Category Archives: Women

Doncaster careworker: I had to leave my flat because #CareUK wage cuts made paying rent impossible

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Update September 1: More careworkers to take strike action – workers at the Your Choice Barnet company on September 8 and 9:

Video I took last year: people with learning difficulties and their families yell at the Your Choice Barnet board as the board refuses to discuss attacks on careworkers’ wages and walks out of a meeting:

Unison careworkers who work for the outsourced Your Choice Barnet company will take strike action on September 8 and 9 with another four days of action to follow.

Your Choice Barnet careworkers are fighting a harsh 9.5% pay cut imposed by private sector management. Like the striking Doncaster careworkers in the video below, the Barnet Your Choice careworkers provide services to people with learning difficulties. Those services were transferred into a local authority trading company by Barnet council in 2012.

Last year, Alan White and I wrote a detailed story for the New Statesman about that failed Barnet privatisation of services for people learning difficulties.

Your Choice Barnet was originally set up by the council as part of the so-called Barnet Group – a trading company which would “provide” housing and services for adults with disabilities. The council had the wild, and entirely unsubstantiated, idea that the company could make a profit and that people with learning difficulties would pay to come from all over London to use this Barnet service.

John Sullivan, the father of Susan Sullivan, a woman with Down’s Syndrome who relied on Barnet services for people with learning difficulties, told us that the name Your Choice was very ironic indeed:

“There was no consultation. We expected letters and so forth: in fact we never got a single phone call to tell us what was going on… The first meeting for residents was a disaster. It was clear there was no structure – Susan would be dragged around a series of shops and garden centres [for something to do]. She needs two things – continuity, and her friends: the people she’s been friends with since they were kids.”

John described the company’s claims that it could make a profit as “mental masturbation.” He was absolutely right. The promised profits never materialised. Instead – true to private sector form – Your Choice Barnet presented staff with plans to slash their wages last year. Your Choice Barnet said the wages cuts were necessary to keep the company competitive.

The Doncaster careworkers below are hearing the same thing from Care UK, their private sector employer. The Fremantle careworkers, another group of Barnet careworkers who I wrote about in detail here, were told the same thing. They lost their weekend enhancement pay – the extra money that made carework possible to live on as a job – and had their sick leave reduced to the statutory minimum.

This is why carework is in such dire straits. Services are outsourced to the private sector, which sets about grabbing cash by slashing careworkers’ wages to amounts that are too small to live on. We live in an era where already-low-paid workers and people with learning difficulties are considered acceptable collateral in that cash grab.

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Orginal post with striking Doncaster careworkers 27 August 2014:

Have more to add to this, but here’s a short post for those who are wondering why it is becoming impossible to make a living at carework:

Today, I spoke with Doncaster careworkers, including Mags Dalton, 44, who were protesting outside Bridgepoint Capital about charming private firm Care UK’s massive cuts to Doncaster careworkers’ wages. The careworkers work with people who have learning difficulties. Bridgepoint is the private equity company that owns Care UK – Mags’ employer.

Mags has lost about £400 a month as a result of those wages cuts and has been on strike for days this year in protest. Now, she’s had to give up her flat because she couldn’t afford the rent any more. She will move back to Newcastle to live with her parents. She will start another job and try to save up to move into another flat of her own at some point.

Mags is one of a number of Doncaster careworkers who have (and are as we speak) taken lengthy strike action in protest at the pay cuts of up to 35% being forced through by Care UK. Careworkers were transferred from the NHS to Care UK when the service was recently outsourced.

True to private sector form, Care UK quickly turned its attention to careworkers’ wages and conditions – wages and conditions which were hardly generous in the first place. Sick leave has been cut to the statutory minimum (the first three sick days must be taken without pay) and weekend and night pay enhancements slashed. New starters begin on £7 an hour – which means, of course, that workers won’t stay if they can find work elsewhere that pays even a little bit better. The pay cuts have hit hard. Mags’ rent was £465 a month and her £400-a-month wage loss put the rent beyond her.

