Lambeth council’s ‘welfare’ – cutting benefits, fighting for police

This has turned into quite a rant – it’s quite long and incoherent, but I wanted to talk about the welfare cuts in Lambeth, mental health, the police, and what scum Lambeth council are. I just got really sick of all of the propaganda they’ve been putting around. I hope some of it makes sense and is interesting.

Woman: “Hello, I was calling to get advice on the latest benefit cuts”

Benefits helpline: “It’s not us you want to speak to, I’ll put you through to Lambeth Living”

Gets redirected to Lambeth Living

Woman: “I saw some posters up with scissors cutting across a pound sign. I was calling for advice. My benefits have been cut because of the bedroom tax and council tax benefit cut. I work in the public sector so my pay has been frozen for the last couple of years. My pay check doesn’t get me to the end of the month any more and this was before the most recent cuts. I wondered if you had advice on income maximisation?”

Lambeth Living: “We haven’t heard about that [the benefits advice campaign that Lambeth are running, which advertised the first phone number as a place to get advice]. We don’t know about that…the cuts have come in, they’re happening”

Boy does my friend know that they’re happening. Before the crisis my friend had figured out a way to just about survive on low wages and low status at work both of which compound her already severe mental health issues. With the cascade of cuts things have got significantly worse for her.

Now all she has money for is food. She walks everywhere as public transport is too expensive – this means that she is then even more exhausted during the time free from work, making survival even more difficult and deepening her depression. Important time and energy is taken up fighting for the benefits she needs. I attended the housing office to support her with her claim and witnessed the suspicion you are treated with as you go through an exercise of humiliation proving how little you have.

Life at work has only got worse with the cuts. Whilst struggling to deliver a decent library service in the face of long-term underinvestment and the more recent cuts, library staff have been under increased pressure as well as surveillance and bullying from management. Council staff are not allowed to speak out against the council, but anyone who visits a library can see the diminishing welfare of the staff as well a witness a service that is only just functioning. Now the staff have been told that they will be providing welfare advice as well as the library service (which always doubled up as social services anyway as vulnerable people sought assistance here).

Supporting welfare cuts

“The cuts are happening” so goes the Lambeth benefit cuts campaign. Lambeth argue that this is the doing of central government, which indeed it is. But Lambeth council are implicated in it too. They are supporting these brutal cuts. Their posters, depicting scissors cutting through the pound sign, state what everyone on low incomes knew already. The posters encourage acceptance and acquiescence. The council could have written anything on these posters, how about “Lambeth let’s organise/loot – luxury for all” but instead they informed us that benefit cuts were happening and that is that. We can get some patronising advice about how to cope with deepening poverty apparently – although the phone call above suggests that the council has failed to tell its staff of this service/campaign. I resented seeing these posters in my neighbourhood which were effectively adverts for welfare cuts. Them enforcing their reality onto us as if their could be no struggle. The absence of any kind of opposition and outrage on what is being inflicted on our communities is complicity with the cuts. Lambeth have not spoken out against these brutal and violent welfare cuts and this is why they are scum – there’s (lots) more to come to support this.

Councillor Edward Davie shows his support for so-called ‘welfare reform’ in his article for the Guardian in which he expresses contempt and suspicion of those on benefits, repeating the myth that benefit fraud is actually a thing. The council’s Emergency Support Scheme (which replaces central government’s social fund which was cut this April) facilitates the role out of another disastrous aspect of ‘welfare reform’ – Universal Credit: “ The council wishes to encourage people to take up Credit Union membership so that they have access to mainstream support and a proper bank account in the run up to the implementation of Universal Credit. Making Crisis Loands conditional on membership achieves this, reducing the likelihood of people getting into difficulty in the future. Charging a small amount of interest allows money to be ploughed back into the pot to help more people.” http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/moderngov/documents/s51837/05%20Cabinet%20report%20171212%20-%20Emergency%20Support%20Scheme%20-%20FINAL.pdf

Of course, in this document about the Emergency Support Scheme, those vindictive words ‘personal responsibility’ appear as a stated aim of the scheme.

