By Aaron Downey

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aaron Downey is the Training and Education officer at CATU Ireland (@CATUIreland).

 

This piece was made possible thanks to support from the Rosa Luxemburg Siftung.

 

18 November 2020

 

By Greater Manchester Housing Action (@gmhousingaction)

 

 

Cover art by Jonathan Tomlinson.

 

8 November 2020

 

By Manchester-based housing organisers

 

Every single landlord who tries to evict someone in the midst of a public health emergency, which is twinned with a profound housing crisis, needs to take a long, hard look at themselves.

 

In a recent article, The Landlord Law Blog questions whether it’s right for anti-eviction activists to target landlords.

 

Of course it is.  It has always been good (and, sadly, necessary) to take direct action against those who dispossess people of their homes.  We encourage you to watch this film, which includes some beautiful footage of East End tenants picketing their landlords’ homes and offices in the 1930s.

 

The landlords’ blog talks about a group of tenants who had protested outside the home of a landlord who had served an eviction notice after the occupiers had complained about disrepair.

 

The author claims that the landlord in question had (probably) acted within the law.  The essential argument is that if what the landlords were doing was lawful, then the tenants can’t complain.

 

Well, protests are lawful, so landlords can’t complain. 

 

The appeal to the law also doesn’t help the blog’s argument because the law is totally inadequate.  The very notion of insecure short-term tenancies and ‘no fault’ evictions is obscene.  The ‘retaliatory eviction’ legislation is barely worth the paper it’s written on.  It’s hopeless to suggest that we shouldn’t take action against an act that is morally wrong on the basis that it was legally permissible.

 

In fact, it is precisely because landlords’ actions are lawful that tenants are forced to take action.  The courts cannot protect us from section 21 notices, and we therefore have little alternative but to use political methods to try to change the landlords’ minds, or to humiliate and punish them for their cruelty in the hope that it will discourage others.

 

The landlords’ blog asks: why don’t we protest to the council?  In the specific case discussed, it was presumably because it was the landlord who had broken the law by failing to keep the tenant’s home in good condition, while at the same time taking so much of their money.  It’s absurd to suggest that the council’s failure to reprimand landlords for their own failings somehow makes the council more culpable.

 

And there is a direct relationship between the landlord and the tenant.  As the blog correctly points out, it is the landlord who decides whether the tenant should be evicted.  It is therefore entirely appropriate that – when a dispute arises – it will be the landlord and the tenant who confront each other.  The council has nothing to do with it.

 

Today’s landlords and lettings agents are lucky.  In a world of direct debits and emails there is very little personal contact between them and their tenants.  Gone are the days when tenants could mob the rent officer: today’s ‘property professionals’ can cower behind their laptop screens, safely watching the value of their assets grow.  We do not think that situation is sustainable.

 

Landlords should know this: for decades, you have taken our incomes and driven up the cost of homes.  For decades, daytime TV shows have provided comfort by portraying you as benign adventurers in the bounteous terrain of the housing market.  You have gained a vast amount of unearned wealth while we constantly face homelessness and poverty.  You cannot expect us to treat you with courtesy or respect.

 

If you try to evict us, we will protest outside your homes – your secure, comfortable homes.  It is in the nature of your grubby business that you make people homeless, and you have no right to complain when we kick against you. Rather than complaining that you can see a lawful protest out your window, be thankful that the bailiffs are not tearing your family apart and dragging them through the front door - yet …

 

 

2 November 2020

 

By Tom Blackburn (@malaiseforever)

 

The recent confrontation between Boris Johnson’s government at Westminster and Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham was something we hadn’t seen for many years: a bona fide showdown between central and local government. Given the punishment to which Labour councils have been subjected for the last decade, perhaps the only real surprise is that it took this long.

 

Burnham, of course, appealed last week to local government secretary Robert Jenrick for £65m to help Greater Manchester cushion the economic blow of entering Tier 3 coronavirus restrictions, only for Jenrick to offer no more than £60m. Local leaders had calculated that they would actually need £90m but, recognising they weren’t going to get it from Johnson, had already reconciled themselves to sourcing the remainder elsewhere.

 

When Burnham refused to capitulate by the government’s chosen deadline of midday last Tuesday, it seemed that no more than £22m was to be provided to support Greater Manchester through the coming months of tighter restrictions. Johnson was forced to clarify subsequently that the £60m would still be made available to the city region, but distributed via its individual local authorities rather than under Burnham’s auspices.