So now, at age 44, she’s got to head home and live with her parents while she tries to save for a new place. She has lived in Doncaster for years: “I made a life for myself in Doncaster with friends that I love and a job that I love. I only signed up for the house a year ago. I moved in on the 26th of June last year and the 25th of June this year, I moved out. How did that happen.”

This is exactly what happened to the outsourced careworkers at Fremantle in Barnet, who I talked with over the course of their months-long strike action several years ago. People who provide (as in work as careworkers) and use social care services are being destroyed by privatisation and it’s been going on for a very long while. Under governments of a variety of stripes, may I add.

Newham council to me: you are foul mouthed and aggressive. #Result. A #FocusE15 update

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To Stratford again! where career mayor Robin Wales continues one of London’s leading Pillock of the Year campaigns…here he is at the recent Newham Mayor’s show running from the Focus E15 mothers and their kids when the mothers asked him again about social housing in the borough.

Video from the Focus E15 mothers:

“This [event] is a family day!” Wales barked at the mothers as they walked around the event with their – err, families. I wonder if I should even bother outlining the ironies in that one. I guess we can take it that when Wales says “families,” he means “families who are not campaigning for social housing for families.” For nearly a year now, the Focus E15 mums have been fighting for secure social housing for everyone who needs it, which is most people. The women want decent, secure social housing for all – places where people can settle for the long term and raise their families. It is actually hard to think of a more family-orientated campaign. (For more on the financing of Newham’s family days and other short-term crowd-pleasers, read Mike Law’s excellent blog on that council’s likely borrowing legacy here). Wales is under investigation now – a complaint was made about his behaviour towards the mothers at the mayor’s show.

So. Perhaps the real problem here is that Wales, Newham council and the political class generally find assertive, persistent women difficult. I thought about that again this week when I found a letter that Newham council sent to the NUJ about me earlier this year. I’d forgotten about this letter, so thought I’d share it with you before I throw on my pile of Fuck Off Kate correspondence from councils. All good.

Earlier this year, I asked the NUJ to complain to Newham council when security guards stopped me from attending a public council meeting. I’d completely forgotten that the council had sent a response, but remembered this week and hauled it out. In the letter, the council said I’d be denied entry to the council meeting because I was foul mouthed and aggressive to security guards. OUTRAGEOUS. Conveniently, I have a recording of the interchange between me and the security guards that evening. You can hear me challenging the guards – as well I might, seeing as they were denying me entry to a public meeting and pushing my press pass aside – and that I actually sound quite sweet, because I am. I am in person, anyway. Generally. I like to swear all the time on social media, not least because that’s an excellent way to let off steam after exposure to a twat like Wales. Anyway – I thought about all of this when I saw Wales racing away from the Focus E15 in the video above. Not for the first time, I wondered about Newham’s two-fingered salutes to assertive women. I’ve posted more videos of those salutes at the end of this article. The Focus E15 fight is a feminist fight, all right. These female campaigners have been dismissed categorically – by Newham, by Labour, by the political class and the press. They’ve kept going, though, and generated a great deal of interest and support. It is not easy to keep things going, but they have. Continue reading →

London evicts. Women and children first, thanks

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One development (if you can call it that) I’ve really noticed in London this year is the increase in calls and contacts from people who are facing eviction, or trying to stop an eviction right then and there, or worried that they are being pushed out of their their estates and homes by planners and developers. I decided to start to collect the stories of some of the people affected. The first two are below in this post. They’ll form part of a longer piece I’m writing on these evictions.

