National Education Union, and sits on the union's national executive as Black Members representative.

 

Cover image: Kazimir Malevich, 'House Under Construction'.

 

By Nigel de Noronha (@denoronhanigel)

 

 

Increasing levels of debt, street homelessness and the threat of eviction disproportionately affect marginalised groups. The impacts reflect historical housing policies whose effects have been discriminatory, favouring those with the resources to own property to live in or rent out at the expense of tenants and discriminating against migrants and racial minorities.

 

Historical racial discrimination in housing and immigration

 

Racial discrimination has been evident in the housing market for more than a century limiting the choices available to those who migrated from the New Commonwealth and elsewhere after the Second World War, forcing them to either buy houses using mortgage clubs and other collective ways of raising funds or to rent in specific districts of the cities they settled in. The removal of the rent freeze which had been in place since 1939 by the Conservative government in 1957 led to intimidation and illegal eviction to remove tenants and replace with those who would pay higher rents.  At the same time politicians from different parts of the country argued for immigration control because of the housing situation in their towns and cities. The housing crisis of the period led to a Royal Commission which failed to publicise the racial dimensions of the situation but did tilt the balance back in favour of tenants through the 1965 Rent Act which provided security of tenure and rent control.

 

Increasingly restrictive immigration controls reduced primary immigration from the New Commonwealth to a trickle, removed the right of children born in the UK to automatically acquire British citizenship and developed internal border controls for access to education, health and housing. The idea of the property-owning democracy was re-invigorated by the introduction of the Right to Buy council housing at substantial discount in 1980.  Since 1980 more than a third of the council housing stock (two and a half million homes) has been bought. Subsequent evidence suggests that many of these homes are now part of the private rented sector (PRS). In 1988 rent controls were removed, tenancy protection was reduced substantially, creating the PRS environment that we now live in. From the 2000s we saw increasingly restrictive immigration controls extended from trials with asylum seekers to all migrants. As immigration controls arising from Brexit begin to kick in those from the EU who used to have the right to live and work in the UK will increasingly be incorporated in these controls. An important thing to recognise here is that the discourse around immigration and the hostility to migrants has been translated to discriminatory practices.  Whilst the law says those with specific citizenship statuses do not have the right to housing, officers, local authorities and housing providers have developed local rationales for exclusion and treated some as not entitled because of the way they look or sound.

 

The right to adequate housing has increasingly been curtailed by the dominance of the housing market.  Developers have had the priority to determine what is built and where. They have ignored local housing need, ignored affordable housing agreements they made when planning permission was granted and have built for investment. Their focus was on profit. At the end of 2020 over £200 billion pounds was held in buy-to-let mortgages by individual investors with £35 billion advanced in 2020. This does not include individual investors with cash, properties bought as assets on international exchanges or the growing size of corporate investment.  Some of these properties are poorly maintained and overcrowded to maximise profit. The impact of poor-quality private rented housing has affected the wellbeing of marginalised groups in both urban and rural areas.

 

Housing market interventions as a result of Covid

 

As a result of Covid, those who own their homes with a mortgage have been able to apply for a six-month mortgage holiday – this includes both homeowners and landlords. There has been a promise of no evictions from rental properties though in a rule change earlier this year evictions of those with more than six months arrears have been allowed and the London Renters Union is currently fighting cases in the courts. The ‘Everyone In’ programme provided accommodation for those who were street homeless in hotel accommodation. Probably the biggest cost has been the Stamp Duty holiday which redistributes money to those who can afford to buy their homes including landlords acquiring buy-to-let houses.

 

Emerging evidence

 

Debt

 

Overall, around 6% of households responding to the Understanding Society survey were in arrears with their housing payments. Those born outside the UK were twice as likely to be in housing arrears. Single parents and other households with dependent children twice as likely and social housing tenants two and a half times as likely to be in housing arrears.  Figure 1 shows that the starkest evidence of inequality is by race with a quarter of Bangladeshi people and a fifth of Pakistani and black Africans in housing arrears.

 

 

Similar patterns emerge when looking at those behind with bill payments.  Around 5% of the respondents were behind with bill payments.  In comparison, more than twice as many born outside the UK, 17% of single parents with dependent children, 21% in social housing and 11% of private rented tenants were behind with bill payments. Figure 2 shows that again race has a significant effect with more than 20% of black Africans, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis behind with bill payments.