 

On the face of it, the government’s conduct – compounded by its subsequent refusal to provide free school meals over the school holidays – seems wanton. Considering the extraordinary amounts of government cash sprayed at private contractors since the onset of the pandemic, it’s a bit late for Johnson to bang the drum for fiscal rectitude. Serco’s £12bn test and trace system has been an unmitigated disaster; some local councils have taken matters into their own hands, delivering better results at a fraction of the cost.

 

Jenrick, for his part, is best known (there are no other notable achievements to his name) for helping Tory donor Richard Desmond deny Labour-run Tower Hamlets, one of Britain’s poorest boroughs, tens of millions of pounds in tax. The idea that an extra £5m, the sort of sum which would be barely noticeable if it were merely a government accounting error, for Greater Manchester represents an unconscionable extravagance is therefore clearly absurd. 

 

Obviously, after the last decade of disproportionate cuts to Labour councils’ Whitehall grants (with all that entails), we wouldn’t expect sympathy from the Tories – even amid a deadly pandemic which has already taken tens of thousands of lives. But taking a purely cynical, realpolitik view, that decade of cuts to Labour councils has served its intended purpose for the Tories. Labour councils, as George Osborne fully intended, were disproportionately targeted and left to take the flak for what followed.

 

It has to be said, though, that a lot of Labour-run local authorities have done themselves few favours. Rather than relentlessly highlighting the spiteful and selective nature of Tory cuts imposed on local government and demanding urgent redress, some Labour council leaders have instead spent the last few years congratulating themselves for ameliorating those cuts or freezing council tax, when the inevitable signs of neglect (of local services, of the civic realm and of disadvantaged residents themselves) were all too obvious. 

 

Indeed, Manchester itself has adjusted itself to the new dispensation with gusto, serving as a standard-bearer for municipal neoliberalism. As Grace Blakeley has pointed out, in recent years the city region has been a poster child for the Tories’ ‘Northern Powerhouse’ wheeze; Manchester’s former chief executive, Howard Bernstein, was lavished with praise upon his retirement by none other than George Osborne – the man who did so much damage to Labour councils and, more importantly, those reliant on support from them.

 

The result has been a breakneck property boom, putting ever larger areas of Manchester beyond the reach of more and more working-class people. While some local authorities in the city region have taken a more progressive approach – Labour’s left-led council in Salford, for example, has built the city’s first council houses since the 1980s – their ability to mitigate the impact of the speculative feeding frenzy gripping the wider conurbation is tightly circumscribed, by the conscious design of central government.

 

Manchester’s own city council, on the other hand, remains firmly in the hands of the unreconstructed Blairite Labour right, the Corbyn years having done little to disturb its entrenched machine. Nor is Andy Burnham himself any great radical. All of this makes Manchester an unlikely site of municipal resistance. But to his credit, Burnham has shown a willingness to fight which has been all too notable by its general absence of late, earning him some wistful glances from demoralised Labour leftists.

 

The fact that it’s Greater Manchester, of all places, that’s finally been pushed to breaking point is indicative of the sheer intransigence of the Tories towards its opponents in local government. It turns out that even Labour councils which prove themselves otherwise more than willing to play by the rules are still at the mercy of a Tory government – ultimately dominated, for all its populist posturing, by the Home Counties-bred born-to-rule – that simply cannot tolerate any backchat from the provinces.

 

What this episode is also revealing about is the way the British state relates to its periphery. As if to prove Tom Hazeldine’s argument in The Northern Question, the Treasury finally lurched into action to offer extra financial support to areas under Tier 2 restrictions once these affected London. An incredulous Burnham could only complain that his own patch had already been under similar restrictions for weeks, to Treasury indifference. Now some wonder if we could be looking not just at the break-up of Britain but the break-up of England.

 

Eye-catching banners aside, this remains a remote prospect. There is little popular interest in regional devolution to the North, let alone anything more ambitious. It is an interesting development, though, that the North’s directly-elected mayors and combined authorities – the introduction of which was intended to grease the wheels of neoliberalism, not to spark any renaissance of local democracy – are beginning to provide a distinct regional voice otherwise lacking. All this may yet prove to be conducive to demands for more.

 

While it was far from the leading factor behind last December’s general election result, the Tories were able to exploit the discontent towards Labour councils. They will now try to persuade their support in Greater Manchester (where they hold nine out of 27 parliamentary seats) that Burnham and his Labour colleagues are out to wreck the government’s Covid response. Such tactics have a long pedigree, and mobilising suburban resentment towards troublemaking left-wing Labour councils proved electorally potent for the right in the 1980s.