A few thoughts on this –

The more I talk to people, the more obvious it becomes that the real problem is the terrible lack of decent, secure, well-maintained, well-managed social housing people can easily afford. Long-term lets are especially crucial. The expensive, wildly insecure private rental sector is a challenge for most of us who rent. It can be particularly challenging and unforgiving if you have support needs. If people had secure social housing with long-term lets, a lot of the problems they’re reporting now simply would never come to pass – problems like being forced to move because a landlord wants the house or flat back, the stress of uncertain short-term tenancies, having to live in single, tiny, dirty rooms that private sector landlords pass off as flats to collect housing benefit and all the rest. I’ve spoken with people who have serious mental health problems and who simply can’t handle the idea of moving home, or to an unfamiliar environment. They are offered other places in the private sector, but that’s neither here nor there. They don’t want to move. They can’t move. But they’ve been evicted – forcibly – because the landlord wants them out.

Unfortunately, social housing waiting lists in some boroughs run into the tens of thousands – about 24,000 in Newham, 28,000 in Camden and 20,000 in Lambeth, to give a few examples. The truth is that people’s chances of securing a place that way are non-existent. (There’s another point, too – with a bigger social housing stock and better security in it, people in social housing wouldn’t be facing eviction in the growing numbers they are now, either).

Without those places, it’s up to tenants to get by in a hostile environment. Doesn’t matter that many people struggle. You beat the odds yourself, or you go down. Ours is the great era of individual responsibility, after all. Iain Duncan Smith – a man who is himself housed in his rich wife’s mansion – is very big on this Do It For Yourself concept. Individual liability at any cost is one of Universal Credit’s many rotten planks. When UC comes in for all, if it does, the housing element will be paid to claimants, who then must pay rent from it. Anyone who fails to achieve that will be dismissed as feckless. Anyone who argues for direct payment to landlords will be written off as a Nanny State relic (*waves*). No matter that the odds in that game are already stacked against plenty of people. Cuts to council tax benefit and housing benefit mean that many already pay bigger council tax bills and bigger rent demands. Using rent money to cover council tax arrears because your council threatens you with a liability order to deduct tax straight from your benefits, say, would not be irresponsible. But we’ll end up there, anyway. We live in an age where individuals must sink or swim – which usually means a lot of well-off people blathering on about responsibility while they watch other people sink.

“They told us that we have to organise the money,” one very young housing benefit tenant said to me a week or so ago when she reported back from a Jobcentre Plus meeting about Universal Credit. “They said that we shouldn’t be having fun with our money.” Continue reading →

Maria Miller gets a fancy house while women with no money must beg for homes

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Video: a person sleeping rough outside legendary tax-dodgers Starbucks in the Stratford Centre on Friday. Hope Newham Council does not slap an Asbo on this person.

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Ok. Today, I will give you an example of our one-rule-for-the-rich-and-one-rule-for-everyone-else society in action:

Almost to the day that Maria Miller gave her non-apology for ripping taxpayers off for a house and her own financial gain, I stood outside Newham council’s housing offices with a group of young people who were there to plead for accommodation. Some of the young people were Focus E15 mothers, the group of young women who lived or still live at the Focus E15 hostel in the mother-and-baby unit and have been campaigning for social housing in the borough. Others were young people who aren’t parents, but who live in other parts of the Focus E15 hostel and are worried about eviction.

So. It was pretty hard not to think about the rank hypocrisy of the political class as I stood with this group of people outside Newham’s housing offices. There’s so much of this hypocrisy around now that you actually find yourself watching it unfold live. You can stand in a London street reading updates on Maria Miller’s meaningless “apology” on your phone while a group of people who have no money plead with council officers for homes. This is the time and place we’re in. We live in a society that is constructed entirely of double standards. Maria Miller has money – a lot of it ours, it would seem. The young people outside Newham housing offices on Friday, on the other hand, don’t have money. They have no money and no connections. Some of them have “problem” histories. They are dismissed because of those things. They are young, but will be dismissed forever because of those things. This double standard will finish us all if you ask me. Maria Miller gets the warm support of David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith and a wee slap on the wrist for hoovering an incredible amount for her second home (and so what if she is ultimately sacked or demoted. She’ll be back. These people are never sacked). By comparison, the young people campaigning for housing outside Newham council on Friday regularly get called sluts (because some of them have babies), wasters and layabouts and told that they’ve done nothing to deserve a roof.