 

 

Intention to move

 

For some households, Covid has provided an incentive to improve their housing situation.  Proximity to work and access to leisure opportunities have become less important whilst more space, a garden and access to green spaces have become more important.  For other households, reduced income, unemployment, debt and job insecurity are forcing them to move.  Over a quarter of respondents to the Understanding Society survey said that they intended to move.  The majority of these (66%) were to improve their housing situation, to downsize or to form a new household whilst 30% cited other reasons.  The remaining 4% cited the end of their tenancy or eviction. Twice as many lone parents with dependent children and members of other households intended to move because of the end of their tenancy or eviction. Four times as many in the private rented sector and one and a half times as many in social housing also intended to move because of the end of their tenancy or eviction. There was little difference between those born in the UK and those born abroad.  Figure 3 shows that black Caribbean, Bangladeshi, White other and mixed ethnic groups were more likely to intend to move because of the end of tenancy or eviction.

 

 

 

Whilst eviction claims reduced significantly across all tenures during the Covid pandemic, there are early signs of increasing claims to the county courts for those in private rented and social housing in the fourth quarter of 2020. There is likely to be an acceleration due to increasing arrears and the lifting of the temporary protections for eviction in May.

 

Conclusion

 

Housing policies and the behaviour of the housing market have consistently created structural inequalities. The temporary interventions to address issues raised by Covid have favoured homeowners and landlords more than tenants.  They are likely to be followed by an acceleration in evictions affecting those in most need.  For those who can make the choice to move to places with gardens and more space, the added incentive of the stamp duty holiday seems likely to lead to significant moves.  These may in turn trigger the displacement of existing residents and the reduction of housing choices for their families as market demand increases the prices of suburban and rural housing. For those who cannot afford the choice the spectre of overcrowded, unsafe and insecure accommodation looms large.

 

The government has demonstrated no evidence of seriously getting to grips with the housing situation in the country, preferring to apply sticking plasters to address perceived issues raised by the stakeholders they listen to rather than considering the international commitments the UK has made to provide adequate housing for all.

 

The government needs to accept their duty to support the provision of the right to affordable, adequate housing (as agreed under the UN Convention of Social and Economic Rights in 1976). I suggest that the following actions provide the basis for a campaign to secure decent, affordable housing for all.

 

1. Cancel individual debt arising from the Covid pandemic.
2. Revise planning legislation to curtail the powers of developers and require them to build to address local housing need and provide adequate affordable housing.
3. Introduce regulations in housing markets to protect local communities from being displaced by gentrification.
4. Enforce action by landlords to address unsafe conditions in their properties and to apply compulsory purchase orders to those who fail to do so.

 

Nigel de Noronha is the Assistant Professor at the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham.

By Caitlin Colquhoun (@ckcolq)

 

Public Space Protection Orders (PSPO) are being increasingly employed across the country. The centre of Manchester has not been spared in their rollout, with the latest attempt to introduce a PSPO in Manchester City Centre. The effects of PSPOs are far-reaching. They give the police broad powers to limit the use of space by a certain group of people and force segregation based on people’s consumption powers. The most recent PSPO submission in Manchester targets the homeless and rough-sleepers who can be fined £100 on the spot for even resting in a doorway.

 

This article intends to explore the recent cross-continental developments of this increased focus on security and crime prevention and to assess what effects it has had and will continue to have on the social fabric of urban areas. To understand these developments further this article looks at Manchester, U.K, as a case study example and looks at specific policies and urban developments that illustrate this increased focus on crime prevention and security. This increased focus on security and crime prevention became a central feature of government policy in a bid to restructure a previously industrial economy to a tertiary sector led economy. What makes Manchester, with its industrial history, a pertinent example are the changes that have taken place in the city. The changes have not only disrupted the urban fabric of the city but, its rich social makeup. When looking at current and past developments in more detail, I will focus on the prevailing trend of marketisation and the resulting privatisation of local government and, public space.

 

Historically, there has always been a connection between the spatial organisation of cities and their need to be effective forms of defence from potential outside threats. One need not look further than the Roman walls that surround Barcelona’s old town, or the large forts in Northern India to see a physical manifestation of this spatial relationship. Although one might not think such a strong relationship manifests itself in the contemporary city, this spatial relationship has adapted and transformed to create more subtle forms of ‘defence’ from a more vaguely defined group of ‘outsiders’. It has manifested itself as an increased focus on security and crime prevention to ensure the security of a certain sector of society from other marginalised sectors of society, resulting often in what we now colloquially call gentrification. This phenomenon has been global, its effects and changes in Manchester from the 80s are more often than not transposable to most other metropolises. The changes have not only disrupted the urban fabric of the city but, its rich social makeup.