 

All of this raises questions about how the socialist left responds. The new-found assertiveness of local Labour leaders is welcome, as is the commitment of nearly 40 Labour councils to supply free school meals where the government has refused (though even a handful of Tory-run councils have been forced to step in). Yet the need for more fundamental changes in local government remains. One of the major disappointments of Corbynism was that it failed to make much headway on Labour councils, outside a handful of areas.

 

For some activists on the Labour left, municipal politics may now offer a constructive outlet and an opportunity to play a useful political role by using town halls as a base for action and agitation, linking up with trade unions, tenants’ unions, social movements and other campaigns. While Momentum has already launched its future councillors programme to recruit and train potential candidates, any municipal turn would need to be well resourced, carefully co-ordinated and informed by a clear local socialist strategy.

 

If Labour leftists do make this municipal turn, they should expect to meet opposition from the party leadership under Keir Starmer, to whom right-wing Labour councillors will look for protection from the left, as they did with Neil Kinnock three decades ago. For instance, when Labour members in Haringey mobilised to remove the council’s old Blairite leadership in 2017, Jeremy Corbyn refused to intervene and instead let local party democracy take its course. It is hard to imagine Starmer doing the same.

 

Complicating matters further, it’s not clear what will be left of local democracy a few years from now, or what any future left-wing Labour councils might be able to achieve in office. The Tories are reportedly planning large-scale reforms to local government, including replacing district councils with unitary authorities under elected mayors. Meanwhile, Robert Jenrick’s overhaul of planning law, designed to weaken local authority planning committees while empowering private developers, has even antagonised some Tory council leaders.

 

Nevertheless, the face-off in Greater Manchester is likely to presage more such disputes amid the coming crisis, as this manifests itself in the form of job losses, evictions, parents struggling to feed their children, and various other serious hardships. The immediate task facing socialists in local politics now, therefore, isn’t just to lobby for a fairer deal from the centre, but to organise among those who need their solidarity and support.

 

Tom Blackburn is a founding editor of New Socialist and a writer at Tribune Magazine. He lives in Greater Manchester.

 

27 October 2020

 

Interview with University of Manchester student rent strikers (@rentstrikeUoM)

 

This week, students at the University of Manchester joined a growing list of student groups nationwide who are launching rent strikes in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. We speak to one of their student organisers.

 

First, can you outline what the situation is that students have found themselves in since terms started?

 

Since terms started we at Manchester have been told that we will have no face to face teaching despite moving into halls under the expectation that this would be provided. Within a few weeks there were hundreds of covid-19 cases among students. Nearly every flat in my halls was isolating, and the same seemed to be the case on all the big student group chats I was part of. When we asked for support the Uni emailed us advising us to break the law by leaving our flats with masks on for laundry or post. They provided boxes of free food but in the last two days of our isolation. It was too little, too late. We are not getting what we paid for. Our safety has been sacrificed for profit.

 

Are students looking to strike in university or privately owned halls?

 

Our campaign is university owned halls only. We would stand in solidarity with anyone campaigning in private halls but it would overcomplicate what we are trying to achieve to be in negotiations with the uni and private companies.

 

How receptive are students to the idea — do they generally feel comfortable with the idea of taking the action of a rent strike, or is there an element of political education needed to get people to sign up to the campaign?

 

We have found students to be very keen to take some form of action because they feel exploited by the university, but many of them did not know what a rent strike is. We have used our social media, especially @uomrentstrike to educate people about it as a form of direct action. Some of them have been afraid of being kicked off their courses or made homeless so we explained why those are not a worry. The university can’t kick someone off a course for a non-academic offence, and the process of eviction takes weeks in which you can just pay rent late and not be evicted. We don’t think it will get to that stage because there are enough of us to present a PR nightmare for the university.

 

What are the immediate next steps for the rent strike organisers? How are you organising the strike?

 

The Friday just passed was rent day. Now it has passed, we can begin more serious negotiations with the university about our demands.

 

What are the challenges you are facing?

 

It can be hard to tell how many of the people who have signed up to rent strike or joined the chat have already cancelled their Direct Debits. We have been getting reassuring numbers from Instagram polls asking who has already done it.

 

What — if anything — has the response of the university been?

 

In the first week after we emailed them they replied saying they would look at our email but nothing more. The deadline we gave them for a response then passed and we called the rent strike. Yesterday they emailed us saying they are “committed to blended learning”, which ignores the reality that online and online is not a blend. It made no apology for deceiving students about how teaching would be delivered to get us to move on campus. 

