Author Archives: Kate B

Newham council walks out of public meeting to avoid Focus E15 mums protest

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Update 28 September 2014

There is another meeting of Newham council on Monday 29 September 2014 in the council chamber at Newham Town Hall at 8pm. Details here.

Below is a report of an amazing Newham council meeting earlier this year when Newham councillors got up and legged it past a Focus E15 protest in the council chambers. There was a hell of a uproar about all of this and my report of it. Members of the public – including the mothers – were denied access to the council chamber, supposedly because the public gallery was being rebuilt, or under construction. Right. Those of us who were either at or filming the protest outside the chamber were allowed to view the meeting on a rubbish TV monitor in a side room. We could see quite clearly that the noise coming from the FE15 protest was causing some consternation in the chamber. I wanted to find out what was going on inside the chamber, so went to security with my press pass and asked them to let me in. They refused, on the grounds that I even though I was accredited, I hadn’t been formally approved by the council. You can hear my exchange with the security guards in the audio below. I couldn’t believe it. Then suddenly, the council chamber doors burst open and Robin Wales and others came hurtling out and hurried past the protest. Some of the Focus E15 mothers chased him and asked him to talk to them. He got very angry, as you’ll see in the video below. The other councillors filed out and left the scene as quickly as they could. The council insisted later that hadn’t run and left the meeting unfinished – that it reached the end of the agenda and left in usual time. I still say that the council got to the end of that agenda real fast and then split. I also say that if a council must accept a variety of interpretations of proceedings if it refuses people access to a public council meeting, won’t allow journalists in to see what is happening and forces anyone who is interested in the meeting to watch proceedings on a monitor. If a council won’t let people into a meeting to see things first-hand, it’ll have to accept that they will interpret things in whatever way they do. Otherwise, we’ll fast reach a point where the only way to find out what went on at your local council meeting will be to ring your council up and ask. You won’t be able to see for yourself.

I got the NUJ to make a complaint about my barring from that meeting as an accredited journalist. The council wrote back to say that I was foul-mouthed and aggressive. Which was an outrage. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – that council really doesn’t like women who talk back.

Anyway. This is the sort of reception the Focus E15 mothers and women like me have had all year from that council. People have been made to wait outside, excluded from a general public event like a council meeting and then left hanging as the elected have run for it.

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Original post:

Updates from the meeting (updated 26 February 2014):

More on the furious misogyny of Newham:

Getting onto three days now and I have still not had an apology from Newham council for barring me from entering the council chamber at Monday’s public council meeting. Not a word. Nothing. Still. I’m an NUJ accredited journalist and have been doing this work for years, but – nothing. I did hear via a number of sources that the council said I should have been admitted, but that means absolutely nothing. Saying a journalist should have been admitted after the event is useless. Completely useless. As everyone is perfectly aware.

I can tell you what I HAVE heard, though. Well, from one person anyway. I’ve heard that I insulted the council by saying that it cut Monday’s meeting short and left the building very quickly and en masse because of the noisy Focus E15 protest outside the council chamber.

The line is (I trust I have this straight) that the meeting wasn’t cut short, because it was in itself incredibly short (about 30 minutes to decide and debate the year’s budget, do you mind). Newham says it did not cut it short as it cuts nothing short, although as I say, 30 minutes has struck a few of us as a very short meeting indeed. The line appears to be that the meeting ended in an entirely natural way at set time as the year’s budget was knocked off in 30 minutes and that councillors simply left the room in the manner that they always do, unmotivated in any way by the clamour made by the young women protesting outside the council chamber. So. I can only conclude that the mayor always leaves council meetings at the speed you see in the video below and that everyone else always leaves at pace and en masse, looking neither left nor right and just going for it. Have a look at the videos below and see for yourselves. I know what I saw and filmed. I saw people steaming out en masse. The whole fast-departing crew is grim-faced in the extreme. Having covered council for years, it’s usually my experience that when council meetings end without a protest in the mix, councillors hang around and talk to each other and leave the chamber at their leisure in twos and threes. They’ll talk and stop to lean against walls and finish conversations and they’ll often be there for a while. They might even speak to desperate constituents lining the hallway.