Lies and misinformation

Another round of Lambeth propaganda posters informed residents that their council tax had been frozen for another year. Lambeth here are again smug and self-congratulatory. However, this is simply not true for 20,758 residents who have seen their council tax benefit scrapped and an increase in the amount they must now pay. On average, they will have to pay £2.12 extra a week, with the greatest amount being £7.68. This may not sound like a lot, but when your pay or JSA already struggles to get you to the end of the month, suddenly losing £2 a week is a big deal. Whilst other local authorities decided to maintain council tax benefit for those who need it, deciding it would be more costly to administer and collect from those who simply do not have it, Lambeth council decided to pass it on to some of its poorest residents (pensioners, disabled people, carers, those affected by the benefit cap will still receive council tax benefit). They are most definitely not on our side.

Lambeth council had apparently consulted on what scheme should replace the centrally administered Council Tax Benefit, however a friend who had responded to this ‘consultation’ told me how the consultation form had been guiding to what Lambeth wanted to hear. She had wanted to propose collecting council tax from second homes in the borough in order to keep council tax benefit but this was not presented as an option by Lambeth and there was nowhere for her to write this suggestion.

Letters from Lambeth Welfare Reform Team partnered with the homelessness charity Broadway have been sent to the 658 families who will be affected by the benefit cap, these letters have also appeared in my local library. A colourful scene of a residential street mocks the reader who is informed that they will be unlikely to remain in their home. “Work is an option that will have to be considered” we’re informed patronisingly by people who clearly have no understanding of the current crisis, one of the consequences being 1,700 people applying for 8 jobs at a local Costa cafe, meaning that waged work is simply not an option. Nor do they seem to know that many housing benefit claimants are already in paid work (over 90% of new claims made between 2010-2011 were made by those in paid work); or that those not in paid work do spend their days working but do not receive a wage. In order to ‘help’ people into waged work, Broadway claim to be working in partnership with the local Work Programme providers. These Work Programme providers sanction claimants with relish, taking away their only means of subsistence. You stand a better chance of getting paid work if you’re not on the Work Programme than if you are. Yet, as the letter acknowledges itself, people are mandated onto the Work Programme – if they do not participate they will lose their benefits. Lambeth Council and Broadway charity are working in partnership with providers who can further impoverish claimants.

Whilst Lambeth council claim to be powerless to act against central government cuts – which we know is false, seeing as they are happily enough driving them through – in areas where it does have significantly more power, Lambeth has consistently acted against its residents and on behalf of large developers and gentrifiers. The council have allowed developers to ditch their commitments to social housing on the Brixton Square development. The developers of Vauxhall Sky Gardens have also applied to ditch their commitment of 31% ‘affordable’ housing to 0%. Whilst the social housing that had been promised would have only been a tiny fraction of what is needed (in a borough which has severe overcrowding, an ever increasing housing waiting list, and hundreds of families being forced from their homes with the forthcoming benefit cap) it would have been at least some kind of tokenistic gesture that the council acknowledge the urgent housing needs of its residents. Instead, the ‘needs’ of developers gentrifiers are of greater interest to the council.

Rage

The most infuriating, sickening, and insulting part of all of this is that whilst Lambeth council fail to take an active stance against these brutal welfare cuts, they suddenly do speak out and campaign when it comes to police cuts. At my local GPs I was met with a pile of postcards depicting two cheery looking police hats perched upon the figure 100 demanding ’100 more police’. Demanding 100 more police in a borough where communities are terrorised and targeted by the police, where the police bully and beat up and kill those with mental health issues shows Lambeth’s disturbing vision of ‘welfare’. Welfare provision has morphed into the policeman’s boot. Of course, welfare has always been a form of domination and control, but now the boot, which had previously nudged at us, is now kicking us in our stomachs and pushing our faces into the concrete.

100 more police will apparently ‘make Lambeth safer for women’ – says the council which is closing one o’clock clubs (one mother told me how important these places were for women, she identified domestic violence as being linked with women having nowhere outside the house to go to), drastically cutting their incomes, and taking away autonomy through their promotion of the Work Programme.