 

Deindustrialisation and decline of the inner city

 

In the past 3 decades, the West has undergone a large restructuring of its economies following the recession in the 1970s. This restructuring saw economies move from being centred around manufacturing to being centred on the financial sector, relying heavily on debt circulation. The growth of the financial sector and accompanying de-industrialisation widened the income gap and created mass unemployment and resulted in an over-stretched social service sector increasingly under pressure to bridge this employment gap. This employment and income divide created a mass exodus of the middle-class from urban cores from the 1970s, leaving ‘enclaves’ or ‘pockets’ of poverty and leaving large swathes of inner cities abandoned.

 

What remained between such pockets was an increasingly under-funded and under-maintained public realm (consisting of parks and alley ways for example), the only ‘space’ left for those who had been pushed out to the peripheries of society and out of housing. This under-maintained public realm led to an increasing scepticism of the safety of the remaining middle class in city centre, ultimately proliferating a fear of crime in such spaces. This can be seen across America, for example in San Diego where this declining public realm ultimately led to privatisation of large portions of public space.

 

The social consequences of this increasing fear of crime and privatisation of the public realm is cyclical. From a young age, society teaches us that the public realm is bad, inefficient, and the private realm is good and efficient. At the same time, people were witnessing a declining urban realm, the site of fears about safety and crime. The term ‘socio-agoraphobia’ has been used to describe the fear of public space that has happened as a result. Although this is a rather extreme extrapolation of the social consequences of an increasing focus on crime prevention and security enabled by privatisation, this affect helps to explain why privatisation and redevelopment of public space went largely unprotested in England and beyond: it was perceived to be making the city ‘safe’ for the middle class.

 

Manchester’s entrepreneurial turn: urban renaissance, policing and surveillance

 

Urban decay of city centres caused by recession and de-industrialisation in Manchester was in  full-force by the 1980s. At the same time, cities were experiencing increasing globalisation and growing competition for foreign and private investment fuelled by the de-regulation of the Stock Market in 1986. Thatcher used this as an opportunity to capitalise on this privatisation — setting up state initiatives, namely Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) across the country. These UDCs aimed to redirect investment from the private sector towards redevelopment. During this period, Manchester saw the introduction of the Central Manchester Development Corporation (1988-96), a public-private partnership that sought to redevelop and create a ‘new, vibrant urban realm’ (language that continues to be used in development advertisements across the country) in the Castlefield area, just outside Manchester City Centre. Setting the trend of public-private partnerships in Manchester for years to come and in effect normalising what is now happening in the city at a much larger scale.

 

The IRA bombing of central Manchester in 1996 set the perfect stage for ‘urban renaissance’ efforts under New Labour. Their affinity with Manchester saw further public-private policies being implemented in the city. Cityco, a private firm which mimicked American style Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) was put in place in central Manchester in 2000. It became the first of its kind in the country and predated British legislation regarding BIDs. This gave Cityco powers to collect levies from shop renters (as collecting levies from owners as American BIDs do would have required a change in British legislation) in exchange for the creation and maintenance of a ‘Clean and Safe’ retail environment, a clear starting point of the privatisation of the urban realm in both a physical sense and a societal, policing sense.

 

Clean and Safe sounds ideal to any citizen. But what did the pursuit of this agenda by BIDs mean in practice? It gave private firms the power to decide what and who interfere with this agenda and how to police these areas (using private security) in the name of security and crime prevention. The city centre for Cityco is an investment, and therefore means this part of the urban realm is treated as a financial asset as are other BIDs across the country. The space has to be ‘made safe’, and security and maintenance of these ‘assets’ of public space became central to their running. CCTV and private security guards have been increasingly employed to maintain ‘security’ and reduce crime in these areas of Manchester and have become the norm.

 

BIDs as an urban policy fed into the Urban Renaissance agenda (1999) under New Labour. The Urban Renaissance agenda adopted a ‘zero-tolerance’ policy (inscribed in legislation) towards crime and anti-social behaviour, an import from New York. Furthermore, crime reduction was made part of urban planning policy through the Urban Policy White Paper (2002) and national policy that put crime prevention at the forefront of planning policy. Therefore while private firms with financial interests in the urban realm increasingly focused on crime prevention and security to encourage consumption, so did the government, in order to facilitate the urban renaissance movement. Leading to the systematic use of hard policing tactics and widespread use of CCTV (even though it’s effectiveness has been disputed).