So. That’s the sum of Newham council communication with me since it cut communication off at the beginning of the year. Silence has been broken to make sure the council’s reputation as an outfit that sees out half-hour meetings is upheld. The rest we must guess. Nobody bleating about meeting attendance has taken this opportunity to expand on issues like the rows of flats that lie empty on the Carpenters Estate while the council hands out Asbo warnings to rough sleepers, or to address the very real concerns about the conditions at the Focus E15 hostel and the effects that those conditions might have on the toddlers and babies who live there. As you’ll read in this story, the young mothers at the hostel raised concerns earlier this year about rats, mice, rubbish and mould. Mould, as I’ve said a number of times now, can be extremely dangerous to small children – read Zoe William’s recent article reference to that here. Nobody from the council or the East Thames housing association responded to me when I posted that story. Nobody popped up on my timeline to say That’s Terrible. I make the point again that I can barely get anyone in the press or politics to take an interest in this, or in the struggle the Focus E15 mothers have and continue to have in their fight for social housing. They’re fascinated by councillor reputation, but a little less by children’s lives. The Focus E15 people are women and children and they have no money. They are dispensable. Women and children are collateral.

More on the Focus E15 story soon. It is certainly very interesting to note who is responding and to what.

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Amazing scenes (and precedents) tonight at the full and supposedly public Newham council meeting. The Focus E15 mums – a group of young women, many of whom are still technically homeless – have been campaigning for social housing for all for some months. You can read that story here. Some have been placed in private rentals for just a year (without washing machines, etc, even though they have small children). Others are still at the Focus E15 hostel for young homeless people. They turned up to attend the public council meeting to try and talk to Mayor Robin Wales tonight. They were told that they weren’t allowed in – some rubbish about the public gallery being under construction (apparently it has been for ages. A lot of us are starting to think it will be forever). Security wouldn’t even let a small delegation from the group in to say their piece. So, the women began to chant. The noise clearly carried into the chamber, because not long after it began, Wales and the council got up and left the building. You can see Wales being followed by the women here and getting really angry:

I’ve got more video to post, so will do so through tonight.

In a very interesting precedent, the council denied me entry to the meeting as well – even though I’m an accredited journalist. Before the chanting began, I went up to security, showed them my NUJ press card and said I wanted to go in and see the meeting for a bit. Amazingly, they responded by saying I needed to be approved by the council to attend that full public council meeting. This was quite something. I’ve heard a lot of crap over the years, but this one was new. They asked me if I’d applied to the council to attend. I of course said I hadn’t – no journalist has to apply to attend a full public council meeting, for God’s sake. Nobody should have to at all. They said if I hadn’t, and hadn’t been approved, I couldn’t go in. I of course would not be approved, because I’ve been writing about these women and their campaign for some time and the council has already told me that it won’t communicate with me, because it doesn’t like the line I’ve taken. You can read that story here. The line I’ve taken is that everyone deserves decent social housing and that homeless women who campaign for that on everyone’s behalf ought to be heard at least, but it appears that is off-message. I’ll tell you this – if we’re at the point where only council-approved journalists are allowed in and the ones who interview service users *too* closely are not, things are not in a good place at all.

Here’s an audio of Newham council security staff saying I have to apply to attend public council meetings or be invited (presume the invite got lost in the mail):

And here’s a video of councillors leaving and the Focus E15 mums asking councillor Terry Paul if he would come and talk.

The thing is – there’s a major issue here and it doesn’t matter if councillors and MPs like it or not, or like the fact people are protesting and reporting on those protests or not. The issue is that people increasingly can’t afford decent places to live. MPs and councillors need to face that fact, rather than take issue with people who yell about it. The private rented sector is out of control and social housing is now so rare that you can’t really factor it in as an option. By demanding social housing and pointing up the problems with the private rented sector, the Focus E15 women are speaking for a great many people. Wales can stick these women in private rented flats for a year all he likes and they’ll be back at the end of the year with the same problems – the problems that everyone who must rent face. They’ll be talking about rent hikes, insecure tenancies and crappy flats owned by landlords who don’t care. That’s the problem. It’s a very big problem and it’s growing. And there it is. I think we can all agree that the housing crisis is not going to disappear just because you tell a bunch of young women to shut up and an old blogger like me to piss off.

Closure order on sex workers’ Soho flat defeated

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Sign the open letter for decriminalisation.

From the English Collective of Prostitutes:

Two sex workers’ flats in Soho, central London were last week re-opened by a judge at Isleworth Crown Court. Judge JW Kingston rejected police evidence that women working in walkup flats in Brewer Street were being controlled or incited into prostitution for gain. He overturned the closure order and directed that the flat could reopen.