The disgusting and abusive treatment by the police of those with mental health issues (last year, a video went around on Twitter showing police men attacking a mentally ill man outside Brixton library. A protest was held outside the police station that evening against their violence to our communities) parallels the contempt that the council shows. In a borough which has a proportion of people with mental health issues in Lambeth is 12 times the national average, the council has taken away bus passes from mental health patients, ended a weekly social session (see photo above), and outsourced some mental health services to a charity which sees work as conducive to good mental health (rather than thinking more critically about the role of work and acknowledging its role in compromising mental health). No doubt there have been other cuts to mental health services which have been unreported. In the face of these cuts, it seems the police will be left to ‘deal’ with those affected by the cuts, as more police is what the council deemed important to campaign for over other, less violent, forms of welfare. This is the ‘welfare’ that Lambeth are promoting for our increasingly impoverished communities.

Isolation feeds sadness

The letters dropping through people’s doors, telling them they may have to work, or ‘manage their money better’ or whatever other crap Lambeth have come up with, are part of individualising the welfare cuts. That they are a personal problem, that must be dealt with on this level, whether it means you are forced from your home, end up needing a food bank to feed your family, or walk yourself everywhere to exhaustion. As the 1968 graffiti declared, “isolation feeds sadness”. To combat this feeling of isolation, helplessness, and self-blame, local residents are organising together to deal with their issues collectively, “to challenge the disrespect experienced by people trying to access housing and benefits” as London Coalition Against Poverty eloquently puts it. Residents have been coming together as South London Welfare Action and Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth where, based upon and inspired by the models of LCAP and ECAP, they discuss the problems they are facing, provide support for each other, and collectively decide what direct action to take. These groups allow people to see that it is not an individual issue or failing to be struggling with benefits or housing, but one that is common to us all. Through leafletting and holding meeting for these groups, we’ve met our neighbours and talked with each other. It was inspiring to listen to people talk about their situation and be so enthusiastic about the groups and taking action together. As one woman said to me when we were discussing housing problems: “Everything is going up, but my wages are the same, my social rent has gone up again this year. Gas, electric, food are all going up as well. I would definitely like to be involved.” In the face of our communities literally being torn apart by welfare cuts, this coming together seems like the most important thing that we can do.

Lambeth have created an interesting ‘profiler tool’ which allows you to view the benefit cuts ward by ward. Worth taking a look at here to try and get an idea of what is happening to our communities. Does not come near to speaking with people about the cuts and crisis though.

Housing and anti-work articles

I recently wrote an article for Red Pepper magazine about bedroom tax organising happening across the UK. I had great fun at a rowdy town hall meeting in Crawley and was moved and inspired by a Leeds’ meeting in which a group of strangers created an incredible feeling of togetherness by the end. I loved speaking with people. I was saddened and enraged by their stories, but also inspired and hopeful. Read it here.

My prolific use of the hashtag #WrongToWork got me an invitation from the Occupied Times to rage against work. I just visited LARC to cram my pannier bag full of this issue on the topic of work. I chatted with one of the Occupied Times folk about the importance of free radical media that you can hold in your hands and pass on to others (after listening to Novara with me yesterday, my mum said she’d like to read more about politics but doesn’t have the internet at home, so OT and other free zines are really important). The OT collective all work for free. They could do with help folding the paper and distributing it, so contact them if you can help. My article is here. There’s also an ace article on workfare (link for this not up yet, but will add it when it is) and a fantastic workfare infogram.

Finally, I read this last night and it made my evening.

Mental health, post-fordism, and animals

Imperial College Stress Less campaign

A friend of mine told me about an email sent to Imperial College students – there will be farm animals and a bouncy castle on campus this term to help deal with exam stress. We had a good laugh about this – we’d just been to a fantastic discussion on Mental Health and Post-Fordism as part of the Immaterial Labour Isn’t Working series – and now here, Imperial had given yet another example of the ‘privatization of stress’ that Mark Fisher had been describing. I love petting animals as much as the next person, but it was the ludicrousness that petting some animals for an afternoon would address 3-4 years of mental torment, as we labour under debt accumulating to tens of thousands of pounds. Student anxiety, depression, stress, suicide could be dealt with by providing students with some farm animals, ignoring the alienating, destructive, intensely pressurised, and increasingly privatized education system which creates such feelings. Through the seemingly innocuous petting of a cow or session on the bouncy castle, students’ mental health issues are decontextualised and seen as specific to individuals and therefore the ‘solutions’ are similarly individualised and superficial. Petting therapy is certainly easier than an overhaul of the education system and also gives Imperial another ‘student experience’ selling point – “your time here will be shit, but you’ll get to pet a rabbit.” Facing £9,000 a year fees and perpetual examination, too right you’d expect some farm animals thrown into the deal.

