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.

“Did my jobsearch in front of them. Still got sanctioned.” More from the jobcentre

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Back to the Kilburn jobcentre with the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group. Have been doing this for a month or two now (links to earlier posts at the end of this one). We’ve been to Kilburn, Neasden and Marylebone. The sessions involve me talking with people on JSA about sanctions, jobcentres, the work programme and the whole dysfunctional Jobcentre Plus system, and the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group talking with people about all those things and handing out leaflets about the group’s weekly support meeting.

That weekly support meeting is growing in size. This is definitely worth a mention. The group is made up of people who are either affected by the government’s so-called “welfare reforms”, or have been affected by those reforms and/or who know a great deal about benefit forms, jobsearch and benefits. They also know a lot about the way that bureaucrats on power trips can operate. The group’s catchphrase, if you like, is “Never Attend Anywhere Official Alone” – wise advice that is catching on if recent meeting numbers are anything to go by. More and more of the people who the group talks to at the jobcentre leafleting sessions turn up to the weekly meeting for advice, and to find someone to accompany them to meetings with jobcentre staff and a wide range of advisers and officials. As far as I can see, self-organised groups like this one are taking on the work that jobcentres should be doing, rather than creating – they’re solving people’s problems, explaining appeals processes, helping people make some sort of sense of the nonsensical paperwork and instructions they’re given and so on. Accompanying people to their benefits interviews and meetings is an important part of making sure that officialdom stays in line.

God only knows I wouldn’t go to a jobcentre meeting alone. The more time I spend talking to people about their jobcentre experiences, the more I see how completely screwed the whole thing is. And okay, we all knew that – but seeing it in action, if action is the word, is still something else. I stand outside of these places and watch person after person reel out – they’re baffled by sanctions, confused by letters which call them to meetings with no explanation, bewildered by extreme jobsearch requirements, frustrated by a (hopefully doomed) Jobmatch “technology” which serves up the same jobs week after week, not at all sure of their benefit entitlements generally, and wondering why being unemployed deserves such punishment. I suppose we all know that is the point of the exercise – to reduce jobcentres to the point of non-function and/or to a stage where a political “justification” can be made for outsourcing. Part of that plan is also to make the thought of unemployment and signing on utterly terrifying to everyone else. The interesting thing is that the majority of people I’ve spoken to are actually employed a lot of the time. They’re just employed in low-paid, insecure jobs which end as suddenly as they start and pay so badly that people can’t save for lean times. Or for anything, for that matter.

Anyway. Here are some of the people I’ve spoken with at the last two sessions.

Ravi, aged 22. Trying to sort out a sanction.

Ravi said he last worked in January. He works in sectors like retail and banking. He wants something permanent, but is struggling to find permanent work. As of Monday, he was still trying to sort out a sanction – he was waiting to go into the jobcentre for a meeting where he hoped things would be worked out. Continue reading →

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 →

“They threatened sanctions because they couldn’t read my handwriting”

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For about a month now, I’ve been spending time outside London jobcentres with the Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group talking to people who are signing on about their experiences with JSA, sanctions and jobcentres. Last week, we went back to Kilburn. Recently at the jobcentre, we heard from one man who said he’d been sanctioned for several months. He was furious and screamed that he was “going to come back with a fucking hammer.”

I asked him if he wanted to talk about the sanction and he told me to fuck off. “Why the fuck would I want to talk about it?” he yelled as he disappeared towards the high street. Which was fair enough. I wouldn’t want to discuss a months-long sanction with some old blogger with a notebook. I’d want someone to fix the sanction. Who wouldn’t. I give you this as an example of the sort of fury and desperation that this vicious JSA sanctions regime generates and to put it to you that there’ll be more of it when conditions for JSA become even more demanding.

Doubtless, that’s the government’s plan – to push people on JSA and jobcentre staff to breaking point and then to sit back and enjoy the fallout. Personally, I can’t believe that people who are out of work are being targeted so viciously. It is not actually a crime to be unemployed. It can happen to anybody. The system ought to stop you from falling – not shove you until you do.

I hope some worthy or other out there is taking note of all of this. People are under serious stress here and someone needs to move on it. Stop cutting people’s money off. Stop it now.

At the most recent session, I spoke with:

Bruce*, a support workers in his 40s. He was furious because he’d actually found himself a job (not through the jobcentre), but had been signed off by the jobcentre a couple of months before he was due his first paycheck. He was still trying to sort out problems with fares and travel costs.

He said:

“[At my signing on appointment], they said “are you looking for work?” and I said “No, I’ve just got a job. They said “okay, we’ll sign you off then.” So they signed me off a couple of weeks before I was supposed to start work. This was at Christmas time. So I had no money for weeks and then I tried to explain to them that I was not going to get paid until the end of the month either. So I tried for a welfare assistance payment, but they said – “you’re not getting that, because you’re not signing on.” Then they stopped my housing benefit, because I wasn’t signing on and everything, so it was like – fantastic. They were giving me no help with my fares or nothing.