Judge Kingston’s decision brought for the first time some common sense to legal cases, which have been rumbling through the courts since mass raids at the beginning of December closed 18 flats. He ruled that: “the furthest the evidence goes is to show that the Appellants used the first and second floor flats for prostitution by arrangement with other sex workers at mutually convenient and agreed times. That does not constitute control within the meaning of Section 53 [of the Sexual Offences Act 2003].”  Continue reading →

London #Atos demo. This is not extreme.

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Having noted that Atos is playing the victim card as it looks to exit the work capability contract, I thought I’d start posting some video from last week’s protest outside Atos HQ in London’s Triton square. You know – so that people can see how things last week went, etc.

These protests are peaceful and people have a perfect right to hold them. The work capability assessment is absolutely toxic and that point needs to be made good and loud. As it has been. Campaigners have done vital work over the past few years to make that clear, and to make Atos’ position untenable. That has been the real success. Other campaigns will take note. As more and more public services are privatised, people will know that they can target a company and tarnish it to the point where it has to leave. That is a result. Continue reading →

Why is middle class feminism so disinterested in women hit by austerity?

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Open Democracy article by me on the group of homelesss young Stratford mothers who have been battling for places to live. These women and their children have been living in Focus E15, a dirty temporary hostel – for years in some cases. They dare to demand something better and they’ve managed to push Newham council to an extent. Theirs has been an extrarodinary fight – and one that is relevant to all of us who must rent. Housing is a crisis issue for most people, unless they’re rich. Yet a campaign to get a face on a banknote is considered monumentally more important than this grassroots campaign by the political class. I’m guessing it’s considered monumentally more important by people who don’t have to worry about finding a place to live.

“Nobody wanted to make an argument for the rights of young single mothers in the anti-welfare era. Media coverage of the women’s problems was intermittent at best. It was certainly intermittent in comparison with reporting of other recent “women’s” campaigns. I think here, as I usually do, of the extraordinary coverage and endless twitter broadcasting gifted to middle-class feminism’s campaign to have Jane Austen’s face printed on a banknote – banknotes that low-income women in Jasmin’s situation struggled mightily to get their hands on from one day to the next. The banknote campaign – and the opportunistic MPs who supported it, like Stella Creasy – was everywhere in the news last year. It never stopped. Women and children who were directly affected by austerity were nowhere. Standing out in the rain with the women at their stall on Saturdays, it was hard not to long for the day when the likes of the young Focus E15 women were thought worthy of blanket, banknote-type coverage for months and months on end. I suspect that day is a long way off. These women are not politically useful to anyone. Labour won’t back them. Labour won’t fight the welfare corner. It also guns for people who say it should. Just after I began to publish stories about the Focus E15 mothers on my blog, Newham council sent a snooty email to say that officers would no longer communicate with me, because I was reflecting the council’s position unfairly.”

Read the rest here.

Focus E15 mothers take their petition for social housing to Boris…

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…who of course wasn’t in to see the women. These people never are.

As many people will know, the Focus E15 women are a group of young mothers, classed as homeless, who have been fighting for decent social housing for all. They’ve been trying to convince Newham council and the East Thames housing association to find them decent social housing in London. They are concerned about being pushed into the highly unstable, unaffordable private rental sector. They are also concerned that to beat the benefit cap, Newham council will send them to live miles away in supposedly cheaper towns. That would remove these young mothers from the families and friends who they rely on and who can provide all-important free childcare when the women go into training and work. Continue reading →

More #JSA stories from jobcentres: “It’s impossible. You’re trapped.”

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In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been attending leafleting sessions outside jobcentres with the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group and talking to people on JSA about their experiences as they sign on. We’ve been talking to people about sanctions, about being spoken down to by staff and having to walk on eggshells or risk being sanctioned, about relying on the jobcentre for JSA payments between short-term, low-paid jobs and about pointless work programme courses. I’ve posted some transcripts from today’s discussions below.

This morning, we were outside the Neasden jobcentre. It was freezing cold and there was a nasty, biting wind and a number of people we spoke to looked cold and shaky because they were not dressed warmly enough for the weather. I know we hear a great deal about life on JSA being a rort and people on benefits enjoying TV and cigarettes and long days lying around in the sun and all the rest of it, but it never looks that great when I see it. People talk about having to go weeks without money and being forced to grovel and fawn to staff to avoid being sanctioned, and about the terror of putting the card into the cash machine and finding that no money comes out because you’ve been sanctioned after all. And in this rubbish weather, they look cold.