(My friend also expressed sadness that the petting zoo is a one day event, rather than a more long term feature of Imperial, as they had been lead to believe.)

Home Sweet Heygate

Home Sweet Home, Enrica Colusso (2012)

Home Sweet Home, a documentary based in the Heygate estate, speaks with both residents and council and corporate figures as the estate is gradually emptied through the latter’s’ ‘regeneration’ plans. Through this exploration, Colusso tries to draw out wider questions: what is a home, who owns our cities? However, the film maker’s whimsical voice tries too hard, the narrative-poetry does not come from the Heygate and feels forced and affected. It is more infuriating than informative. Shots of her Mac and iphone displaying archive footage, perhaps an attempt to play with documentary conventions, are jarring, unnecessary and inappropriate. Or perhaps it was some sort of reflexive acknowledgement of her class privilege or an ironic comment on the Mac class to whom the Heygate is being handed over to by Southwark council.

Yet, Colusso has captured some brilliant footage that makes the film important viewing. Speaking with residents in and around their homes and sometimes as they leave for the final time; these scenes are captivating – at times hilarious and very moving. A single parent mother tries to articulate her feelings about the imminent eviction as her daughter plays with a toy that sings a piercing jingle. A man sits for the last time in his armchair in the home he has spent half his life in. A grandmother wraps up her trinkets telling the stories that they hold as she gets ready to leave. These scenes convey uniquely and powerfully the inherent violence of gentrification. Juxtaposed with these homes – spaces that have been lived and loved in, now being brutally yanked away – a plastic looking man from Lend Lease, tries to convince us that he understands the meaning of ‘home’ describing the old farmhouse he and his partner have bought and are “SPENDING LOTS OF MONEY” renovating. Other interviews with the architect of the new development, the leader of Southwark council, and some other Southwark council non-entity, are fascinating in their grotesqueness. It is impossible to do what they said justice, but it involved a mantra of contempt for “poor people”. Taking themselves seriously, they came out with statements such as: “There are rich people and there are poor people, we need to mix them up a bit. Call me utopian…” Someone plays around with a model of the Elephant area, picking up the Heygate chunk and casting it aside. Replacing it with their vision, he proudly points out the new passage ways which have been created allowing people to “flow”. Through their language and actions they are surprisingly honest about their project of class cleansing. The absurdity of it all is shown through archive footage of Bill Clinton declaring that “Elephant is the place to be”.

A cliché ending with the Special’s Ghost Town tells the narrative that Lend Lease and Southwark council scum would have you believe. With one home still inhabited and many people still using the space for games, gardening and other activities, they have not won.

 

 

Justice for Jola and the struggle for housing in Warsaw

At Self-Organised London, an anti-gentrification and housing rights social centre, two pensioners and two younger members of the Syrena collective from Warsaw, shared their story of their struggle for public housing. They spoke with fire and anger telling a story that was all too familiar to those of us sitting in the Elephant and Castle social centre – a story of corrupt developers, complicit local councils, a law working against us, and the violence that is at the core of commodified housing. Despite not sharing a common language, as the women spoke we could feel and understand what they were saying. The talk was impassioned and inspiring and we left with plans to show solidarity to our friends in Poland fighting this common struggle and to support the European convergence of housing rights activists that the collective have organised for 12-14th April in Warsaw.

Jola Brzeska

Wanda and Ewa came to highlight the story of their friend, Jola Brzeska, who was burnt to death because of the threat she posed to developers as a tenants rights activist. Her body was found in a forest on the outskirts of Warsaw on March 1 2011. Two years later, her death remains ‘unsolved’. The police have failed to investigate her murder; they did not take fingerprints from her apartment where she was kidnapped nor did they investigate tyre tracks in the forest where she was killed. Police have claimed that a witness who saw the moment of the kidnapping withdrew their statement. Instead, Jola’s friends are taking up the struggle for justice for Jola. “We are trying to do anything to be loud about the case and get justice for Jola.”

