Time for a rant.

The young woman in this video is Fatima Fonesca, aged 23. She is sitting with her one-year-old daughter in their single room in the Focus E15 temporary accommodation hostel at Stratford. I went into the hostel to film the two last week. Have overlaid some scenes from the hostel room into the video. Think I’ll add more video soon.

This is the kind of living arrangement that gets on my nerves. It’s not just the cramped room that Fatima must live in – the bed and the cot shoved together, the tiny kitchen, the piled-up clothes, or even the tough security you have to go through to get into the hostel and the room in the first place (I had to hand over my passport for photo ID to get in, which made me nervous). It is the fact that women like Fatima must live like this while other people royally take the piss. I have specific royals in mind here, actually. The pictures of Fatima with her baby made me think (and not in a bighearted way) of that recent, pointless-but-much-fawned-over photo of the appalling Kate Middleton and her Prince Forgettable hanging out of a window with their baby. The Duke and Duchess – whose main achievements in life involve simply being born and later producing offspring (things that your average bunny, garden toad or housecat can do without even trying) – have just splurged £1m of taxpayers’ money on renovations to their already-luxurious palace. The fact that they have a palace at all makes me want to punch in a door. It’s 2014 and we still have grasping royals living in palaces and tooling about the world on endless holidays like they need a letup.

Fatima, on the other hand, does not live in a palace. She lives with her baby in one small room in a temporary hostel which has more than 200 small flats in it. She has lived in the Focus E15 hostel for three years – the last year, of course, with her daughter. The kitchen in the flat is tiny and has no ventilation. Fatima says the flat is unbearably hot in summer and very cold in winter. The lock on the window has been broken so that she can push the window open far enough to let air in. Wet washing hangs over the doors. That’s the only way Fatima can get the baby’s clothes dry enough for the child to wear. It is not the greatest place that I’ve seen. It’s certainly no Kensington Palace. But it is Fatima’s punishment for not being born to a grossly indulged family in a fancy postcode. This is her punishment for being a young mother on benefits. This is the era we’re in. The young mothers of the Focus E15 hostel have been battling Newham Council for decent housing for themselves and their children, and they’ve had to put up with patronising, dismissive crap from well-appointed worthies all the way. Councillors and their hangers-on keep asking them questions like “what have you done to help yourselves? What are you doing to help yourselves?” I’ve heard people say that. I can’t tell you how irritating I find it and they’re not even talking about me. The facts are that these young women are actually doing a great deal to help themselves and a lot of other people besides – they’ve organised an extraordinary campaign for housing for all and have managed to stop Newham Council from sending them out of the borough to live, for now at least. But you don’t see media getting all excited about that. Kate Middleton can make her home over to the tune of £1m, but the Focus E15 mothers are regarded with suspicion and sneered at.

No matter that these women have lives. They talk about the future a lot, as you do when you’re young. Fatima wants to work as an interpreter. She speaks several languages. She thinks that she’ll have to do things by herself for now. Her baby’s father is not well and can’t be with the family for reasons that become very clear as we talk. Fatima worries about making his problems too public. I tell her that we can save that part of her story for another day. Part of me thinks that we can save that part of her story forever. I wonder if it is really anyone’s business. I wonder about that a lot these days. As a journalist who writes about people who are affected by austerity, I get sick of having to rummage around in people’s private lives, trying to dig up details that will make them seem pathetic enough to be thought deserving of social security and a mainstream press writeup. These people aren’t pathetic. They just have lives. And yes – there are things in those lives that the monied classes would wag an admonishing finger at. I really don’t give a damn.

Fatima and I talk for a long time. She tells me this, among other things:

“[When I was little], my grandma left me in the care of my auntie. She is my mum. So, after she sent me and her son to Portugal, she came here a year. Then, when I was 13, 14 – my auntie asked my mum if she wanted to come here. So I came and stayed with her for a while, but things wasn’t really great. I ended up doing a couple of madnesses. As you say in the hood life… basically, we were just living like this, like the way that we live in Focus [with lots of other people] – you know, today there’s this missing and today there’s that missing. We were surrounded by drugs. There were people drinking. We were all young, but together, we got older, so we ended up doing a couple of mad things. Sometimes, we find ways to get money. Do little robberies and stuff.

“The girl [whose house I was living in], she had a baby. Her boyfriend is like one of the hood guys. He knows more guys and more guys and more girls and so the whole house was just full. Some of us used to leave and some of us used to stay and stuff like that, but then I heard about this hostel, because my friend was living here and she told me to go to go to Connexions and she told me who was her adviser and to meet with him. I spoke with him and he made me a couple of questions. They wanted to send me to some bed and breakfast in London and I was like No. You know – if I’m going wrong, and my mum, she is religious, she don’t smoke and she don’t drink, so me being around all that… I didn’t really want to go far from there – so I was like “what’s going to happen to me if I proper get mixed up there [in central London]?”

“First, I went to First Step. That just had a bed and a sink to wash your face. If you wanted to use the toilet, you would have to come out of your room and there’s the toilet and there’s the bath up there. The kitchen – you would have to share it as well. I stayed there for 2 months for them to see if I can live on my own. And then I moved here.”

Fatima’s aim is to get Newham council to place her in housing in the borough. The council has already placed a number of the Focus E15 women in short-term private rents in London, rather than out of town in Hastings or Birmingham, which was the council’s original plan. That has been a partial success for the women – it’s a partial success, because the women are fighting for secure social housing in London and they haven’t got that. They’ve only got those private lets and they could lose those private-let homes when their tenancies finish in just a few months. Forcing the council to find them homes in London has been a success, though. It really has. It’s a success that the women have achieved by getting right in Newham Mayor Robin Wales’ face. This is a real feminism if you ask me. These women do not spend their time on twitter, wittering on about faces on banknotes, golf club bans and Goop. They spend their time petitioning local people at their regular Broadway stall and chasing Wales around the borough – from library meet-and-greets to town hall meetings from which councillors have simply run. The women have created a situation that Wales and the council have had to address. That’s the way to do it.

So.

Join the women this Friday 4 April at 11am for an event.

Meet at Focus E15, Brimstone House, Victoria Street, Stratford, London, E15 4NX

Bring banners, whistles, people and enthusiam.

The Focus E15 mothers’ facebook page is here.