 

In response to our complaints about unacceptable delays for example in getting fridges fixed they did not acknowledge there was any fault with staff. They responded to repeated burglaries by saying we should follow guidance to keep our windows closed and doors locked. Windows have been broken in these burglaries so blaming it on the victims is absurd. They defended their choice to give students the option of on and off campus learning in the first semester because a survey of students showed that more than 75% wanted to move on campus. This doesn’t address the fact that living conditions have been unsafe and the university has prioritised profit over our wellbeing.

 

How can people reading this support your campaign?

 

Visibility is definitely our biggest challenge right now. As students with all teaching online we are only able to interact with our flats. This makes it really difficult to get the word out. Social media is great but we need as much conversation about the rent strike drummed up as possible. Endorsements from organisations and high profile individuals have also been really helpful.

 

Greater Manchester Housing Action stand in solidarity with student rent strikers at the University of Manchester. Support their campaign and find out more by following them on Instagram @uomrentsrike and on Twitter @rentstrikeUoM.

 

25 October 2020

 

By Jay Dee (@JDomicide)

 

On Friday the 16th October two weeks of virtual planning inquiry drew to a close. Sitting from 09:30am until 16:30 for 8 working days, this inquiry was a result of an appeal the developer, Pemberstone, lodged against the planning decision of Leeds City Council to refuse permission to demolish the Oulton Estate in South Leeds to make way for executive housing. Jay Dee, of Judicial Domicide, has followed the case throughout and provides us with this report of the court proceedings.

 

We heard closing submissions from Mr White QC, (Counsel Barrister for Pemberstone.) His client seeks to appeal the planning decision which refused them to demolish 70 Airey Homes which are currently occupied by residents of Wordsworth Drive and Sugar Hill Close in Leeds LS26. Pemberstone argue that the structural integrity of the buildings is compromised and that if they do not secure a win on this appeal inevitably the impact and thus harm caused to the existing residents will be the same — the buildings are so compromised that their current state is akin to demolition. They argue that Pemberstone cannot sit back and do nothing when in possession of the structural report, and that irrespective of the outcome of this inquiry, Pemberstone can and will if it is needed exercise its legal rights under Landlord and Tenant Law to issue S.21 notice (no fault eviction notices) which will require all existing residents to leave their homes. Mr White QC stressed however that his client is not a social housing provider. It is a commercial operator acting for profits to satisfy shareholders.

 

 

Ms Bell (Counsel Barrister for Leeds City Council as the Local Planning Authority) in her closing said: "Put simply: to refuse planning permission is to preserve something special. To grant planning permission is to approve an entirely ordinary housing scheme." Ms Bell emphasised the following: "Whilst the LPA accepts that the existing homes are not affordable within the NPPF definition... the homes are genuinely affordable in the plain English or laymen sense of ‘affordable’". Ms Bell did acknowledge that the appeal proposal would provide an increase in NPPF definition of affordable homes but that the cost of allowing the appeal is that the existing residents are likely to become homeless and increase demand on Council services. Additionally, on the point of the social cost of demolition, Ms Bell added: "There are 39 children living on the appeal site. Where the article 8 rights in issue are those of children, they must be seen in the context of article 3 of the UNRC, which requires a child’s best interests to be a primary consideration... No other consideration must be regarded as more important or given greater weight than the best interests of any child."

 

We heard throughout the inquiry how special the residents and the existing community was in the way they supported each other and how the origin of that strong community was deeply entrenched to the close association to the mining industry. It was agreed by all parties that the homes were classified as non-designated heritage assets of local significance and that they had unique cultural, communal and heritage value. We also heard that the special community that existed was partly to the design of that estate by the Coal Board Authority in that the design was to "foster good relations and replicate what it was like in the pit."

 

Ms Wigley (Counsel Barrister for @SaveOurHomes), in her closing said that "this proposed development would have a devastating effect on the residents of Sugar Hill Close and Wordsworth Drive." She reiterated the evidence of Mr Kitchen who explained the houses were built by the Coal Board Authority and they were never intended to be privately owned but were for renters, for those would could not obtain, or did not want to become bound into, a mortgage. Ms Wigley concludes that "the alternative to demolition [using a Structherm or similar system] is a realistic option which has not been fully explored by Pemberstone and which has not been proven to be either unfeasible or unviable" and that in these circumstances "there can be no justification for the destruction of an irreplaceable heritage asset or for the destruction of this valued community and all the distress that be entailed." Summing up the case, she put bluntly: "the appeal should be dismissed."