“Because I’ve been waiting for this job to sort out and waiting for my CRB checks to come through, they sent me on this stupid course at Wembley. It was just a two week thing – a waste of time. They teach you how to stick a piece of paper back together as a teamwork thing. I paid the fares myself. They said they’d reimburse me, but they lost the form and everything so I had to pay for it. It was a waste of my time going there. They said I’d get certificates for it. Waste of time. I said there’s no way I’m putting that on my CV. You’re having a laugh.

“I signed on for six months was made redundant. I moved up here [to London] thinking I’d get more work up here. It’s just been a nightmare really.

“Over that time, I borrowed with loans. Paying that back – it’s going to take another year or so to get out of it. They just like screwing you in to the wall. They don’t do anything when you get a job.

“They sent me on that stupid course and then promised me the work programme after it. You pay into this [system for help if you lose your job]. Some of the people in the jobcentre are all right, but as soon as you question them… they did threaten me with sanctions, because one of them couldn’t read my writing. They said – “that’s not good enough. If you do that again, we’ll sanction you.”

“I’m working and I still struggle. I had to ask if I could get paid in advance as soon as I started work.”

Next, I spoke to a woman who was in her 40s. We’ve met a number of times now. She used to be a factory worker and has signed on for several years. Last week, she was concerned about a letter that she had received which said that she must attend a meeting at the jobcentre in a week. The letter didn’t say what the meeting was about – just that she must attend and bring bank statements, and evidence of savings and earnings. She also had a letter which called her to training sessions with work programme provider Seetac. The sessions were for assertiveness training and things like that. It was a little difficult to see how she or anybody would fit a meaningful job search around all of that. She had folder stuffed full of paper.

She said:

“At the moment, I have to sign on every two weeks. If I wants to see my disability adviser, I have to come in for that as well. One time, I had an appointment with my disability adviser and one time I had to sign on two or three times in a couple of weeks. Now, I have to go to this work programme and this meeting.” She seemed bewildered.

*Name changed. I’m not putting names up at the moment in case people are sanctioned.

Previous transcripts:

First story from outside the jobcentre: Kilburn
Second story from outside the jobcentre: Neasden
Third story from outside the jobcentre: Marylebone

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

“I’m 62 and they threaten me with sanctions.” More stories from the jobcentre

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve spent time outside jobcentres with the Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group talking with people who are on JSA about their experiences. We’ve been talking about sanctions, about the realities of trying to find work with jobcentres (a month in and I have yet to speak to anyone who has) and about having to fall into line on all fronts or risk having your benefits cut. Am posting transcripts from those discussions here as I work on a bigger project.

Last week, we went to the Lisson Grove jobcentre at Marylebone – a jobcentre that quite a few people we’ve spoken to seem to dislike intensely. Once again, we talked to people who were tired, angry and sick of the whole JSA regime. Don’t forget that the only crime people have committed here is being unemployed. Anyone could end up in that situation.

This is what happens if you do:

We began by speaking at length with one man who had been sanctioned for some months. He really wasn’t sure why this had happened. English wasn’t his first language and he was struggling to understand the story that he’d been told, or the steps he should take to get his sanction lifted. He said that the jobcentre said that something had happened to his records when he moved from one part of London to another. He showed us payslips from his most recent job – he seemed to have been working on and off in light industry. Now without income, he was relying on family to survive.

“It’s embarrassing to me,” he kept saying. “I have to go to my sister-in-law for food and for somewhere to sleep. I have no food, no light, no electricity. I don’t like that I have to rely on her.” He stayed and talked with us for quite a while. People offered to go back into the jobcentre with him, to try and find out more about his situation. He seemed completely stuck. A lot of people we talk to outside jobcentres seem completely stuck. They say their problems aren’t being resolved at all.

We’ve talked to plenty of people who are furious about that. At Lisson Grove, I talked to Penny*, aged 62. She was angry all right. She said that she’d worked in the voluntary sector until August last year, when she was made redundant, because of budget cuts. She was particularly angry about being told by the jobcentre that she wasn’t trying hard enough to find work.

She said:

“Some of us in our previous lives actually taught jobsearch. We actually took people through to the point of appointment, so [it’s very hard] to come here and be told “why are you late, you’re not doing proper jobsearch, that’s why you haven’t got a job,” when you’re 62 years of age. I’m being told this by people who are half my age. I’m being told that if ever I arrive late, they are going to cut the whole of my benefits. Continue reading →

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?

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.

————————————————————————————

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 →