I’ve heard variations on that theme ever since I started writing about the Focus E15 mothers’ campaign. Worthies at this recent women’s event asked me, for example, if I really thought that the young campaigners deserved social housing. Did I really think that would be the best thing for them? The concern seemed to be that housing these “poor” people securely would awaken the dreaded, so-called sense of entitlement in them. Of course – no mention was or is ever made of the startling (and poisonous) sense of entitlement that people like Maria Miller have. You never hear about that. Ever. You only ever hear about the greedy, grasping, aggressive poor who will take an inch and then a mile and then your wallet. It’s the double standard that gets me. The double standard is unreal.

Continue reading →

Kate Middleton gets a palace. Mothers without money get the home you see here

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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. Continue reading →

Children in mouldy, decaying houses, councillors at property investor fairs in Cannes…

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To Manor Park library yesterday and the “Meet Mayor Robin Wales” event yesterday, where there was a big turnout. Housing problems were on many minds.

I spoke to a woman who works as a cleaner and has been in temporary accomodation with her three children for four years. She earns £500 a month as a cleaner and her housing benefit does not meet her whole rent. I went round to her house to film the mould, missing floorboards, uncollected rubbish and peeling wallpaper later on in the day. Look at the mould growing here – the woman has to wipe it off regularly and it keeps coming back. There’s a two-month-old baby living in this place:

There was a woman who said her rundown place was full of mice and an older woman who was there on behalf of a disabled friend who she said was also in temporary accommodation…and that wasn’t the half of it. Decent, secure housing that people can afford is becoming very hard to find, we all know, and people were definitely concerned and angry. You’ll see from the videos that there was quite a turnout for meeting at a small library on a Saturday morning.

Focus E15 Mothers were there to ask Wales if he would back their campaign for social housing. Politicians won’t back these women, of course – young women who have children and who are on benefits for now aren’t thought worthy of that sort of attention. Kate Middleton can make her home over to the tune of £1m, but women like the Focus E15 mothers are regarded with suspicion and sneered at. More than one worthy at this recent women’s event asked me if I really thought that the Focus E15 mothers deserved the local social housing that they’ve been campaigning so hard for. Did I really think that would be the best thing for them? The concern seemed to be that housing the Focus E15 mothers securely would awaken the dreaded, so-called sense of entitlement in them. Of course – no mention was made of the startling sense of entitlement that people like Kate Middleton have.

The Focus E15 women – who were or still are all homeless and living in temporary accommodation in the Focus E15 hostel – want decent and secure social housing for all (you can read their story in detail here). Some of the women have been placed in private lets in London for a year – which means that they’ll very likely have housing problems again when that year is up. Others are still living in the Focus E15 hostel with their babies. More on that soon. The group had trouble pinning Wales down for a chat to start, as you’ll see. When he did speak to them, he said that their argument should be with government, not with the council. That didn’t go down too well. People want councillors to join their campaigns, not tell them to take their campaigns elsewhere. The mothers asked why boarded-up flats at the Carpenters Estate couldn’t be opened for social housing and if homes in the borough’s post-Olympic residential builds would be earmarked as social housing…Wales was a little vague on that, as you’ll see in the video:

The Carpenters estate was to be demolished as part of a Newham Council/UCL plan to build a £1bn campus a couple of years ago. Campaigners managed to stop that plan for the time being and to keep their estate and homes in Newham – they wanted the estate to be refurbished and retained as social housing. At least a year on, flats on the estate remain boarded up and unused. This is certainly a sore point with residents and with people who are on the council’s housing waiting list (there are about 24,000 people on that waiting list). The council’s allocation policy prioritises people who are in work over people who are not in work, too.