 

Whether in Leeds, Manchester or anywhere else, the story is the same: working class communities forced to move to make way for private profit. We fight for a different outcome, and a different kind of city. Greater Manchester Housing Action would like to extend our solidarity to the campaigners at @SaveOurHomeLS26. You can support their campaign on their crowdfunder here.

 

18 October 2020

By Vik Chechi-Ribeiro (@VikCR86)

 

This week there was a surge was reported in the number of UK children registering for free school meals, with an estimated 1 million pupils recently signing up for the first time. At the same time research from the housing charity Shelter estimates 230,000 people (12,000 in Greater Manchester) have fallen into rent arrears since the start of the pandemic and face evictions and destitution. This impending crisis is now immediate with the eviction ban lifted and furloughed workers face paying 100% rent with 66% of income.

 

A clear link exists between housing and poverty on one hand and the exploitation in the housing market on the other. This is reflective of the wider class oppression intrinsic in our economic system.  What does this mean for workers, exploited by both landlords and bosses? Workers in the Manchester district of the National Education Union (NEU) have spent the last two months attempting to bring together individual parts of our movement to answer that question.

 

Our education worker members will be renters, paying increasing amounts of income to pay the mortgages of landlords, forced out of city centres and spending increasing amount of times commuting to schools they cannot afford to live near.

 

Our students will be the same members of the community facing evictions this winter and displaced during a pandemic that has disproportionately impacted working class and black communities. Others live in cramped and temporary accommodation, precarious housing, all in areas that face demolition and gentrification. All of these are key factors in educational outcomes, where the poorest end up two years behind the wealthiest at the end of secondary school. The fight for housing is the fight for working class health, education and power. How can trade unionists play a role in uniting the workplace and community? And win for workers in education and the community whilst agitating for both a socialist education and housing system?

 

Manchester National Education Union is a district of 4,500 workers covering every community in the city. Inside those schools are educators who face every day the impact of austerity through cuts in education budgets, increased class sizes, an explosion in food bank use and cuts in youth provision. This has resulted in a degree of worker politicisation that with trade union activity and political education can develop into ‘whole worker organising’.

 

The concept — ‘whole worker organising’ — develops a workers political consciousness beyond the four walls of their workplace, out into the community. Education workers should organise and win on issues such as workload and pay, but also do the same on community issues such as housing. This will bring into the trade union wider layers of politicised rank and file workers passionate about developing community working class power.

 

This will in turn build our movement to abolish neoliberal reforms such as performance related pay, league tables, high stakes testing and Ofsted. And in the long term strengthen demands for a working class education system capable of developing critical thinking skills, decolonised curriculum and radicalism needed to transform society.

 

As we know sites of struggle exist not only in the workplace but also in the community. Trade unions acknowledging this political reality. 'Bargaining for the common good’ sees unions work with community partners to tackle inequality collectively at its capitalist roots, rather than simply acting in a parochial and reactive manner. As a district we negotiate with the council on school issues, so why not place political pressure from grassroots members and the community on those same councillors to act against the gentrification that is devastating our class?

 

So what can be done? Our district passed a ‘tenant solidarity’ motion, a first of its kind nationally, with a mandate to encourage members to join tenant unions and support their political aims for rent cancellation and abolition of no-fault evictions. What was striking in the district meeting debating this motion was the large number of young politicised workers participating for their first time - inspired by the radical democratic and socialist potential of trade union structures and a model for our movement in desperate need of rank and file invigoration.

 

What has followed is the exciting prospect of collaborative work between trade and tenant unions to politicise and develop the organising capacity of our individual groups and the wider movement. This has included jointly planning a ‘housing and education’ political education event on eviction resistance, the finanicalisation of housing and why trade unionists must develop their own community organising capacity.

 

Our district is also delivering ‘strike school’ training for its workplace reps covering structured organising conversations, mapping workplace and communities, structure tests, big bargaining (including rank and file members in organising and decision making) and whole worker organising. This aims to develop the capacity of workplaces to leverage its ultimate tool which is the withdrawal of labour. We have extended our training offer to tenant unions in the city in order to develop our reps understanding of community organising whilst mutually developing the organising capacity and methods of our community partners.

 

A well organised and political trade union furthering the aims of tenant unions is mutually beneficial to our movement. And since passing the motion our district has been supporting NEU comrades in Bristol and Cambridge which are cities with strong tenant unions to explore similar collaborative activity. Taking abstract concepts of ‘workplace and community organising’ into concrete building of class power across the country.

