A few thoughts and interviews:

I’ve spent some time in the last week talking to people in Stratford who are not involved in the Focus E15 campaign, but who also have housing problems. Some of the transcripts from those interviews are posted below and I have more to add. The views of these people are important. They will give you some insight into the extent not only of the housing problem in this part of the world, but of the fury those problems have generated. They will give you an idea of the mistake Labour makes in running from the Focus E15 campaign (as it did last night again at a Newham council meeting) and pretending that its current problem is merely a “bunch of trots,” or “agitators and hangers-on.”

As it happens, I hear chilling talk when I speak with different people about their housing and income problems. I hear anti-immigration talk. I hear concerns about racism from people who worry that they will be treated badly if they are moved from the places they live in now to areas where they feel they will not be welcome. (“My daughter-in-law was sent to Brentwood and they put her next to a lovely man,” one Newham woman told me last week. “Racist as anything, he was. She wants to come back.”) I hear from new immigrants about the problems they face.

I took the three interviews below at a coffee morning on the Carpenter’s estate last week. One of the back rooms at the community centre is open for several hours on a Tuesday morning and people who are homeless, or needing food, or support come in for sandwiches, coffee and tea. I talked with people for a while. Not for the first time, it occurred to me that the likes of the Focus E15 campaign might just prove a sort of buffer against less positive tides: fascism, out-and-out racism and the aggression I always see when there isn’t enough to go around. Because I can tell you this – Labour isn’t providing that buffer. So. I’d imagine that Ukip is on Labour minds at the moment: certainly as you head towards Clacton and a byelection. I wondered of those sorts of issues were in Robin Wales’ mind when he took a moment during his recent ice-bucket challenge to implore council staff to vote Labour:

Anyway. A housing shortage and austerity generally does not bring out the best in people. Keeping so many properties in the Carpenter’s estate closed for so long was a bad move on the council’s part. People now know that a number of flats there were perfectly fine to live in. Exposing that has been the great achievement of this part of the Focus E15 campaign. Politicians can write a group of young housing campaigners off as a bunch of trots if they want and even drive through them in the mayoral auto, but that’s the lazy approach when you get down to it. It’s a dangerously lazy approach. It will not change the fact that many people now know that serviceable homes on that estate were closed. Nor will it change the fact that social fallout from a housing crisis and rising inequality is inevitably unpleasant.

It already is.

I’m going to add more interviews to this post as I go along. These three are to start:

Tony, 57, unemployed. Lives in Plaistow in a council flat. Angry and reluctant to talk in the first instance.

“Immigration is the problem. There’s too many immigrants. Housing is the problem and jobs. It has changed a lot here. Not for the better, either – no work. I want to get into the CCTV [to work as a security guard]. I’ve got my [security guard] certification, but I haven’t heard back from them.

“I’m 57, nearly 58. It’s hard now. I have to pay council tax now. It’s £10 a month what I wasn’t paying before. My rent went up 30p and the benefit rise was only 70p. I have to pay £2.50 in council tax. I live in a council flat. It’s okay. There are druggies upstairs, but it is okay. It’s not bad. It’s somewhere to live.

“With the work – I want to get into security. I passed all the courses. I got the badges in security, but they don’t want to know, because I got no work experience. It’s that I’m getting older now. I’m 58 this year. I got four children. I can’t give my kids money. I’m on the dole and that. It’s about £72 a week. About £144 a fortnight. You can’t do anything. You know what I mean. You can’t have a night out, or even go down the pub. So, you know. What can you do.”

Alick, 45. Lives in a council flat. His daughter lived in the Focus E15 hostel several years ago. He works with people who have substance abuse problems. He gets called racist names in places like Barking.

“I’ve lived in Stratford all my life. I’ve seen all the development – the new builds. There was a lot of promises made to local people, specially round the time that they were looking to secure the Olympics. They said that housing was going to be available for local people who had a bit of ambition. I don’t think that’s happened at all.

“I’m involved with people who deal with substance misuse issues. That’s another thing what ties in with the housing. There is a lot of substance misuse and a lot of depression, and a lot of people living out in the street in the Stratford Centre. There will be up to 30 or 40 people landing there. It makes me appreciate that I’ve got a roof over my head.

“I’ve got a council property. They [council flats] are like gold dust. I had to wait for six years to get one. I know a lot of people in rented accommodation that they can’t afford. A lot of that is not good.

“My daughter was in E15 Focus, because she fell pregnant at a young age. She got a flat. She was lucky – but you try to get a flat now. I feel sorry for them [the Focus E15 women]. My daughter is a single parent, but she managed to get a place, because she had issues with domestic abuse. Over the last few years, they get hostels, or they try to move you out of the city. It is a lot of single women.

“If you are on the council list, they tell you up to ten years. I know people – they’ve been in council accommodation, but they have lost their houses through various things, and they are put in temporary accommodation and the only way they can get back into a flat is to move Birmingham. They have been told to uproot their children and to move.

“There is a lot of racism. I get that in Barking. Sometimes, I’m walking along with my grandchildren and I get called a nigger and all of that. People are being sent to places where there is a lot of discrimination. It’s also against the Europeans. There is a lot of negative feedback. This is where a lot of conflicts happen, isn’t it.”

Adam, 19, is from Hungary. He’s been in the UK for 11 days. He is still learning English, so we don’t speak in great detail. He’s sitting across from Tony, who watches him. Tony does not like immigrants.

“I come here to learn English. I came to teach [learn] English much better.

“I need a job – in maintenance, labourer, anything like that. I need food to eat as well. I am 19. I worked for a while in a shop [in Hungary]. I come here and live with my father (his father is also in the room this morning). My father has lived here for a year. My father does not have anywhere to live now.

“It isn’t easy learning English. I learned for five years at home.”

More soon.