Defragment your self
Is it better to be right or to win? And under what circumstances we you do both? These are big questions for a movement of renters in the UK. From the point of view of renters, there is a strong desire to morally judge landlords for their extraction of so much wealth, often for very…
I’ve been talking to a wide variety of union members lately for my academic research and one of the conversations that I’ve fallen into with more precariously housed members – even when I haven’t brought it up – is how the union can do more to help members like them to be involved. Of course…
[Please note this is a personal view] The early days of the pandemic and lockdown saw a flurry of activity in London Renters Union, along with nearly every other tenants union in the world. It was clear that people were about to lose jobs and income on a large scale and that many would have…
London Renters Union, seeing itself as a radical organisation drawing on radical traditions, refers to a ‘right to housing’ seldom, bordering on never – at least in its formal literatures and trainings. Yet as this news clip featuring the union demonstrates, the idea of a right to housing does come up in the union’s street…
I have noticed that one key difference between people who are left wing activists and – for want of a better term – ‘normal people’, is that the former are motivated by the very idea of collective action. In the more orthodox left tradition this is collective action in the workplace, while in the post-60s…
It’s exciting to see tenants in Berlin campaigning to take formerly government owned properties back into public hands, but it does rely on specific elements of German law that we don’t have in the UK. So how could we equalise the relationship between renters and landlords in the UK – not in some hand-wavy level-playing…
There is today no strong relationship between therapy and radical politics. In my experience many people who are interested in changing the world are very unsure about therapy. They worry it will seek to dampen their anger. They worry that they will become better adjusted to a world which does not deserve to be accommodated….
Owning the Earth is an account of Western land ownership from the medieval period, through colonisation to the present, though it does not, alas, always recognise how geographically restricted it is. While I enjoyed the book’s account of private property in the Anglo-sphere I’d have to disagree with reviews that refer to it as ‘comprehensive’….
Academia likes to see itself as a producer of knowledge, and that’s difficult to argue with. But most of the time its self-conception goes further than this. We are the knowledge experts, think the academics. We are better at developing knowledge than other people. It’s what we’re paid for. Years of post-modernism has, curiously, failed…
The dissertation for my MRes in Geography, available here, was research with London Renters Union into member engagement during a period of high growth in the organisation. From the beginning I designed the research to have two outcomes, one being the dissertation, the other being the work with the union, and a small report I…