This is the punishment you get these days for the crime of being unemployed and not rich. You are utterly powerless. You’re on the receiving end of everything. You have to put up with everyone’s crap. Of course – things are very different if you’re rich and connected. Life generally is very different if you’re rich and connected. Very different. If you’re Chris Huhne, for example, you get your media-class buddies to give you a column at the Guardian when you leave prison. If you’re Maria Miller, you help yourself to £90k from the taxpayer and claim that little earner was totally above board. If you’re Nadhim Zahawi, you charge the taxpayer to heat your horses’ stables. These people genuinely believe that it’s the rest of us who are out of line. That’s the part that really gets me.

Most of the people we spoke to this morning were forced to collect JSA between low-paid and insecure jobs, or to subsidise low-paid and insecure jobs – something that ought to concern everyone who relies on a wage to pay the bills. One of the women, Noreen, talked about finding work on “lucky days.” She meant that she found work by herself on days when her luck was in and she managed to talk to the right people, not because there was any system in place to help her. Pity she doesn’t have as many lucky days as Chris Huhne.

Continue reading →

Tell your MP to attend the #WOWdebate: 27 February 11.30am

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From DPAC:

The WOW petition debate which has been supported by John McDonnell MP will take place on Thursday 27 February 2014 around 11.30 am at the House of Commons chamber. The WOW petition calls for a cumulative impact assessment of the impact of the government’s welfare reform changes on sick and disabled people.

Please contact your MP to ask them to attend this important debate. You can find your MP’s email details at www.parliament.uk. You can also write to your local MP (find the details by using the Write to your MP tool), tell them what the petition is about and ask them to attend the debate. Or you can email your MP using this automated tool to help you compile and send the email.

You may want to remind your MP that as we are approaching an election in the not too distant future, you will be monitoring to see whether they attend or not on your behalf.

Template letter to send (mainly taken from WOW): Continue reading →

Fighting for decriminalisation: talking with the English Collective of Prostitutes

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I’ve spent time recently with the English Collective of Prostitutes, talking with the women there about their fight against the criminalisation of sex work.

As readers of this site will know, this is a subject I have some knowledge about. I also feel that we don’t hear enough from sex workers themselves on the topic of decriminalisation. We hear an awful lot from “experts” and interest groups and opinion writers, but not anything like as much as we should from workers themselves. I have never been able to understand why people wouldn’t want to support sex workers in their campaign for decriminalisation and the safest possible working environment. Supporting that campaign does not mean that you support trafficking, which is horrific. It means quite the opposite. It means you support the notion that everyone – everyone – deserves recognition and the protection of the law. So, I’ll soon be posting some of the interviews I’ve done where ECP members talk about the working environment and the rights and protections in law that they rightfully seek. A lot of women do this job and a lot of them are mothers. They need the money. They need a safe working environment in which to get it, especially in this rotten economic environment. Judge that if you will.

I’ll start posting those transcripts in the next few days I think. In the meantime, here is a press release from the ECP about recent raids and attempts to close Soho workplaces.

Press release from the ECP:

“Violence against sex workers is increasing. Tragically, two sex workers have been murdered in London in the past three months. At the same time, the police have stepped up raids, arrests and closures of premises where women are working in relative safety. This is despite senior police officers admitting that: “[police] operations to tackle the trade are “counterproductive” and likely to put the lives of women at risk.”

Eighteen flats in Soho, Central London, have been closed. Most of the women who were evicted are mothers and have now lost their livelihood. Continue reading →

Shutting homelessness hostels, then slapping Asbos on rough sleepers. Brilliant.

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In the Guardian today, there’s a story about cuts to supported housing – the hostels and housing used and needed by people who’d otherwise be on the streets.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the loss of this accommodation will mean more people must sleep on the streets:

“Nottinghamshire county council will vote later this month on proposed cuts that will, according to Framework (the Nottinghamshire-based housing association mentioned in the Guardian aticle), result in almost all the homeless and housing support services across the county closing down. As Nottinghamshire’s hostels, and specialist housing support services are decommissioned over the next three years, around 6000 vulnerable clients currently supported by Framework each year – rough sleepers, care-leavers, ex-offenders, addicts and people with complex mental health problems who are not receiving NHS care – will be cast adrift.”