In this next video, I asked Wales why he attended a recent property investors’ fair in Cannes and what he did there. There has been a great deal of anger about councillors’ attendance at that fair, as you’ll read in this Guardian story:

“Protesters accuse local authorities at week-long MIPIM of being ‘in pockets of investors’ and ‘selling off’ Britain’s cities…Every year, for a week in March, this stretch of the French riviera is transformed into a global property trading zone, a souped-up real estate supermarket, where whole swathes of cities are put up for sale to the highest bidder.

“This year saw more than 20 UK local authorities taking part, the biggest presence since the 2008 peak.

“Public sector attendance at MIPIM has long been contentious, with budgets for local authorities’ presence at the fair often stretching up to £500,000. The symbolism of council chiefs on a champagne-soaked jamboree, as swingeing cuts bite back home, has not gone unnoticed, prompting most authorities to find private-sector funding and trumpet visible results from the week of networking.”

I’m always keen to hear Wales trumpet, so I asked Wales what he’d been up to in Cannes. Had to chase him round the corner with the “were you selling Newham?” questions… he wheeled round at that point and answered with an angry No I Wasn’t:

“It’s all paid for by our development partners,” Wales told the Guardian. I find that an even bigger worry if I’m honest. Time for some absolute transparency on all of this – who met with who, when, why, what was discussed, who will be “investing” in what and what sort of money will move between which organisations and people and why – and how the people who turned out to Saturday’s event to try and get their housing problems solved will benefit. I didn’t get a chance to ask about the council’s recent moves to slap Asbos on homeless people in the Stratford centre, or where homeless mothers and babies will go when the Focus E15 mother and baby unit closes down, which the East Thames Housing Association has confirmed it will.

The Focus E15 mothers will be at next Saturday’s 1000 mothers march for justice: 11am Saturday 29 March. Assemble at Bruce Castle Park, Lordship Lane, N17 8NU.

More soon – post will be updated.

Homelessness, Asbos, Operation Encompass

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This is the first in a series of posts which feature conversations with people who are street homeless.

This series was inspired, if that’s the word, by Operation Encompass – the Metropolitan police-local council-UK Border Agency “partnership” to “combat begging and rough sleeping across six London boroughs.” Brilliant. They weren’t doing this by building more homes, or anything useful like that. They were doing it by – among other charming initiatives – hitting rough sleepers with Asbo warnings and telling people that they had to accept “help”. A few things appeared in local papers about this earlier this year – charities expressed concern about the operation “aggressively targeting and potentially criminalising some of the most vulnerable people in society” – and then things went quiet. I’ve asked the Met for an update – if it still going as Operation Encompass (the Met’s original press release said “activity” would be “ongoing“) and/or who is doing what and where. You can use Asbos to ban people from certain areas, see. This means that Asbos could be used by politicians to clear streets of people who might not, say, impress the bigshot property investors that council leaders have been hanging out with in Cannes, etc. These things need to be watched.

They’re not pretty. Boroughs like Newham seemed to be running their own Encompasses (I’d ask Newham where things are at there as well, except that the council refuses to talk to me). Only a month ago, we had mayor Robin Wales in the Newham Recorder boasting about cracking down on rough sleepers in the Stratford centre. (Wales, incidentally, seems to have been at last week’s property fair in Cannes. I do keep seeing the same faces at the moment). In his column, Wales said that rough sleepers who refused the council’s offers of “assistance” could not expect to continue to sleep on Newham streets. “I realise that this is a tough message,” Wales said, “and that some people will be instinctively unhappy with it.”

I was unhappy with it. I was very unhappy with it. The part that made me especially unhappy was the nasty, vengeful note in those statements – the “people with problems are not entitled, so they’ll damn well take what they’re given, or else,” line that informs so much of today’s political discourse. There was nothing in Wales’ article about the many reasons why people might be sleeping rough. There was nothing about the fallout from this government’s dreadful social security “reforms.” There was just a magnificent oversimplification of the reasons for homelessess and justification, if you can call it that, for lording it over rough sleepers. There was a real nastiness there.