As explains, “I have my own theory about Jola’s death – we had the same enemy, the same people throwing us out of our apartments. We were leading our investigation to find out who were taking our houses. She came up with too much knowledge and trusted the authorities that she shouldn’t have.”

Jola had been defending her home from developers and had been supporting others too, joining their struggles together by co-founding the Warsaw Tenant’s Association. Jola had spent the last years of her life studying the law to defend the rights of elderly tenants and others who were under threat of losing their homes. “Jola never missed any demo, direct action, hunger strike, she gave all her heart to support the people, she fought till the end.”

Background: Re-privatization of homes in Poland

“Her case reflects the issues connected to the pathology of what is happening in housing in Warsaw, the rest of Poland, and the UK.”

Today, 97% of houses in Warsaw have been re-privatised. Syrena used the term re-privatised because before the Second World War, most of the housing had been private. After the war thousands if not millions of people rebuilt the city with their own hands. “Warsaw is a city built by the squatters basically.” These houses became public housing with tenants renting them from the local authorities. As one system of domination replaced the other, the onset of capitalism saw the mass sell-off of public housing to private developers. There is no law to regulate the private sector and so developers can speculate unhindered creating a housing monopoly. Now council housing stands at just 11% of all housing stock; there has been no new council housing for many years.

The developers buy up titles such as “prince”; “so the developer of our apartment is a ‘prince’, I call him ‘our prince’ because he owns us.” Groups of specialised bandits operate on behalf of the developers to evict tenants from their homes. “We have no chance when we are meeting these groups – the corruption runs through the police and judges. We cannot rely on the law to be on our side.”

Developers purchase these public apartments at rock bottom prices from the local authorities, the developers then claim money back from these same authorities for the period during which they were re-constructing the properties.

As well as the privatization of housing, squares and parks across the city are also being enclosed.

Housing hunger

“There is a housing hunger. A hunger that is political rather than natural.”

“There are no statistics but Jola was not the only person who was killed because of this process.”

“We are strong women, other people who cannot take it and commit suicide or get very sick. Personal space so important on this earth, losing it is a death sentence.”

Pensioners and other tenants are being forcefully evicted from their homes without the right to social housing. There is no social housing for them to move into (there is a waiting list of 10 years) and so they are told to rent in the private sector. For many people, they simply cannot afford the rents of the private sector. Old people cannot access credit to get a home and so eviction is a “death sentence”.

Evictions were banned during the winter period between December and April because of the extreme cold however this law has recently been changed so that people can be evicted at any time. They are told to stay in bed and breakfasts or in metal containers which charge £10 a night.

We watch a video clip of one eviction in Lodz, 100km from Warsaw, in which two parents threaten to commit suicide as the bailiffs arrive. In response the police send in 100 anti-terror police to ‘deal’ with the situation. Another video clip shows an old woman with her cat who are being evicted:

“what the authorities want me to do is jump out of the window along with my cat”.

The issue of privatised/commodified housing is not just the subsequent loss of public housing but the distribution of housing. There are hundreds of empty buildings across Warsaw as people face living on the streets or in metal containers. If the authorities had the political will, they could deal with this artificial housing crisis “within a month…but authorities are like companies, they are only interested in making money.”

“No one cares what will happen to people. No one cares that we were the ones who built the place and have taken care of the building for all these years.”

Warsaw housing struggles – “You cannot burn us all”

“Jola was saying we should do something – people were calling us hooligans but now people are taking us more seriously. We are fighting for housing and for dignity of people…Not to get dignity but to fight back, because we are all born with dignity.”

Warsaw tenants have been defending their homes against the bailiffs, police, and developers and whoever else attempts to threaten their basic human right. With corruption across all authorities, and first hand experience that working within the system will get us nowhere, people are taking direct action for themselves and each other. People are squatting buildings across the city; this is becoming normalised rather than a ‘sub cultural’ thing. The older generation have been “far more radical than young people – red and black and all that – more radical in resisting the authorities than the young people.” However, young people are now getting on board and supporting in resisting evictions.