Isn’t that great.

I want to make a further point – that once all those people are cast adrift and forced to sleep rough, they’ll find themselves targeted by the very authorities who shut their hostels. That’s because councils and coppers are going on the offensive as far as rough sleepers are concerned.

Last week, I posted this story about Newham council’s latest gig: slapping Asbo warnings on rough sleepers in Stratford and then bragging about this brand of toughlove. Mayor Robin Wales wrote an entirely charmless piece in the Newham Recorder about his crackdown on rough sleepers round the Stratford Centre. As part of a programme that the council winningly (not) referred to as “a rude awakening for rough sleepers”, the council had handed out Asbo warnings to 28 people who were sleeping out around the mall. The council was being “helped” in this endeavour by the police, the UK Border Agency and Thames Reach.

As I wrote last week, there was a nasty, punitive thread running through Wales’ column. It hit exactly the Clean Up or Piss Off pitch that the likes of Edwina Currie keep aiming for.

“There’s a rough sleeping problem around Stratford centre, Wales said, because there was “easy access to waste food and cardboard,” (he sounded like he was talking about the things that attract rodents in that bit). Rough sleepers who “refuse offers of assistance from us or our partners cannot expect to continue to sleep on our streets,” the mayor said. They could expect Asbos if they tried, it seemed. The council was “offering support to those who will accept it and enforcing the law where necessary,” Wales informed us. “I realise that this is a tough message,” he went on to say, “and that some people will be instinctively unhappy with it.”

Indeed. A lot of us were very unhappy with it. We’re getting unhappier by the day, too. Hitting rough sleepers with Asbos as their accommodation is removed and social housing disappears, and then trying to style that as an example of great local government leadership is an amazingly crappy endeavour. I’ve had word this week too that the mother and baby unit accommodation for homeless young parents at Focus E15 in Newham will definitely close when all current tenants are rehoused. My point here: perhaps keeping that sort of accommodation open would be more of an answer to rough sleeping than issuing rough sleepers with Asbos. The same will surely apply in Nottinghamshire once they’re closed hostels there. What would I know, I suppose.

Meanwhile, campaigners are gearing up to fight Operation Encompass, the Met’s latest wheeze against rough sleepers:

“The Metropolitan Police Service has joined forces with Camden, Croydon, Islington, Lambeth, Southwark and Westminster together with UK Border Force, local authorities and other partner agencies to combat begging and rough sleeping across the six London boroughs.”

I’ll be following that one closely. A lot of us are keen to find out exactly how you combat rough sleeping while closing the places where people might sleep. Throwing the book at people seems to be one of the plans. “Support will be offered through support services and making arrests where offences are identified,” the Met informs us in its Operation Encompass press release. Which is interesting. Who knew that arresting people who were trying to shelter from the rain under cardboard was a key route to fixing homelessness. As I say, I would have thought that one of the best ways to fix homelessness would be to find people decent and secure supported housing, rather than shutting that housing down, but now I’m just repeating myself. So – I guess the official take is that it is better for all to hit rough sleepers with an Asbo and push them into someone else’s borough. Or something.

Four people talk about sanctions and the pointlessness of jobcentres

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Earlier this week, I spent a morning outside the Kilburn jobcentre with the Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group. The group regularly leaflets at the jobcentre, to let people know that there is help and support available for people who are struggling.

We talked to person after person who was on JSA and signing on. And being sanctioned. The first person we saw was a young man who came out of the jobcentre yelling that he’d just been sanctioned for 13 weeks. He was furious, as well he might be. Thirteen weeks is a hell of a long time to go without money.

He was too angry to talk about that with us in any detail, but we did speak to a lot of other people who had similar experiences. I recorded those discussions and have posted transcripts of those recordings below. I’ll be doing a lot more of this. People need to hear the sorts of things that people on JSA are saying. And I don’t think it will do jobcentres any harm to know that there are journalists out the front of their places asking people what things are like inside.

Because things don’t seem too good at all inside. Just about everyone we spoke with talked about sanctions and appointment mixups and confusing instructions and paperwork, and having to “walk on eggshells” in case anything happened that might lead to a sanction. This part really gets on my nerves. If you’re on JSA, you’re at the mercy of everyone. You’re on the receiving end of everything. People can treat you however they like. And all because you’re unemployed. It’s as though being unemployed has become a hanging offence.

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