 

But how does collaborative political education and organiser training develop into political articulation, demands and victory? Our hope is normalising and successful joint working will organically develop into coalition building with enough organising strength to develop radical political demands to our employers, landlords and council that cannot be resisted.

 

Our district’s goal is political organisation such as a housing campaign led by renters in struggle and partnered by trade unions. This is where developing the coordinating ability, organising capacity and rank and file profile of Manchester Trades Council is crucial. The potential of the Trades Council to develop into a genuine radical workers council rests on rank and file organisers active in individual movements to build informal networks, share and develop organising methods, build commonality in struggle and encourage affiliation and participation in the Trades Council.

 

A working class housing campaign that educates, agitates, organises across our movement and is oppositional to landlords, bosses and council that represents exploitative and rentier class interests Is precisely what this moment demands. Our district has therefore tabled a motion to Manchester Trades Council in order to explore building such a campaign. This would be led by community affiliate tenant groups who would shape its demands and be partnered by trade unions. Both groups organising the same workers and our class.

 

The general election highlighted our institutional weaknesses in the workplace and community. We cannot build socialism and worker power without organising and building bonds of solidarity to meet the challenges faced in a period marked by crisis. If it’s not organisers across the city active in our individual movements, then who? And if it’s not now, then when?

 

Vik Chechi-Ribeiro is the Vice-President of the Manchester National Education Union.

 

 

14 October 2020

By Georgie Hulme

 

Since the horrendous Grenfell tragedy, more and more buildings are being identified nationwide as unsafe due to various fire safety defects. The main issue is cladding, but the problem goes much further than this.

 

Nobody should be living in buildings with major fire defects, and no leaseholder should have to pay for such remedial works. This scandal has shown the problems of successive Governments in failing to address building safety standards. Greater Manchester has the highest amount of buildings at risk compared to the national average. The last count I heard from the Fire Service a few weeks ago was 88, and it's potentially even more now.

 

It’s really positive that media across the political spectrum are covering this scandal, and it's powerful to read and hear so many personal stories. But one group who I haven’t heard or seen being involved are those with conditions and/or are disabled leaseholders. I am a disabled leaseholder and of course we are not all in the same situation, but we do exist. It’s important that all groups and circumstances are reflected, because as things are, the Government gives the impression that all leaseholders are in positions to access loans to cover costs. It’s important to note that all these properties have no market value as a result.

 

Here’s a bit about myself and my situation. My name is Georgie. I’m a leaseholder living in the Life Buildings in Hulme, Manchester. The buildings have major fire risks, including unsafe cladding, compartmentalisation issues and unsafe timber/decking on balconies. It was built unsafe. The developers went bankrupt, so we have no recourse to challenge them. We have no indication that the freeholder is likely to cover any required costs.

 

I really love my flat, the location and the community, but I am stuck in a building that’s extremely unsafe, with no options, other than to wait and see what happens. As things are, realistically it’s not going to be a positive outcome.

 

 

My Mum died in comfort, thinking that despite my complex disabilities, combined with austerity, she’d left me with home security for life, in an accessible flat that I love. It’s heartbreaking that’s not the case. This situation wasn’t her fault and it isn’t mine. Even though I miss her so much, I’m relieved she isn’t having to go through this. She lived in the flat before me. She was a pensioner reliant on state benefits, who had MS and she died of multiple cancers. Imagine being in such a situation, with this then hanging over you? Of course, there will be people who are.

 

Daily I feel sick and stressed — the impact on my physical and mental health is extremely detrimental. Bills of tens of thousands of pounds may arrive any day. My income is state benefits, so how could I even be granted a loan of such a potentially large amount? We have no indication of an estimated cost or how and when we will be billed. I’ve heard about bills of between £20,000-£115,000, per flat, often payable in short timescales. Can you imagine living like this, especially during the coronavirus crisis and lockdown. Hundreds of thousands of us have had no choice.

 

How many more fires and deaths until the Government will act to safeguard all in this situation? All residents were asked on safety grounds to clear balconies and to keep them sterile. Does it make me feel safer? No, but that I’ve started packing before eviction.