 

This urban renaissance agenda has therefore been criticised by academics, for example as a form of ‘urban revanchism’. Urban revanchism is the control of social dynamics through physical and technological means. The line between renaissance and revanchism is one that is increasingly blurred as zero-tolerance policies towards anti-social behaviour employed under the urban renaissance agenda have often led to vilification of minorities through stereotyping, policing and mass surveillance. For example, for the New East Manchester redevelopment projects to go through, a clearing out of ‘unwanted individuals’ was the method that would be employed. Additionally, East Manchester has seen tough policing, often intrusive, in a bid for zero-tolerance of anti-social behaviour.

 

Undoubtedly, surveillance or policing (may that be private security or public police) have strong effects on the psyche of the population and the ways in which we interact. Forcing mechanical separation of people through policing creates a divide between different parts of society instils a fear of the ‘other’, making society less tolerant of difference. Only those able to consume within the city centre business districts are permitted, otherwise populations come under pressure from the surveillance and policing apparatus of the BIDs. Not only are homeless individuals being pushed out of the urban realm but young people who use such spaces are increasingly being barred and marginalised.

 

Privatisation of Public Space

 

This trend towards increased privatisation as the tool used for urban renaissance agendas has led to an inevitable commodification of ‘public space’ — sometimes referred to as ‘cappuccino culture’ — and has been gaining traction in the UK since the early 2000s. Here, ‘public’ space exists for the consuming public and their ‘safety’ is ensured by excluding the non-consuming public through the codification of these spaces; may that be through the presence of private security, CCTV or the design of a space and in most cases, all the above. This increased privatisation is not only of the management of public space but is now also regarding the ownership of seemingly public spaces. This has given rise to pseudo-public spaces (Pops) of which Manchester is no alien to. The Guardian newspaper is continuing to map Pops across the country but, has been met with silence from most of the city councils they contacted including Manchester City Council.

 

Here in Manchester, there are many examples of Pops. Spinningfields, owned by Allied London, a private firm, has been heralded as a flagship public space in Manchester, The Great Northern Square, a previous industrial site, another Pop, owned by Peterson Group, a property company based in Hong Kong are only two and the list goes on. These are seemingly public spaces however, the companies that own them reserve the right to entry, essentially allowing such spaces to be run, not under the rule of law but, on their own terms. Furthermore, what makes these spaces evermore concerning is that they increasingly blur our understanding of public space. Although the definition of public space itself has never been clear, right of access is a theme that commonly appears. This right of access is  under threat given the transfer of decisions regarding right to entry. This affects the public’s right to protest which is the true litmus test for determining whether a space is truly public.

 

 

The production of Pops has seen also a trend where they are being produced like pre-fabricated space, increasingly designed with insular designs, turned away from streets and visibly reducing access. They are driven by a narrative or perception around who should and shouldn’t be in these spaces of consumption — in effect reducing the richness of social diversity in cities to a sterile, controlled environment through surveillance and iconography. This codifying of space means that any individual or group that is deemed to disturb this narrative and impede consumption, is removed and barred.  Displacing further social problems and inevitably creating a ‘zero-sum game’ where ostracised groups such as the homeless, groups of youths into the periphery, in which they will continue to be vilified. One need not think further than benches retrofitted with metal protrusions to stop skateboarders skating.

 

The parts of the urban realm that remain under public management and ownership are also being increasingly controlled using private-management techniques on the assumption that they are the ‘solution’. This has been done using Public Space Protection Orders (PSPOs) introduced in 2014. They are a geographical adaptation of ASBOs which were introduced under the Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour act. They allow local councils to create orders that criminalise certain behaviours within a defined geographical area. The local council of Trafford, within Greater Manchester has criminalised the congregation of ‘groups of people’ around the Trafford Centre. The issue with PSPOs has been highlighted by the manifestoclub.info, an activist group raising awareness against the widespread use of PSPOs across the country. PSPOs are vague, often discriminatory and target specific groups such as the youth and homeless and create the climate of a nanny state, again infringing on freedom and independence.

 

Conclusion: who has the right to the city?

 

Ultimately, this increased focus on crime prevention and security has been used as a justification for ‘regeneration’ causing gentrification of inner-city Manchester where one can expect to pay levels of rent only paralleled by London. In light of the roll-out of further CCTV and facial recognition technology in communities, conversations of this insidious, privatised securitisation of the public realm is increasingly important. This begs the question: who, now, considering this increased focus on security and crime prevention and the social consequences of exclusion and has a ‘right to the city’? As it stands, it appears that only those with an increasing power of consumption are allowed their right to the city.