Defragmenting our selves
For a long time left housing campaigners have repeated constantly that the problem of housing in London is not that there isn’t enough, it’s that it’s poorly distributed. Housing clearly is poorly distributed in London, with many new-builds, old-builds, and ex-council houses snapped up by landlords. And perhaps sometime around the early 2000s it was…
A recent visit to Berlin has given me much cause to reflect on the thorny topic of how to win better housing for everyone. I have been part of the London Renters Union for 5 years and while little in housing has improved in that time, we have always been able to comfort ourselves with…
One of the things I’ve realised through my research is that it is a vain hope that everyone who cares about the issues you are organising around will get involved in intensive community organising. The meetings and one-to-ones and campaign building are all very time-consuming. Many people – the majority of people, if we are…
An organisation like London Renters Union sees itself as part of a renters’ movement, or sometimes a housing movement. Like all movements it is not clear where the boundaries of the movement are, nor should it be. However activists in LRU do sometimes talk about a ‘renter identity’ that LRU is trying to marshall into…
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…