 

 

The Building Safety Fund, whilst welcome, falls massively short. Only covering cladding costs for buildings 18 metres and above, means that numerous buildings, like the block I live in, which is 16.8m, will receive no financial assistance at all. Why are we deemed unworthy of any help? Why are our lives viewed as unequal? Fire does not discriminate height-wise. So whilst an application has been made, it is extremely unlikely that we will be granted any funding, even though we’ve been assessed under the same criteria as those eligible. Also, what about other fire safety costs, some I’ve mentioned above, that also include mass insurance hikes and required specialist reports?

 

It’s not enough for Government Ministers to ask developers and freeholders to do the moral thing and not pass costs to leaseholders. Asking politely is not going to save so many people from huge debts or eviction. I feel sick, anxious, angry, appalled, petrified, and utterly heartbroken. I don’t want to lose my flat. I want more than anything to be able to stay. This is an injustice of immeasurable proportions and the Government is enabling this to continue when the situation could be stopped.

 

The relaunch of the Manchester Cladiators End Our Cladding campaign, in collaboration with other groups, sets out 10 asks of Government that could end this nightmare. For more information head to the website here.

 

Our local leaseholder group actively supports this campaign. Whether you are impacted by this scandal or not, I urge people if on Twitter, to please follow, tweet and retweet the main campaign @McrCladiators, @EOCS_Official and our local group @LifeBuildings.

 

 

There doesn’t feel much hope around at the moment, but despite the detrimental impact this is having on my health, I have no choice but to fight on in any way I can, when I can, because the alternative is too unbearable to contemplate.

 

 

Georgie Hulme is a leaseholder at the Life Buildings in Hulme and a campaigner with the Manchester Cladiators. You can follow the campaign on Twitter at @McrCladiators.

 

 

2 October 2020

By Alessio Kolioulis (@alessioilgreco) and Rahel Süß (@RahelSuess)

 

When Universities in Aberdeen, Glasgow and Manchester reported more than 1,000 COVID-19 cases last week, students started questioning why halls were allowed to reopen in the first place.

 

With Health Secretary Matt Hancock not ruling out that students may remain in halls throughout the Christmas break, students and parents are now protesting against what they see as an act of “imprisonment”.

 

As students are now forced to live in university accommodation despite teaching being moved online, universities have alarmingly invited the police to control campuses.

 

This situation is a far cry from ideals of the university as places of learning. It prompts us to wonder — how did we get here? Answering this question requires an understanding that halls of residence have become a lucrative business for companies that manage them.

 

Take for example The Blackstone Group, an American private equity firm specialized in hedge fund investment strategies. Blackstone has invested heavily in the UK, since acquiring iQ student housing company from Goldman Sachs and the Wellcome Trust.

 

Via its subsidiary iQ, Blackstone is now the key actor in the real estate market for student halls, owning 67 housing blocks comprising more than 28,000 beds in 27 UK cities. Its £3.7bn portfolio includes 15 blocks and 6,776 beds in London, 10 blocks and 3,605 beds in Manchester, and 7 blocks and 2,692 beds in Sheffield.

 

While the iQ Group generated £168.4m in net operating income in 2019, IQSA Holdings, the company controlling the Group operating in the UK, benefitted from the fiscal regimes of tax-heaven Luxembourg, the country where it is registered.

 

Paying rent to iQ means contributing to the profits of tax-evading financial companies like Blackstone, a company deeply embedded in contributing to the earth's climate breakdown. As reported by The Intercept, Blackstone's CEO Steve Schwarzman, a top donor of the Trump campaign, invest in firms that are deforesting Brazil's Amazon.

 

 

Angry students worried about the current situation have plenty of reasons to be so. Lured into the promises of "fantastic student experiences", what they are getting in return is a very opposite — and bleak — picture.

 

While on the surface we may perceive the government as incompetent in its attempts to facilitate a safe return to university, what emerges is a story of orchestrated exploitation. Students are trapped in a system built to generate huge profits for international capital. The entanglement between campuses being policed and rent being paid to real estate firms is a testimony of the impact of finance on people's everyday lives and the environment. Nothing — not even a global pandemic — can afford to interrupt the profits of companies like Blackstone.

 

The financialisation of student halls stands as particularly egregious example, whose negative effects we are seeing unfold before our eyes this week. However, the dynamics within student halls is merely the cutting edge of a far deeper problem. Urban sociologist Saskia Sassen insists that a new economic reality is rising in cities across the world: the transformation of housing into financial assets.

 

The growing role of finance and private equity firms in housing across the world results in a familiar pattern: rising rents, displacement and debt for individual households, then evictions; while at the same time significant number of buildings remain vacant.