Tenants groups comprise of people struggling for their homes learning together to provide legal advice and support for each other, and through this process empowering each other.

Groups of tenants and squatters have also taken back buildings symbolically to show that “it is not for the authorities to change something – we are the change”. On International Tenants Day people reclaimed a 19th century building.

The struggle continues more radicalised as a result of Jola’s death. “They cannot burn us all, like they burned Jola, that is our slogan ‘you cannot burn us all’”.

UK solidarity & struggle

Suggestions of how we can show solidarity with seeking justice for Jola and the struggle for the right to housing in Warsaw were highlighted. Raising attention at the Polish embassy in London, writing articles together about our shared housing struggles in London and Warsaw, and making direct links with each other, through the forthcoming housing rights convergence. Through actions such as these, we can learn from each other and together and strengthen our struggle for our homes.

A proposal to hold a demonstration outside the Polish embassy a week before the Warsaw convergence in order to highlight Jola’s murder and to raise awareness about the convergence received lots of energy. Get in touch to help make it happen or watch this space for further info.

Skillshare 2013

Best avatar ever (rivalling @wolvopingu?)

Aaaawwwwwww I just wanted to write a post bigging up the wonderful Skillshare 2013 this weekend. I think I spent most of it wide eyed with excitement – particularly the last session on ‘props and ninja tactics’. My friend had promised that it would have “everything you can think of, well almost everything…” and this was definitely the case. The workshops – including public (dis)order, lockons, Fitwatch, climbing and abseiling and more – provided a much needed space to learn new skills, rethink old ones, and share stories and ideas related to our activism. The two days were massively useful, fun, engaging and inspiring. I learnt so much from everybody involved, it was wonderful. With things feeling a bit shit, skill shares like these can help us reflect on what we’re doing and what we face and support each other in doing things better. Skilling up with each other helps break down informal hierarchies and helps us towards what a friend has suggested we aim for – ‘Total Anarchy’ – based on the Dutch football tactic…which in turn inspired ‘Total Policing’. Skill shares also open up new tactics to new people, or to old people who’ve been having a bit of a break, making sure what we do is accessible to everyone who wants to be involved.

Even though the workshops were hugely comprehensive, we flagged up things that we didn’t have time to think about more then. So hopefully we can get together and skill share again soon. (Of course, we should be making an effort all the time to share our skills within our groups and between groups but dedicated events such as this one are super fun and allow us to encounter people and skills (e.g. ninja skills) that we may not previously have come across.) I think there were loads of people who wanted to come but were unable to make this weekend which was rammed with other events and happenings. In a way, it was really lovely being in a smaller group which allowed us to discuss things more and get to know each other, creating a really warm and comfortable environment, however, it also meant we couldn’t practice avoiding kettles properly as we didn’t have the numbers. Next time though!

I’m still feeling so stoked thinking about it now!

Massive thanks to the awesome folks who organised the event and ran workshops!

Women’s library occupation

Just a quick note before bed about the Women’s Library occupation that happened earlier on today and will be going on over the weekend and hopefully beyond.

Instead of an exhibition on women’s struggles being closed on international women’s day, the occupation has meant that the exhibition now will be extended so that more people can enjoy it. The occupation is also against the plans for this incredible space and important feminist resource being closed and its contents shifted to the London School of Economics, and against austerity and its gendered impacts.

The occupation is incredible and inspiring – it’s hard to articulate exactly what is so wonderful about it – it’s more of a feeling after spending a wonderful day there talking, organising, and hunting for food. But there is a great warmth and determination about everyone and the space. There is also a badge machine!!! I’ve been getting angrier and angrier recently, but  there was a real sense of hopefulness about it all. There are tonnes of amazing events happening in the space and so you should absolutely go down and get involved.

The Women’s Library occupation has added to the amazing action-planning-against-austerity events that are taking place all over London this weekend – with Skillshare 2013, Benefit Justice meeting, London Roots Collective drop-in, CAAT…it’s all really exciting!