You find that nastiness everywhere in political discourse on housing, of course. You find it, for instance, in this discussion with Hastings council leader Jeremy Birch, who told me that upgraded estates in his borough would not be open to people on benefits. People like the Focus E15 mothers hear it all the time, too. So do I when I’m out with them. For example: More than one Labour worthy at this women’s event last week asked me if I really thought that the Focus E15 mothers deserved the local social housing that they’ve been campaigning so hard for. Did I really think that would be the best thing for them? The concern seemed to be that housing the Focus E15 mothers securely would awaken the dreaded, so-called sense of entitlement in them. I found this extraordinary and extraordinarily patronising. It seems that young women who think they should have somewhere to live are now considered grossly pushy and grabby. Of course – no mention was made at this luvvies event of the startling sense of entitlement that the well-appointed have. Nobody asked me what I thought about Kate Middleton’s sense of entitlement when it comes to housing, or Nadhim Zahawi’s sense of entitlement when it comes to getting the taxpayer to pay to house his horses in heated stables, or MPs’ sense of entitlement when it comes to flipping and selling homes, etc. The political class never mentions those people. Their big concern in life is that everyday punters are on the make. Continue reading →

Focus E15: stories so far #iwd2014

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At the end of this post is a list of the stories I’ve done so far on the Focus E15 mothers’ campaign for social housing for all. Will be adding another tomorrow – namely, a report from the West Ham Labour International Women’s Day event where MP Lyn Brown kept screeching that I was “exploitative” because I was filming the Focus E15 mothers. The mothers, meanwhile, kept saying that they wanted me to keep filming them because they needed to have a record of this interface with their MP – because nothing else seems to hold people in power to account.

Interesting day. More on it soon.

Update Sunday March 9:

Here’s some video from the part yesterday when MP Lyn Brown kept screeching that I was “exploitative” because I was filming the Focus E15 women. “Exploitative! Exploitative!” she kept shouting as she put her hand over the camera. “Exploitative! I think we both know what I mean,”she told me. Actually, I didn’t. I really didn’t. I still have no idea and we never got to discuss it, because Brown kept shouting “exploitative! Exploitative!” and her Spad-type person kept holding a notebook up in my face. Then, the Spad person tried to box me in for a while, to tell me that Brown was actually a wonderful woman who made a great contribution. I really wanted a drink. Meanwhile the Focus E15 women told me to please keep filming them. They often ask me to film them, because, they say, they need those records to hold politicians to account. This point can’t be made often enough. As Sam Middleton, one of the Focus E15 mothers said to me yesterday (you’ll see her talking about this in the video from 0:45): “If Lyn Brown feels exploited, that’s her business, but I’m not being funny – we’re all adults here. If I want to be filmed, that’s for me. Private conversations get us nowhere. That’s the only time we’re heard, is when we’re filmed. So.”

This is important. The video and that statement should tell you all you need to know about the faith people have in the political class. It also tells you all you need to know about the political class’ belief that it can and should control people’s responses to austerity. I don’t know if Brown noticed that other people were filming and photographing our exchange on their phones. I don’t know Brown at all. I would have asked her some questions and talked to her if there’d been any way to get a word in. But there wasn’t, which was doubtless the point. That’s the local political scene for you these days. People either bar you from public meetings, which Newham council did a fortnight ago, or they yell and physically try to stop you recording the scene. I can’t see how this works to anyone’s advantage. Even MPs must know that they’re onto a hiding. They look like twats when they carry on like this and they can’t even get their rare vaguely pertinent messages across while they’re trying to shut things down. There was mention yesterday, for example, of Brown finding washing machines for the women who don’t have them in their flats (will be watching to see if she does), but the big moment was lost on me because I was being swatted away with a notebook. Still – on we go. “Exploitative” is actually one of the better names I’ve been called in the last few years. It’s certainly a refreshing change from Cunt.