 

To unlock the current impasse faced by students, we need to link and broaden students and renters' struggles. There are many directions the fight against the financialisation of housing can take, for example:

 

1. Direct action such as rent strikes, opposing evictions and the expropriation of vacant properties;
2. Getting involved in tenant unions to strengthen renters' rights;
3. Organise to prevent housing from becoming a speculative asset and build alternative housing projects;
4. Force local governments and universities to cancel partnerships with businesses involved in climate breakdown;
5. Demand increase in corporate tax to finance social housing developments.

 

This is not a definitive list, but a starting point for challenging housing as a commodity.

 

What we need are strategies to democratise housing. These strategies are in opposition to the “property-owning democracy” famously promoted by Margaret Thatcher. While such an idea celebrates a model of citizenship that makes participation in the private property the benchmark for a democratic society, we call for housing to be a common good.

 

As the ongoing fiasco in student halls shows us — we can no longer duck the fight against the financialisation of housing.

 

 

Rahel Süß is a political theorist, author and editor of engagée Journal (@engagée_journal). Alessio Kolioulis is an urban theorist at UCL Development Planning Unit and editor of engagée.

 

Image credit: MMU

 

28 September 2020

By the Greater Manchester Tenants Union (@gmtenantsunion) formally Tenants Union UK (@tenantsunionuk)

 

Tenants Union UK is changing. From this autumn we will be focussing our organisational efforts on housing issues in Greater Manchester. We will work to strengthen and grow our branches across the city-region, and we’ll be relaunching to reflect this: welcome the Greater Manchester Tenants Union.

 

By consolidating our activity onto the specifics of housing in Greater Manchester, our aim is to build a strong and vibrant regional union, one that is active and deeply rooted in our diverse communities, and which can play a full part in the growing national tenants and renters movement, alongside our allies the London Renters Union, Living Rent, ACORN and many of the other new groups starting around the country.

 

Taking inspiration from housing movements across the world — from Los Angeles to Barcelona to Cape Town— we act with the principle that organisations that are rooted in and led by working class communities can change a city, and that organising around housing issues can create a platform to build working class power from below.

 

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Although we would like to support tenants everywhere, we have realised that for us to have the most impact we must focus on building up community power: house by house, street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. It is difficult for us to provide more than signposting and casual advice for tenants outside of Greater Manchester because that’s where our staff and the bulk of our organisers are based. True power as a tenants union comes not from providing a service — but from building solidarity and a spirit of mutual support among tenants in their communities.

 

Here in Manchester, while investment and regeneration may have enlivened the city centre, and recent years have seen the city continually placed on ‘cultural hotspot’ lists in the U.K, this has come at a price. Once marginal areas on the periphery of the city centre have become ‘investment opportunities’. The average tenants are being displaced, moved out and uprooted from the community they know and love. In the city-region’s core, in Manchester and Salford city centres, billions of pounds have been invested in the construction of skyscrapers and luxury apartments. Big investors have entered the rental market as corporate landlords. This is driving processes of gentrification and displacement, as rents rise and working class people are priced and pushed out. 

 

Common across our region, and not confined to Manchester and Salford, are the hallmarks of Britain’s broken housing system, a system rigged against tenants. Exploitative landlords who charge rents for mouldy properties. Evictions and harassment. Disrepair. Social landlords who are run by remote PFI schemes with no duty of care or responsibility to their tenants. Rising rents, precarity and thousands trapped in temporary accommodation. On top of this, the coronavirus pandemic has revealed the fragility and stark injustices of the system, as the threat of eviction looms for tens of thousands across our region. 

 

Housing is in crisis, and only an organised tenants movement can combat this — taking action against landlords directly and putting pressure on the government and councils for legislative change. The scale of the crisis in our region is such that Greater Manchester needs its own Tenants Union, tailored to the specificities of the crisis here, and fine tuned to the local political and cultural landscape.

 

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Our ambition is to build a federated Tenants Union across Greater Manchester. We will do this by building local branches, rooted in and led by working class communities. By fighting and winning cases against bad landlords, campaigning on local issues that matter to people, conducting neighbourhood research and mapping of the housing crisis, and building community solidarity and pride, we will build these branches. By joining one of these branches you’ll be part of a local group that will offer mutual support and solidarity with housing cases, and connect you to city-wide campaigns.

 

We know the system is stacked against tenants. But we also know that there is strength in our numbers and power in our solidarity. Landlords understand how weak they become when tenants work together so discourage you from knowing your rights and disempower you from fighting back. It’s time to change that. Join us.

 

22 September 2020