Control is the thing. These people want to control something that they can’t. They want to control the austerity narrative until the people on the arse end of it go away, or are dispatched out of sight via the benefit cap, or sent out of boroughs on Asbos if they’re homeless, or whatever. But the fact that people can’t house themselves is not going to go away. Neither is the fact that the Focus E15 women, like most people who are on benefits, have been left to fight for basics like housing on their own. For months now, these women – who were all homeless and living in the temporary Focus E15 hostel with their small children – have fought Newham council for social housing. Newham had told the women they’d be sent to live miles out of London and away from the families who’d provide free childcare when the women went into training and work. After months of campaigning, some of the women have been placed in private sector rents in the area. The tenancies are largely short-term and insecure. The women are perfectly aware that in as little as a year’s time (it’s less now for some), they’ll be right back at the beginning – trying to hang onto private rentals that they can’t afford and fighting removal from London and their free childcare.

These women are certainly on their own as far as meaningful political support goes. And that is their point. They’ve got as far as they have, because they’ve made a noise about it. Their campaign for secure social housing goes on. They continue to run it alone. They’re young and they’re on benefits and nobody wants to know. I could ask why local politicians don’t turn out in droves on Saturday to help these women leaflet Stratford about the housing crisis from their Broadway stall. I could ask why local councillors and MPs didn’t all join the women when they tried to deliver their petition for social housing to Boris Johnson last month. The Focus E15 mothers are making a straightforward point. They’re demanding decent social housing for everybody and saying that the private rental sector is impossibly grim and unaffordable. You’d think persons of moment would want to get behind that banner. But they don’t. They want these women to shut up and get out.

Happy International Women’s Day anyway. Mine certainly spoke volumes.

List of articles on Focus E15 to date:

Open Democracy article: Why is middle class feminism so disinterested in women hit by austerity? (interviews with the Focus E15 mothers on their campaign to date)

Newham council runs out of meeting to avoid Focus E15 mothers’ protest

Focus E15 mothers take their petition for social housing to Boris at City Hall

Focus E15 mothers’ battle for social housing: an update

Young mothers occupy Newham council housing offices to demand social housing

Rubbish, mice and mould – good enough for young mums without money

Put this on a banknote: young mothers without money abandoned by the political class

Protest today: stop criminalisation of sex workers. Safety first.

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From the English Collective of Prostitutes:

Protest today against raids, evictions of sex workers and criminalisation.
Walkers Court, Soho
Wednesday 26 February, 11am-12pm

A motion by MEP Mary Honeyball to criminalise sex workers’ clients is being voted on in Europe today – Wednesday 26 February.

Lobby your MEP TODAY – Information from the International Committee for the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe here and model letter here:

Additionally, on 3 March, the All Party Parliamentary Group on Prostitution reports and is likely to recommend criminalisation of clients.

Criminalising clients will not stop prostitution, nor will it stop the criminalisation of women.  But it will make it more dangerous and stigmatising for sex workers.

Mass police raids last December against sex workers in Soho have thrown scores of women out of the relative safety of their flats. Premises were closed using laws promoted by Labour women ministers in the name of “gender equality”[i]. But where was the feminist outrage when women were dragged handcuffed in their underwear onto the streets? False claims about trafficking have been used to justify the crackdown.  If the police get away with attacking sex workers in Soho who have such strong and visible support, then arrests and illegality against those of us who work on the street will escalate.

Cuts, benefit sanctions, rising poverty and homelessness have forced more women, particularly mothers, into prostitution. Do feminist politicians have a thought for how we’ll feed our children if they further criminalise prostitution?

Sex workers are fighting the Soho closures. One appeal has been won but other flats remain closed. Local people have rallied to support because they fear the closures are to make way for the gentrification of historic Soho.

Consenting sex is not a crime; we demand the decriminalisation of prostitution. New Zealand decriminalised in 2003 and sex workers report feeling safer and more able to demand their rights. Why not here?

Closure order on sex workers’ Soho flat defeated

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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 →